Books at the Center: Peter Boxall, The Possibility of Literature (10/14/24)

Books at the Center: Peter Boxall, “The Possibility of Literature” - 10/14/24, or read the full transcript below.

The Possibility of Literature
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[typewriter noises, and then intro music plays in the background throughout the description of the episode]
Jessica Monaco: Welcome, and thanks for joining us for another installment of CSN Café, the podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. In this episode, our host, Héctor Hoyos, is joined by Peter Boxall, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and Luo Jia, a PhD student in comparative literature at Stanford.
Peter visited the Center on October 14th to deliver a lecture related to his new book, The Possibility of Literature: The Novel and the Politics of Form, which was just published with Cambridge University Press in 2024. This episode was recorded directly before that lecture, and we are delighted to be sharing it with you now.
Thank you for listening in on another one of our warm and informal
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conversations.
Héctor Hoyos: Welcome, everyone. This is the podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. My name is Héctor Hoyos. I am the faculty director, and we are very pleased to have today join us Professor Peter Boxall from the University of Oxford, who is going to be discussing his forthcoming book, The Possibility of Literature.
Welcome, Peter.
Peter Boxall: Thank you very much. Hi, I'm Peter Boxall, as Héctor says, professor at Oxford and talking today about my new book, Possibility of Literature.
Héctor Hoyos: Fantastic. We're also joined by Luo Jia. Luo is a third year graduate student in comparative literature at Stanford. Luo, how are you?
Luo Jia: I'm good. Hi, everyone, very excited to be here.
I'm Luo.
Héctor Hoyos: So this new year at the Center for the Study of the Novel, we have a number of research lines that we want to try, and we couldn't be more excited to have Peter. One of the things that we're looking at is the role of English, bloke, brokering
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rather, relations across the globe. We're thinking about conversations with scholars from different generations.
And to that end, I'm actually going to give the floor over to Luo Jia and ask her to maybe introduce us, to set us off with, with one of her questions.
Luo Jia: Yes, so I finished reading the book, and I think I'm really amazed by the whole idea of constellation theory and also the possibility of literature, which reminds me of, of, like, a discourse that we are all more or less familiar with, which is the death of literature or the death of novels. Some people believe that novels are not capable of generating new meanings or generating new possibilities. But at the same time, we also see a whole new generation of authors coming up, rising, gaining great popularity.
So, as someone who barely reads anything published after 2000,
[Luo laughs]
I was wondering if you have
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observed or you have, like, explored any exciting new trends, new possibilities in literary creation, literary market and stuff?
Peter Boxall: Yeah, I mean, I am a sort of eternal optimist, even though I seem to spend a lot of my time talking about things that might make us feel gloomy.
I, I think the, the novel is an extraordinarily vibrant form and it remains so today and we've just seen Han Kang win the, the Nobel Prize. There's a whole range of new voices emerging at the moment that make us have lots of reasons to make us feel very optimistic about what the novel's doing. There's also a whole range of writers who, who are now in their late phases. So we're also producing totally, kind of, genre bending work. I think of someone like J. M. Coetzee, still writing in, you know, late in his life, work that, that
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in his phrase "deforms the medium." For, for J. M. Coetzee, the novel is productive when it deforms its own apparatuses.
And lots of, you know, Claire-Louise Bennett will be, you know, lots of experimental writers are writing now, reaching big audiences who do deform the medium. And the other thing I think you have to bear in mind, the, the death of literature narrative or the death of the novel narrative tends to overlook the fact that the novel has always been in part a minor form.
And the novel has been being announced to be dead from the time it was first called a novel. So there's something about minority status and novelty that are bound up together. And I think we make a mistake in thinking that it's only our generation that are seeing these kinds of anxieties about the draining away of literary possibility.
I think it's alive and well. That doesn't mean to
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say that you want to be complacent about either the fate of our, of the discipline of literary criticism, or the fate of the novel, because there are many forces that make continuing to be imaginative, continuing to be productive, quite difficult, but that shouldn't make us think that the novel is dead.
Luo Jia: Thank you so much.
Héctor Hoyos: It's a good thing that we started on a positive note, on an optimistic note, because I'm pretty sure we're going to talk about nuclear destruction during the Cold War and the COVID-19 pandemic and other wonderful things.
Peter Boxall: Of course we are.
Héctor Hoyos: Okay. The Possibility of Literature, your new book starts with a reflection on the passage of time.
We are always changing as readers. And I, I believe you wrote these essays over a period of some 20 odd years. So the question would be, could you tell us more about the experience of revisiting your thoughts, revising your ideas, how that came about?
Peter Boxall: The
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first thought I had first when, you know, when asked to do it, and then in the process of doing it, was that it feels very much like dying.
That, that sort of sense that you, that you look back over work that you've produced. I mean, the, the oldest essay in the collection I wrote when I, much to my dismay, didn't need to shave.
And so, and, and looking back and, and, over 20 years about half of the essays I wrote more or less in the last couple of years. The other half I've assembled over a long period of time. Looking back over that time, it is a strange thing of gathering your, your life together and as Woolf will tell you, it's one of her, kind of, I suppose, Virginia Woolf, it's one of her, her dominant thought forms that the process of accumulating a life,
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summing it up is also the process of ending a life or dispersing, and that, that feeling was, attended the whole process.
But other than that rather existential kind of dread element of, of doing a Festschrift when one is still alive, the, I suppose the, the main question for me was, do these occasional essays written at different times with no thought of assembling them into a book, is there a through line? Is there, is there something that makes these, that lends coherence to this body of work?
And I thought at the beginning that there was no way that the answer to that question was going to be an encouraging one. It was always going to be a negative one because either I find that I've written 160, 170 essays over my life and there is no connecting thread, which would be devastating, or I find that I've just
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been doing the same thing over and over again, which would be devastating in another way. So I was kind of, I was sort of prepared for that. But the, I suppose what I ended up feeling was that there is something that connects these, these essays. And that, that is around this question of possibility which I chose for the title of the volume. And, and this, and this, this rather, it's a very, kind of inescapable, rather simple question, really, how far literature is determined by its conditions of possibility, and how far literature produces new possibilities that aren't in the world until that particular act of imagining came along. And that, that question is there, attends everything I've ever written. And it's such a broad question that it's almost the question of the possibility of literature and criticism itself.
What gave it a bit more shape, for me, is that the last, that the period of time over which the essays are written,
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20, 22, 23 years, is a period where our understanding of literary and critical possibility has changed very radically. And so the essays ended up being, for me, as I assembled them, like an x-ray of, of how, how and whether criticism is possible, how and whether literature is possible, and how those possibilities manifest themselves politically and historically.
Héctor Hoyos: You know, the double entendre in the title is more than a double entendre. It's an actual dialectic. What possibilities lie in literature and the fact that literature is even possible. You touch on so many important threads.
I'm thinking of, of Derrida, you know, famously unequivocal pronouncement of no democracy without literature, no literature without democracy. You touch on all of this, but I want to ask you a bit of a corollary question
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here, very nitty gritty, how was encountering your style? Because the way the book reads now, it's quite homogenous in style. It is, it is a voice. You see that the concerns are growing and some of them are fading out as new concerns you know, go in, which makes the book a truly riveting read. But what happened at the level of the page?
Peter Boxall: It's a brilliant question, and I'm delighted to hear you say that you found it homogenous.
Héctor Hoyos: Your, your editors might be, might be as well.
Peter Boxall: And I, and I, I did do a very small amount of editing, but it's the first question you have to ask yourself about doing anything of this kind, is how far you're going to edit and how far you're going to aim for consistency. Really I, I didn't, I didn't change the way that the voice works. And I, I mean,
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you, you may find this doing, writing a PhD, one of the odd things about writing anything that's book length even, particularly maybe a PhD thesis, is that the time during which you write your PhD thesis, you change very radically as, yes.
Luo Jia: I change every five pages.
Peter Boxall: And so the, the process of editing your PhD thesis at the end of the first draft will be that you, you look back to, to find, that your, the, the PhD thesis is a, is a record of your growing up or a record of your intellectual development, and that never stops. I mean, for me it's that I don't know what it does to the, any book you write, you find that you've grown up over the process of writing.
So the, the earliest essays for me felt like they were written in a radically different voice. And, and, and it's probably a, a problem with the volume. The, the essays aren't, they're gathered sort of
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thematically and with a various number of logics attending them. They're not chronological. So the first essay in the collection after the introduction I wrote in 2023 and the second one I wrote in 1998.
And, and so the lurch from those two, it must, for a reading, as a reading experience, it must be, well, I'd like to know what it's like.
Héctor Hoyos: I did not think it was much of a lurch. For our audience to know, the sections in this book are part one on writers, part two on literary history, part three on the contemporary.
And there are three, three of the essays, there are 15 essays total, three of the essays have not been published before. In any other shape or form and will not be published again in any other shape or form, as we're assured in the introduction, some of the authors that are discussed throughout the book are Samuel Beckett, a big, big presence, and we shall return to Samuel Beckett shortly, but also Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro, E. M. Forster,
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Cervantes makes a very interesting cameo, as it were, in this fantastic film of a book, Coetzee is another interlocutor. So you you're tackling some of the big authors there and not pulling any punches, making claims that are at times polemical and that run, run counter to, to field, you know, platitudes and conventions. It's really great to see you, you know, take stands and disagree with folks who, always very collegially and invoking many other authors.
Your style of writing, I think maybe this is one of the continuities I noticed, it's always very choral, very Bakhtinian, you're always bringing in other figures and, and letting quotes speak for themselves while you also discuss them and gloss them. But that, that I think is something that was a throughline stylistically for me as a reader.
Peter Boxall: Yeah. That's, that's, that's a very sharp observation, and I think, I don't think I am a
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theorist, I think I, I work insofar as I work at all, I work through acts of reading, so when you say this is about making literature speak for itself, I think that's what I try and do. And there's a, there is a sort of, like, a kind of techne that I've been developing, I realized over, over however many years, 23, 24 years, about how to thread a critical surface through a, an act of writing so that that act of writing speaks to the question of literary possibility and, and each, and each literary machine, we, you're talking about, about Derrida being a kind of quiet presence throughout the book, Derrida and Adorno thinking differently about supplements and negativity. If literature is a machine that makes a, makes a supplement
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appear or speak for itself, or a negativity available, then each literary machine works differently. And I suppose what I've been trying to do is produce a, a way of allowing each of those textual artifacts to, to reveal their supplement or their underside or their, their miraculous organ.
Héctor Hoyos: Well, I would say that one way that the theoretical creeps in is by way of the contextual, interestingly enough, because you read books in a different fashion in different moments in your life and in light of things that are going on in the world. So maybe let me jump to a question having to do with your reading of Beckett's Endgame or Fin de partie.
You and Adorno would agree it's a politically relevant play. It is not partisan, clearly or allegorical necessarily, but it is formally
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compelling. It's an exposition of politicity, right, one might say. And I'm interested to hear how, how you and Adorno disagree on Beckett. I, you know, I, I outlined the ways in which I think you, you agree, but also how does the politicity itself change upon re-experiencing the play?
And I'm thinking of a very moving discussion in one of the essays-slash-chapters of this book of a certain staging of Happy Days during the nadir of the COVID-19 shutdown, when you went and saw this play with your partner, Hannah.
Peter Boxall: Yeah, yeah, it's a great, it's a great question and “exposition of politicity,” it's a wonderful phrase and, and I, and I think that's what, that's what I'm finding that Beckett can do, and maybe, maybe he does this in a way that's exemplary for many of the other writers I discuss in this volume.
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I, not this, I don't think, Beckett in Endgame is allegorizing nuclear destruction or, or representing political scenarios so much as, and making available on the stage in this instance, something like in your phrase, a kind of politicity itself. But if you're going to, if we're going to understand how Beckett does that, we have to understand that he is also, cannot free himself from reference.
So, so there is a, there is a historicity and a specificity to his writing that, that is not a, in contradiction with his searching for politicity as such, but is part of the way that he goes about entering into that zone. So, so Adorno writes in, in his
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early essay, "How to Understand Endgame," it says, he writes this, understanding Endgame can only mean understanding its unintelligent and unintelligibility, concretely reconstructing the fact that it has no meaning.
Now that, that I think is a, is a claim that one could only make quite early in the reception of Beckett's writing. It's a powerful claim, and I think Adorno is an extraordinarily powerful reader of Beckett, but what that, what that claim that, that to, to read Beckett's work is to reconstruct the fact, the fact that it has no meaning flies in the face of the fact that Beckett's desperate attempt to rid himself of referentiality or of historical, spatial, geopolitical meaning structures, is, it all, it's always, it always fails. And it's always, it's also always ambivalent that there is a, there is a longing to
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refer in Beckett's writing all the way through there, there at the, around the time, I was writing that very early, so I was obsessed with a line in Beckett's short story, "The Calmative," where the narrator is on the outside of a town that's probably Dublin, looking towards the city walls, probably Dublin, it's not, it's not Dublin, but there's a referential tracery to Dublin in that, in that moment.
And the, the, the protagonist, narrator-protagonist says that there was a field of clover outside the ramparts of the town. And he says, nonesuch, perhaps. It's a lovely moment, isn't it? I mean, nonesuch is a kind of clover, and maybe, maybe he's remembering a field of clover that's a very specific field of clover.
In fact, nonesuch. And the fact that it's also, declaring that this clover doesn't exist and never has, that doesn't get rid of the reference. It only, it only enters
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into a kind of struggle with it. I, what he says, in fact, is nonesuch, perhaps. Who cares? Does it, do we care whether this clover is a specific kind of clover that was found in a specific part of the globe or not?
Both we, we don't want to care. We'd want to not have to care. We want to still care. And we find that we can't free ourselves from caring. And it's that all of that, all of those sort of directions or tensions are there in a single utterance. And that's, that's a very, it's something that happens in Beckett's writing from the beginning to the end.
Yeah. And going to see, and Happy Days, yes, just as we were coming out of Covid, was an extraordinary experience. You realize, I mean, when we went to see this play, as I say in the essay, the Covid precautions meant that the auditorium, a rather large auditorium in Riverside Studios,
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had just pairs of chairs. Not rows, pairs, all in little islands, so that, so that we were all remote from one another. And most of us came into the auditorium in couples. So we sat tethered together in, on chairs in, in, largely romantic couples. Whilst we watched Willie and Winnie locked in a kind of blazing sunlight of Covid lockdown and climate change catastrophe. And, and Beckett's, Beckett's work is very, it can't resist in fact, seeming to be about now. Endgame felt that it was about nuclear war in the 80s. It feels like it's about, climate destruction now. Happy Days felt like a verdict on romantic
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relationships strained, under the strain of lockdown.
But it's also about when it's written. And, and, those, that sort of tension is, is everywhere in Beckett's theater and everywhere in his prose too.
Héctor Hoyos: Yeah, the, the power of, of form or the form of power, right? It's, it's quite something. I, it's interesting. I was really, you know, moved by, by that essay in particular also because during the Covid pandemic, my mind kept going to this, this poem by, by Beckett.
I might be butchering it, but I think I remember it accurately. "En face le pire, jusqu'à ce qu'il fasse rire."
So to contemplate, to face what's worst, until it makes you laugh.
Peter Boxall: Yeah.
Héctor Hoyos: And the envoi performs what it's describing. It's a beautiful short poem and, and it gave me solace oddly enough --
Peter Boxall: Yeah.
Héctor Hoyos: -- during the pandemic. I wasn't looking for it. It kind of, like, found me, that poem.
Peter Boxall: Yeah, well, there's nothing funny about unhappiness.
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[Héctor laughs]
Héctor Hoyos: Well, well, we, we promised nuclear Armageddon and Covid and we have delivered so far. So we're, we're going swimmingly.
[Peter and Luo laugh]
Let, let me maybe ask one tiny follow-up Beckett-ish question. And then I will move on to a, to a different sort of line of questioning. So, at one point you write that Beckett stands as a limit case, a test of the possibility of literature at its furthest edge. Efraín Kristal, the critic at UCLA, in his well known response to Franco Moretti in New Left Review, challenges Moretti's, our colleague and former director of this very center, model of literary diffusionism by showing, just documenting, how César Vallejo, the Peruvian avant garde poet, left a profound mark on Beckett's poetics while they both had these day jobs as interpreters for UNESCO in Paris.
The question that emerges then is how do center-periphery dynamics and cultural flows,
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both real and perceived, affect the possibility of literature in your felicitous coinage?
Peter Boxall: Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a tremendous question and one that I'm spending almost all of my time thinking about at the moment because, whilst I was writing The Possibility of Literature, I've also been working on a book called Fictions of the West, which is, which is a, I suppose, cabbing on the, what Kristal is doing with, with trying to free oneself from center-periphery models.
And trying to work out how artifacts that might be products of normative environments or normative conditions might carry within them forms of thinking, forms of, fictional structures that don't conform to those norms,
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and then trying to work out how one can read for fiction-reality constructs that don't sit within the, the Western history of reality formations, mimesis. And Kristal writes in relation to Beckett's work. He says that it's, that in Beckett we find emancipation of the periphery from Western forms. And we find that emancipation of the periphery from the Western forms, even in situations where Western political or economic hegemony is still operational.
Now there are many ways of decolonizing the curriculum and there are many ways of trying to think past the fetters of the
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Western imperium. One of those ways is to, is to find, or to find a language for how a writer like Beckett or, in fact, most of the writers that one finds oneself to be interested in, both prop up and are bound up with those normative discourses and, and elude them or, or redirect them. And I think that's what Kristal was trying to do with Beckett, trying to, trying to read him outside of some notion that there's a struggle between center and periphery, which ends up reaffirming the West as the, as the kind of positive term in the dialectic. So, so how, how do you, how, how do you read outside of that enforcing of the West as a positive term in a dialectic without, without ending up simply reasserting the West as the, as the reference point for all our,
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all our thinking.
Héctor Hoyos: We can't wait for that next book. No pressure.
[everyone laughs]
Luo Jia: So, we've talked about emancipation and I was thinking of confinement.
[Luo laughs]
So, I really enjoyed your writing about Proust and reading, because there's such a, like, signature Proustian moment, him sitting in his room with blinds that, half open, half drawn, reading, and then thinking, oh, if, if Albertine is with someone else, this is such a beautiful moment.
And I think we've talked extensively about reading and rereading, but we are mainly thematizing the experience of professional readers like us, so I was thinking. And also, I've noticed that during COVID, many of my friends or many people I know, or even just ordinary people, who shared experience online, they say, “Oh, I picked up, or I just got into this hobby of reading.”
So I
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was thinking, what do you think like reading and rereading might mean, or might generate for readers who read for pleasure instead of for business?
Peter Boxall: So again, a really wonderful question. I don't think it, is it Nabokov -- If I lean back, can you still hear me? -- Or, is it Nabokov who says that all reading is rereading?
Luo Jia: Mmm-hmm.
Peter Boxall: And I don't think I'm an unusual reader in that, if I think of where I was at a given time, where I was on holiday, where I, where, where I would, which friend's house I was at, I can tend to remember what I was reading at that time, and the, the experience of remembering the moment of my life is bound up with the experience of remembering what I was reading.
And so somebody
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else's life kind of fused to mine at that moment, which, which is an extraordinary, you're thinking about confinement and emancipation, it's an extraordinary liberation to find one's own sort of sensorium and memory structures bound up with a whole series of others, the way that others imagine.
Now, I am a supposedly a professional reader and I, and I absolutely take the spirit of your question. It might feel, the process of reading might feel different if you aren't doing it for a living. But I, I think it's, or we could perhaps discuss this, but I think it's, I think it's very central to the experience of reading itself, that A, reading really only happens when you reread. And B, that the, that the archive we build up of what we've read when, and what was read to us as a child ends up as a kind of medium in which our
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own childhood is, is, I don't know, encased or preserved. So a friend of mine has recently written a sort of strange half novel, half work of literary criticism, partly about Enid Blyton.
Now Enid Blyton doesn't make it over the Atlantic, so, so many US readers won't and listeners won't know who Enid Blyton is. But Enid Blyton is a, a kind of UK institution in that children, generations and generations of children have, are, her, her work is read to us and then we all go around. Her work is all set in kind of, underground caves and waterfalls. It's got a very particular kind of feel and, and light and color. And so many people born in the UK go around with Enid Blyton in the bit of their head that's reserved for the nightlight,
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the bedside table, where parents read to across classes. I mean, it's quite a gathering together kind of experience.
And I, and I think we could, we could find many, many sort of structures of reading that do that, that hold us together, by realizing that imagining others is also how we imagine and remember ourselves. Yeah. So yeah, I think, I think rereading and that, that process where you, where you return to books that you love, that you've read at different stages of your life and find your life sort of structured by imagining otherwise is an experience that's common to professional and non-professional readers.
I kind of think, but I mean --
Héctor Hoyos: I'd like to posit maybe the flip question, this time thinking of professional readers and emerging critics who might be listening to this podcast.
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How do you go about, Peter, balancing the practice of literary historiography with less referential literary theorization, right?
The, the Beckettian problems of reference is, is also, you know, testing us, critics. And in other words, how much of a craft involves dwelling upon history and how much engaging in pure conceptual inquiry.
Peter Boxall: That's, I mean, that's been a question that I've been, it was at the very heart of my last book, The Prosthetic Imagination, which was a history of the novel.
The history of the novel as artificial life. And one that I find runs all the way through the essays in this volume. And it will be central also to Fictions of the West. And what I found in The Prosthetic Imagination was that it's, telling a, telling a history of the relationship between the prosthesis and the novel as a form involves a kind of double-jointed form of historiography, where you, you can't really understand the novel
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historically without understanding that it comes about in a, in a dialogue or a dialectic with the growing history of technologies. How the novel works is absolutely intimately involved with the technologies we have extending ourselves into the world. And as those histories have changed, so the novel form has changed. And to tell that history is to, is to, is to have a very clear sense of how technological forms develop. But you also can't tell that history without realizing that there's something that the novel is doing.
In Cervantes, a great thinker of prosthetic extension, and Coetzee, another thinker of prosthetic extension, that, that, in that, in that great sweep of time between them, the, the, the technological production for artificial life is unrecognizable, but the novel is doing something in both writers that is intrinsic
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to the conceptual apparatus of the form.
So how, how you, how you. read for the historical continuity between those two moments and the historical difference between them ends up being central to how you think about prosthesis.
Héctor Hoyos: Also how you read for the future.
Peter Boxall: And it's just Proust again, you know, there's, there's that famous moment in Proust where he, he says that that, that he's projecting his novel into the future, into, hundreds of years into the future as we write for, we write for a posterity that we can't begin to understand. And of course the novel ends up being a kind of ribbon that connects the moment that it's written with the moment that it's read, with Marcel looking at that from above somewhere, asking, you know, what kind of community of minds is this act of thinking generating?
What kind of, what, what does a future community of minds do to this act of imagining that I as
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a, I as Marcel in this book couldn't possibly dream of, and that, that it's back to rereading, I guess, um, uh, that happens both to professional and non --
[everyone laughs]
Héctor Hoyos: We, we do want more people to become professional readers and to do PhDs at Stanford and other institutions as well.
I, I should. Make a note of where we are physically recording this. We are in a room in Margaret Jacks Hall, uh, the Stanford campus surrounded by books, many of them works of reference that are easily accessible on the internet. You know, it doesn't take long to peruse something in the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, but I'm seeing all three volumes here.
We also have a state of the art microphone, two computers, and a typewriter that we just found in this building. And right behind there, I think those are index, there's an index card
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cabinet.
Peter Boxall: Oh, this is making me feel nostalgic.
[everyone laughs]
Héctor Hoyos: And the future might not recognize half of those words.
Peter Boxall: Yeah.
Héctor Hoyos: You, you cite at one moment that formidable line that the word snow is going to be snow.
And so let us, bring us back to a, to a more glum aspect of what you're dealing with, because of course you are dealing with life or death questions and, and that would be war as something that is something of an absent signifier when we think about the “posts.” So, uh, postmodern, well, that was World War II, postcolonial, that was also World War II or World War I, because that's when empires started to unravel. And so on and so forth, right? I mean, when we talk about schisms, there are de facto actual schisms that we don't always think about. So maybe it is the times that we're living, but I wanted to ask you about, about war.
Peter Boxall: Yeah. I think, yeah, I mean, I think you're
[00:37:00]
absolutely right that, that, uh, it's war, wars that, that lead to the phenomenon of the “post.” Or forms of, forms of military aggression anyway. Not all wars, of course. The, the experience of “post” or the, the, the spectral notion that we, that our experience in the 20th and 21st century might be bound up with the “post” is allied to the Western Imperium, I think.
And it's, and it's allied to wars that the, that the West recognize as epoch changing. World War II, as you say, the, the military history of decolonization, uh, 9/11 is another moment that, that has a kind of, uh, before and after quality that far exceeds its actual, the actual nature of the
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event.
So I think we're, we're very used to thinking that, that the before and after is generated by, by military or, I don't know, the forms of power meeting its, meeting its limits. What I'm, what I'm, what I'm struck by, and by the way, I'm very skeptical of the “posts.” As an, as an, as an organizer, as a, as a temporal or political or spatial organizer.
And, and the relation and the tension between the temporal and the spatial in the notion of the “post,” the posterior, as well as the afterward is absolutely central to its operations. But what, what strikes me, what struck me putting this volume together is that there are, there are a number of historical, I don't know, shaping structures.

[00:39:00]
War, war lends itself, or the experience of conflict between the powerful and the powerless, lends itself to narrativity very clearly, and it lends itself to the illusion of a kind of historical, I don't know, sequence very clearly. There are a series of other major structuring forces that are just as powerfully producing our experience that don't lend themselves to narrative nearly as readily, climate change being an obvious one.
And we're not told this anymore, but for a long time we were told, yes, climate change is happening, but climate change can't be demonstrated in any single event. I mean, how do you, how do you historicize that? It's not a before and after, it's a kind of meanwhile, haunted
[00:40:00]
by a tipping point or something like that.
The pandemic experience that we've all just been through, I mean, in many ways, I, the long, long history of relations between peoples has been shaped by plagues. But the, if we, if we look at the, at the kind of trace that the pandemic leaves, it's very difficult to narrate in a way that, in a way that perhaps war isn't.
So, so how, how do we, how do we produce a, a historical narrative of the 20th and 21st century that is, that is alive to the international global forces, planetary forces. And, and there's a tension here between the global and the planetary and everything I've said that are alive to the way that planetary forces are shaping historical experience without themselves being
[00:41:00]
historically locatable.
Héctor Hoyos: Yep. Yep. You know, listening how epoch changing wars, have or don't have narrative quality depending on where you are standing in the world just makes me realize how important this work is beyond the confines of professional or lay literary criticism. We, we do need more, more folks who can think about narrativity critically and to think of the big picture.
And I think, Luo, you, you had a question that had to do with where, right? What would be the site for that thought?
Luo Jia: Right. So I was thinking, well, as this might circle back to what Héctor mentioned in the very beginning of this conversation, that in this room, we are a group of scholars, well established scholars and emerging scholars like me and Caroline, but what we have in common is that we are educators.
We are working at a higher education institution, right? So, if we think of this age as an age of crisis, as an age
[00:42:00]
of meanwhile, as you just mentioned, what responsibilities do you think institutions have, like literature departments, research universities, anything else?
Peter Boxall: Yeah, I mean, it's a tremendously good question and, again, one that, that preoccupies me much, for much of the time.
And I'm, I'm aware, again, that I'm speaking from a, UK perspective and, and it, the, the, I'm sure there are similarities and some differences between the UK and the US. There has been a, I sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there has been a concerted campaign to weaken the university as a place of critical thinking in the UK.
Concerted and naked and absolutely, you know, unmistakable. And one of, you know, one of the ways to, to prevent the humanities
[00:43:00]
from, from, from thinking in ways that might challenge existing norms and existing power structures is to instrumentalize the university, and, and the, the university in the UK has, is nine tenths of the way through this process of not, not thinking about the university as a as a utopian space and I know the, the word utopian is difficult in this context but a utopian space where we can think outside of instrumental pressures.
We're nine tenths of the way, about, through eradicating that role in the university and thinking about the university as a simple producer of the future in, in, totally in line with how we produce the world now. And that is a, that's a dreadful, dreadful development. And, and it's a responsibility for all of those
[00:44:00]
in institutions, in institutions of learning and perhaps very particularly for institutions of learning like Stanford in the US or Oxford in the UK that still have forms of freedom and autonomy that many institutions now all but do. I mean, it's, it falls to us to cherish that freedom and continue it.
Héctor Hoyos: I think that is a beautiful note to end on. I'd like to thank Peter Boxall from Oxford University, whose book, The Possibility of Literature, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, as well as Luo Jia and Caroline Bailey, who was producing this podcast.
I am signing off. Héctor Hoyos from the Center for the Study of the Novel. Thank you.
Peter Boxall: Thank you.
Luo Jia: Thank
[00:45:00]
you.
[outro music plays]

Stories of the Seas Conference with Ross Ballaster and Jonathan Lamb - 4/5/24

Stories of the Seas Conference with Ross Ballaster and Jonathan Lamb - 4/5/24, or read the full transcript below.

Stories and the Seas
[00:00:00]
[intro music plays in the background throughout the description of the episode]
Jessica Monaco: Welcome and thanks for joining us for another installment of CSN Café, the podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. In this episode, our host, Margaret Cohen, is joined by Ros Ballaster, Professor of 18th Century Studies in the faculty of English at Mansfield College, Oxford University, and Jonathan Lamb, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Literature at Vanderbilt University. Both of them visited the Center to speak at this year's CSN conference titled "Stories and the Seas" on April 5th, 2024. This conversation was recorded the day before the conference, and we are delighted to be sharing it with you now. Thank you for listening in on another one of our warm and informal exchanges.
Margaret Cohen: I'm so glad you could join us, and give our audience a taste of what we're going to be talking about tomorrow with our annual conference, "Stories and the Seas." I, I framed the topic
[00:01:00]
pretty broadly because I was interested in the way in which the seas stimulate the imagination.
And so I wondered if I could ask each of you to talk about what stories it conjures for you.
Ros Ballaster: Wow, that's a big question. I was thinking about, actually, your title. Because I was thinking about, um, Salman Rushdie has a lovely 1992 novel called Haroun and the Sea of Stories in which a father's telling stories to his son, and I like that idea of stories being a sea. The idea that they're a sort of whirl of water that you can pick stories out of and then they go back into them and that they don't have a kind of clear original direction or that you can't, or you can't see the horizon. So, so what you have is an infinity of water rather than a sense of a kind of limit to story and where it stops and where it starts.
Margaret Cohen: It's beautiful. I'm so glad you noticed that because that was one of
[00:02:00]
my son's favorite books when he was a kid and we used to, to read it to him. So for me, just briefing a little bit, it also has an oral component of, like, something that you share.
Ros Ballaster: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. There's also a sort of verbal exchange.
And I think it's also partly about getting away from that idea. I suppose there's a lot of discussion. I'm most interested in stories and Oriental tales and sort of the notion that stories travel along the Silk Road. But thinking about how stories travel across seas and are told on the seas as well.
As someone who works in the 18th century, I love the, you know, Penelope Aubin has all these stories in which people are on, on a boat telling a story of their abduction or their liberation. So, so there seems to, the sea seems to be a place where stories get told that's between two places where things have happened.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, I've been reading recently the stories of Sinbad,
[00:03:00]
The Seven Voyages of Sinbad. And that, that's, that's a weird collection of stories. But one of the things that happens twice actually in, in, in his, in the seven tales is that he goes into the sea with, which nobody knows, I mean, without any kind of map or sign or signal of where to go.
And all the same thing happens twice. The helmsman gets really nervous and, and, and finally goes manic and the ship sinks. And that's usually when Sinbad, by some means or other, gets into a current of water that washes him towards an island.
Ros Ballaster: And nobody else does.
Jonathan Lamb: Oh no!
Ros Ballaster: It's just Sinbad that survives, isn't it?
Jonathan Lamb: Well there's something extraordinarily
[00:04:00]
egotistical, I think, about, about extreme voyages. You know, it just becomes you. It's like the ancient mariner. All, all alone, you know, nobody, nobody with me. Everybody on the ship is dead. Well, they may as well be dead. And they're going to be dead at the end, but they're all inert.
Ros Ballaster: And that's true to Robinson Crusoe, isn't it? That that survival story is one of kind of being the only one who survives. And I suppose they are also linked in that they're both providential stories. So there's something about Sinbad and Crusoe where they, they at least, I mean, you can call it egotism or you could call it providentialism. They, they have a version of their story, which means they've survived because God wanted them to.
Jonathan Lamb: Well there's a very funny end story for Sinbad. I think that the Sinbad author or tale teller was, was worried about repetition. Because those stories do begin to repeat in one form or
[00:05:00]
another. They have sort of, you know, he's going to be destitute. I mean, he's going to be cast away, then destitute. Then he's going to be rich again. It's simple. But I mean, in the last story, he, he has a, he meets some people who are within a cloud of birds, and the birds all fly up to the heavens, and he flies with them, and he meets all of these angels singing the praises of God.
And so he starts singing along, you know, until he realizes that he's, he's actually in a different religion. So he stops. And at that point he falls back to the earth. And he sees a serpent with a man halfway down its throat. And, and then he sees two
[00:06:00]
people from the moon, who've landed on the earth too. And, and they praise him for his fidelity to Allah.
Ros Ballaster: Right.
Jonathan Lamb: And I thought, what on earth is this story about?
Ros Ballaster: It's interesting as well, that business of the, I've just been reading there's an essay by Jerome Cohen, I think it's called "The Sea Above," and he talks about these medieval myths of, and stories as an Irish 13th-century bishop who tells them of sort of people looking up to the sky and seeing, and it's a sea, and there's a boat flying above them, and someone throws down an anchor. And it gets hooked on a church, and then a little man has to climb down from the ship above and try and get the anchor up. People on the earth are trying to hold him down. He's saying, no, let me go, I'm drowning. And this, this, this, these stories seem to be partly about, I think there's something about the sea
[00:07:00]
always taking you to the sky, or some, somehow lifting you to it, or, or, that there's some kind of reflective state.
Jonathan Lamb: Reflective, yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Where I, I mean, I always think about that weird bit in Marvell when he talks about the fish jellied in air.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: So, so there's a kind of mirage that happens when you are at sea, when you start to think maybe the sea's above you rather than you being below it. But those are also clearly sort of tales that have something to do with religious epiphany and a necessary separation between the sky and the sea, that you must let the man go back, do you see what I mean, to the sea above, that is?
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, well, in my theology, I mean, they, Rangi and Papa. Papa is the female earth spirit and Rangi is the sky spirit, male. And they have to come apart if there's to be any kind of
[00:08:00]
human development on Earth. And so rain is Rangi weeping for Papa, and it's a very tender kind of story, but I mean there's no, there's not going to be any kind of happy, happy ending.
Margaret Cohen: I mean that's such a profound theme, the kind of elusiveness of the ability to contact, you know, from one element to the other. I think you're going to talk about that a little bit.
Ros Ballaster: Yes, yes, I'm interested in that, well that's sort of elemental theory. And I was thinking about, you know, Empedocles says about the elements that it's only, they're always pulled together by love or by strife.
But he says you see them most clearly in strife and in love they want to mix. And in strife they must, their shape becomes more apparent.
And actually, sorry, this is, maybe it's a distraction, but one of the books I was, I've got very interested
[00:09:00]
in is Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch and actually what you've just described explains something. There's a character called Rain. Who lives at, who's a, on a Caribbean island who's a sort of descendant of white plantocracy.
And she has a, a mixed race child. But she lives on an estate that's called Paradise, and they have a tree called Papa Bois, or Papa Bois, where there's a kind of epiphanic moment in the novel. And so clearly, I mean, Roffey is riffing on all of these sort of African and Caribbean myths. So she's clearly picked up on the rain, Mama Rain and Papa Bois story and put it into that novel.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: I mean, I think that's another thing about, I mean, maybe that does relate to that idea of the sea of stories. Do you see what I mean?
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: That they, they are in a, they're
[00:10:00]
a kind of melting pot or a whirlpool.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: And they have, they may originate in particular regions, but they circulate.
Margaret Cohen: They circulate.
Ros Ballaster: And people encounter them afresh and don't necessarily recognize them.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: And then might join them up.
I mean, I think that's a big question for me always about story, about, you know, are there routes that stories travel or are they actually kind of just common patterns?
Margaret Cohen: Structurally, or yeah. Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: A sort of structuralist versus historicist account of English literary history, or literary history in general, not English literary history.
Jonathan Lamb: I suppose the big one is, is the Arabian Nights. I mean, that traveled.
Margaret Cohen: I was going to ask you both, as very distinguished scholars of the 18th century, that we're delighted to have with us, if Defoe read Sinbad and how the Arabian Nights traveled around the, the maritime writing of the 18th century?
Jonathan Lamb: Well, it certainly, it travelled
[00:11:00]
in spirit in Oriental tales because everybody was writing Oriental tales. Hawksworth and Addison and all those people, but yeah. But I think that certain, certain elements of the Arabian Nights, like Sinbad, I mean, stuck in people's imagination. So you've got Swift, who borrows from, from Sinbad's story of the rook, the rock, you know, for the escape from Brobdingnag, isn't it, in the second book?
Ros Ballaster: Does he get lifted up by a big bird at the end of that?
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think they must both have, I, I can't think of a moment when Defoe mentions Sinbad. But we don't have a lot of that kind of documentation from Defoe. We have a lot of his essays and so forth, but I can't, but I'm quite sure he must have read Sinbad.
I mean, there's
[00:12:00]
so the pattern of this kind of, I went to sea, I got shipwrecked. I swore I'd never do it again. Then I got, then I had to do it again. The kind of compulsion to keep going on a sea voyage.
Jonathan Lamb: The compulsion is really strong at the beginning of the, the continuation, you know, after Robinson Crusoe, it's such a big hit.
And there's the second part and it starts with, with, and, and you, you don't know if it's Defoe or Robinson Crusoe. He, he says, I could not get out of, in my, my mind the, the picture of my island, and even when I would fall asleep is what I would dream of.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: And I think that's what happened to Defoe. I think, I think his imagination was taken over by the product of his own imagination.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: And, it's, with Defoe, it does seem to me that he's impatient with, with,
[00:13:00]
a tissue of imaginings. You know, what he wants are facts, really, it's a highly empirical imagination. But that fascinates him, and he can't, he can't let it go.
Ros Ballaster: I suppose I sometimes wonder about how easy it is to tell stories, you called it "Stories and the Seas," didn't you? Stories that are actually on the sea or in the sea. That they always seem to land up on the island, do you see what I mean? Or that somehow the, the, the sort of the desire, the sea, the problem that the sea always seems to be something that you're crossing or washed up from rather than, So the stories that are actually about being on the sea are often, more the sort of stories that you talk about, Margaret, about, you know, they're kind of mariners stories.
They're stories. I mean, how interesting is it, I suppose, is my question, to tell a
[00:14:00]
story about the technical business of being at sea, which I imagine a lot of the time is pretty boring.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
[laughter]
It's dull until everything goes wrong.
Ros Ballaster: Yes. And then it's, yeah.
Margaret Cohen: You run into the Francis Scott Key Bridge and you, it collapses.
And then, I mean, I've then had Conrad on my mind a lot in the past few days, thinking of the, I think they may be Sri Lankans. The ship was going to Sri Lanka and there are Indian seafarers who are stuck on board in Baltimore, keeping the ship working and just wondering, like, what would Conrad's version of that story be?
But I mean, but to your point, yeah, there's, there's, when you see very often, like in Conrad, if you want to get a story that's actually set on the sea, it's like you have to frame it with all these kind of buffers because it's so scary when you actually get there, and traumatic. So I'm thinking of the story "Falk."
I don't know if you've read that, that's
[00:15:00]
About a German mariner who turns out to have engaged in survival cannibalism. And he can only tell this to someone else who is, you know, part of this community of seafarers in a secret, you know, kind of pact, which can't really fully be related to the land people because it's so, you know, transgressive and taboo, but, but they understand each other.
So I think I guess what I'm saying, and I, one could even, you know, amplify this to Melville or take in different places is that to get to the traumatic conditions of what's going on at sea, you need a lot of filters and preparation and it just can't be offered without any qualifications and disclaimers.
Ros Ballaster: It's interesting, I've just been watching the, that film, Nyad, you know, about swimming for a hundred hours from Cuba to
[00:16:00]
Florida, and she does it about four attempts and there's this sort of two hour film and she's most, and it cannot show you the kind of utter tedium of a hundred hours of swimming. So all you can get are the moments of crisis.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: You know, the moments when a box jellyfish gets her or a moment when a storm means she has to, to sort of stop. There's a wonderful line in it when she sort of, when her friend Bonnie is sort of saying, oh, all the things that were going on the boat, you didn't see any of that.
No, I was just swimming.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
[laughter]
Ros Ballaster: Putting one arm over another.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I saw it too in my preparation to be able to see all the films for the Oscars this year. It's a sort of a jolly, but, but that disconnect between what the crew is doing and what she is doing, I think is something which is one of the stronger narrative elements of that film. Yeah. You know, that she's
[00:17:00]
just off in this other world, actually in the sea compared to all the challenges that they're facing in terms of navigation and keeping her safe.
Ros Ballaster: But, and that story about cannibalism is interesting as well, I suppose, because I was thinking about, you know, the sort of African myth of, of Mami Wata, who's a sort of mermaid serpent figure of African, folklore.
And the story there is one in which people who are taken to Mami Wata's abode return with their clothes entirely dry and having undergone some kind of spiritual transformation or transfiguration. So there's something that happens. When you go in the sea, do you see what I mean?
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: That is not, that gives you a kind of knowledge that you can't share again on land.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: That you have been changed. But precisely not been changed by getting wet. The obvious.
Jonathan Lamb:
[00:18:00]
What is it, E. E. Cummings, it's always ourselves we find by the sea.
Ros Ballaster: Right. Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Do you agree with that?
Jonathan Lamb: No.
I think, I think the sea is magnetic, however. I mean, you know, it's always where you want to go and look, stare. But I mean, on, on the question of cannibalism, it's, it's interesting because there was, there was a notorious, well it wasn't notorious actually, case of the Minionette, have you ever heard of this?
It was a yacht and it, it sank on the way to Australia. I mean it was quite a, you know, big yacht, and there were only, sort of, three people on board, the, the skipper, his mate, and a cabin boy. And, they, they are in a boat and, the, the cabin boy's in a coma. So they say, well, we've got to eat him, if we're to survive, and they do
[00:19:00]
eat him and they get picked up soon afterwards.
And of course in maritime law, they haven't done anything wrong. There was a, there was a, there was laid down in the Black Book of Admiralty a sequence that had to be observed if you were going to eat somebody, kill them and eat them. And they did observe it. But when they came ashore in Portsmouth, they were arrested under common law and charged with murder.
But already the captain had gone to the, there was a memorial service for the boy and his family knew exactly what had happened. And they went up to the captain and thanked him for being so careful of the boy in his last moments. And, and I think because he had eaten him, he was like a relation. So they embraced him.
So it's funny, really.
Ros Ballaster: It's interesting. I was thinking about Don Juan,
[00:20:00]
of course. There's a cannibalism scene --
Jonathan Lamb: That's right, that's right.
Ros Ballaster: In Don Juan, when they're sort of, they're just a small boat, aren't they, and they draw lots as to who's going to be, and that was the scene that people found beyond the pale in Don Juan. All of the rest of it was okay, but that was the kind of stopping point for a lot of readers.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, yeah. Well, I worked with somebody who did a lot of research into, into maritime law and how, and also navigation acts and how they were constantly being abused in the Caribbean and beyond. But she had a story from Norfolk Island, which was one of the grimmest of the convict colonies in the settlement of Australia, where in order to get off the island because it was so hideous and the punishments were so, so torturous.
[00:21:00]
they, they would make a pact but six or seven people would make a pact, usually Irish Catholics. And one would draw a straw, well they'd all draw straws, but one, one would have a straw that said that they had to kill somebody.
And one would be, the other straw would be the victim. And the, then they would be arrested, but they'd be sent to Sydney. They'd all get a trip to Sydney. The, the, offender would be hanged. No doubt. I mean, certainly. But it was, it was just a form of release and it was all done by, you know, nobody was dissenting from the, from the business. It just shows you.
Ros Ballaster: And I was thinking, because I have been preparing for our
[00:22:00]
conference by writing a paper about mermaids and seagulls and their connection, but particularly, but looking at mermaids, I've just been reading a very recent sort of short work of Afrofuturist fiction by Solomon Rivers called The Deep, which is a kind of fantastic tale based on, it happened to coincide, I think, it's based on an 18th century controversy about a ship called the Zong, where they, where they ran out of water and trying to get back, I think it's to Jamaica or the Caribbean, so, so, well, what happened on the ship was that slaves were thrown off the ship in order that, sailors said, in order to preserve, to keep enough water for the rest of the people to survive. And then when they came back to England, they were charged. This is one of these Mansfield cases, wasn't it?
Margaret Cohen:
[00:23:00]
Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: Mansfield was in charge of the review case, certainly.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. And they were charged, they were, I mean, it was thought to be an insurance, well, there was a big debate, wasn't there, about the owners of the ship and whether they could claim insurance for the loss of those bodies.
And this, this little work of fiction, it's a lovely work of fiction based on a piece of music. But then it's sort of the, the conceit of it is that the, the children or the, the babies that the pregnant women are carrying are born underwater, they're raised by whales, they form their own little colony.
And then there's a kind of fantastic tale about how the pain of this past is so hard for them to deal with that they sort of store it in one figure, one mermaid called, or one sea girl called the historian. And she can't bear the responsibility of this, insists that they must all share it, and sort of flees from them.
So it's a lovely story about fleeing the sea to the land, and then she has a kind of romance with a fisherwoman.
[00:24:00]
So it's both a sort of, yeah, it's a kind of gender fluid, it's sort of interracial fantasy. It's a clever conceit, I think, the book, and an interesting way of telling that story. For me, it coincided with, there was a play in London last year called Zong, which tried to retell that story.
And interestingly, in terms of what we've been talking about, the second part act, the second part of that play had to move into fantasy, I think, to kind of recover from the real horror of the story. So there's a sort of fantasy second part in which the, you see Caribbean women sort of holding a line together and forming a kind of imaginary community --
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, yeah.
Ros Ballaster: -- out of that horror. But it does seem as though there's a kind of need for a sort of fantasy stories about the sea to come back against the sort of often the horror
[00:25:00]
stories that we --
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, there's an African American artist who, who worked on, on those lines with the Zong. Her name was Emily something and I can't remember what the second one was.
Which, her fantasy was, with the, they all drown and come to the bottom and then various sorts of seaweeds grow out of them and at each node of the seaweed there is a face.
Margaret Cohen: Scary. Very scary. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
Jonathan Lamb: No, I was going to say though that Mansfield was in a, in an awful position.
Because it was, it was again, a collision between common law and, and maritime law. I mean, Collingwood, the, the skipper of the Zong, I mean, had behaved according to maritime law, perfectly correctly. In fact, what I think was
[00:26:00]
wrong was that there was cholera on the ship. And he thought, well, if we, if we keep the people who've got cholera on the ship, everybody's going to get cholera.
So that was what he did. But Mansfield couldn't bear it. He said, it's like murder. But he said, he actually gave the judgment, on the, you know, on the second sort of readout of the trial and said, well, they had to pay the insurance.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, I mean, I, I think we're surfacing again this, this ambivalence on the one hand, and, and I've seen this in different ways in which the Zong massacre has been written about.
On the one hand, there's, like, this melancholy and a sense of an inability to, to access the, the horror, that I, I don't know if you know the, the poem by NourbeSe Philip called Zong! -- it's, she takes the actual trial language and she cuts it up and she does a kind of Mallarmé
[00:27:00]
scattering of it across, across a number of different, I forget what she calls this.
Oh, zongs, the actual, like, song and zong. Okay. And, and, by the end, there's a Derridian component too. You have, like, the ghosts of the African ancestors who were being evoked through this. So, like, this profoundly, I mean, I'm getting kind of goosebumps as I talk about this, profoundly chilling and melancholy and eerie affect.
And then in the Afrofuturist kind of fantasy of, like, a kind of, you know, sea creature that's able to emerge in a sense of hope for, for the future. There's this transmutation of some sort. And that's a really profound, like, tension that runs through I think different aspects of this effort to, like, encompass what, what Conrad calls a destructive element, right?
In the destructive element immerse.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah,
[00:28:00]
yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. Well, um, I feel we should talk about beauty. Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Beauty.
Jonathan Lamb: What's beauty?
Margaret Cohen: I mean, we started with more entrancing aspects of stories and the seas, and then we, we fell into the abyss and, you know, the horror and the trauma, maybe we just stay there, I don't know.
Jonathan Lamb: Oh, I don't know, I, I, think we should strive for the skies.
Ros Ballaster: I don't know, I do, I suppose, I think there is a kind of, I don't know, this is, may not help us that much. I mean, one of the problems now, isn't it? It does seem to be that it's very difficult to talk about the sea except in terms of sort of ecological disaster and sort of, so that, and the sort of problem that all that you can, that often the way that that's counted is by talking about the sea as though it was some kind of pure space that has been polluted, do you see what I mean? Rather
[00:29:00]
than the extent to which, you know, was there ever, was there ever a sort of a world of the sea, which was not subject to man's interference, or was not something that was, you know, it might not have been drowning in plastics, but it's, or even is there, is there a kind of concept of this? Is, is the sea, actually you could answer this better than me, but I sort of was wondering whether, you know, in the same way as we might say race is a construct, you know, is the sea a construct, do you know what I mean? Or is the way we've been talking about it, do we want to sort of say no, actually it's an elemental reality, that man's always been, that humankind's always been struggling to kind of conquer, manage, manage, map.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, it's sort of, the history, I mean, well, the mythology of the sea, I mean, is, is circular
[00:30:00]
in fact, isn't it? Because after the deluge, what the sea is, is an offensive element because it has absorbed all the sin that's been annihilated by the deluge.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: And so for a long time, as, as Alain Corbin says, you, it, it's been regarded as filthy. And then, you know, in the 18th century when people, or before that, I mean, start swimming in the sea and finding it really healthy, it, it attracts a new kind of purity.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm .
Jonathan Lamb: Or it may be that just, you know, belief in, in, Christianity has weakened and, and, you know, it, but now it seems as if we've repeated the whole cycle.
I mean, what's happened to the
[00:31:00]
waterways in Britain is a scandal. I mean, all of the privatized water companies have neglected to control sewage outlets. I mean, recently there was a triathlon in the north of England and all of the people, 59 people who went in the sea off Saltburn in the north of England, northeast, had to go to hospital.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. And I was just watching the boat race this last weekend and some of the, yeah, some of the Oxford crew had --
Jonathan Lamb: Did they?
Ros Ballaster: -- diarrhoea and sickness that they think is a result of high waters in Oxford, which meant that they haven't been able to practice as much either.
Jonathan Lamb: Wow.
Ros Ballaster: So.
Margaret Cohen: Well, I do want to return though to what you said about, Ros, about the, the idea that the sea exists without us, you know, it reminds me of an article by William Cronon, it's called "The Problem of Wilderness."
[00:32:00]
And the idea that wilderness is a construct which, you know, excludes the human. But if you look at how we practice the planet, humans are part of the ecosystem, you know, and it gets, it actually just raised one of my pet peeves when I watch nature documentaries are the ways in which the filmmakers go to such great lengths to exclude the human from the frame, you know, when, when, you know, they're sort of doing all kinds of things to massage the environment so that it looks like those penguins are flinging themselves on the rocks, you know, but actually they're sitting there in their boats waiting, waiting for those penguins to do it or whatever it may be.
And I do think that, that, part of an environmental imagination going forward. And this is just kind of something that, that is my suggestion is that we include humans in the frame, you know? So,
[00:33:00]
so I really, I liked, I don't know if you saw My Octopus Teacher.
Ros Ballaster: Yes, I did.
Margaret Cohen: I liked that because it's, it's that film has a kind of, a very specific and eccentric individual who is in relationship with a specific marine creature and you get to observe their interaction. You get to observe him on land, you know, it, it doesn't have this mystical blue planet sense that the seas are this magnificent environment without us. So, yeah, that, what you said really resonated with things I think about.
Ros Ballaster: That is interesting. I mean, I wonder whether. I mean, I hadn't thought about it this way, but I wonder whether some of the mermaid tales I've been talking about are partly about imagining that interaction or, or finding a way of putting humans in connection with sea creatures. But they're just a sort of fantastic way of trying to tell that desire, which is very strong in, in My
[00:34:00]
Octopus Teacher.
I think this is a ridiculous confession to make, but I'm very, I was very struck years ago. I took my children to see Finding Nemo when they were tiny. And the CGI was so effective in that film, I was having a sort of slight panic attack in the cinema about the idea of being Nemo underwater and all of that sea.
And I still feel slightly that way when I get on a boat. I don't, you know, getting too far out, the idea of an infinity of sea and not being able to see land --
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: -- I find really quite terrifying. And the idea of being way underwater, even though I love swimming, there's something about that, those experiences that are so other to one's normal positioning in the world. I think that's probably what it's about.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Not having some, you know, something on your eyeline, do you see what I mean? That organizes
[00:35:00]
where you are.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, I mean, I think that the connection between the sea and the sky in that respect as mirror, mirrors of one another.
Ros Ballaster: Mm.
Jonathan Lamb: I mean, kicks in because, I mean, both Locke and Hobbes were quite convinced that infinity was an impossible concept.
I mean, you could not absorb it, you couldn't make anything of infinity. It, it left you in the sea, in fact.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: But you know, Newton came along and said, no, no, no, no. He said, infinity is in fact, a double negative. And what's, what's negative is the end. So you've got here an infinity, the word infinity, an end to the end, infinity, you see, and therefore it leaves the residue of a positive by means of a double
[00:36:00]
negative, which the definition of a double negative is what? Can you remember? You affirm something by denying it's opposite.
Ros Ballaster: Yes, it's a positive. And that's as far as Jonathan's going to let us go with beauty.
[Margaret and Ros laugh]
Jonathan Lamb: No, no, no, I'm not. I've got something more to say. And I mean to say it. No, what, what you can pick up from Newton is, is what people do in infinity then. It becomes an excitement that causes the imagination to work in a very, very liberated way.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah, and that's, yes, and I suppose that's, you know, the idea of the sublime, isn't it?
It's a kind of perception of infinity. is the sublime experience. You can't actually --
Jonathan Lamb: Articulate it.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: I think that's probably true. It
[00:37:00]
may account for the kind of mixture of terror and delight that you get in fantastic tales.
Margaret Cohen: Terror and delight, that's a very powerful, yeah, coordination. Do you think we still experience the sublime in relationship to the sea today?
Jonathan Lamb: I think I keep thinking of polymers.
Margaret Cohen: Polymers.
Jonathan Lamb: There are, there are more polymers in, in the, in the city of Auckland than, than in London because the waves of the Pacific Ocean all are very good at generating or concentrating the polymers in the ocean. And then they burst on the shores of New Zealand.
And there you go. I don't know. You see, the Anthropocene is, is a form of, of species self-hatred isn't it?
Margaret Cohen: Say more about that.
[00:38:00]
Jonathan Lamb: Sorry?
Margaret Cohen: Say more about that.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, it's as if, it's as if we have lost any sense of our own evil. So what we have to do is recover it in a secular context. And that's, that's what the Anthropocene is.
I mean, we say, if it weren't for human beings, I mean, the earth would be a better place, there would be certainly more animals, more creatures in the sea, and more, you know, more of everything that would be natural to the earth. And so we, I mean, it's not everybody who thinks like that, but there is a, I mean, certainly the green movement is, is accelerated by that kind of feeling that we've done something terribly wrong to the planet.
Margaret Cohen: So you mean the discourse on the Anthropocene? Yeah. Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose what's, I mean,
[00:39:00]
I'm thinking about sort of the problem of how you have a kind of imaginative solution is often that the, the response, perhaps it is a sublime response is what, is one of kind of almost total passivity. Do less. Yeah. That's the only answer.
And yet that, that doesn't --
Jonathan Lamb: As an individual. Just do less, live a clean life.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. Exactly. Or just, yes. Try and, yeah. Make as little, yeah. Actually, it's an interesting idea. I suppose I was thinking about carbon footprints, but can you make a footprint in the sea? What does that mean? Maybe that's part of the imaginative kind of grip or non-grip of the sea is that you can't measure quite as easily as you can like that kind of, that, that footprint.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: "My name is writ in water."
Ros Ballaster: Yeah, so that's Keats.
Margaret Cohen: Yes, on his grave, his stone in Rome. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's,
[00:40:00]
it's also reminding me of conversations I've been involved in here with scientists at Stanford and Jonathan, we're going to go down and meet some of them on Monday. And they're, they're kind of so solution oriented that the kind of discourse, almost a tragic discourse of mourning that people in the humanities have about the Anthropocene is really not something that they kind of take to, you know, and so they're, they're looking for how can we know more about the ocean?
How can we know more about what we do to the ocean? How can we solve the problems that we cause? You know, and it's just been really interesting to, to sort of be steeped in that rhetoric of not optimism exactly, but very active solution oriented rhetoric, you know, I mean, they're doing pure research, so it's not that they're coming up with, you know, technologies or devices.
Ros Ballaster: Ways to move this on.
Margaret Cohen: But yeah, but, but, it's just so different.
Ros Ballaster:
[00:41:00]
I suppose then you sort of, we don't want to argue, we wouldn't want to argue our profession out of a responsibility or an engagement with these with, with those issues. And there's a book I really liked by a critic called Tim Clark called Anthropocene on the Edge. And one of the things that I like about his argument there is, he does talk a lot about sort of, sort of disaster thinking, but he also sort of says perhaps literature and the arts are a place which allow you to sort of think through, or address the problem of scale, you know, that problem of kind of, What will this tiny piece of work here, how does that relate to the scale --
Margaret Cohen: It's a powerful argument.
Ros Ballaster: -- of overfishing or, or plastic pollution, do you see what I mean? Or, or any of the other kind of global or climate change?
And it's partly that literature and the arts allows you to kind of, yeah, get close to the
[00:42:00]
reality, do you see what I mean? In a way that one could argue, well, science is very solution oriented, but it's also in a way, not always persuading people or people are not hearing science, do you see what I mean? All those solutions and finding a way of, well, it's, it's getting a dialogue where both of those elements are working together.
Margaret Cohen: And the science communication piece is something which has drawn the scientists into this project is how to reach audiences because they feel that, I mean, generalizing from the couple that I'm in dialogue with that they do this research, but they can't get it out there. They don't have a way imaginably to have it gain traction.
So, yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: I think what, what's worrisome and what sort of defeats that, that kind of pragmatic research, you know, that was something we can find out about the problem and, and maybe solve it is, is, is this, I've forgotten the term
[00:43:00]
for it, but I mean, when, when temperatures get to two and a half degrees higher, I mean, what kicks in is not controllable.
You know, there's gonna be so many forest fires. I mean, there's going to be so many inundations, that, that there's going to be so much movement of refugees over the planet that it won't be controllable. I mean, nothing will solve the problem except, I'm sorry to say, war.
It's grim, you know. I mean, a lot of, a lot of stuff I, cause I live alone in the country, you know, with my wife away in Nashville, and it, you know, the, so many films I'm watching are about, about the Second World War or the lead up to it. Or the results of it. And Oppenheimer was a, you know, it, it brought back to me the terror of
[00:44:00]
1963, you know, by the, the, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I think we've forgotten the nuclear threat, you know? We'll do it to ourselves, probably. We'll self-cancel.
Ros Ballaster: Hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: I'm sorry if that's too pessimistic, but I mean –
[laughter]
Margaret Cohen: I was going to say --
Jonathan Lamb: Well, I haven't heard a good argument against that. I mean, you know, it's what Einstein says to, to Oppenheimer. I was the first to do this and I can't forgive myself.
And of course that's what Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer is paralyzed by guilt.
Ros Ballaster: It feels very, it feels like, it feels very paradoxical. I suppose I was thinking about, you know, I was thinking about an analogy with the sort of arguments around the pandemic. It seemed to me that another way of looking at it is to say that if we weren't so, still so much in the grip of a sort of nation statism, we would be able to come to
[00:45:00]
global solutions.
But we are so, yeah, and actually talking about the sea is good place to talk about that, because you would imagine that the sea should be a place where, where, where nations, yeah, well, I mean, think about what's going on in England at the moment, I suppose, you know, around the kind of, you know, can we put the border between England and Ireland down the middle of the sea?
[laughter]
Jonathan Lamb: I know.
Ros Ballaster: What is it to call a, you know, to say here's a border in the middle of water? It's a sort of shifting border again. So, yeah, so, but I suppose that the kind of, you know, you know, that's why I'm saying it seems pessimistic because, in a way, what you're suggesting, Jonathan, or saying what's going to happen is that nation statism will be the solution as well as the cause.
Because war will be the thing that wipes out populations. So that we are making less demand on the planet.
Jonathan Lamb: What seems to be happening all over the
[00:46:00]
place is that global institutions, you know, like the UN, are being completely ignored, um, at the moment, you know, in the Gaza situation. And, China is animated by nothing but a vast sense of nationalism.
And, you know, I, I don't know, I was just looking at a film about the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany. And if you've got people in a, in a state of, severe deprivation and of national humiliation. That, that is the result, actually. I mean, you're going to overarm, you're going to become too, you know, I mean, imperial, not nationalist, imperial, and you're going to want other people's land.
And, and there will be a fight for resources, won't there?
Margaret Cohen: My gosh, we're really getting into Mad Max territory here.
[00:47:00]
Jonathan Lamb: I think, I think, I am not, I'm not, you know, avid about this. It's just, it's borne in on me. I mean, I can feel fear. I felt fear today walking through Stanford. I mean, the buildings are so massive.
They make you feel like a pygmy and, and then I walked past this new building that's being put together by, which is going to be about science, science research and digital research. And I thought, you know, there's this terror about AI. If you can't find terror in one place, you can certainly find it in another.
Margaret Cohen: Well, I'm looking for a cheery note to end this podcast on. I think it's the note that I'm going to see you both tomorrow and listen to your papers.
[laughter]
Ros Ballaster: So there is a, there is a tomorrow.
Jonathan Lamb: We won't be dead by then.
Margaret Cohen: And I hope you'll get a good dinner before that.
[00:48:00]
Ros Ballaster: Well, we, yeah, maybe there will, I'm sure there will be conversation which comes up with other ways of thinking about solutions.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly the Anthropocene is such a challenging and important subject and the sea is so deeply involved in it that I think it has also drawn people.
I mean, I'm not, it's not that I'm looking for a silver lining, but I think it has animated the conversation around the seas in a way that it was hard to do 20 or 25 years ago when we first started working on the seas. It was hard to convince people that they really were at the center of human history and now we realize that they are.
Jonathan Lamb: Students will queue up for courses on the sea. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. It's a good sign.
Margaret Cohen: Well, thank you both. It was so great to have a chance to speak, and I'll look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Jonathan Lamb:
[00:49:00]
Yeah.
[outro music plays]

Ian Watt Lecture with Caroline Levine, "A Tale of Three Pipelines" - 2/20/24

Ian Watt Lecture: Caroline Levine, "A Tale of Three Pipelines" - 2/20/24, or read the full transcript below.

Ian Watt Lecture: Caroline Levine, "A Tale of Three Pipelines"
[intro music plays in the background throughout the description of the episode]
Jessica Monaco: [00:00:00] Welcome and thanks for joining us for another installment of CSN Café, the podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. In this episode, our host, Margaret Cohen, is joined by Caroline Levine, the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University, Alex Woloch, the Richard W. Lyman Professor of the Humanities in the English Department at Stanford, and Sasha Starovoitov a PhD student in the Stanford English Department. Caroline visited the Center on February 20th, 2024 to deliver her Ian Watt lecture, "Studying the Novel in the Climate Crisis, or a Tale of Three Pipelines." This conversation was recorded directly before that lecture, and we are delighted to be sharing it with you now. Thank you for listening in on another one of our warm and informal exchanges.
Margaret Cohen: Hi, and welcome to our Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. We're delighted today to welcome
[00:01:00]
Caroline Levine, who is going to give the Ian Watt Lecture in the History and Theory of the Novel. So let me get started by asking you all just to say a few words about yourself.
And the question I thought of asking was, where are you coming from?
Caroline Levine: Well, I, so this is Caroline Levine. I came from Ithaca. I teach at Cornell University, and I was experimenting with low carbon travel to get here. So it took me many days, and I can really recommend the train, had a little sleeping car, but then I drove an EV down the coast from Portland, Oregon, and that was more complicated. So I am coming from Ithaca with a relatively low carbon footprint on the way.
Margaret Cohen: Thank you. Yeah. Do you have any kind of a metric or calculator to measure that?
Caroline Levine: No. I mean, in some sense, the reason I did this was not actually to reduce my own carbon footprint, although that's what it looks like, but to
[00:02:00]
experiment with what the available alternatives are because I don't think any individual, one of us, taking a train rather than a plane is going to make all the difference, but I do think figuring out whether taking the train is a good possibility makes a difference, right? And so, thinking about infrastructure and what's available and, you know, even our ideas about the train. So on the Amtrak train, if you have an overnight compartment, they seat you with other people, strangers in the dining car. And so I just got to ask people why they took the train, you know, so I was learning about, like, what is train culture in this country? I think probably very, a very small percentage of Americans have ever been on a train. You know, I was trying to think about that.
Alex Woloch: Have ever been on a train at all or overnight, maybe. I mean, overnight, it would probably be a low number, but.
Caroline Levine: I would just wonder about being on a train at all, you know?
Margaret Cohen: Alex, have you been on a train?
Alex Woloch: I've been on a train. But I can't really think that I've been on an overnight train. So I can't remember being on an over -- well, you were on an overnight train, right?
Caroline Levine: Yeah, yeah.
Alex Woloch:
[00:03:00]
Where you slept on the train.
Caroline Levine: I slept on the train, yeah.
Alex Woloch: What about, what about the rest of you guys?
Margaret Cohen: I've done that in Europe.
Alex Woloch: In Europe.
Margaret Cohen: But I haven't done that here.
Sasha Starovoitov: I've done it in China and in Europe, but I have never done an overnight train in the United States, although I'm very interested in it because the population that does engage with it definitely seems to be enthusiasts, rather than kind of using the train as transportation. So I'm interested whether you met people who were, like, what the distribution was of people, what brought people to the train.
Margaret Cohen: Sasha, I'm just going to interrupt so people can identify.
Sasha Starovoitov: Oh, yes, sorry. Hi, I'm Sasha, and I am a first year English PhD student here at Stanford and delighted to be joining this conversation.
Margaret Cohen: And what's your favorite train ride?
Sasha Starovoitov: Oh, my favorite train ride is the most sentimental one, which is, uh, my family is from Belarus, and there is a train that goes from the capital city out to the countryside, and you see these, it is not a very comfortable train at all, but it is one that holds the most memories for me, so.
[00:04:00]
Margaret Cohen: Wow. And Alex?
Alex Woloch: I don't know that I have a, oh, I'm Alex Woloch. Is that what you wanted?
[laughter in background]
I'm a twenty-- let's see, approximately 24th year English professor at Stanford, and I don't think I can think of a favorite train ride easily, having not, having not been on a train for, for a while, definitely.
It does seem like an interesting thing to talk about, and does seem tied up in the work. I don't know if it's tied up in the work you're presenting tonight, but --
Caroline Levine: Definitely. I mean, I think one of the things that I, I'm constantly running up against is this sense that people feel guilty about their own, I mean, you were even saying that, Alex, about driving in by car and then you feel bad in the presence of an environmentalist. But actually, I just don't think that's the way we're going to solve the climate problem is not by guilting everybody into it. And so part of what I'm trying to figure out is kind of
[00:05:00]
how much sacrifice do you need to make?
And that's all wrong, right? The more sacrifice we need to make to do this, the harder it is to convert over and therefore we have to take our cars or we have to fly. So it was, I think, three times more expensive to take the train.
Margaret Cohen: I mean, you start out the activist humanist with a very moving portrayal of your students in class worrying about, you know, their carbon footprint.
And I wondered if that played into your, into your decision to write this book.
Caroline Levine: It absolutely did. I mean, I was a person who always worried about my own carbon footprint until I read, and maybe you all know this already, but it was, a big kind of shock light bulb moment for me when I read that British Petroleum invented the term carbon footprint to get us all focusing on our own individual consumption as opposed to on what British Petroleum
[00:06:00]
is doing.
And so that was a kind of shift for me where I really wanted my students to think about that. You know, is it, is it more effective to get us all feeling guilty? No, I think, although, uh, people put a lot of pressure on themselves to try to live up to these high environmental standards. But what if we were putting pressure on, you know, the hundred companies that are responsible for the great majority of emissions worldwide, like, that seems actually much easier than changing billions of people's habits when changing those habits is a big sacrifice for people.
So yes, it's all part of the -- trying to think with my students about what would be effective.
Alex Woloch: Can I jump? I mean, can I jump? I don't, can I? Yeah, no, just thinking about like pedagogy in your work, and it seems really tied into it. So I guess the, and also just the, sort of the question of response to the environmental crisis.
The part of what you're modeling is that response is partially, is partially about, like, how
[00:07:00]
we write, how we teach, what we teach, what we write. So that question of, like, how much has your work in the classroom turned to kind of, ecology and environment, and how is that? And then just, and I think this is a big question, like, for any literary scholars, this curiosity about the place of literature in your work.
So, so with teaching, I mean, I feel like we could probably get to the same answers, whether we're talking about the books or your classes.
Caroline Levine: Yeah, no, it's true. And it's, sometimes I feel like I jumped off a cliff, because I really --
Alex Woloch: Just one?
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: Yeah, maybe many cliffs. That's a good point, but you know, leaving the humanities behind in some really crucial way by saying, you know, just to address the climate crisis, I don't think reading literature in any of the traditional ways that I was trained to and love to do and still wish I could do, isn't actually gonna help us. I think there are ways of
[00:08:00]
thinking humanistically that are still valuable. But a lot of what people will say, a lot of environmental humanists will say is that, you know, literature or the arts give us these new modes of attention.
And that I think is true, but also really slow, right? And we don't have the time with the climate crisis. So to me, part of the structure, the form of thinking about it has to do with the kind of urgency of acting now and so I think, you know, if we could stop the climate crisis, I'd go back to reading literature my old --
Alex Woloch: And teaching.
Caroline Levine: -- favorite ways and teaching that.
But really I teach students, you know, it's a very odd kind of teaching for me trained as a literary critic. We look at Cornell, and we think about what we know about Cornell's contribution to the climate crisis, and then we try to solve it actively. And some of that is communication because a
[00:09:00]
lot of people don't know what Cornell is doing well and what Cornell is doing badly, that a lot of the worst emissions are completely invisible to most people, and so it's a research project and then a communications project and it, but it doesn't feel like the humanities. So --
Alex Woloch: But is that a class or is that, like, most of the teaching you're doing?
Caroline Levine: That's most of the teaching I do.
Alex Woloch: ’Cause that seems like a big difference too. Like, if it's just one class.
Caroline Levine: Yeah.
Alex Woloch: But it sounds more radical than that. Like, the shift.
Caroline Levine: Yeah. I mean, I do, so, I teach writing. That's one of the ways I teach this is that Cornell professors in the English department, we all teach first year writing seminars. And so I do that pretty much every year where the first year students do this kind of climate communication and research stuff, so that feels like a little more in keeping with what we do. And they write op-eds and they, and they write, kind of persuasive cases for why we should pay attention to what they want to do. So it's still within the genres that I'm familiar with, but then I teach the same course in the upper level and we
[00:10:00]
watch movies and we read novels, but we're really thinking about like climate storytelling and what does that require and how can we tell stories?
And so it's much more of a practice based kind of lab situation is what it feels like. So yeah, a radical shift, and I don't feel great about that, to be honest, I don't feel great about that. It feels again like a kind of horizon of urgency, rather than what I'm good at, what I'm trained to do, you know, and I, you know, I feel like humanists, we are not supposed to do this kind of stuff, you know? This is exactly what we're not supposed to do. So I don't know. How does it sit with you, Margaret, as a ... ?
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, I, I think a lot about this because I work on the oceans and I've also worked with ocean scientists. And it's interesting that the scientists
[00:11:00]
feel or the scientists I've been talking to are less involved with activist science. That for scientists, activism is, they say, a corner of the sciences and their job is to generate new knowledge and that new knowledge will eventually be taken up in coming up with solutions, but they are not solution oriented and they're surprised to hear me talk about exactly the kinds of issues you're talking about science communication, storytelling, buried environmental knowledge that you can find in texts, say, you know, pictures of corals from the 19th century, and so I kind of am trying to hold these two sides together, you know, and, I think another piece in this, which I'm sure that you would have, you would all have things to say about is the crisis in the humanities and the need to justify what kind of knowledge, humanistic knowledge gives, and, how to continue to do
[00:12:00]
it, which I don't think is the same case for the ocean sciences, for example.
Caroline Levine: Right, right. No, it's so interesting. I do, I, in, just in the last week, I talked to a couple of scientists who said, I, it's a risk to my work if I start taking political positions, right, then my work loses credibility. But some, we were talking about some of the scientists who've done it and successfully.
Alex Woloch: No, I just that's a different kind of risk than the risk that you're talking about.
Caroline Levine: Yeah.
Alex Woloch: It's more internal to, like, the intellectual process.
Caroline Levine: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Alex Woloch: I mean, they're both risks.
Caroline Levine: Right. I feel like I'm selling out the humanities. They feel like they're underselling their or somehow discrediting their research by, by not being neutral. It's a different thing.
Alex Woloch: But do you really feel yourself, I mean, because like some of the latest book is a defense of the humanities. So it's interesting that it could both be a sense of, like, anxiety about selling out the humanities at the same time, like, like an effort, like a kind of ardent effort of defense or reinvention of the ... .
Caroline Levine:
[00:13:00]
Yeah. No, I would love to think that that's true. I guess I move in circles where it doesn't feel true. Like where, where my fellow academics say, you know, that's really not our work, right? We do this other thing that's really valuable. I don't know, Sasha, do you feel, as a person starting out on this career, do you feel like you have a strong sense of what the humanities, whether it should incorporate this kind of practical action or not?
Sasha Starovoitov: I think my own personal opinion on this is slightly in flux because I've come into academia at a time when, on one hand, I'm, like, vehemently told to be very aware of the boundaries of the kind of work that I do, and I think, like, specifically thinking about the role of the realist novel or the novel, and then, on the other hand, from a more communications end, you are told that, like, narratives are efficient, they are the best way to communicate information, and so you kind of
[00:14:00]
oscillate almost between disciplines, and part of what I really appreciated about your work was like the advocacy for a multidisciplinary kind of reading of forms, right?
The, I mean, I felt so touched by the reading of like the public square in tandem with literature and with kind of, like, where can we read efficacy. And so to me that spoke to the kind of confusion that I believe many of us may feel as kind of people entering into the humanities amidst a time where everyone is telling us not to be here.
Caroline Levine: Yeah, so in a way, if I'm, if I'm getting you right, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's, we, I certainly experienced this, what I think I'm hearing you say, of a, of a dual purpose that's always been there. One is, is a set of skills in reading and writing, which we do teach and that are portable. And the other is this kind of, sphere that's separate from the pressures
[00:15:00]
of the world and particular outcomes. And, and those are, when we teach writing, that's what we're definitely teaching something that's not only aesthetic, right?
Alex Woloch: So what about grad students, like your work with grad students, and grad classes, grad advising?
Caroline Levine: You know, I have not taught a graduate class in five years.
Alex Woloch: So related to this impulse.
Caroline Levine: Yeah. Yeah, and I am going to teach a course in narrative theory in the fall at the graduate level, but it has that sense of a multiple purpose, exactly like what Sasha is saying. Like, what can we do with narrative? Not only aesthetic, you know, those narratives defined as aesthetic, but what can we do with narrative? And it is an, it's an incredibly compelling public form, right? It, it works.
Sasha Starovoitov: But at the same time you're really met, I feel, maybe on the more kind of aesthetic side with the cynicism about that, like narrative as
[00:16:00]
communication almost feels like a taboo to talk about sometimes. And it's funny to trace that back and that, like, narrative as communication of political action is, you know, not new in any way. And, like, there are so many genres, and, like, smaller genres that jump on this and I know, I know it in like the late 19th century. So that's where I'm coming from. But it's, it's really interesting to kind of, like, think about the sort of taboo that narratives, the, this idea of like narrative as communication of ideology has taken off.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. Since you raised genres, a question I've been burning to ask you, in organizing this podcast, and Alex is here too, is realism. Like, what, what do we do with realism? Is it an effective mode of communication? And how does that look? How does it look now? How does it look compared to 19th century realism?
The title of the talk that, that you're going to be giving is "A Tale of Three Pipelines." So, you know, I hear Dickens in the background.
[00:17:00]
So I wonder if I could ask you all to, to think a little bit out loud about that.
Caroline Levine: About realism. Do you have thoughts, Alex?
Alex Woloch: I was going to defer to Caroline because, I mean, let me, I think I'd like to do that and then jump in. But, yeah.
Caroline Levine: Well, you know, part of what I think about realism I've learned from Alex, so I do just want to, like, make a, make a citation here to a person who's sitting in front of me, which is the problem that the novel has of crowds, right? It's just not good at giving us multitudes. And so, ever since reading your book, Alex, I've been thinking about that as one of the limitations of the novel.
And so realism, some realisms try to get beyond the protagonist, but kind of classic Lukács model of the, the protagonist in the middle of a social situation only goes so far, I think, if you want to start thinking about solidarity and collectivity and those kinds of things. So,
[00:18:00]
for me, realism has still some really great potential.
And one of the things that I, you know, I find with the generation that we're teaching right now, they're really into science fiction and fantasy, and I don't have, I, I'm trying to get myself to love science fiction and fantasy and don't, and, and I think part of the reason is I'm really just interested in if we think about a time horizon of like six years for the climate crisis. We've got this little window where we really need to change a lot of things. Let's think about what's feasible. Let's not think about what's beyond, you know, so that great, you know, let's use our imaginations to think the world beyond the present, but let's also think about what we got. What is it? What are our materials right here and now? And that feels like a realist project.
Alex Woloch: I mean, I can jump in. I just wanted to circle back though. And that is, I mean, just to what about what you're saying about grad teaching, because it does, I mean, I
[00:19:00]
think for me, you know, I identify your work, Caroline, and particularly Forms, but it, like, as sort of strikingly galvanizing for graduate students.
It was, I mean, and there's like, I was, you can sort of think about the work that's come out in the last 15 years that like has sort of been organically met with excitement by graduate students and Forms is high up on the list, I'm sure you know this, it was like, there's something about it. I mean, we could talk about that, that seemed particularly like, and I think part of it was like the ground clearing element of it, like the sense of like, there was a kind of fresh air, this kind of different landscape that, that, but, but so on the one hand, like that specificity of your work and other hand, like, the difficulty of knowing what it means like to do graduate teaching now seems really interesting to me.
So then to circle back to realism. Yeah, I mean, this was obviously like that question, like, cause we're here for the novel and the, like, the question of how salient is the novel or not for your current work? Like that seems to be
[00:20:00]
like, there's a push and pull there that you both sort of wanted to speak to the novel or want like the novel is important, but you're also, there's also this wary eye about not just the novel, but any kind of like purely literary distillation, right? So, so I think it's super interesting. And I guess one, one big thought I had, in, like, and I know Forms well, and I was just, I've just been reading the new book, is representation, like the importance of representation. So that's sort of what comes to mind with realism, like realism almost as a proxy for this larger thing, which is representation and how that also seems to be a term that's both super important to your model, but, but also maybe misleading in some ways, at least as it's traditionally understood, like, so, so that would be, so I'd throw that into the mix, I guess.
Caroline Levine: Yeah, it's a little like communication. It's one of those terms that's, we think is flat-footed and
[00:21:00]
ideological only, right? Like it's a, it's a ruse, right? The represent-- you can't represent the world, A, and you can't communicate in some seamless or transparent way, B. So what am I doing? And I think, I guess I think that we, the discipline studies representation, even when we draw attention to its limits, I don't ever think we've given up on it.
So, so it feels to me like, you know, this is again, a sort of like, a non-aesthetic but still formalist claim that every experience we have, every idea we have, is a mediation with forms of some kind, right? And so representation is one mediation. You know, it's not that it's purely transparent, but it is mediating an experience of the world in certain ways and not in others, right?
So to me, it feels fruitful, um, but flat-footed. I mean it does feel,
[00:22:00]
it feels very like, you know, pragmatic and not, you know, not high theory in the, in the way. Although, you know, I, I feel like it's there in theory and that's why I think I'm, I'm always playing this double game of like, yeah, I'm in the, I'm in the conversation, but I'm going off in this direction, which has been mostly devalued, but I still think it's important to go in that direction.
Margaret Cohen: I'm thinking about pragmatism. I mean, it seems to me that like that's a core quality that comes through a lot of writing, which I wouldn't necessarily associate with realism. I'm trying to think through like the steps or why do I not associate pragmatism with realism? You know, there's kind of like the Moretti notion that realism is about compromise.
So that would be a very pragmatic notion of realism, but then there's also a much more tragic sort of Lukácsian notion
[00:23:00]
of realism is about, the inability to kind of come in to come in to find a way through the social world. And I'm not I don't know. I mean, I just wonder if, sort of one, this is not really a question, it's just thinking about how important pragmatism is to you. And if I was to pose it as a question, it would be like, where did that come from?
[laughter in background]
How did you get pragmatic? And why did you go into literary studies as a pragmatic person?
Caroline Levine: That is the real question. What am I doing here? Such great points about realism. I guess the connection I would make between realism and pragmatism is through the critique of both of them, which is like, they both put us back in the world that we are in, as opposed to the world, the dramatically other world that we're supposed to be building, right? That we can't even see because it's beyond our consciousness, right? Which is the sort of radical otherness, you know, it's an
[00:24:00]
Adornian version, I think it's an Adornian version of the aesthetic, which is everywhere now in our field. So that idea that, that you're supposed to not work with the materials that are available to you.
So I, so to me, they, they are connected. And, you know, when you're mentioning the, Moretti, Lukács connection, I'm thinking about, you know, the, the particular forms of the plotted narrative are not the only forms of realism. So you could have realist painting and you could have, you know, realist description and you know, so is it the --
Alex Woloch: Realist film.
Caroline Levine: Realist film for sure.
So is realism, the realism of compromise or the realism of tragedy, that's already a narrative version of realism, but I, I'm wondering if realism could be a lot of other accounts of mediating our experience with the world as it is right now. I
[00:25:00]
do think I had, just to go back to the question of how I ended up in literary studies, I do think it's a little bit of an accident and that I was always the person who thought maybe we should do something practical while everybody else was doing more high minded things, and --
Alex Woloch: What's an example? Like, what's an earlier, you know –
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: What's an earlier version of this? I mean, I, this is not exactly the, the question that you're asking, Alex, but I did, I did become department chair because I thought there are a lot of things we could change, you know, there's a lot of things we could do with the, with the department, that could make it better. And that, you know, people talk about the administration as going to the other side and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, no, no, no, all these things we think about here, you know, citizenship and collectivity, and we could bring all those things into administration. So I think, and that always felt like not a standard literary critical view.
[00:26:00]
But I think I must have that temperamentally. So I think it comes from some deeper childhood –
[laughter in background]
Margaret Cohen: Answer off the air.
Caroline Levine: I don't know what trauma brooders did, but, uh,
Alex Woloch: Do we wanna, Sasha did you have thoughts with the real, with realism? I mean, just as, since we're circling,
Sasha Starovoitov: I've been thinking a lot actually about kind of the way that we've been speaking about individuals and their role in narrative, even outside of the novel.
We started this podcast by kind of asking you about your car journey. And in that way, we got the model of the individual activist. And I'm kind of, maybe to circle back to the novel, I'm curious about, like, the novel's maybe, I guess, complicated statement, but inability to contain collectives. But then, do you ever consider kind of collectives around the novel in its life?
And kind of, once we step outside of actually kind of, the diegetic world and into the world of like the book
[00:27:00]
circulating, is there room for a more collective kind of interaction there rather than the individual that we get in narrative?
Caroline Levine: I love that question, especially for a 19th-century scholar, because of course you have the image of people reading aloud to one another.
And yeah, I mean, I think the novel as we've inherited, it does, is often a solitary form, right? Often read in silence and in privacy, but it doesn't have to be. And maybe what we were saying earlier about a sort of, podcast culture, which is more, it's more oral, it's more collective, you know, what, what kind of new forms of collectivity could come through not reading, but sharing, sharing the voice, in the novel. But I think there are forms that are better, more conducive to groups and crowds. So I think the novel can do that, but you have to sit
[00:28:00]
for a long time in the same space, you know, to listen to a full novel if you want to be a collective listening, or you have to have a serial form for it.
And you know, something like the publicly read poem is actually, you know, thinking about Amanda Gorman, like, that's actually an easier way to have a collective experience, partly because of its brevity.
Margaret Cohen: I also really like your reading of The Wire. I mean, and serial TV does seem to be a great collective, you know, bonding experience in the U. S. And particularly during COVID, I think that that everybody just was able remotely to connect through, through some of these, some of these shows. So, I don't know, it seems to me that the collective is, is alive in that way, but it's an entertainment collective. And this is an old Frankfurt School question, you know, how do you go from the entertainment collective to, to a collective that is going to do anything?
I don't --
Caroline Levine: yeah, I mean, I,
[00:29:00]
my own response these days, I used to feel very, you know, committed to Frankfurt school style analysis, and I think I'm much more Birmingham school now. And so, like, what do publics do with cultural materials? You know, they do all kinds of things. They don't necessarily do what they're supposed to, right?
So what are they up to? You know, over the water cooler used to be the model, I guess we maybe don't have quite the same model anymore, especially with binging, right? We can't have the, like, what's going to happen in the next episode quite the same way. But, but what do publics do? That feels to me like a, there's more richness in that answer, I think, than the Frankfurt School imagines.
And I guess I don't have good examples off the top of my head, but, I have been watching a lot of movies about activism, and there are a lot of them. And they usually focus on individuals. So I find that kind of interesting. And it seems like they give people less to do than they could.
[00:30:00]
So what would an activist genre, which has the same exciting plot of, like, you know, there's a toxin in the water, Erin Brockovich, you know, single mom discovers that there's this corporate malfeasance, right?
But she heroically sees that through to its conclusion. And so you think, well, I'm not in the position to just find, you know, those documents, but what would it be to tell a story like that, which also included kind of lots of other people joining her in the fight, you know, what would that look like? So I think we could make entertainment that had more of the materials for people to act together.
Sasha Starovoitov: Yeah, I'm thinking about collective narratives and it's often, I'm trying to think of examples in my own head and the ones that I'm remembering are all acts of retrospection. So like Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl or Secondhand Time where you're actually, you're getting a kind of like multivocal remembrance, but they're all
[00:31:00]
past looking rather than to, you know, use the six years of the future that we have in front of us and thinking about that. Those are kind of restricted to history in a way.
Margaret Cohen: What about journalism? I know you've had some experience with journalism, Sasha.
Sasha Starovoitov: Well, and that's, you know, Svetlana Alexievich kind of goes, to go back to that most immediate example.
She's kind of in this, yeah, she's a journalist really. But I found in my work in journalism that the, the time span was so immediate that it was almost frustrating to be so constrained to a kind of like, really hyper precise moment and then not be able to go beyond it. I found the form very, almost constricting, and I'm not sure how able it is to capture a collective experience.
Caroline Levine: Mm-Hmm.
[00:32:00]
What kind of journalism were you working in?
Sasha Starovoitov: Specifically climate journalism, yeah. With the Columbia Climate School.
Caroline Levine: Excellent. Yeah.
Sasha Starovoitov: Yeah. But again, the, the, also, the problem with climate journalism is that as a journalist, you're straddling many, many different, as typical of journalism, kind of asking everyone questions.
So you're asking the scientists, I worked on one specific piece about climate grief where I was, like, talking to psychologists and scientists and everyone, but you're on such a quick turnaround that you can't really capture the, like, totality of, for example, climate grief and its whole, like, body mind experience for the individuals who go through it. So --
Caroline Levine: It's so interesting because I feel like one of the arguments, traditional arguments made for the aesthetic is that you can get that wholeness by way of the artwork. So is that your sense that you can, like, with a really great, you know, written account, you could get that
[00:33:00]
wholeness of climate grief?
Sasha Starovoitov: Potentially, but then you brush up against the problem of time again and immediacy and I think time becomes the real factor that limits, perhaps the movement between journalism and something more holistic.
Alex Woloch: I have a question just coming from this collective. This was the part in your book, your new book, on Call the Midwife, which was a really interesting example. And obviously, I mean, the canon, you call it a canon at one point, the canon, the sort of assortment of texts is, there's a lot to think about with that.
I mean, again, both as it's so generative and also as it's so heterodox, like, it's so much not like a canon that we can grid into. And part of that, it's this magpie approach, right? Like, the idea that we take what we can find and, and, so, I mean, this would seem like an interesting example of, like, in general, there's a kind of looking for the collective in, in art. And one of the thoughts I had with that example was, was
[00:34:00]
just, it's essentially like, is the U. S. different, like, than other places? Like, it's just less hospitable to collectivity and in some sense, and also more problem-- like more of a problem with the climate crisis. And so, there's something about that show in particular that, like, it's impossible without the NHS and the NHS is actually what it's, like, it's actually just insofar as that's a piece of art or narrative that can be collective in, like, a striking way. It's because of the NHS, which doesn't exist, so it wouldn't be possible in the U. S. And I think that raises some, I mean, among other things, it raises an interesting question about the kind of universalism of your model, right? That there's something actually, and I noticed a lot of the examples are British because there's a sense of civil society, like --
Caroline Levine: That's interesting. Yeah.
Alex Woloch: Yeah. You know, obviously with trains, it's the same thing. Like, like, there's just, but in general, like you could say there's a kind of social democratic, like, essentially you're a social democrat.
This is, there's a social democratic politics that's realized in above all in like Europe,
[00:35:00]
right? And you, you have other political examples too, but, but --
Caroline Levine: Yeah. I, I sometimes ask a classroom full of students, so, you know, at Cornell, as at Stanford, students come from all over the world, and I, I kind of asked them about how much they think of themselves, I mean, I don't ask it quite this way, how much they think of themselves in terms of groups or collectives, you know, their communities, their families and how much they think of themselves as individuals and how important those are. And every student from every culture has a mix, and I think that's partly contemporary culture, right?
And, and partly those who come to Cornell have a kind of individualist, there's something that moved them to, to come to this American university and, and study. But, but it's also true that the American students often have a sense of community that they care about a lot. And so, you know, I do think American culture is
[00:36:00]
particularly individualist and has particularly less investment in group, works, in, in public works. But it's not gone, you know, it's still, it's still around. And so again, my future orientation is where can we find it and how could we --
Alex Woloch: And cultivate.
Caroline Levine: Build it, yeah. So, you know, sports teams are one of my examples, right? There's a lot of, uh, first of all, group coordination and second of all group enthusiasm, right?
I mean, of course, it's all tied in with, you know, competition and that kind of thing. But I do think we have these desires for belonging and collectivity and community here too. I wish they were stronger.
Margaret Cohen: Oh God, my Adornian side just wants to say not sports.
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: You're not the only one.
Margaret Cohen: So, you, I think you have some of these two sides to you that are utterly fascinating, you know, and one
[00:37:00]
can see that at work in your books. I mean, you kind of, you argue through things, you consider both sides of it, and then you kind of come round in the end to like a pragmatic, but still we have to go on, you know?
Caroline Levine: Yes.
Margaret Cohen: And I, I find, I find that very compelling. And also the airtime, you, you give to the counter arguments and you know, the, whether it's deconstruction or Frankfurt School, there's a sort of modernist, utopian, avant garde gesture that you appreciate and then that you move away from. And, I don't know, what kind of reception do you get from some of those communities?
Caroline Levine: Oh, such a good question. I don't know yet. The book just came out, so we'll find out.
But I do think, right, I think that I was myself so invested in both deconstruction and Frankfurt School thought that the counter arguments are much more powerful in my own head
[00:38:00]
than they might be if I wasn't the generation that I am, you know, that I was trained in that moment. And so that's the voice of what I thought was right. And so that's one reason I think it's both, you know, appealing and a little bit sad to kind of, you know, so it's not that I, I don't want that value still to be around.
It's just that there is this other thing and this other side that I want to push. Yeah, so it's, I think I ended up much more dialectical than I intended to be.
Margaret Cohen: And how do your, I mean, what about for your students?
Caroline Levine: Oh, for my students.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. And I guess I say this as someone who was trained by deconstructionists who themselves had had this incredible training in literary history and rhetoric back in Europe.
And then when they came to the US, they were rebelling against it. So they, they knew it all, but they wouldn't teach it, you know?
Caroline Levine: What a great point. Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, yeah, so one of the
[00:39:00]
things I think I don't do in the classroom when I have a group of like environment and sustainability majors that I teach to, you know, every semester, a course that's in that program is, I don't say, this novel that we're reading, this movie that we're watching is an opening to a totally different way of being, so in that sense, I don't teach it, I don't teach what was so exciting for me as a student. But I think it's partly because of them, that they were not buying it for a long time. And I, I think partly it rubbed off on me. So again, Sasha, you're my representative of a different generation, although you're now in a PhD program in English, so you're not fully representative, but, does that image of a kind of art that, because you've, because it gives you a sense of limits, then allows you to imagine something beyond, does that feel like an
[00:40:00]
exciting and motivating force?
Sasha Starovoitov: Well, when you read, okay, so I actually have a question about like, what literature do you read with the students that, kind of, and that's kind of, because I -- that would be my question in response, I guess, first, before I give a more full answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Fair enough.
Sasha Starovoitov: Just a bit, just to kind of understand a little bit better.
Caroline Levine: Well, for a number of years I was teaching Parable of the Sower every semester. And partly, I think, what came to feel kind of significant to me and to the ways in which my students were reading with me was, that the main character in the novel founds a new religion and she does so working with the materials that she's inherited.
So she's not breaking completely from the past, and then she builds a new collective also with the
[00:41:00]
materials that she finds. And so thinking about that novel, you know, I taught it for years in a, in a way that it, it didn't, I think it didn't hit me why I was so drawn to it for a long time. But the students, in my experience, love, love, love the novel and find it incredibly compelling.
The one thing that's strange about it now is that it's, it was written in what, 1990, 19-- early 1990s and set in 2024. And so it's now, the dates are in the now, and that is actually disruptive to students because they don't, they can't quite read it as science fiction anymore. So it seems like it's dated in the moment. So that's one reason I stopped teaching it. And I, let's see, I teach, I'm trying to think of other good examples. I teach quite a lot of poetry. I teach, gosh, all names are, are, are leaving me. There's a poem, really brilliant
[00:42:00]
poem by a woman poet that's more or less from the perspective of the deep-sea drill that BP used that broke during the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And it's an almost entirely impersonal poem about this machine, and at the very end it names the dead and then it names the CEOs of the companies, that are responsible. And that also I find teaches incredibly well. And for me, it's the satisfying experience of, you know, not everything is first person experience. Not everything is just how we feel about things. There's also this kind of artwork of the machine that, you know, goes back to my, where my heart really lies right in this kind of formal fascination with how you can write things that aren't necessarily, you know, the immediate experience.
Margaret Cohen: So, so I'm keeping my eye on the time because I know you have a lecture to give that we all want to attend and we have to wrap up soon, but I can't
[00:43:00]
let things go without asking you about a book that ends with a workbook.
Caroline Levine: Oh, yes.
Margaret Cohen: That's, I mean, you talk about avant garde gesture in a really pragmatic way. It's quite dramatic and it was really thought provoking for me about what do I do with my time all day. And so I'm just wondering if you could speak a little bit about your decision to end the book that way.
Caroline Levine: So I don't know how, okay, here's the, here's my million dollar question. A lot of us care about the climate and a lot of us would like to do something to solve the climate crisis. Most of us don't have a plan for doing that or feel or have a theory of why we can't do that. So my thought about the workbook was how might you get from "I care about the climate crisis, but I don't know what to do about it" to actually doing something about it.
What I think I don't, I'm not sure of, and I'm worried about it, is that that doesn't get people over the
[00:44:00]
hump. Like, they can read all the way through to the end and still not take action, because there's something about that move that's really hard, uh, really, really hard. And it looks like from the research that people get involved in activism when there's a turning point in their lives.
And so one thing we did at Cornell is we, we built a little online course for incoming students about climate, because that's a moment when people might take on a new kind of identity or a new action or a new kind of hobby. So that was, you know, part of this kind of theory of like moments in your life, but I imagined the workbook as something that could be taught in the classroom.
And if it was assigned, that students would actually take the steps and become. activists, but I don't know if scholars will or could. So yeah, very much the pragmatist in me, but trying to solve this problem of that last step because you could persuade people that it's important to do
[00:45:00]
it. You can persuade people that here's some effective things that work and still getting that commitment or that jump over into it, it's like I feel like I become a, you know, a revivalist preacher or something. It's like --
Alex Woloch: But you also call attention to the idea of the turning point.
Caroline Levine: Yes.
Alex Woloch: It's a perfect example of that kind of political formalism, right?
Caroline Levine: Yeah. No, right. I think it is a formalist --
Alex Woloch: Where there is no politics without turning points, but like what happens if we pull back and scrutinize that turn that's so --
Caroline Levine: Yes. Yes. You got it. Yeah. But could, could we push Sasha to answer the earlier question about --
Margaret Cohen: Please.
Caroline Levine: About the, about a sort of Frankfurt School version of the aesthetic? Like, you don't know. You don't have to commit. I'm just curious.
Sasha Starovoitov: I'm not entirely sure how to answer your question and speak for, like, an entire generation of readers, especially because I have, like, a limited interaction with -- my world is grad students.
Caroline Levine: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Sasha Starovoitov: So I've been partially, like, deformed by
[00:46:00]
that.
Caroline Levine: No, I'm really, really just talking about you.
Alex Woloch: What did the people on the Amtrak train say when they asked if we'd seen anything?
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: Actually, interestingly, these two young guys were talking about how they listen to audiobooks, but they don't read, and they feel guilty about it.
And I was like, I consider that reading, you know, I consider that, you know, they were like, no, no, I'm not a reader, you know, I only listen to audiobooks and they were doing it on the train. So uh, anyway, just to know whether you think that the --
Alex Woloch: Tried to deflect it.
[laughter in background]
Caroline Levine: I know, I know, I, and I feel like I've asked the question wrong and if I asked, if I asked it right, you would have an answer, but it's sort of like, is the pragmatic appealing or is this idea of the aesthetic as a separate realm that you purposefully inhabit as not pragmatic is appealing.
Sasha Starovoitov: Is the pragmatic appealing, it's such a difficult question. And I think in part it also comes from the, so what I, okay, so if I am also to answer for kind of a
[00:47:00]
Generational, like, relationship to the pragmatic and the aesthetic and related to activism. I think when I look at the pragmatic, I come from a generation of individuals who have seen pragmatic solutions consistently fail at the institutional level I'm from a town that's like 30 minutes from Sandy Hook, so like I feel very so, so for me as my, like, if I'm to speak about, like, my own Individual formation as an activist that is where it starts and turning points. But the problem with that was that I grew up in a milieu that consistently approached pragmatic solutions towards gun control and then watched them fail at a national level over and over and over again.
And there is a desire, I think, for the aesthetic to remain somehow separate because if the pragmatic solution fails at the level of, like,
[00:48:00]
death and actual tragedy, what can the pragmatic in the aesthetic really do? What can the pragmatic in the aesthetic form really accomplish when something that is so horrifying in reality cannot accomplish?
And so seeing the failure of any solution, I think for me personally led me to want to actually reserve the aesthetic as a kind of aesthetic, not for a therapeutic reason. I think, like, the converse is that it's not that I see the aesthetic as therapeutic either in the kind of, like, escapist model, which I think is equally as kind of problematic in climate, specifically climate conversations about the role of narrative and the aesthetic.
But I think there's, there's a kind of more existential feeling about both pragmatism and the role of the aesthetics and that like, it feels at the end of the day that many fail in an activist
[00:49:00]
sense. That's a very pessimistic answer, and unfortunately, is, like, my own personal one, based upon where I came from.
Caroline Levine: It's very moving, and I think it's important, so I'm glad I pushed you to answer.
Sasha Starovoitov: Yeah, no, of course.
Caroline Levine: I realize it was a lot of prodding, but thank you for that. That is very moving.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, thank you. And thank you all. It's just been really a thought provoking conversation, which I am going to take forward with me in my own conversations with people in environmental humanities, as well as, you know, my own conversations with myself, really looking forward to your talk in just about an hour.
Caroline Levine: Thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure.
Alex Woloch: Cool. Should we cut
[00:50:00]
tape?
[laughter, and outro music plays]

Ian Watt Lecture: Wai Chee Dimock, “A Long History of Pandemics” - 3/2/2023

Ian Watt Lecture: Wai Chee Dimock, “A Long History of Pandemics” - 3/2/2023 transcript, or read the full transcript below.

Leah Chase: [00:00:00]

Welcome, and thanks for joining us on another installment of this Center for the Study of the Novel’s Podcast Café. In this episode, our host, Margaret Cohen, is joined by Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor Emeritus of American Studies and English at Yale University, and John Robichaux, Director of Education at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Wai Chee visited the Center on March 2nd to deliver her Ian Watt lecture, A Long History of Pandemics. This conversation was recorded directly before that lecture, and we’re thrilled to now be sharing it with you. Thank you for listening in on another of our warm and informal exchanges, as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Margaret Cohen:

Wai Chee and John, it’s my great pleasure to welcome

[00:01:00]

you to another episode of our Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. Wai Chee will be speaking this afternoon at our annual Ian Watt lecture. But today we’re doing something a little different, and we’ve invited John Robichaux from Stanford’s new Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. And John and Wai Chee are gonna have a conversation about an exciting collaboration that they’ve just launched, and I’m just going to be a fly on the wall and every so often buzz a little bit. So thank you so much for coming, Wai Chee. I know you’ve come a long way. How was your trip?

Wai Chee Dimock:

It was great. I was picked up at the airport – and I’m going to mention this at the lecture as well – I was picked up at the airport by Alex Sherman who brought water and tangerines. And we had a wonderful conversation on the way about the passive and neutral voice in scientific writing in the 18th century and all the way to the present moment. So it was a great story,

[00:02:00]

deeply learned on the part of Alex because that’s what he’s writing his dissertation on. And it was really fascinating. I think it’s only here that one can get into a conversation like that right from the airport.

Margaret Cohen:

Well, I’m so glad that you’ve come to join us. And John, where have you come from?

John Robichaux:

I’m afraid I’m right here on campus here at Stanford. I did not have anything so as exciting as passive voice and tangerines on my way in, but what a privilege and real honor to be with you here today. Grateful to Wai Chee for the invitation to join in this conversation, and then Margaret, for you and the Center’s generosity in allowing me and HAI to be here with you. We hope we can be useful and looking forward to an exciting conversation.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, no, I mean I’m just so grateful for supporting this, you know, collaboration that is called AI for Climate Resilience,

[00:03:00]

and we can definitely talk about that when it comes up again. But, you know, I’ve reached out to various universities, including the University of Washington about this, and they haven’t been able to give either the kind of very tangible support that Stanford has been able to give us. So I’m just completely thrilled and just incredibly grateful and fired up by this collaboration.

John Robichaux:

It’s terrific. Well, it’s an exciting moment in Stanford’s history, where both interests in artificial intelligence and climate are core to the University’s activities right now and our strategic plan. So I know we’ve been grateful for your interest in our work. Also the connections that you’ve been able to make with Harvard and Yale and other colleges globally.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, yes.

John Robichaux:

So looking forward to talking more.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, no, this is definitely something to build up on. And Margaret, and also the Center for the Study of the Novel, we were just saying that, you know, AI ocean data,

[00:04:00]

it’s just so crucial for the health of the planet, for the wellbeing of the indigenous communities and the ocean – so many of them are island nations. So the ocean really has a key part to play and in all kinds of ways. I mean, you now, I think the novel form also has something to contribute to conceptualization and design an AI, which we can definitely talk about more. But in any case, this is also a moment when humanness can really jump in in a big way.

Margaret Cohen:

Yeah, I think it is an interesting moment. I mean, and I’ll just choose the podcast to do an advertisement for a grant I just received with Fio Micheli through the Public Humanities Seed Grant Program – so Fio Micheli is the chair of the Oceans Department – to think about what’s called public knowledge infrastructures in the ocean beyond the two cultures, to think about how that old divide between, you know, science, tech, and humanities, can be bridged, superseded with the urgency of climate change

[00:05:00]

and the need to collaborate on different ways of knowing. So it’s another facet to bridging the STEM-Humanities divide that I think is also really important to Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

John Robichaux:

Yeah, it’s one of the core missions of the founders of HAI to be thinking about AI across disciplines and feeling like Stanford has a unique opportunity as a tech leader and having that well-rounded curriculum that many of our tech peers don’t have at their disposal. And of course, being located in the valley as well. So really this moment to think across disciplines and the contributions that humanness can be making to the AI, to this moment, to the AI’s history that I know we’ll talk more about today. It’s central to our mission. It’s an exciting moment, and you’ll hear me say over and over again I think it’s also a moment where we bear a great amount of responsibility, those of us who are living through this to get these moments right.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Absolutely, to make sure that we know what we’re doing. At least, we have an

[00:06:00]

input in there to shape the development of AI. Because that’s not just for the future of AI, but also for the future of us, right?

John Robichaux:

Correct.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Because it’s really a case of, you know, building up of two futures for the non-human world and the human world. So this can’t be more important, and I think that all of us really have some contributions to make.

John Robichaux:

Well, I know regular listeners of the podcast will be familiar with, you know, a range of topics and interesting conversations that were privileged to be a part of and hear through those who come today. But I’m wondering, Wai Chee, if you could maybe kick us off by saying a few words about why you wanted to dive into the AI subject in earnest, especially giving the Ian Watt lecture’s connection to the Center of the Study of the Novel. What is it about AI that [indecipherable] you can bring?

Wai Chee Dimock:

Well, you know, actually, my interest in AI preceded the current interest in Chat-GPT, right? So everyone is interested in that, you know, plus all the big corporations

[00:07:00]

like Google and Microsoft. But my interest actually preceded that, and that’s because I think that in my conception the two things about any relation to the humanities and the novel form that the novel has A) has been very good at making listening an important part of this undertaking. And, in fact, AI can listen very well. I mean, it’s ability to analyze sound data is second to none, and that includes listening to the health of coral reefs, listening to the health of seals. I mean, you know, so the Alan Institute for AI really specializes in that, so, you know, they were there at this important conference that was co-organized by the US State Department – John Kerry was there. And it’s all about AI helping to monitor

[00:08:00]

illegal fishing and then monitoring all these other ocean auditory data. Because sound has a different property from visual data, and so AI specializes in, again, second to none in its ability to analyze sound data. And that’s something that actually humanness has done very well. You know, listening has been an important part of our training, really. I mean, it’s really central to our training. So there’s that. But I also think that the novel form has been very interesting in thinking about agency from unexpected sources, right? So the Gothic novels, you know, it’s not just humans who have an input – I mean, whoever has an important role to play. But various forms of deviation from the human norm, including non-human forces, are very important. And of course, recently, Kazuo Ishiguro has been really important. I mean, all his novels have really been about

[00:09:00]

non-human intelligence and how humans can learn to think about the non-human in a way that makes the most of them, that will allow them to have a voice that would make a difference to our own voice. And so, I mean, I love Ishiguro. So he’s been doing this for 20 years. Again, long before the current interest in stock by Chat-GPT. So I think that, you know, that literature professors, humanities professors really have a lot to bring to the table, and we just have to make a decision, you know, make a conscious decision that we have to learn more about AI. Because this is also a moment – I mean, AI is not that hard to ever come to a general understanding of. But at least we have to take us toward AI literacy,

[00:10:00]

and I don’t think that most of us in the humanities are doing that. So this is really a good moment to make a pitch for AI literacy as the kind of very loose foundation from which we can make other contributions.

John Robichaux:

I have to say that the commitment to AI literacy and understanding AI within the context of citizenship, self-fulfillment, one’s community, one’s life interests is also an essential part of our work at HAI. So I’m thrilled to hear you emphasize that, as it’s really what I’m doing day-to-day or trying to do in our programming as well.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah. Right, I mean, for some time, I’ve kind of felt a little bit of disconnect between my kind of interest as a citizen, you know, just making sure that we’re not making disastrous climate decisions, that kind of stuff. And if things are right about, you know, it seems that the two are kind of disconnected. And oddly, this new turn to AI has enabled me to bring them together in a kind of frontal way.

[00:11:00]

So it’s totally unexpected, but for me, it’s been really helpful, and I feel – because there’s so much to learn. I mean, everyday I try to learn about what’s happening with AI, and everything there’s something new. I find myself getting up at 5 in the morning just to follow this train that’s moving so fast, and it’s really – I’m sure that it would have the same effect on other people – it can really energize humanities scholars in a way that makes us feel that it’s very funny because we know so little. But on the other hand, there’s so much interesting stuff to learn.

John Robichaux:

Yeah. Well, on that idea of unexpected connections, critical to both those of us who love the humanities, and yes, one of the great gifts that AI can help us bring to the technologies as well on expected findings. I know we’re gonna talk a little bit more about climate and the ocean piece in a moment, but because you mentioned Chat-GPT,

[00:12:00]

and because I don’t think we can walk away from this conversation, given the moment we’re living through right now where Chat-GPT and other new models of generative AI have really taken the public’s imagination by storm in an unprecedented way, we think right now, or so we think. And so I wonder, you know, we’ve got on the one hand a lot of really positive opportunities that folks are emphasizing around these large language models, around generative AI, both with text-driven models of Chat-GPT and in visual-based models like Stable Diffusion –

Wai Chee Dimock:

Like DALL-E.

John Robichaux:

– and DALL-E and the like. Again, at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023 when we’re recording here, the public has in their minds a real sea change. At the same time, we just a saw a piece recently from the New York Times –

Wai Chee Dimock:

By Kevin Roose.

John Robichaux:

– by Kevin Roose, exactly, who underscored

[00:13:00]

what many of us in the AI world often are reminding folks: these models have their limits.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Oh, yeah, no. I mean, for one thing because I think that generative AI, which is kind of the broader category for both DALL-E and Stable Diffusion and Chat-GPT. I mean, the way that the algorithms are trained are by feeding them billions of web pages. The Internet is the primary medium of education for training for the AI. And so, I mean, they are just so exposed to the misogyny, racism, everything else, hate speech. Everything that is on the Internet, they are just assimilating, and sooner or later that stuff is going to come up. You know, there’s somebody at Stanford, Erik…Brynjolf…?

John Robichaux:

Brynjolfsson?

Wai Chee Dimock:

Brynjolfsson, yeah. I don’t know how to say his name. But anyway, he’s a very important thinker, and he wrote a piece called “The Turing Trap”

[00:14:00]

that he put on his website – that’s how I found it. And he talks about how mimicry – how generative AI built on mimicry is actually quite dangerous. And I completely agree with him.

John Robichaux:

I agree. So Erik, I’m glad you mentioned Erik. Erik Brynjolfsson is HAI’s first senior fellow, and he directs the Digital Compact, which is one of our signature labs. So he both is tied to our work day-to-day, and he had this Turing Trap idea. For those who don’t know, the famous AI test is called the Turing Test.

Wai Chee Dimock:

The Imitation Game, as in the movie.

John Robichaux:

Exactly. So Alan Turing said that you will know AI has reached a general intelligence when you can’t tell it apart from a human interlocutor if you didn’t know who you were interacting with. And many people think today that Chat-GPT may have crossed that line

[00:15:00]

for the first time. That’s at least one of the conversations we’re having. I wonder though – but Erik is lifting up, I think, one of the dangers when we think about AI replacing humans, as opposed to AI more likely going to be technology that works with humans.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Complementing us.

John Robichaux:

Complements, augments us is the language we often use.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, that’s the word he uses, augmenting. Yeah.

John Robichaux:

And so that’s where the gift is gonna be, and that’s where most of the AI is gonna end up functioning for us. So that the question isn’t where AI might replace humans but rather where humans that are working with AI are probably gonna have the advantage over those that aren’t working with AI. Now that could be a controversial question alone.

Wai Chee Dimock:

That could be, yeah. But I think that, first of all, Turing is the one who actually brought up this danger. In fact, he was amazingly prescient. I mean,

[00:16:00]

he said in those seminal papers on computer numbers and computation and intelligent machinery – in his two seminal papers on machine intelligence, he said that quite often the programmers would not know quite what is going on inside the algorithms, that they would be just completely opaque, and they would take us completely by surprise. And that is exactly what happened in that conversation with Kevin Roose. So, I mean, Turing saw it from the very beginning. But I think that we definitely see it in terms of the projected job losses, you know. It’s not just people in Amazon warehouses, but it’s going to be people doing biomedical research. And journalists, I mean, they are the next ones to go. Maybe at the same time, I don’t know. Computer programmers – which you can speak to.

[00:17:00]

The CEO of IBM said that 90% of the data processing and software engineering will be taken over by AI because they can write their own code. So it’s just terrifying, and it’s just something that, you know, I think that we kind of see the handwriting on the wall, but we don’t respond to that, right? I mean, it’s just gonna happen just like that? So we really have to make sure we don’t go down that very, very dangerous path.

Margaret Cohen:

Can I ask a question, then, about pedagogy? As someone who’s designing undergraduate courses for the Spring Quarter and wondering what kind of assignments should I be giving my students so that I don’t spend a lot of time wondering, “Was this written by AI?” Do you think the research paper is dead?

Wai Chee Dimock:

No!

Margaret Cohen:

Like, where are we going?

Wai Chee Dimock:

No, I don’t think so. You know, what’s really funny is that a lot of high school teachers have also weighed in. And what they say about

[00:18:00]

Chat-GPT, or maybe GPT, which also actually does some of the same stuff, is not irrelevant to what we do. Because they say that, “So if you do an assignment on ‘What is the importance of the green light in The Great Gatsby?’, right, of course there will be people who will find an AI that can write their paper for you.” You just have to be more creative in your assignments that you give to your students, and if we are creative about our assignments, there’s no way, you know, if the AI hasn’t seen it before, it can’t go there. AI is really stupid in one sense. It has absolutely no knowledge unless it’s seen millions of iterations of that on the Internet. So if you can make the assignments so interesting and so unusual that only your students can write about them, there’s no fear.

John Robichaux:

This is a great question, and I think it’s one that we’re finding, I’m hearing working with professors working with teachers in primary and secondary school

[00:19:00]

is a moment – we’re all working through this together right now. How to challenge it, or the challenges that we’re facing, how to deal with them. I think a couple of things are on my mind here. Firstly, I love this idea that you might try and out-create or be more creative than the AI might possibly be, but where I begin to see the boundaries or worry that we need to be playing towards where the ball is going rather than where it is today, is acknowledging that the generative AI models, including the text-based ones, are going to improve.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yes.

John Robichaux:

And so, I worry that I may not be able to be as creative to out-push that.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, I do worry about that.

John Robichaux:

One. But two, it’s not the case that we don’t currently have similar types of problems. I think the problem might be more at scale at this stage. So unfortunately, I do have a

[00:20:00]

former classmate of mine who went into the business of grade paper writing, where students who have enough income could pay him or his people – his staff – to write papers for them to submit on behalf of the student. We have plagiarism. We have opportunities already. We have, really, with the rise of Internet search in our lifetimes, seen the transformation of information that’s available. So I’m not sure if it’s really a difference in kind as much as a difference in scale, in degree. One. Two, I do think though, and I think a lot of the teachers and professors that I’m talking about, talking to, are recognizing that there is a change of pedagogy and a skillset that must come. Now, some have described it as like a calculator,

[00:21:00]

where the calculator made basic mathematical calculations moot or that you learn them earlier but then you transition to higher order operations and thinking earlier in your studies. So my daughter is using a calculator in fourth grade – or sixth grade – right now, at a time when I wasn’t permitted before high school. So she’s a few years ahead of where even I was a generation ago. And she’s then able to learn math concepts at a different level. So there’s one line of thinking we’re seeing, which is these text-based generative AI in particular will allow us to move away from one type of skillset – writing, by the way, you all should definitely weigh in on the benefits of still being able to write – and push more towards that editorial, that conceptual, that refinement of thinking that you would still expect of the student who is taking a grade paper from somebody and probably needing to refine it.

[00:22:00]

Let me put it this way. If you were a Y student, you would not take a third party’s work and necessarily submit it as our own. But there’s a definite different skillset. And then I think the third thing I want to point out as an educator is – and Wai Chee pointed this out earlier regarding the displacement of workers right now – that we’re hearing from our students here at Stanford and elsewhere that they’re seeing this moment in the AI’s development as a real crisis for them. Should I study code? Much less should I write the next great American novel? So, you know, for us as teachers and educators, one of the questions we’re having to wrestle with is how to respond to students who are sitting in front of us in tears questioning their entire course of study and life plan to this point, much less than those who are later in their careers and so on. So I’m wondering

[00:23:00]

if you can maybe help us think a little bit with those who are listening about, “What’s the difference between the Chat-GPT who can generate text versus the process of writing and what that really gives us that AI may not yet be able to replicate?”

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, I mean I think that, you know, one – again this is something that came up in one of the conversations that high school teachers had about AI, and I think that it should be really illuminating, those conversations – but one of them said that maybe one way, one skillset that should be developed more is the ability to edit other people’s writing. Because if we already take something generative by Chat-GPT and asked students to edit that, or maybe have several different ones and ask them to compare them – which one is better than the other? – make them articulate

[00:24:00]

their own criteria in judging whether a piece is good or bad or whatever and how it can be improved, that is a very important skillset. And I think the advantage of something that would work not just – that’s a skill that would be useful not just in school but later in life if they become a lawyer. I mean, they have to look at different testimonies and try to find ways to integrate them or maybe eliminate some of them as not being on the same wavelength as the others. And so that’s a really important skill that could be developed at all levels in all disciplines. The other is the ability of AI to listen to very granular auditory data. So it can listen to the sounds made by coral reefs. It can listen to a sound made by whales, by basically all marine ecosystems, and be able to identify important trends. Listening is also an art

[00:25:00]

that is essential to the humanities. Listening is about as integral to our training as humanists as anything. So this is really interesting for the overlap between what AI can do and what humans have historically been doing and doing rather well. So this is again a really important area where people coming from outside science and technology can make a huge difference. We’re not too much concentrated in thinking of generative AI as the only future for AI. And I think that there’s just so much work for people in computer science to think about different forms of AI. I mean, it’s definitely not a forgone conclusion that generative AI is the only future. In fact, there’s a piece in WIRED Magazine that talks about the dirty little secret of generative AI and how environmentally unfriendly because in order to train those models,

[00:26:00]

those large language models, it takes up an enormous amount of energy. It’s like training a single one is equivalent to the energy used in just 60,000 households. I mean, can you imagine? This is just totally crazy. So it’s definitely not for me. It’s not a sustainable future for AI and definitely not for humans. So there’s just so much interesting work developing cheaper, low-power, less computation-dependent. Also the computation dependency means that you are dependent on a cloud server. So everyone dependent on either Microsoft or Google and just that dependency, I mean, again those data centers are enormously energy inefficient at this moment. Although, to their credit, all those companies have made the big point of wanting to make them more energy-efficient,

[00:27:00]

but at the moment it’s not a sustainable use of energy. So developing more low-cost, low-power, less computation-dependent AI such as done in edge computing, which is a very interesting type of ML, which is a small subset of edge computing. But edge computing is done on a device. It's on device analysis as opposed to the cloud server analysis. And that is just so important for communities that are more research constrained for them to be able to active users of AI.

John Robichaux:

I’m so glad you emphasized that. This has been a subject that HAI has been talking about for many years now, and so to see it picked up in the public press is great. And in fact, some of our graduate student fellows are working on precisely this question of bringing down the computer environmental impact of large model AIs and working at the edge.

Margaret Cohen: [00:28:00]

Wow, that's exciting!

John Robichaux:

So, you’re speaking our language.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah. I mean, because suddenly from the standpoint of somebody interested in Indigenous communities, that’s what’s been driving my interest in AI in many ways. And they definitely have, they can see the importance of emphasizing this low-cost, low-connectivity, low-power kind of AI. So that’s just enough. But right now, even though edge computing is actually used significantly by large corporations like all those voice assistants, those use on-device computing. So they’re already doing it. They’re just not doing it for specific, you know, African-American communities. We don’t actually see anything catering to African-Americans. We see some catering to Indigenous communities, which is interesting because I think that the tribal colleges like Navajo Tech have done one of those workshops

[00:29:00]

with Harvard School of Engineering just to train the high school teachers and students to recognize the importance of artificial intelligence but on their own terms. You know, not this high-power, high-energy, intensive kinds of AI but designed specifically for communities in more remote regions who don’t always have connectivity, who don’t always have access to cloud servers for those communities. So he has work cut out for people who want to do something other than what hundreds of AI does.

John Robichaux:

Indeed, and in fact, on the Indigenous side in the non-North American or non-European context for emerging communities, HAI has identified this as a key area along with Stanford. So we look, we're launching this year – Stanford was just awarded a National Resource Center designation from the US Department of Education to work in the

[00:30:00]

Global Studies area. HAI's contribution to this is exactly on the question of marginalized communities of emerging countries and where AI can be developed with interests out of those communities, those stakeholders at center and what it would mean for us both as technologists developing AI and then for an educator like me, what it would mean for us to educate the next generation about AI. If we were to take seriously the needs, the interests, the unique dimensions of Indigenous communities, of marginalized communities outside of Europe and North America.

Wai Chee Dimock:

And in fact, it goes beyond Indigenous communities because, you know, we were just talking a little bit about, I mean, you know, just generally about the importance of kind of going outside the US frame of reference, right? You know, thinking about AI as kind of a global phenomenon. And what is really interesting is that Africa has been really an important player

[00:31:00]

A) because it can bring trillions of dollars, you know, to the African economy in general, and because some of those – a lot of countries, you know, not just the usual suspects like South Africa, but lots of countries, African countries that are not known for being high tech countries actually have very interesting national AI strategy plans. I think that Mauritius is the first country with a national AI strategy plan, and it's just such a surprise to me, you know, to find that the US doesn't have a national AI strategy plan. I mean, so here's Mauritius ahead of us. Likewise, there's some countries like – again, you know, I just want to emphasize it's not South Africa, which wouldn't have been so surprising – but it's Tunisia has

[00:32:00]

the highest funded AI, the first round of capital of the first-round funding for this Tunisia-based AI startup called InstaDeep. This was the startup in Tunisia. It was, in fact, one of those co-led by a woman, which partners with all the major big corporations now because it's so successful. But so Tunisia has that to its credit. And so a lot of interest and – you know, it seems that the gender dynamics, I mean, in terms of InstaDeep – I mean, I don't know everything about it, but I mean, because a lot of the stuff that they do, I mean, they do something – though, actually, I think we'll be talking a bit later about the protein folding and the importance of AI to understand the molecular biology, very important drugs and so on. But InstaDeep,

[00:33:00]

as far as I can see, really specializes in that. And so it can predict the three-dimensional protein structure of various, you know, drugs based on the one-dimensional amino acid sequence. I mean, it's just incredible, and it would have taken humans years and years and years to come up with what AI can come up in a matter of weeks. But I just want to emphasize, I mean, it's actually African countries who are taking the lead.

John Robichaux:

Indeed. And then I know we've been talking outside the US, but I know you're very committed to thinking about how AI is impacting Indigenous communities in the US, communities of color, other marginalized communities here, very much in line with, with HAI’s work around race and technology, race and AI over the past few years as well. All of which folks could find out more about,

[00:34:00]

of course, on our website. But I wonder, as you're thinking about communities within the US, if there's anything you'd want to lift up for us.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah. I mean, I think that in the US, I mean, certainly I've been following, you know, what's happening with the Navajo Nation. And I'll be talking actually a little bit about the Cherokee Nation as well this afternoon. But in terms of the Navajo Nation, it's been quite surprising. I mean, they have hydrologists who are highly at home in the world of technology. And they – you know, I'm just a little bit giving away what I'm going to talk about – they collaborated with federal agencies like NASA and to develop a drought monitoring tool, which is important, I mean, just as a kind of basic necessity for the Navajo Nation, but especially in the context of pandemics

[00:35:00]

when you need to wash your hands. I mean, if you don't have running water in your home, it's just, you know, beside the point to talk about washing your hands. So I mean, the Navajo they really understand what is coming to all of us. I mean, drought is just – especially in California, even though with the strange weather pattern, you know, it's easing up a little bit – but nonetheless, it's a long-term problem. And the Navajo are feeling it right now. And they have a lot to tell us about, you know, how to optimize water distribution usage. I mean, you know, right now, some of the distribution policies are made on really kind of unsustainable models. Like, you know, if you assign a certain amount of water, if you don't use it up, you lose that. And that's a crazy way to conserve water. I mean, you know, all kinds of communities have access to water that they don't need that they could have conserved

[00:36:00]

that they're just using up. So I mean, definitely AI would change all that. Plus, you know, it would pinpoint, you know, if you have a relatively large area as the Navajo nation does – I mean, you know, it's 27,000 square miles. And so, they have such tremendous variation across the whole nation in terms of who is experiencing drought and who is not. And right now they don't, I mean, until NASA comes along and help them develop this, co-developed – NASA's very, very emphatic to the credit – co-developed with the Navajo Nation a drought tool that would enable them to pinpoint exactly which area has experienced the most severe drought so that the water can go there. It just makes such a huge difference, and it's not just for the Navajo Nation. I mean, the rest of the US is going to need that. So I think that Indigenous communities really are in a very interesting position. They can, they really can be pioneers, you know, in the tech field, both in terms of developing

[00:37:00]

low-cost AI and in identifying all those areas that would need, you know, for AI to intervene. I mean, they can really, they can play a role that nobody else can at this moment.

John Robichaux:

Well, you did a great pivot there or a seamless transition right into I think the next topic that we want to talk about, and that's AI and climate. So your example with the Navajo nation working with NASA co-developing models that would look at water availability is one of those great examples that I think about as we're entering this new moment in artificial intelligence's development, where we've got computer vision and satellites being able to help us monitor water at community, at regional, at national levels. We have a number of researchers, even here at Stanford, but several around the world, working on AI conservation efforts or opportunities with smart buildings,

[00:38:00]

with smart cities, infrastructure. One of our HAI affiliated faculty talks about how the old algorithms that we used to gauge when to let water out of a dam today, given the changing weather patterns, are actually leading to more flooding. And so, artificial intelligence or AI is going to allow us to mitigate local flooding, conserve more water, and really help cities and counties at those levels control what are real changes that are coming about because of climate change, A, and B, ensure that there's less devastation, less harm along the way. And then see how that have things like water more long-term and then apply that out, of course, to food and other places that I know we're interested in. Margaret, I know since you're here, I know you've taken a turn recently to thinking about oceans.

[00:39:00]

And I know the three of us have talked before about AI and ocean health as being a really interesting and exciting moment that we're living through as well. I wonder, Margaret, what it is about oceans that you're, that's got your interest right now.

Wai Chee Dimock:

It’s a long-standing interest, long-standing for like 20 years too.

John Robichaux:

Yeah, exactly. So maybe what’s happening now that you think is most interesting with it?

Margaret Cohen:

Yeah, yeah. Thank you for the question. Yeah, so as Wai Chee said, I've been researching the imagination and literature of the oceans, particularly narrative, going back to the beginnings of the European trans-oceanic voyaging on its impact on the novel. I think maybe it's partially being at Stanford, but I got very interested in technology as giving us access to realms of the planet and specifically oceanic realms that we don't have access to without it. And so, then,

[00:40:00]

I just recently finished a book on the history of film shot underwater and the way in which –

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, wow. That’s, that’s great. Nobody has done this, right?

Margaret Cohen:

No, it’s kind of offbeat for film scholars. They don’t think that it would ever be more vibrant.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Because it’s so technology dependent.

Margaret Cohen:

Yeah, yeah. The whole thing is technologically mediated, and some of the most brilliant things that probably are in your popular imagination like from Blue Planet 2. You know, remote vehicles, for example, enable us to access the deep ocean and they enable us to, to monitor also from the surface whole areas of the world that, that we don't have access to. So, yeah, I've kind of moved from thinking about the imagination of the oceans in a more I'd say creator-oriented focus to thinking about – and this is, you know, under the umbrella of the climate crisis – how to diffuse knowledge about ocean environments that are so remote and yet so much part of our,

[00:41:00]

you know, planetary health. And obviously film and TV have played a big role in that and the popular imagination. So I think there are a lot of ways into that question. I'll just give you an image from a class that – I took my class on a whale watching trip two weeks ago. And we were out in Monterey Bay watching gray whales, and the bay was filled with mylar balloons that were from people's birthday parties, you know. And so the whale watching ship would go by and gaff these balloons. But, you know, there's so much detritus out there in the ocean that needs to be located and then cleaned up for the health of the ocean and for our health. I mean the Pacific garbage, I just – they call it this gyres – is like another example that I think – yeah, I could give you lots of different examples. But the ability to access these environments that are fundamentally toxic and hostile to humans,

[00:42:00]

yet also that sustain life on land is something that AI has a huge potential to impact.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, yeah. And just want to add my view for a long time. I was nine years [indecipherable]. So what we think is the bulk of, you know – that's what I wrote about in my first book. And there is just so much knowledge in what we think. I mean, it really is, you know, like a lot of the 18th century, 19th century novels, is encyclopedic, and the wealth of knowledge emerging. I mean, still put likewise, Thoreau, about the natural world. I mean, BU scientists – Boston University scientists – actually going back to Thoreau's notebooks and learning about the New England ecosystems and the variety of species back in the 19th century and comparing that with what we see now. That's really invaluable. So, you know, these are scientists. They're not – they’re professors, they're [?] professors.

[00:43:00]

They're interested in Thoreau in this fun way. Now, I mean, I think that in terms of just bringing this back slightly to the question of food and agriculture, I mean, the ocean is a very important source of food, right? So especially with ocean acidification, a lot of the seagrass and seaweed, you know, there's a market decline. All across the Pacific coast, Western United States, I mean, Washington, Oregon, California. This is, you know, like 90%. Also in Australia, 80, 90% decline in the seaweed population. And, you know AI can really do a lot monitoring that decline and should, you know, thinking of suggesting ways, you know? So for instance, using less fertilizer would be a very important

[00:44:00]

remedy for the ocean acidification. And AI is one of the most important means by which chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen-based fertilizers can be reduced. In fact, I think that there was just one study about the Chesapeake Bay lessening its use of fertilizers and seaweed just making a comeback. So, I mean, in order to scale that up though, AI is absolutely crucial. So this is another way in which, you know, it’s not just the natural ecosystems but human food ecosystems as definitely impacted A) by the phenomenon of ocean acidification. And it's not a foregone conclusion that it's going to proceed in the way that it has been doing now. I mean, this is something that can be reversed.

Margaret Cohen: [00:45:00]

Yeah, I just want to go back to the Thoreau comment and the role of AI enabling us to understand all the documentation that we have from centuries and centuries of environmental practice. Because outside the great works of literature, there is a lot of data that comes from, for example, overseas voyages that is, you know, accumulated. And I was at this conference – I think, John, you and I were talking about it – it was Harnessing Data and Tech for Ocean Health that was put on by the Oceans Department in November. And one of the speakers was talking about the way in which the Smithsonian now has access to 200 or 240 years of Navy data in the logbooks and the way in which they’re using AI to go through the logbooks to get climate data – because every ship’s logbook will tell you what the weather is on every day of that voyage – and then accumulate that and be able to come up with a model for like what the climate has looked like globally because these ships were sailing all around the world.

Wai Chee Dimock: [00:46:00]

Absolutely. Because that’s the big database, you know, that, yeah, the AI can definitely help us.

John Robichaux:

I’m so glad you mentioned this because to my mind on this humanities podcast, I know Chat-GPT and the art and music applications get are getting a lot of attention in the public imagination. And also the ability to scour, as you say, you know, decades, centuries worth of text across modalities has been really central. So in fact, just in February, so just a couple of weeks ago, February 23, our weekly research seminar was on a historian who was looking at malaria outbreaks in islands using naval data, using burial records, using, in many cases, handwritten and merely scanned budgetary records from governments and the like.

[00:47:00]

And what he's attempting to do, or what his team is attempting to do across disciplines, is a historical reckoning of a malaria outbreak on the island, which is very famous in those who study pandemics, A. So it's a historical humanities project. It's got a history of colonialism attached to it. Intersection. And today he's trying to use that example of how the ocean waters change, deploying slices of coral, which act like tree rings in terms of grabbing ocean history data, in order to help predict current or future malaria outbreaks or pandemic outbreaks based on those historic models that otherwise without AI would never have been able to put all of that data together. And pump out models that are helping us at least, yeah, grab the right correlations

[00:48:00]

from history that might influence going forward. And that's just one example that crosses again, crosses history, crosses sociology, crosses narrative medicine and health, colonialism. All, however, across all of our disciplines, we really have an opportunity on that, on that data mining that five years ago would have been unimaginable, even for those who've been thinking about the digital humanities for a very long time. This is really, this is another edge that's been opened.

Wai Chee Dimock:

And the novel form, actually, has been – you know, I’m just thinking of Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Syndrome. I mean, that’s about malaria, and, you know, colonialism. I mean, so is Ireland and India. I mean, those are the two, and they have great writers, you know, who can definitely help us see, I mean, predict the future as well as understand the past. I mean, and Ghosh is really archival driven. You know, he's done so much research in terms of just going back to the British libraries and look at all those colonial records. So this is a

[00:49:00]

great way in which, you know, the humanities once again can really I mean the historical record of humanity. I mean, that's for us to use right now with the help of AI.

John Robichaux:

Yeah, tremendous. Let me ask: Wai Chee, you are, you know, from your position at Yale and working with the Jackson School of Public Affairs, you reached out to Stanford, and now currently I think you have a position at Harvard where they’re also giving you a platform to connect researchers across this AI and climate resilience interest. So I wonder if you – we’ve done a good jab talking about gesturing towards some areas where AI might be helping us think about climate, think about food, think about communities. I wonder if you’d say more word about what you’re hoping to do with your AI and climate resilience project and network.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, yeah. I mean that’s definitely some ways into the, you know,

[00:50:00]

into the future. But I, you know, once again, this question has come up when I was listening to those conversations from high school teachers about Chat-GPT. I mean, there’s such an overlap, you know, across different educational levels. I mean, you know, those high school teachers have been able to pinpoint some really important questions that college professors should be paying attention to. So, I mean, my hope in this AI for Climate Resilience project is really to remake education and make it completely, but at least, use AI, use the integration of AI into education in general to make education serve the educated, serve the students more, so that it can help them, you know, live lives that would enable them to integrate knowledge and the actual jobs that they’ll be taking.

[00:51:00]

And once again, I mean, I’ve been struck by how it’s not necessarily the elite colleges but community colleges. I mean, the Cal State system actually has been very proactive in terms of introducing AI into the programs. Likewise, Bunker Hill Community College near Boston has both an environmental focus – I mean, they have made that the foundation for the entire curriculum – but they also have AI programs as well because they see that this is where students can get jobs in community colleges. But also that it’s going to five them jobs that will be more satisfying in the long run. You know, if you really do something that you believe in, it makes all the difference in the world. So, I mean, there’s some really old-fashioned questions about, you know, what kind of job could be fulfilling. It’s really basic, old-fashioned but with a new meaning right now, you know,

[00:52:00]

with the way in which AI can support, you know, kind of mission-based, or at least purpose-based, you know, forms of work. And yeah, so, I mean, I think that the outreach to elite colleges can definitely do a lot, but the community colleges can do a lot as well.

John Robichaux:

I’m so glad you said that. This is definitely one of the areas that I work in day-to-day with our partners here at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, their new Accelerated for Learning, the Stanford Design School, Stanford Digital Education – a number of projects that have launched really in the past six months around AI and education. So, one, where we brought in K-12 teachers to rethink about how AI might be transforming this moment, which we alluded to earlier with the ChatGPT conversation, we’re training community college instructors. And really this is an extraordinary need in the country right now, given the lack of computer science talent, the lack of AI talent,

[00:53:00]

or the way that talent, because it's so rare, is being siphoned into Big Tech, elite universities sometimes. But even we’re suffering versus Big Tech, where the pay can be better, et cetera. And so one of the, one of the goals that, you know, those of us at Stanford are thinking about right now is how can we help? Those community college instructors, those secondary education teachers and faculty and teachers that are doing workforce training and within the higher education space as well – what tools do they need, even if they’re not fully AI or computer science literate so that they don’t need to be the technologist? But they need to also help students get up to speed on, you know, the skill set, maybe some of the soft skills in some cases, in many cases, yes, the technical skills. But do that either through digital and online or through upskilling of the community college instructors themselves. So I’m glad you see this. This is something that we see is really critical

[00:54:00]

at this moment, in our country's history, but I think if you put that globally, you know, the scarcity of talent is going to be even more. And if generative AI can solve its error problems – which again, I think we're headed towards – yeah, we're going to be in a world where students may not need to do most of the coding themselves. But again, we'll be thinking about the problem solving communities, the meaningful purpose that you're describing that will be behind the work.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Right, I mean, low code is a really important movement in, you know, AI development. So, you know, along with low cost and so on, low code is, I mean, AlphaCode is doing that, right? I mean, we didn’t even talk about AlphaFo, which is related.

John Robichaux:

Copilot, I think is what you – yeah.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, Copilot, exactly.

John Robichaux:

Yeah, so 2022 in many ways was an extraordinary year in AI in that you had Microsoft Copilot really take off, right, which was able to take a lot

[00:55:00]

of boilerplate code that coders would have to write and offload it to automation so that the coder’s time was freed up to do the higher level, higher order things.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Just think about this side, conceptually, you know, what we want from AI. I mean, I think that people like us certainly have lots of ideas, but I have no technical expertise to implement them. So somebody has to write a code so that ideas can take shape.

John Robichaux:

Yeah, exactly. And so for HAI, this is actually a big part of our mission to say: A lot of times the technologies will tell us we can solve the problems. The technical problems are the questions. The questions are the ones that the humanists would add, that the policymakers would add, that the stakeholders in the community would add, the community leaders would be adding. Help us get to those decisions and then we can write the technical solutions to get there. So – go ahead.

Margaret Cohen:

No, I’m realizing, Wai Chee,

[00:56:00]

that you have lunch for the graduate students at 12.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, but they’re just downstairs.

Margaret Cohen:

Yeah, so I just want to make sure that we give everybody time. But I just wanted to sort of bounce off that – and I don't know if this is a way to sort of start to wrap up – but I think the idea of collaboration is very exciting in humanistic context because certainly in our field, you know, everybody, it's single authored monograph, it's, you know, single authors or single scholars are kind of the focus, and yet so many of the problems that we have confronting us both intellectually and policy and more generally as humanly need collaboration, need different skill sets. And so one of these I find so insane about this conversation is the emphasis upon collaboration.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Yeah, yeah. Especially because, you know, I think that we can see something that people who are trained as programmers might not see, right? Because we can definitely see the different levels of education need, you know,

[00:57:00]

or different subsets of the education sector can have different AI needs, right, which I don't think that they have been thinking about those questions. So we have something to bring, but they definitely have the expertise to implement them. So in terms of the difference between division of labor between people who have kind of visions or sense of, you know, various kinds of purpose, you know, that we could bring to bear on AI and then people who can actually implement them. I think that that collaboration is increasingly important. So I mean, I think that – and that's something that could even be bipartisan. Because I don't think the Republicans are really against that, you know? I think that this is one area – I mean, just as they are now united, supposedly, against China, right, because this AI is right from China – I can see them actually potentially collaborating on how to make AI available

[00:58:00]

to the more general public.

John Robichaux:

I am so glad that you both are emphasizing the collaborative nature or opportunity we have here with tools. With the tools and humans, but also among different conversations that might happen among those of us who are in policy, those of us who are in leadership, those of us who are in policy, those of us who are in leadership, those of us who are in different academic disciplines, like this conversation, that’s been a centerpiece of our conversation work at HAI. It was part of the founding vision. And in fact, Margaret, the way you described collaboration, you know, thinking about how people working together with tools goes, the AI tools goes back to, I think, Erik Brynjolfsson’s comment and others who have emphasized that the future of AI is as likely to be those of us who are working with AI – once we, you know, understanding when there are limits and dangers that we have to overcome –

[00:59:00]

that that’s going to be where we get a lot of power out of this tool set. Not always in the replacement – there will inevitably be some replacements – but the tools where we work with. Much like, generations ago, my grandparents’ generation, moving from pre-tractor to post-tractor, those farmers that works with tractors are still able to be farmers. They are also able to work more efficiently, generate more food, et cetera. So there’s some displacement, but then there’s also this real sense of collaboration. Margaret, I think that was what I’m hearing from you. Wai Chee, I think, you know, this other dimension here that it’s also an opportunity like this podcast, bringing together folks who are thinking about the technologies but the big questions as well. And so when we come together around how do we want to organize the next tool set that we're coding out for climate, that we need to have the right stakeholders in the room, populations, et cetera.

[01:00:00]

And that that's the other dimension of collaboration here, which is absolutely essential. Both of those, I think, A) are essential to what Stanford is sought to do in putting a lot of investment in the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, one. And two, I'm going to say – and maybe this is a place to close – that what I often remind folks is, we, this generation today, have a unique moment in all of human history. There's no generation that's ever going to be able to shape the future of artificial intelligence more than our generation is right now at this late and early or this early stage. That comes with an enormous amount of responsibility, not just to those of us living today, but for generations to come. And so I'm grateful, Wai Chee, for you

[01:01:00]

to bring us together for these types of conversations to hopefully help nudge the arc of history more towards that broadly shared benefit of the tools and the technologies, of having the conversations that are cross disciplinary and really at the heart of what it is we want to be. Because we get those choices today in a way that maybe nobody else will going forward. And finally to recognize that it’s a work in progress and we're gonna have fits and starts. It's not going to be a singular positive trajectory. There are going to be grave failings, and they're impactful at this level of scale that AI can unleash. So thank you.

Wai Chee Dimock:

No, but yeah, no, I mean, I think that there’s just so much that’s depending on us. I mean, you know, not because we are especially imaginative, but just because we happen to be at a juncture where the future development of AI is not carved in stone.

[01:02:00]

I mean, it’s just so adaptive, and it could be – I mean, it’s not necessarily now – but it could be very responsive to human needs, and also to kind of the dangers that are facing us. So, if we could just make AI, push AI – or not push – but certainly point in that direction is one of the possible directions of AI to develop that that could make a tremendous difference to future generations.

Margaret Cohen:

Well, thank you both for joining us. It’s been really an immense pleasure to get to chat and to think so much. And Wai Chee, I’m so looking forward to your lecture, and I hope we’ll continue to be in touch, John. It’s really great.

John Robichaux:

Indeed. Thank you. Thank you, Margaret, as well.

Wai Chee Dimock:

Likewise. Our work is going to continue for a while, so yeah.

John Robichaux:

Looking forward to it. Thank you all.

Charne Lavery: Writing Ocean Worlds and Isabel Hofmeyr: Dockside Reading - 11/3/22

Books at the Center: Charne Lavery: Writing Ocean Worlds and Isabel Hofmeyr: Dockside Reading - 11/3/2022 transcript, or read the full transcript below.

Leah Chase: [00:00:00]

Welcome and thanks for joining us in another installment of this Center for the Study of the Novel’s podcast cafe. In this episode, our host Margaret Cohen is joined by the distinguished scholars Charne Lavery and Isabel Hofmeyr to discuss their new oceanic humanities books focusing on the Indian Ocean. Also joining us is Stanford’s Michaela Bronstein, author of Out of Context. Charne Lavery is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria, whose book, Writing Ocean Worlds, was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2021. Isabel Hofmeyr is a professor of African Literature at Wits University and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. Her most recent book, Dockside Reading, was published with Duke University Press

[00:01:00]

in 2022. Thank you for listening in on another of our warm and informal exchanges as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Margaret Cohen:

So welcome to our podcast and welcome to Stanford. Isabel and Charne, it’s really a great pleasure to have you here, and Michaela, thank you for joining us. I wanted to start, Isabel and maybe Charne, by asking how you got to know each other.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

That’s an interesting question. We both had an interest in the Indian Ocean, and I think we first met at an Indian Ocean conference and then continued to remain in touch. And then Charne and I set up jointly together this project, Oceanic Humanities for the Global South, in South Africa.

Charne Lavery:

I have a slightly more

[00:02:00]

garrulous version. I met Isabel when I was a first-year doing my PhD, and I was working on Indian Ocean studies. And a lot of it was quite sort of high-level. And I met Isabel at a conference, and she was telling this amazing story about how these World War prisoners got taken to India, and so there were all these Anglo [?] or now called the African War gravesites in India. So these kind of really random connections that made for a great story. And then also the story about a very slapstick, very popular film in South Africa called Mr. Bones that had also become really popular on the Bollywood circuits. So kind of connections across the Indian Ocean that were not the third world solidarity and other more high-brow things. And then I invited her to be my external examiner, and she said

[00:03:00]

at the drinks afterwards, “Come do a postdoc with me.” And so thus began a beautiful friendship.

Margaret Cohen:

That’s so cool. Have you met Michaela Bronstein?

Michaela Bronstein:

Just a minute ago. Hi, I’m Michaela Bronstein.

Margaret Cohen:

So Michaela has serious ocean creds. She swims in the Pacific.

Michaela Bronstein:

It’s true. That is true. That may be my most serious ocean cred. But yeah, the Pacific’s wonderful. But I’ve never been to the Indian Ocean, except by your wonderful books.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

You’ll have to come to visit us.

Charne Lavery:

Yeah, you'll have to come.

Michaela Bronstein:

I'd love to.

Margaret Cohen:

So I have a very broad question, which is how did you all get started working on the ocean? It’s a topic or an area or a method that really has not been at the center for all the 20th century, I think, of literary and cultural studies. Going out on a limb here.

[00:04:00]

And then in the 21st century, it started to really emerge as a hub of history, culture, literature, anthropology, and I’m wondering how you got involved with it.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

[indecipherable]

Margaret Cohen:

Yeah.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

I think interestingly, it goes back, in fact, to the political transition in South Africa, so 1994, the legal end of apartheid. And so a lot of scholars then started to think South Africa was – it was both a transition to democracy but also a transition to a very rapidly globalizing world. And most of us had only ever really worked on South Africa. So there was this question of, “If one was going to think about South Africa in the world in this context of this rapidly globalizing, the emergence of the Global South, how would you do that?” So in the wake of 1994, a lot of people became really interested in the Indian Ocean as a way of thinking about

[00:05:00]

South links within the ex-third world. And there was a lot of really interesting work that emerged from that. Of course that was all very much a kind of all-stars surface ocean. And in fact, it was really through Charne, who took the lead then to say, “Of course, the surface is extremely important, but we also have to think much, much more in material terms.” So that was my particular reach for coming in.

Michaela Bronstein:

I mean, one of the striking things I found when I was reading these two books alongside each other is the kind of shared object, kind of Indian Ocean culture, but the very different methodologies. And given that you two have worked so closely together, I’m kind of curious to hear the backstory about your more book history -- would that be a fair description? – book history approach versus your what’s inside the books -- that’s a little too glib but let’s go with it – approach and how those

[00:06:00]

cross-pollinate within the world of Indian Ocean studies from your perspectives.

Charne Lavery:

Well that sort of feeds in nicely to how I came to the topic. I’m not a natural Pacific Ocean swimmer myself, really sort of not naturally an ocean person. Grew up in the mountains and forests, you know? I came from a philosophy literature background, and then I’d been reading Conrad and being really interested in these moments that he describes throughout a few of the works sinking into the sea as a way of describing existential uncertainty, existential vertigo. So that was my kind of point of interest. And then wanted to bring that into also, you know, I was from South Africa and doing my DPhil at Oxford, so wanting to very much push back against a hegemonic view of the world, of being completely

[00:07:00]

Northern. So bringing those two together, this like, “Okay, well, where is Conrad when he’s describing these moments?” And that’s in an Indian Ocean context, and the existential uncertainty is from the experience of otherness. So then that led into Indian Ocean interest. And then I was quite aware of my own ignorance of the ocean itself. And the headlines around the time - I was doing this research on the PhD and then the book – the headlines were all about how the Indian Ocean was changing, its oceanographic characteristics, etcetera. So I became interested. We did an oceanography course and tried to learn a little bit more about the physical object that we were studying. And then maybe we can talk a bit more - because I came from this close philosophical reading, and that’s very much apparent in my approach in this book.

[00:08:00]

And Isabel comes to it from books from the outside.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

Books from the outside. Yeah. I think so. I’ve always found one of the really wonderful things about doing and thinking in those really vast terms about the ocean, or the Indian Ocean, is that it’s this huge space of experiment. And that it doesn’t really belong to anybody, you know, so it’s this huge, huge container in which you can do all of these kinds of explorations. And I was really interested in this Dockside Reading to think about, “Can you put together oceanic studies and the dry area of print culture?” Which has always been dry. And I think it’s this very interesting work starting to emerge from all sorts of quarters thinking about this intersection of environmental humanities and print culture. And so the book I think is an attempt to join that particular kind of intersection.

Michaela Bronstein:

I mean, I was thinking about it, and although I’m a

[00:09:00]

Conradian scholar, most of my climate change focus research isn’t ocean oriented. I work on the Future Library Project. I don’t know if any of you have encountered this. It’s basically a work of conceptual public art in Norway where an author every year donates a book that will not be read until 2114 when trees planted in 2114 will be cut down to print the books. So the interaction between the materiality of texts and questions about circulation and stopped circulation that you described so wonderfully in the book and questions of environmental humanities are very much on my mind, but I hadn’t thought of it in terms of the ocean until this occasion, really. Perhaps because there are ways in which the ocean feels so threatening to material culture.

[00:10:00]

And both you and the descriptions of books being tossed into the ocean when they’re not allowed in, and all of those more philosophical, existential Conrad passages that you’re talking about.

Charne Lavery:

Yeah, I love that books overboard image. There was a point during the research of this book that Isabel – I don’t know if we were having a meeting or something – and she called me, and she was like, “What do you think happens to books underwater? How can we find out? You know, like, what’s the process?” And I’d been reading about slightly darker versions of various tsunamis, you know, Japan, Indian Ocean, and what happens and differently to human bodies in the sea after long periods of time. So we were kind of thinking of those two things together, but it’s a very – you know, you start off with the textual first hook, and then you end up asking these questions about, “Ok, paper and the substance,

[00:11:00]

what’s its chemistry? How does that interact with seawater? What’s its chemistry?” So it’s really lovely to involve these materialist, material questions.

Michaela Bronstein:

Did you find an answer to the question, “What happens to books if they’re tossed into the-?”

Isabel Hofmeyr:

I spoke to our water engineers who said they thought it would be maybe the currents, that it wouldn’t actually be -- I, in fact, left paper in the water to see, and it seemed fine for a long time. They said it would be the sort of knocking the thing about I think would be really interesting. But, Michaela, the project you’re talking about sounds so interesting also because it’s this real recognition of books as organic objects.

Michaela Bronstein:

I requested that the Stanford Library purchase one of the Future Library certificates which entitles them to a copy in 100 years. And what’s fascinating about it is that it’s a very ostentatiously handmade paper kind of look. It’s not the kind of paper you would print

[00:12:00]

a volume on at all because it’s very uneven and the edges are all rough. It’s sort of designed to draw your attention to materiality that is actually not I would imagine the end goal of what printed books are supposed to look like. And also materiality is consumption energy is the element of that project that I think is fascinating, that kind of making you hold off on the novel that you’re interested in because some of these authors are famous authors. You might be sad that this novel by Margaret Atwood that nobody can read. And so that sort of forcing you to refrain from consuming something and making you think about that even the consumption of a book as a form of energy expenditure I find fascinating.

Margaret Cohen:

That’s really fascinating, yeah. I had a question similar to yours about the cross-pollination of your methods because Charne, you’re so powerful in evoking the imagination of the Indian Ocean world

[00:13:00]

and the different readers and the different authors that you discuss. And Isabel, I just was blown away by the fact that authors really didn’t matter to the censors. You know, that they looked first for who’s the publisher. I mean, your lists of all the different things that they looked for, and it just struck me that, you know, there’s this interesting cross-pollination including things like words that you take from Goethe[?] like, I don’t know how to pronounce gallimaufry. And I just am curious a little bit to just talk a little bit more about that intersection but also difference. It’s like you’re conjuring up a world, and then the materiality of it starts to take on all these incredibly interesting and odd features. I mean, I really want to go out to the three-mile limit and just pull up the ocean

[00:14:00]

and see what’s down there.

Michaela Bronstein:

Probably many things that have lasted more than the books have.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

Absolutely.

Charne Lavery:

I’ve just been reading about this story by Nadine Gordimer, which I hadn’t come across until recently. I’m much more in newer projects, but it’s basically the sea recedes at some point and reveals what’s on the sea floor. So it’s like fantastic, and it’s all, you know, this guilty mess of waste and detritus that’s on the sea floor, and it’s off the coast. It’s kind of this revealed history. But the sea recedes as in when a tsunami is coming, and so it eventually comes and covers it back up. Everyone’s very relieved. So that sort of drained ocean imaginary is something I’m quite interested in. You do just want to be able to see through from the surface of the sea to the bottom and what’s underneath.

Michaela Bronstein:

I mean the perhaps less monumental inland version of that is that in several of the drying up lakes of the

[00:15:00]

western United States they’re finding bodies. And so the kind of literal excavation of the skeletons of the past as the climate changes. Of course, it doesn’t seem like the sea is going to recede any time soon. [?] the opposite.

Charne Lavery:

Isabel Hofmeyr: And maybe I can just come in and briefly again on method. Just very briefly, the background to this book was I finished a book called Ghandi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading, which was about the press and the newspaper that Ghandi set up during his South African years. And he was a great opponent

[00:16:00]

of copyright, so when I finished the book I was fascinated and thought “Was this position unusual? Well, you know, what was the position with colonial copyright?” And that’s how I in fact then ended up with a custom pass. But I think if I had printed this book 10 or 15 years ago, it would have been a much drier book, and I would only have looked at the print culture. But Charne and I both in our teaching and research obviously drew in all this inspiration from Margaret’s work about giving us methods and ways to actually – because it’s just a huge mental leap to try to imagine under the sea, so your work was really, really fantastic for us. I tried to – I mean, it doesn’t really go as much underwater as I would have liked, but it was at least a sense of, “Okay, how can we put together the ocean and paper as closely as possible?”

Charne Lavery:

I mean, the other thing that I was thinking about when you were sort of talking about

[00:17:00]

this hundred years in the future has become very much the timescale of imagining post-climate change futures. It was a much longer period, and now it kind of keeps shrinking. We have time horizons that are much sooner than 100 years for kind of major changes in the world. So I mean there’s a really interesting question what the paper would look like in 100 years time. Because now all of a sudden it could be a very different future by then, or it could be very similar.

Michaela Bronstein:

Well I think the logic of the project is that the kind of goal is not just to incentivize preserving this one forest but to preserve a world in which you might have books and that you might be able to use the trees to do something as unnecessary as print books, compared to, say, firewood or building shelter or something like that. So I think absolutely the project is meant for it to be possible to fail in a certain way,

[00:18:00]

meant for there to be possible for some kind of radical transformation that would make it morally, physically, technologically impossible to succeed because forcing you to think about that possibility is part of the goal.

Charne Lavery:

That’s what I think about climate change is forcing Isabel’s might have been a drier book, but we were both very much aware when we started working together that the object we were studying was currently changing. It’s this kind of consistent space with reliable oceanographic characteristics. You know, this monsoon that goes one way one half of the year and the other way the other half of the year. And that deep structure underpinning a social world and imagined world was changing at the point at which we were looking at it. So, you know, you have to think differently. You know, there’s a kind of forcing to think differently, to think underwater, across oceans which maybe could’ve been

[00:19:00]

considered blank space for some of the 20th century. But that’s becoming more of a gap in the long history of imagining the sea as opposed to, you know, central to forms of transport and now central to futures.

Margaret Cohen:

And then ocean also is very much related to the land, so the climate would affect inland climates that you would have no sense of actually being connected to in a visual way or in a practical way for seafaring. But yet they’re very much affected by drought, for example, in California here for farming. One could go into a very long laundry list.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

I found also, in fact, Charne and I went to Antarctica in 2019, and out of that came a short piece “Reading in Antarctica.” So again it was this thing about how one really in this age has to become a sort of elemental reader. And that point is very clear when you go to Antarctica because how you read is hugely governed by the

[00:20:00]

state of the weather and the ship and whether you’re seasick or not. I mean it also obviously impacts a lot on how we thought about reading and discussions of reading.

Michaela Bronstein:

I mean one of the things I’m thinking about hearing you talk about this after reading the books, the kind of dichotomy between oceanic experiences, sort of noble material reality – Am I seasick or not? Are my fingers too cold to turn the pages? etcetera and whatever situation I happen to be in – and ocean as kind of symbolic other to the land, the kind of space uncertainty or the unknown. You site, I think, in your book one of those Conrad lines that I’ve never written about but always runs through my head, the Pacific being the most discreet of the hot temperate oceans. And one of the things I thought while reading

[00:21:00]

your book was that I could see what it meant for an ocean to be less discreet, as it were. An ocean to be a little more knowable, a little less kind of unimaginably vast than the Pacific is looking out across it. And now my own romance with the Pacific is kind of coming out here. But also the way in which that sort of functions both as noble thing, a thing that sort of brings people together, that reflects all sort of material reality in their interactions, versus ocean as kind of this zone of disorientation, which you also talk about, or uncertainty, and how at various points it seems to function in both ways in different cultural contexts and for different purposes.

Charne Lavery:

Yeah. One thing we’ve been really pushing back on in the project as a whole - so the sort of wider network and research project of the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South - has been to try and not only rely on one of those poles.

[00:22:00]

So that the ocean is a metaphor for fluidity and uncertainty and unknowability, but that in fact, as many scholars, Margaret, Liz DeLoughrey, several others have been saying for a long time, the ocean is also militarized, territorialized, and materially distinct both across its surface and underneath the surface of the sea. So that it’s not just generalized fluidity, which has been one thing we’ve been finding quite hard to - it requires a certain ocean literacy, actually, and it almost requires a sort of retraining to see the sea not just as a metaphor or an analog of fluidity and to see it neither as that, nor just as this transport highway, this kind of blank, blue connecting

[00:23:00]

like a highway. You know, you don’t think about the highway itself. Yeah, those are two things we’ve been focusing on.

Margaret Cohen:

I want to come back to something you said about taking a course together in oceanography and the intersection of science and what we do. It’s a super interesting moment for it - I think I mentioned it as we walked in the door - Stanford has started a new school of sustainability, the Doerr School of Sustainability with an oceans department. And I’ve been talking to some of the people in it. They came after a long conversation that’s primarily scientists and policy people to three kind of goals, which is literacy, leadership, and inspiration. I believe those are the three. And we’re talking about what role could the humanities play, what role could the blue humanities play and introduce that concept, and they loved that idea. And there is no department of

[00:24:00]

blue humanities, as you know. So I’m really curious to know about the ins and outs of your working scientists and taking science classes. And Michaela, I don’t know if you’ve worked with scientists in the contexts of woods or trees.

Michaela Bronstein:

No, I haven't. At least, not yet.

Margaret Cohen:

But anyways, so then let me just ask the question to Isabel.

Charne Lavery:

I mean, you probably are working with – I mean, we’re all sort of working with engaging with climate science increasingly just as a matter of living in the world. This has been very much our challenge. When we knew that the monsoon was changing and was impacting the currents, that was when we realized we needed to understand how currents work, how they’re related to sea temperature, etcetera. That’s when we took this online oceanography course that was very hard but very good, but also, you know, it became a challenge. But moving actually from this book to my new book project

[00:25:00]

to think – you know, literary studies is often done, certainly in this book, figuring out how an ocean is represented in fiction, and so turn to other disciplines. Indian Ocean studies is a very interdisciplinary field, and the other disciplines are typically Indian Ocean histories -- which is now a very vast literature -- Indian Ocean anthropology. So those are kind of the other fields. So the question is, “Is it possible to do a cross-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary project engaging with literary studies and then marine biology and oceanography, maritime archeology?” So these very different disciplines, and it’s sort of led to quite interesting collaborations. One of them is – Isabel is interested in the South Atlantic, and I became interested in the southern part of the Indian Ocean. So we’ve

[00:26:00]

both become involved with the national primarily science body working on Antarctic science. And then the other one is this project on the deep Indian Ocean where we’ve followed Margaret under the sea, but in this different context of the Indian Ocean, which is requiring an entirely new literacy in deep sea science, which is something. If we all have a familiarity with climate science, we do not all have a familiarity with the deep sea, its layers, etcetera. So it’s led to some interesting things. The final point is I ended up working on the latest Africa Chapter for the recent IPCC report as the person who works on narratives of oceans and then was helping to narrativize the findings of the IPCC report. So it’s interesting that, I guess, learning

[00:27:00]

from science in one way leads to these interesting narrative science collaborations.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

The one thing just thinking about – because as you said, it is the successes and failures and very often it’s just a failure because you’re just speaking from such different kind of paradigms and worlds – but the one thing that I found out we’ve got water engineers who were very fascinated by this idea of what the book calls creolized waters. You know, set in Indigenous understandings around much of Africa, the sea is the realm of the ancestors. And so that became quite a productive site that they felt they could approach that and that was interesting to them. And they felt that was an interesting point in which if they were looking at water, particularly in rural situations, that was useful. And Charne has mentioned, Charne has done more work on this than I, but a real collaboration with marine archaeologists,

[00:28:00]

and that’s been particularly productive in terms of the kinds of narratives hat they generate and the fictional narratives around those shipwrecks.

Margaret Cohen:

Are they interested in information that comes from the creative or cultural or imaginative or historical works that you do with scientists?

Isabel Hofmeyr:

I think it depends on the individual scientist, you know. And you just sort of try and – I suppose like anything – you just find out the ones who are a bit interested. Some are absolutely not. And they’re sort of really quite anxious if they feel they have to engage with that, but yeah, we’ll hopefully find someone.

Michaela Bronstein:

There is this tendency for certain kinds of science-oriented people to think of the arts as a form of communication and not of knowledge production. And I think that that’s probably what’s you’re running into.

Charne Lavery:

Do you have experience

[00:29:00]

of working with scientists?

Margaret Cohen:

I have, and I think as Isabel said, it’s been quite varied. I think that when I’ve engaged with marine biologists, some of them have like looked at the first underwater paintings that I write about and they said, “Oh, the lagoon in Tahiti doesn’t look like that anymore.” You know, so they’re interested as a record of coral in a beautiful state, although the work of this painters or printers is quite modernist. So it’s not a detailed, loving rendition of coral in the way that a scientific illustrator would give. Others are interested in communication strategies, primarily. And that’s been a surprise to me when I talk to scientists, and they say, “Our work is so dry. We can’t get public traction on it. We can’t get general audiences interested in it.

[00:30:00]

Could you give us some help?” And I always feel like my work is so dry. But I think that we do share the goal of literacy, and that literacy is so hard to convey, and it’s so hard to get. And this is not on the scientists. I think recognizing our knowledge, as Michaela says, is really important. But for us on the side of the humanities to recognize that, you know, the description of the secret share or the kind of conditions off the coast of Siam and what that means for the maneuver that a captain is going to do at the end versus a much more allegorical reading of that story about, you know, the narcissistic double or a queer reading

[00:31:00]

of the story to understand the reality of these conditions. That’s a hard sell still. You know, when I teach a course imagining the ocean, sometimes I pass out a tide [chart]. Like I say, “We’re gonna go look at the tide pools. What day would be good?” And then people look at their schedule, teaching and they have all kinds of obligations. And then we settle on a time, and I pass out the tide charts. And they open the tide charts, and we look at the day. And usually it’s a high tide or it’s not a good tide, and I say, “We have to go at this time,” and they’re like, “No, we can’t.” So just to realize that the ocean environment is really – I hate the word granular – but it’s just really specific, and it’s an element, you know? It’s very hard to convey that. I mean, climate change forces it because, you know, you can’t just – I was very struck – I’ll just go off on one more tangent – but during Hurricane Sandy, I have

[00:32:00]

good friends in New York. I come from New York. And downtown Manhattanites, who are very disconnected from the ocean, they’re not ocean-lookers. And they were so offended that their power was knocked out for four days because of Hurricane Sandy. It really drove home the fact that they were living very close to the water, but it was hard. They needed that lesson, and I don’t know if they kept it.

Michaela Bronstein:

I’m thinking about the west coast of the United States has a bunch of wilderness beach backpacking routes that you can do where you’re just sort of hiking along the beach where there’s no other access between the start and midpoint for 25 miles usually. But they’re dependent on the tides. And lots of people get permits for the beach hikes without realizing that the day that’s available is available because

[00:33:00]

the only time the tide is low enough to get past a certain point is at like 3 in the morning or something like that, which would be very unwise in other ways. And that sense of sort of what’s going on there is sort of the ocean as something that you don’t realize you need to know. It’s not that there isn’t knowledge to be had. This maybe relates to your friends in New York. But you don’t realize that you need to take the knowledge that’s available into account, which I think gets back to that binary that you were talking about wanting to get away from earlier, that sort of desire to, on the one hand, to see something as sort of just about producing all the knowledge, and we have the knowledge and understanding it, and on the other hand, symbolic realms of the unknowable or unknown. But I think what a lot of what we’ve been talking about is this kind of sense of knowledge that you don’t know you need to access in a particular way,

[00:34:00]

and I sort of feel like a lot of things that you’re talking about get at that, whether it’s the knowability and unknowability of things that have sunk three miles off the coast or the zones of contact that are also zones of separation and isolation in the communities that you’re talking about in the novels. But, yeah, I don’t, you know.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

On that, I think it’s also about the bureaucratization of the ocean, which obviously became clear to me with these customs officials and that somehow you could make the ocean predictable, but you just build an ever bigger and bigger porch to actually remove yourself. Because in the early days, you know these customs houses were very precarious and have been invaded by sand or they’ve been washed down, and it is this sort of idea that you can actually - it’s an imperial fantasy that you can

[00:35:00]

bureaucratize everything and stamp your authority on the ocean.

Margaret Cohen:

That’s an amazing illustration you have with people of color carrying things onshore like straining under the burden and extremely fit and then the British customs officer – is he British? No, he’s a colonial customs officer -

Isabel Hofmeyr:

Yeah, yeah.

Margaret Cohen:

- dressed so beautiful, you know, just standing there with his clipboard.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

Yeah.

Charne Lavery:

Well, there’s so many forms of semi-forgotten embodied knowledges of the ocean, you know, that just intuitive embodied knowledge, and it’s just not a knowledge that has been needed by those in economic and political power for much of the last hundred or so years. And so it feels, it’s an area of ignorance and therefore fear. You don’t actually want to think about how the ocean might swamp you or take into account

[00:36:00]

the tide tables because it just feels like, “Well, I mean, I’ll fly over it. I don’t need to do that.” But there’s a lot of people still working in very oceanic ways. There’s this fantastic book set in Cape Town. It’s a narrative nonfiction about abalone poaching, and it’s called Poacher. And it’s written by a former poacher and a journalist together, and it’s really just seeing how these kind of basically diving equipment abandoned by tourism companies for being old or whatever is now taken over by this community that has had a long history with fishing but now has added scuba diving for abalone as part of their community, and it’s this very vivid, adventurous tale of dodging sharks and policemen to get abalone. You know, we forget that

[00:37:00]

there are still underwater workers all over the world. There’s been a kind of recovery of histories of African aquatics, African diasporic aquatics, and you know, it’s not everyone who’s ignorant of the sea. And we have the Maldives sinking, and people who live there are very much aware of that. It’s not out of sight, out of mind as it certainly was for me.

Margaret Cohen:

Charne Lavery: Yeah, there's increasing

[00:38:00]

militarization of the Indian Ocean, which is I think less well known, so submarine territorialization, but also deep sea mining is likely to start next year, and the less is known about ecologies under the sea is the better for companies that might make money out of that. And even though there’s invisibility because of, you know, the actually reflective sea surface, this kind of physical invisibility, and then there’s possibly more pernicious invisibilization.

Margaret Cohen:

So I want to zoom out with a big question, Charne and Isabel. I mean, you’ve been working for five years on this really extraordinary project about the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South with the Melon Foundation grant, and I was curious to know maybe any surprises that have emerged for you out of the project.

[00:39:00]

Isabel Hofmeyr:

I think for me was our graduate students got very interested in this idea of creolized water, and that produced really fascinating insights. And one thing – it’s partly oceanic but it’s also sort of linked to other waterways – was the extent to which those waterways would chart home to ancestors and water spirits and all sorts of things really occupied us and unbelievably effective popular sort of archive against the colonial. So they have stored memory in the most interesting and powerful way, and for a long time, it was also hidden because people didn’t discuss it or it didn’t really register on scholarly radar, so that I think I found

[00:40:00]

really fascinating.

Charne Lavery:

Yeah, we had at the start this sense in introducing the project to graduate students who, you know – like to take one example and someone who has now completed her PhD, Dr. Confidence Joseph, and she’s now a postdoc, and she was working on, and she was like, “Well, what does the sea have to do with me?” And the kind of link that she found, which then became the basis of her PhD project, was at home, her grandmother had always had seashells in inland Zimbabwe, you know, far from the ocean. Never been to the sea, she’d never been – Conny had never been to the sea. So, you know, these seashells were a big part of her life. The house is lined with them. So, a lot of the students developed things like notions of the sea inland, so bottles of seawater that are brought inland for spiritual purposes,

[00:41:00]

the seashells, mythology, mythopoetics about the undersea, but that circulates another aspect of the research became how to link, “What does the sea mean for me?” with how to link it to the hydrological cycle. So that it has to do with rain and drought and land, and it’s about how water evaporates from the ocean and then lands up on the interior plateau of the country. So we had – there was, you know, a question that has important was also how to make sure that studying oceanic humanities in the global south doesn’t become a kind of greenwashing – or in this case, blue washing. You know, turning away from very important questions of land redistribution to the ocean at a time just, you know, as a kind of slight of hand. And I think the thing that we’ve been focusing on

[00:42:00]

is that whether we like it or not, the sea is important for you, whoever you are, partly because of its future invasive land likelihood.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

I just had one more thing. Also this relates very much to Charne’s work. I think if I had to also summarize it, we started off with Oceanic Humanities for the Global South, and we’ve ended up with the Oceanic South. So, and Charne could maybe speak to that, but so to put those categories much closer together.

Charne Lavery:

This is a formulation I must attribute partly to the wonderful Meg Samuelson, our colleague who – she was working on the kind of – just made the very obvious point which we hadn’t thought about, which was that the southern hemisphere is twenty percent more water than the northern hemisphere. It’s just much more sea than land in the south. In the way, actually the same way, if you sort of tilt the globe, the Pacific is way bigger than you think. Every time I look at it, the southern ocean is also way bigger than you expect

[00:43:00]

and compressed. The northern polar regions and the southern polar regions are not comparable in terms of size. So there is something oceanic about the Global South and the southern hemisphere, both in a physical way and how climate change will impact it. So yeah, that’s kind of the jumping off point for us into future research.

Margaret Cohen:

Well, I guess, the jumping off point for future research is a, you know, maybe pat but very apt way to end. So thank you all for this marvelous conversation. It’s really a pleasure to have you here, and I’m so looking forward to our Books at the Center later today.

Isabel Hofmeyr:

Thank you.

Charne Lavery:

Thank you for having us.

The Turn Against Fictionality: Percival Everett - 5/13/22

The Turn Against Fictionality: Percival Everett - May 13, 2022 transcript, or read the full transcript below.

Casey Wayne Patterson: [00:00:00]

Welcome and thanks for joining us in another installment of this Center for the Study of the Novel’s podcast cafe. In this episode, our guest hosts Ben Libman and Mitch Therieau are joined by the acclaimed writer Percival Everett. Percival Everett is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California and visited the center on May 13th 2022 to deliver a reading at our conference, addressing the turn against fictionality. This conversation was recorded directly before that reading. We're thrilled to now be sharing it with you. Thank you for listening in on another of our warm and informal exchanges as we scholars have a friendly

[00:01:00]

chat among ourselves.

Ben Libman:

Hello everyone. Welcome to the CSN podcast. We have a very special episode today. My name is Ben Libman. I'm a PhD candidate in English here at Stanford.

Mitch Therieau:

And I'm Mitch Therieau. I am also a PhD candidate here at Stanford in modern thought and literature, and I'm delighted to be here.

Ben Libman:

We're joined today by a novelist, a poet, a children's book writer, a critic and a painter, and, and much else besides. He's written something like 30 books as far as I'm aware. And most of those have been novels, and his name is Percival Everett. Percival, thank you so much for joining us.

Percival Everett:

Thank you for having me.

Ben Libman:

So we're convening today on the occasion of a conference that the CSN is putting on and at, which you'll be reading later today, and the, the theme of that conference is the turn against fictionality often

[00:02:00]

this turn against fictionality, as I see it sort of comes in the form of a desire to collapse author into narrator or to collapse a narrated event into supposed real event or to collapse, say, beliefs or ideas or opinions stated within the novel into the beliefs, ideas, and opinions. The novelist who wrote them, whether in the mouth of a character or in the kind of disembodied voice of a narrator. I guess my first question to you would be, what comes to your mind when you think of the turn against fictionality and how might it come to bear on your work and your career? .

Percival Everett:

Well, the first thing that occurs to me is a mantra that you hear in film. It's one that betrays an inability of a public to read fiction and come away with meaning. And that is based on a true story. It's used to sell movies, denying a couple of things. One is that any story is true. And the

[00:03:00]

other is that somehow authenticity resides in factual. And so that conflation of truth and authenticity is at once dangerous but also misguided. And I think incapacitates an audience.

Mitch Therieau:

So kind of along similar lines, I mean, Abstraction is kind of a central term in the talk that you'll be giving, and I'd be really curious to just hear how you understand this term. I mean, it seems like it's this very flexible, labile term that has so many resonances and connotations in different registers.'m just kind of just curious to hear how you are understanding this term and, and also its role in your work.

Percival Everett:

Well, yes, I mean, basically, one can approach abstract- the notion of abstraction, one by saying that there is something that's represented in the world and that you step by step abstract that idea/ image until it's not recognizable as that thing that it was. The other is the

[00:04:00]

abstract expressionist model that you've suggested that is that it's merely an expression of feeling. Obviously it can't be pure idea because idea like language is based on representation of something in the world. The problem I have with either notion is it, it assumes something called realism. and this is something that I've only come to recently in my own thinking though. It seems pretty pedestrian once I thought of. And that is, there is no such thing as realistic representation. Even when we look at things in the real world, we see in two dimensions, we can't help but do that because all we see a surfaces and it's our minds that change things to three dimensions. which is why we can trick the eye or the mind with three dimensions on film. That said, this privileging of the idea of mimesis is what drives my interest in abstraction.

[00:05:00]

We're already starting with abstract thinking, abstract representation. So we're doing something else. And it's not addressing reality. It's addressing this notion we have of what reality looks like. in my work, because the constituent parts of my medium are representational: words, I really believe that I should be able to make an abstract novel. Unfortunately, I can't say what that looks like. I can't say what it would sound like. I have no idea if I can even recognize it if I make it. But being mentally ill, I continue to try.

Mitch Therieau:

Is there, I mean, it's so interesting the way that you put that and it occurs to me, this error of thinking that there is such a thing as, as realism that that, you know, mimetic representation is possible in some way. You know, that's like this, this analytical mistake. But I mean, is there a way in which a writer or an artist or someone whose business it is to create

[00:06:00]

representations if they kind of are laboring under this illusion, do they miss out somehow on not seeing that, that this is impossible. Is there a way that this delusion can kind of tamper with one's artistic project?

Percival Everett:

Certainly can. The idea that one might take, say, a conversation from real life, a recording and simply transcribe it and have it serve as dialogue in a story or a novel, would yield a really bad novel.

Ben Libman:

I think I've read that novel.

Mitch Therieau:

The Warhol novel, right?

Percival Everett:

Yeah. And of course the job of the fiction writer, of the novelists is to create an illusion of real speech. It is not real speech. And, and conversely, if we were to memorize. , the best dialogue you've read, and then we were to go sit on a bus and act it out to each other. People around us would think we were nuts. , because it's not real. It does it, in fact, it, it only sounds real and it only sounds real within context.

Ben Libman:

But so is the

[00:07:00]

abstraction you're after in some sense, more real than these realist attempts?

Percival Everett:

So you're asking me if I know what I'm doing? And I do not. All I know is I think I should be able to do it.

Ben Libman:

So it's, I mean, it's like I've read you in in other interviews, talk about how you look for the form that makes the most sense given what it is you want to write. And not all forms are going to be able to sort of go the distance. And that's certainly like reading many of your books. Each of them has a kind of different generic approach to suit a different story. Do you think that this problem of abstraction is a problem of the same kind? That is you have to simply find the right form for it? Or is it even a problem that throws form. Into question. I

Percival Everett:

wish I could answer that. Certainly it is the case for me that I've thought on several occasions that I had achieved a step toward what it is I want to make, only to step back and realize I've failed. Now that's not uninteresting to me and I, in whatever perverse

[00:08:00]

way, enjoy that failure, but it doesn't get many closer. My goal. In fact, in some ways it causes me to move in my thinking away from it, away from understanding it. When I think of my works, perhaps the one that's the most naturalistic, and I always, I use that in quotation marks. Or realistic, is the one that seems to me to have gotten closest to that abstract nature. Though I can't say why I believe. I have a novel the water Cure, which I believe at least someone mentioned it in this way. And I was trying to attack the fourth wall, trying to attack that fourth wall only to realize that, that all that does is move the wall back . And so I didn't meet with much success there.

Ben Libman:

So there is no outside in that sense.

Percival Everett:

No, uh, you know, it's this, well, there's no ceiling. We find .

Ben Libman:

Well, I, I guess it's just on these same lines, given that you do

[00:09:00]

paint, and I've seen a few that seemed relatively what might be called abstract, although there's certain figural elements within them. Could you not simply go there and say, well, because I work in this medium of language, I could just abscond into this other artistic medium of mine, uh, where abstraction might be more possible? Or is that cheating? And would it be cheating to write a novel? that included visual elements like that within it?

Percival Everett:

Yes, it would be cheating . Also I wouldn't address what I, what I want to do and that, and that is to take, my art that incorporate s that relies on representation and take it to that abstract place. I'm not sure whether abstract or non representational or better words, I don't like non representational because I don't like describing anything negatively.

Ben Libman:

Right. Yeah.

Percival Everett:

which I'm always sort of amazed by the term non-fiction and really, what is that? And so they're not the same thing. They inform each other when I go to work and for the first time I just had a show of

[00:10:00]

paintings of works that were based on my last novel The Trees. They are abstract until you know what they are, and I'm fascinated by that because then they no longer are abstract. . So what does it mean to say that they are abstract in the first place?

Mitch Therieau:

Hmm, right. Abstraction as like something that a perception unfolds over time, since we're talking about, you know, the relationship between visual art and your writing. I mean, the, the place that my mind goes to is so much blue, and I guess I found myself wondering if some of these questions about, you know, non representational or figurality. If those questions were kind of in the swirl of your thinking as you were, as you were writing that book in particular?

Percival Everett:

I have to admit to something that. , we in my house, call work Amnesia . Once, once I'm done with a novel, I don't remember it. And so, um, I vaguely recall working on this book. Often people will ask me about particular scenes or characters and I

[00:11:00]

look at them dumbly, not dishonestly, but dumbly and, and don't remember that that event occurred. I remember the painting and the desire of the artist in the book to destroy it before anyone could see it. . And that's a notion that I constantly have because I tenaciously guard my process. And weirdly, I see that process as a part of the creation of the work. So I guess I was thinking about my own relationship to visual art when I was. and to that notion of abstraction, but also again, trying to work through my understanding of it by addressing my own desire to protect myself, I don't know if that makes sense to you.

Mitch Therieau:

Well, it certainly makes sense because, I mean, there's a way in which the abstract expressionist model of abstraction is kind of one of these, you know, not as satisfying models of abstraction in your way of thinking about it. And so on my reading that book kind of invites the reader down that

[00:12:00]

interpretation of the protagonist art to a certain degree. Mm-hmm. like, oh, these are all of these formative and traumatic experiences in these different timelines, and, oh, of course these are all going to be expressed finally in this one canvas that sums everything up. But the process of translation that, you know, those emotions would have to undergo in that model is not available to us in the narrative. And so there's a almost like a, like a ruse character, like a delightful misdirection or the the reader thinks that they know what kind of abstraction is going on, that it ends up not being that kind of abstraction that is actually taking place.

Percival Everett:

Sure, I'll take credit for that. ,

Ben Libman:

I appreciate that. Uh, I would really love to ask you about your position as a writer who's also institutionalized within a university.

Percival Everett:

I'm glad you added in a university

Ben Libman:

For now it's just the university. You know, I, it might be helpful for me to kind of bring up this this anecdote. When I was an

[00:13:00]

undergrad, I took a seminar that was co-taught by a fairly famous novelist who was, you know, also fairly well decorated. And he began the first session by telling us an anecdote whether it's true or not. I'm, I'm unsure, about Vladimir Nabokov and his candidacy for being brought into the department of English at Harvard. And apparently so the story goes when the committee was assessing his dossier, roman Jacobson at some point stood up and said, would we hire the elephant to run the zoo? And apparently that was the winning argument. And he didn't get hired at Harvard. Mm-hmm. , although of course he worked at Cornell very famously. And the novelist who taught my class and was telling this story sort of used it as an occasion to register his discomfort, I guess, with his position in that moment. You know, being in a kind of literary environment where we were teaching literature. and yet also being kind of hired in the first

[00:14:00]

place because of his role as a major novelist. I wonder if you feel fundamental tension in your existence as both kind of academic, broadly speaking, and also a novelist and how that tension might kind of play out in your work or your process.

Percival Everett:

No.

Ben Libman:

You don't at all?

Percival Everett:

No, I'm, I'm just a cowboy.

Ben Libman:

You're just a cowboy.

Percival Everett:

Yeah, and you sit on the top of the horse and you ride. None of this is hard. Universities are great. I get paid to hang out with smart young people, , and, that's what it comes to. We get to talk about things that I don't understand. I'm only interested in the world because I'm interested in things that I don't understand. I mean, I suppose if I set, I'm out thinking long enough about it, I could just, like any person, I could work myself up into, into a lather and get confused and , you know, and be institutionalized, as you said. but no, it's not difficult.

Ben Libman:

That's good. I'm glad to hear that, I wouldn't want you to have any undue difficulties because of that position.

Percival Everett:

Well, now that

[00:15:00]

you've mentioned it, .

Ben Libman:

But it's, it's interesting to me at, at least, you know, to read something like Cliff or to read, you know, those earlier moments in erasure when, when Monk is going to the nouveau roman Society conference and being accosted by the post-structuralists. You know, I, I guess I wonder where that world and that kind of vocabulary registers with you know, where does it sit in your kind of, uh, mental cosmology?

Percival Everett:

Well, I have a good bullshit detector, and I'd, you know, I would never lie, and there's plenty of that to be found in academia. There's plenty of lip service paid to jargon. There's plenty of jargon that is just jargon and there's plenty of jargon to be decoded, to find something interesting. There's a lot of carving out space for career. I don't begrudge anyone that, though it might bore me to tears, but I suppose if I worked in an advertising agency, somebody would be working on a campaign for deodorant that I didn't like. You know, one that involves aluminum, them that kills people, ,

Ben Libman:

that makes sense.

[00:16:00]

Mitch Therieau:

There's no kind of real, organic linkage from what we were just talking about to this question, but as we were talking about earlier, I mean, your work makes use of elements from so many different genres and I feel like this is one of the kind of ur- narratives about recent literature that, you know, genres are these kind of mobile things that people kind of, uh, something about it's in the air, but it's also something that you've been doing for longer than people have been talking about it. So, you know, just thinking about the elements of detective procedural and Western, and thriller and speculative elements, just like what role did to, to kind of formulate it, I guess similarly to how Ben formulated his last question, like, what role do these genres have in your artistic cosmology and what do they help you?

Percival Everett:

Oh, first of all, anytime somebody does something more than twice, it's a genre . The idea that

[00:17:00]

literary fiction is described as one that does not fit into a genre is kind of strange. Though I can't give you the, the necessary and sufficient conditions to make that claim it's not formulaic in that way. But as soon as I say it's not formulaic in that way, I've given you a criterion. I have never made a study of, in fact, I can't read detective fiction. I've never been able to read it. I'm not drawn to it. But all of us have seen all of the tropes all around us, and so we know them, and that's available to me as a writer to exploit in the same way that humor would be. You know, it's part of the trap of fiction. There are tricks, and that's how, and that's how magicians work. Nobody believes that that ace really turned into a king: it's that you can't see how it becomes a king.

Ben Libman:

It's very resonant with the talk about hocus pocus that's going on right now.

[00:18:00]

Do you read other so called genre fictions. Like, you're a cowboy. Do you read westerns or watch westerns?

Percival Everett:

I teach a course on the American Western. And I read, I do not read them, but I did read 150 of them because I wrote a parody of the Western. And so I read a lot and watched a lot, mainly because I wanted to create a language of the Western that didn't exist. In order to do that, I had to learn it and then, and then own it, and then change it.

Mitch Therieau:

Have you returned to Western since, or did you exhaust westerns in your media consumption diet after doing that?

Percival Everett:

Uh, never say never , but I dunno. We'll see. Now you've put this in my head.

Ben Libman:

I'm curious about, more broadly, I would love to hear, just out of curiosity, who the writers are that you read in order to then write, you know, who kind of gets your juices flowing.

Percival Everett:

Well, one of my heroes is JL Austin, and not just his work on sense

[00:19:00]

data, sense data theory and not, and not how to do things with words, which is about performative language and elocutionary acts and all that stuff. It's more his essays like- which I will reference tonight- plea for excuses, or he gives a great argument about the difference between a mistake and an accident And that's in a footnote.

Ben Libman:

what is the difference?

Percival Everett:

Oh, it's a long story, . That's a great story. And I love Bertrand Russel. , and I love Bertrand Russell in a fairly narrow way. I've always had this, this dream and desire to teach Principia Mathematica as a literary text, even though there's not a single sentence. I think it's a beautiful work of literary logic, if you will.

Ben Libman:

Do you love the Russell who disliked the Philosophical Investigations?

Percival Everett:

I agree with the Russell who didn't like them . So, the Philosophical Investigations is fantastic, and you have to put another book on top of it, or we'll just float to the ceiling and, and it will give you a headache every time you open it.

[00:20:00]

It's a remarkable document about not doing what you preach. But there are some great ideas and, and, and ones that I return to frequently, not the least of which is the beetle in the box.

Ben Libman:

Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . So I mean, I would note from that answer that the writers who get you writing, at least the ones that you mentioned are not novelists.

Percival Everett:

Well, it's not, nah, well, I mentioned those because one of my interviewers steered me that way.

Ben Libman:

I apologize.

Percival Everett:

One of the funniest novels I've ever read is, and I read it every year, is The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler. Um, no one talks about it. Uh, everyone talks about his novel -not everyone , six people- talk about his novel, Erewon , but I love the Way of All Flesh. I also, love the work of Chester Himes who is, not read enough, and when he is read, it's his genre work. The detective stuff that's talked about, but his. I only know of three of them, three literary novels and one posthumously published novel called Plan B that I think are remarkable.

[00:21:00]

Ben Libman:

When you think through these philosophical ideas that you're reading or that you've read, think through Wittgenstein, think through Russell. Are you finding a way to incorporate something like philosophical propositions into your novel, or is that a kind of, are those two things anathema? .

Percival Everett:

I don't know exactly how it's happening. I do know that there are certain basically logical questions that drive my interest in identity. Not the least of which being the remarkable understanding that A equals A is not the same as A is A and that gives me a headache, and that gets me working.

Ben Libman:

Can you explain that a bit?

Percival Everett:

No, I can't.

Ben Libman:

Okay. I'll accept it though. Okay.

Mitch Therieau:

It's a mystery to be pondered .

Ben Libman:

That's right.

Mitch Therieau:

We'd love to hear a little bit about what you're about to read.

Percival Everett:

I have not decided. I have a problem with the idea of readings in general, and that is I wrote this down so it's available to people to read and, and I find it strange that

[00:22:00]

anyone wants to hear a writer read it out loud. So I actually, given the the context of the conference, I, I think I will tell an instructive story and we'll see. And I can always fall back on a book sitting beside me. That's the comfort of having written a book. I can just say, oh, I'll just read this. But I have something in mind, which is always a frightening thing to hear me say. See what happens.

Ben Libman:

Well, Percival, thank you so much for being here with us and talking to us. Very much appreciate it.

Percival Everett:

Thank you very much.

Casey Wayne Patterson:

Thank you again for joining us in this episode of the Center for the Study of the Novels Podcast Cafe. We would also like to thank Percival Everett for his generosity in agreeing to this conversation. Thanks to our team at the Center for the Study of the novel to

[00:23:00]

Colleen Laurent and Maritza Colon for their operational support to our graduate coordinators, Allie Gamble, Alex Sherman, and Ido Keren to Casey Patterson for recording, editing and sound engineering, and to our host and director, Margaret Cohen. The center for the study of the novel is a subsidiary of the English Department at Stanford University.

Books at the Center: Peter Boxall, The Prosthetic Imagination - 10/29/21

Peter Boxall; Ian Duncan; Nancy Ruttenburg; et. al.

Books at the Center: Peter Boxall, The Prosthetic Imagination - 10/29/21 transcript, or read the full transcript below.

Casey Wayne Patterson (00:06)

Welcome, and thanks for joining us for our third season of Cafe, the Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. This episode, our host, Margaret Cohen is joined by Peter Boxall, professor of English at the University of Sussex, to celebrate his book The Prosthetic Imagination: a History of the Novel as Artificial Life, which was published with Cambridge University Press in 2020. To give responses to Peter's book, we are further joined by Ian Duncan, the Florence Green Bigsby Chair in English at the University of California Berkeley, and Nancy Ruttenburg, the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature at Stanford University. This episode is edited from the live recording of our virtual Books at the Center event on Friday, October 29 2021. We have the good fortune to showcase some really fantastic scholarship at the Center, which we're thrilled now to be sharing with you. Thank you for listening in on another of our warm and informal exchanges, as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Margaret Cohen (01:14)

Well, then, I think we should get started, this is our first event of the season for 21/22 Books at the Center. We're hoping to be back in person, by winter quarter, if the optimistic vision for our future prevails. I'm going to get started because there's a lot to talk about here. So today, the format is as follows. I'm going to introduce the speakers. And then Professor Boxall has prepared some remarks on Kazuo Ishiguro's "Klara and the Sun" to frame his argument in The Prosthetic Imagination. After that Ian Duncan will speak and then Professor Ruttenburg, and then that should leave us about 45 minutes for conversation, first speakers among themselves, and then opening up to everyone who is gathered together with us today. So let me start by introducing our guests. I'm so thrilled to have Peter Boxall with us to discuss The Prosthetic Imagination. Professor Boxall teaches English at the University of Sussex. And his research has focused on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in modernist and contemporary writing. And he also studies the longer history of the novel. He's got an extensive publication list and his current book concerns the 20th century novel and the decline of the West. And it's entitled Fictions of the West. So welcome, Professor Boxall.

Peter Boxall (02:35)

Yes, thank you for that introduction, Margaret. And, and thank you, Margaret, and in and Nancy for this invitation. It's a great honor to be here at the Center, I'm very grateful to you all. And thank you for so smoothly managing this event, it's amazing how quickly we've learned how to do this. As Margaret says, I'm going to speak for a little while on Kazuo Ishiguro today as a way into a discussion of The Prosthetic Imagination. I'm going to share my screen as well. I finished The Prosthetic Imagination some time ago as these things go, and since finishing The Prosthetic Imagination, I've been working on a book called Fictions of the West, which I think follows on from The Prosthetic Imagination in accordance with a certain kind of logic. And I thought, I thought rather than just talking about The Prosthetic Imagination or introducing it, I thought I might offer a kind of reading, a quick reading of Ishiguro, his latest novel "Klara and the Sun," because I think it might sort of mobilize some of some of the ideas that run through The Prosthetic Imagination. And in my mind, at least, putting those ideas in motion in a way that allows me to point to the bridge between The Prosthetic Imagination and a fiction of the West. And I'm going to be thinking as I say initially about Ishiguro's 2021 novel––only came out a few months ago––and I'm going to be thinking about this novel as a prism, in a way, through which to read Ishiguro's long conversation with the novel form and to tune that conversation that Ishiguro is having with the novel with the kind of conversation I try and have with the novel in The Prosthetic Imagination. And I'm thinking about a particular moment which comes in a scene about three quarters of the way through the text, in which the protagonist and first person narrator makes a critical discovery about the nature of artistic representation. This discovery that Klara makes about how art works is related to various forms of artificial life. The various forms of artificial life with which Ishiguro's novel is centrally concerned. I don't know how many people have read this novel yet, so I'll sort of try and give you a sense of how it works. Klara, the protagonist, is an automaton whose sole purpose in life is to act as what is called an "artificial friend," or an AF for short, to her owner, a teenage girl named Josie. Klara is the most obvious artificial persona in this novel. But as anyone who's read the novel will know, that she belongs to a wider environment which is more generally artificial. Manufactured, simulacral, hardly really there. A very kind of absent sort of place. The children in this world, Josie being one of them, need AFs because the world of the novel, this oddly skewed, North American suburb (we don't quite know where it is, but it's in North America somewhere) this place is so absent and so technologically mediated, so artificial, for want of a better word, that there are a few places left in which young people might socialize with each other and so make what we might think of as "real" friends. Children in this world do not go to school, but are educated at home on their mobile devices. I think Ishiguro wrote this before most of our children were educated at home on mobile devices. And their education and their social life is empty, estranged, a tinny replica of what we might think of as shared line. And the children themselves are engineered, artificially enhanced, made in a laboratory. Wealthier families––the novel is very attuned to class difference––wealthier families subject their children to a form of genetic engineering, which is known as "lifting," which makes the enhanced students more readily able to learn these odd distanced lessons that are given to them by their avatar professors on their mobile devices, which are here called "oblongs." The genetically modified children learn in artificial educational environments from simulacral educators, and it's the job of a set of artificial friends like Klara to assuage the loneliness and isolation that such radically alienating social engineering produces.

(06:56)

So this biomedical adaptation of the children like Josie to the artificial environment of the novel comes, we soon learn, at a great cost. Being lifted does not only render these children strangely evacuated and out of focus, but it's also biologically medically dangerous. Josie had an older sister named Sal, who died, we intuit, of the procedure, and Josie herself from the beginning of the novel is seriously and possibly terminally ill, also as a side effect of the lifting process. Josie is so weak that she is more or less housebound. But despite this illness, she makes regular trips when she is well enough to the nearby city, where she visits the studio of a local artist named Mr. Capaldi, in order to sit for what we are told is a portrait. There's something fishy about both this portrait, and about the portraitist, we're led to suspect. Something fishy, that's obscurely connected to Joe's illness, and to her artificiality. Josie's boyfriend Rick, who is the only unlifted child that we meet, is deeply suspicious of him. "This guy," Rick says, "this artist person, everything you say about him sounds well, creepy. All he seems to do," Rick says, Is take photos up close. This piece of you, that piece of you. Is that really what artists do?" Josie's housekeeper Melania, a tough talking immigrant worker of unspecified ethnicity, also expresses her distrust of Mr. Capaldi, and perhaps more plainly, that Mr. Capaldi, she says, "is one creep son bitch." Klara, confused by Melania's virulence replies, "but housekeeper, isn't Mr. Capaldi just wishing to paint Josie's portrait?" and Melania only intensifies her hostility. "Paint portrait fuck. AF you watch close, Mr. Son-Bitch, or something bad happen Miss Josie." So it's when Klara and Josie and Josie's mother and father pay a visit to Mr. Capaldi in his studio midway through the novel, that the moment I'm interested in here, that I'm offering as a prism, that this moment arrives. Klara's mother and Josie say to Mr. Capaldi when they visit him in the studio that they want to see the portrait that he's made of her. "It's kind of scary," Josie says, "but I'd like to take a peek." You can hear the kind of the nature of the language. It's very kind of flat. And unflashy. "It's kind of scary. I'd like to take a peek." Mr. Capaldi though, is a bit hesitant, a bit reluctant. "You must understand," he says, "it's still a work in progress. And it's not easy for a lay person to understand the way these things slowly take shape." Josie is forbidden to look at the portrait that Mr. Capaldi has made of her. But Klara, with Melania's emphatic instructions in her mind, breaks into the studio to see the portraits for herself. "I turned the corner of the L and saw Josie there suspended in the air. She wasn't very high, her feet were at the height of my shoulders, but because she was leaning forward, arms outstretched, fingers spread, she seemed to be frozen in the act of falling. Little beams illuminated her from various angles forbidding any refuge." And I want us to remember this, these little beams and this lack of refuge because we'll come back later. The portraits of Josie we realized that this moment isn't a portrait at all. Klara had already intuited this, she says to Mr. Capaldi and to Josie's mum. "I'd suspected for some time," Klara says, "that Mr. Capaldi's portrait wasn't a picture or a sculpture, but an AF," an automaton like Klara herself.

(10:53)

Through all of Josie's trips to sit for Mr. Capaldi as he photographed those disaggregated pieces of her that Rick found so creepy, Mr. Capaldi had not been making a mimetic representation, but rather a new prosthetic version of Josie, one that might take her place when she herself dies, as it's expected she will, a victim of her own genetic artificiality. As Mr. Capaldi says, "What you have to understand is this. The new Josie won't be an imitation, she really will be Josie, a continuation of Josie." Mr. Capaldi has made a new automaton body to replace Josie's when she dies. And he explains to Klara that she too is part of the portrait that he's making. That Klara's own real purpose, unbeknown to her until this point, is to act as a replacement or a continuation of Josie's mind, of her personality. "That Josie you saw up there," Mr. Capaldi says to Klara, "is empty." Klara must––the word he used is "inhabit"–– Klara must inhabit her. "We want you to inhabit that Josie up there with everything you've learned. You're not being required simply to mimic Josie's outward behavior, you're being asked to continue her. The second Josie won't be a copy," Mr. Capaldi says to Josie's mother, "there's nothing inside Josie that's beyond the Klaras of this world to continue. She'll be the exact same and you'll have every right to love her just as you love Josie now." So this moment, I think, is the crux around which Ishiguro's novel turns, a moment which one can only begin to address by placing it in dialogue with the longer history of the novel form, as the novel itself shapes our understanding of what artificial life is. How, Ishiguro asks here, are we to find or guard the line in a fictional world between an act of imitation and an act of creation? That is, between mimesis and prosthesis, between representing a missing thing and being the thing that is missing? When Klara says in her first person narrative voice when she rounds the L in the studio, that "I saw Josie there suspended in the air," how are we to read the referring power of the name "Josie"? Do we sustain a difference within the name itself between the living child Josie and the prosthetic replacement of Josie that Mr. Capaldi has named? "I saw Josie there," Klara says and perhaps we hear her saying that the doll Josie that she saw was so like the real Josie, such a sophisticated imitation of her, that it felt as if she was looking at Josie herself. Or do we hear in that single name Josie being used to refer at once to Josie and this imitation of her, this replacement or this continuation? The suggestion that there is no difference between the real Josie and the artificial Josie, that "Josie," in inverted commas, is artifice, is fiction pure and simple. And so the distinctions between first order and second-er order versions of her collapse at the moment but her status as fiction, as an effective fiction, is revealed.

(14:13)

So that's the question and Ishiguro asks this question at this moment in Klara and the Sun, in order to pose, I think, a question about the nature and history of the novel form, what I've theorized in this book as the "prosthetic imagination": to place a character in a fiction in front of his or her represented likeness in order to ask whether the original or the copy has ontological primacy. This is to mobilize a critical tradition running throughout the history of the novel, often associated, although not always, with the fictional representation of portraiture that touches on the very capacity of fiction to produce what we might think of as living pictures. It's to employ a device that knows it's a device and that knows that it is a device which has been employed at every key moment in the history of the novel to anatomized the texture, and mimetic potency of that device itself. The device of a fiction which contains within it a fiction, a very well known device. As Klara stands in front of the portrait of Josie, as these different forms of artificial life confront one another under the specific technological and political conditions that determine representation in Klara and the Sun, we can feel Ishiguro weighing the balance in 2021 between prosthesis and mimesis, pressing at the ways in which the technological, political, and material production of the real is related to our capacity for crafting representations. And as we feel Ishiguro approaching this difficult shifting ground, we can see ranged behind this meeting between the portraits and its subjects earliest stagings of this encounter, each of which speaks in its own terms of the relation between the prosthetic and the mimetic, between life and the representation of life. Take, for example, the centrality of the painted portrait, to Thomas Pynchon's 1965 novel, The Crying of Lot 49. This work, famously, sits at a junction in the history of prose fiction, in part because it articulates the growing revolutionary power in the mid to late 20th century of the aesthetic representation to overcome that which is represented. The novel's protagonist Pynchon's novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, feels herself to be ensnared in a series of interlocking representations that have no reality underpinning them, to be trapped as she sees it like a kind of Rapunzel in a simulacral tower, and the vertigenous sense that Pynchon's novel is partaking, itself, of this representational groundlessness, this interlocking series of representations within representations. This sense is concentrated in a moment in which Oedipa stands, famously again, in front of a painting which depicts other women, other Rapunzels, similarly trapped in their own towers. The painting, "Embroidering the Earth's Mantle," by Remedios Varo, depicts a number of "frail girls," this is Pynchon's words, locked in a tower embroidering a tapestry which spills out of its frame so that quote, "all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry and the tapestry was the world." The imagined portrait here bears the weight of an epistemological revolution, the revolution which came to be known, for a short time anyway, as post modernism, which tends to invert the relationship between original and copy, between fiction and the real. To read Ishiguro's portrait against Pynchon's and Varo's is to approach the balance between the material and the informational as this has shifted in the passage from the mid 20th, to the early 21st century, and from the postmodern moment to whatever has come to replace it and perhaps retrospectively shift it.

(18:03)

And then behind Pynchon's portrait we can see other portraits reaching back and back to modernism and before that to 19th century realism and before that, to the earlier manifestations of the novel form. Take the moment for example, in Edith Wharton's novel, The House of Mirth, when Wharton's protagonist Lily Bart feels herself to be a continuation of Joshua Reynolds' portrait of Mrs. Lloyd, or, when Millie Teale is overwhelmed in Henry James' The Wings of the Dove, by her resemblance to Bronzino's portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi. Both of these moments follow closely the contours of that meeting between Josie and her portrait in Klara and the Sun, but in Wharton and in James this meeting is given its epistemological weight by the tension at the turn of the 20th century between a realist and a modernist worldview. In Wharton's novel Lily Bart manifests her affinity with the Reynolds portrait quite literally when she poses as Mrs. Lloyd during an evening of tableau vivant, becoming a living picture, just as Josie's portrait is a living picture of Josie. She had shown her intelligence in selecting a type so like her own, that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It was as though she had stepped not out of but into Reynolds' canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace. These beams here seem to resonate closely to me with the beams that surround Josie when she is imagined as a living portrait in Klara and the Sun. Wharton's Lily is not an imitation of Mrs. Lloyd, any more than Mrs. Lloyd is an imitation of Lily. As Lily stands static on the stage, allowing her body to assume the posed attitude of Mrs. Lloyd, the two are continuations of each other, sharing their being with each other as Josie shares her being with her prosthetic twin. It's in becoming Mrs. Lloyd, Lily's pseudo lover Lawrence Selden thinks, that she quote "becomes the real Lily Bart, to lily we know," unquote. Lily's reality is enhanced for Lawrence Selden by this intimately shared relation between being and representation.

(20:16)

In Wharton, as in Henry James, this struggle between life and artifice does not quite lead to the overcoming that we see or we possibly see in Pynchon, but stages rather a fraught struggle between a modernist aestheticism and a real which it cannot fully either accommodate or reject Lily's sharing of her being with a portrait is the uncertain climax, I think, a moment of deeply compromised freedom quickly forsaken as Lily heads towards poverty, unfreedom and death. And in James's Wings of the Dove, Millie Teale achieves a similarly vexed form of epiphany, in her identification with the portrait of Lucrezia. It is as Millie stands in front of the Bronzino, as she finds herself replicated in the compositional fields of an old master, that she is granted some strange ecstatic understanding of the nature of her being, some revelation in which she comes to understand both that she is herself a representation and that like Ishiguro's Josie, she too, is dying, as if there's some underlying connection between aestheticism and death: being a painted portrait and having some kind of terminal illness within you. She found herself, James's narrator says, "looking at the mysterious portrait through tears." And I can hear again here a resonance with the moment in Pynchon's novel were Oedipa Maas our stands in front of the Varo painting and looks at it, she says, through the veil of tears. The lady in question, at all events, with her "slightly Michelangelo-esque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great person, only unaccompanied by joy, and she was dead, dead, dead." James's entire novel I think, is concentrated in this moment, as the House of Mirth is concentrated in the coming together of Lily and Mrs. Lloyd. The emergence of James's and Wharton's modernism is materialized in this politically weighted encounter between a fictional character and a painted portrait, one which is itself staged as a correction to or a conversation with still earlier such encounters. It's impossible I think, not to see in Lily's affinity with Mrs. Lloyd, an after image of Oscar Wilde's living pictures in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian is portrait as what Wilde's narrator calls "a strange affinity" with the life that it represents and substitutes. But Wilde imagines this affinity not as an incipient modernism, but as a late gothicism, in which the death that James sees as a function of aesthetic representation is altogether more ghoulish. The eeriness of the bond between the portrait and its subject that you can feel so strongly Ishiguro, in Wharton, and in James, is given a kind of full rein in Wilde and in the 19th century Gothic more broadly, and it runs too throughout the realist tradition, where the capacities of the novel to depict life truly are insistently shadowed by a fascination with the painted portrait, its particular fidelities and duplicities. Consider the painting concealed spookily behind a wooden panel of an upturned dead face, which opens George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, which is the hinge around which the novel as a whole and its novel as a whole turns. That painting that opens the novel behind that open panel, prefigures Gwendolyn's view of her husband face as she watches him drown towards the novel's close, where she thinks, "there was the dead face, dead, dead," which calls me to that moment in James when Millie Teale thinks that she is "dead, dead dead."

(23:49)

Or think of the central episode of the portrait earlier in 19th century in Jane Austen's novel, Emma. Emma adopts as we all remember, an artificial friend herself. An earlier version of Ishiguro's Klara, in the form of the cheerful Hartfield resident Harriet Smith. Emma, we understand, has no real feeling for Harriet. She's not a real friend. And this manufactured friendship is a sign in the novel of Emma's faulty and partial understanding, both of people around her and of herself. This gulf between the novel's world and that world as Emma sees it is given its most condensed form in the portrait Emma decides to paint early in the novel of Harriet, with the deliciously misconceived aim of dazzling the local vicar, Mr. Elton, with Harriet's beauty. We never know really, why Emma wants Harriet to marry Mr. Elton, but she paints a painting of her where she improves her in order to coax Mr. Elton to fall in love with Harriet. The delicious comedy of this episode turns around the fact that Harriet, focalized through Emma's own skewed forms of perception, is already an artificial figure. And so, and Emma's amateur and deliberately mistaken likeness of Harriet is not so much a bad portrait as it is another version of Harriet, and Ishiguroan continuation of the ways that the novel sees her. Each of the central characters express a view on Emma's artistry and in eliciting these critiques the portrait, Emma's portrait, serves as an index of the novel's reality effect. A means of testing how ways of seeing, ways of representing, relate to some notional but impossible real Harriet, lying somewhere beyond the limits of the text.

(25:31)

We see Ishiguro here engaging this history of portraits that are acting as a test of the gap between portrait-as-representation and a portrait as a kind of stand in for reality. And when Ishiguro imagines Klara standing in front of Mr. Capaldi's prosthetic version of Josie, he activates this novelistic tradition. But what I want to finish by saying: even if we can see Ishiguro engaging this tradition, there's something else going on in the way that Josie and her portrait and Klara relate to one another, something like an approach to the way that the novel produces what I theorize in The Prosthetic Imagination as a kind of prosthetic ground, that isn't historically specific. And that is something like the way that the novel itself works. And there's a moment where I want us to close, thinking about how at this particular moment, this kind of prosthetic ground that is not historically specific might come to thought or to imagination. And this is a climactic moment Ishiguro's novel where the mother and Josie visit a waterfall together. The mother and Josie were planning to go on go on a trip to a waterfall and the mother, out of a kind of cruel tyranny rather than for any apparent reason, decides to force the daughter Josie to stay at home and say she's too ill to come out, and she's going to take Klara with her on this trip that she should have been taken with her daughter, as if she's already imagining that Klara might take Josie's place. So Josie's too ill to be able to leave the house, she's got to be confined to her bed, but the mother takes Klara with her. When the two arrive at the waterfall, they're sitting together at a picnic table and the mother asks Klara to try and become like Josie. And I think this is one of the uncanniest moments in all of Ishiguro's fiction. "Okay," the mother says to Klara, "since Josie isn't here, I want you to be Josie," and Klara pretends to be Josie. "'But now I want you to move,' the mother says, 'do something more. Don't stop being Josie. Let me see you move a little.' I smiled in the way Josie would, settling into a slouching, informal posture. 'That's good. Now say something. Let me hear you speak.' 'I'm sorry,' Klara says, 'I'm not sure--' 'No, that's Klara. I want Josie.' 'Hi, Mom, Josie here.' 'Good, more. Come on.' 'Hi mom. Nothing to worry about, right? I got here and I'm fine.'" This is the moment I want us to end on, this moment that I think is a kind of intense proximity to what the novel can do. This is a moment where we feel the grief that the mother feels for her dead daughter Sal and for her living daughter Josie who is in the process of dying. This is a moment where we feel the absence of the addressee, but it's also a moment that magically and almost miraculously brings that voice back. "Hi mom, Josie here." This is Josie talking insofar as Josie has ever talked. This is a voice back from the dead, back from the condition of never having been. This is a more sophisticated imitation, more sophisticated than any imitation has the right or power to be, because it's no imitation at all. There is no join, or no seam, between Klara speaking and Josie speaking. As the mother leans forward as the mother who can't distinguish between the dead daughter and the living, she is speaking to Josie. She's not speaking to someone like Josie or to an imitation of Josie, but to Josie herself. "I'm sorry Josie," she says, "I'm sorry I didn't bring you here today." The question Ishiguro's novel asks––can Klara save Josie? Can artificial forms save life rather than replace it?––is answered hear both too early and too late, as the novel voice speaks at once for Josie and for Klara, for both the artificial and the real, the living and the nonliving. The beauty of this moment is that Josie's his mother is able to make the apology, the act of loving contrition for their distance and unreality, that so many of Ishiguro's parents and lovers and children longed to make. Its sadness lies in the fact that in receiving that apology, in hearing it and accepting it as she does, Josie can only conform to the artificiality for which it seeks to atone, can only demonstrate that none of us are quite at home in ourselves or in each other. It's at this moment––I've got one more minute to go––it's at this moment when Ishiguro's embrace of artificiality touches most closely on his pathos, that we glimpse this ground of the novel form itself, the ground that Ishiguro unearths in his conversation with Pynchon, with Wharton, with Austen and so on. This is an oddly collapsing ground, made of the necessarily strained difference between being and the forms in which it knows itself, and the magical overcoming of such difference. The voice that speaks here is the voice of the novel. The voice that can reveal to us the terms in which we encounter ourselves but only by installing a prosthetic distance at the heart of that self-encounter. And I'll leave it there. Thank you.

Margaret Cohen (30:14)

Thank you very much. So Ian! Ian Duncan is a longstanding friend of the Center. He teaches at the University of California Berkeley, where he holds the Florence Green Bigsby chair in English and is currently chairing the department. He's the author of again a number of books. His current book in progress is about Scotland and romanticism and he has a number of different positions and sort of outreach in the field, including Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a member of the editorial board of Representations, a general editor of the Collected Works of James Hogg and co-editor of a new book series, whose title is Edinburg Critical Studies in Romanticism. Join me in welcoming Professor Duncan.

Ian Duncan (30:57)

Hi there. As Peter said just now, he referred to an exchange we had last week about how impressed we both were by the uncanniness of the attunement between Ishiguro's novel and The Prosthetic Imagination. It's as though Ishiguro's novel, published a year later, is itself a prosthesis of Peter's argument. Peter describes prosthesis as the master trope of novelistic fiction, an analog to the persona or mask in the drama, mediating between representing a missing thing and being the thing that is missing, its operating procedure is to escalate mimesis into identification: simulacrum into substitute. Prosthesis dissolves the hard distinction between the two poles of linguistic and figurative operation described by structuralist thinkers, notably Romani Jakobson, between metonymy, relation of addition or extension, and metaphor, a relation of substitution. Prosthesis seems analogous in this rhetorical vein to simile, working between metonymy and metaphor, softer the neither but not weaker because more flexible, articulated by the relation "like." "Like" concatenates the world, binds it loosely, but thereby powerfully together. One thing is like another thing that is like another thing and so on. Simile makes room for difference, resists identity and substitution, since the chain of likeness keeps sliding from one term to another. Hence, and this is really the point I want to dwell on, if not beat to death today. likeness is the trope of social bonding, encompassing both genealogical relations, family resemblance, I looked like my parents and siblings and affective relations, as in the likes of social media. Like is not as strong as love, but it's more effective at holding together a large dispersed society of strangers. But for likeness to work, the prosthetic telos of substitution has to be deferred. The friend, artificial or not, must not take our place because friendship is premised on our both being present to sustain the relation.

(33:04)

To turn, then, into Peter's virtuoso reading of Klara and the Sun. His readings of the novels that are his book's case studies, from More and Cervantes to Atwood, Coetzee and DeLillo, are comparably dazzling. The difference between Josie and her simulacrum to be Klara is temporal. Their relation is meant to transition from likeness, resemblance, friendship to substitution with Josie his biological death, for substitution will cut both ways since becoming Josie, Klara will also cease to be––cease to be, that is in her ontological state of "friend." Except, spoiler alert, Klara does not get to fulfill her prosthetic destiny. And here comes the cruel twist, typical of Ishiguro, that consummates the novel's pathos. Peter has analyzed the scene in which the mother takes Klara on a day trip will be later understand to be a rehearsal for her substitution of Josie, culminating in her pitch perfect ventriloquism: "Hi mom. Nothing to worry about. Right? I got here and I'm fine." The irony that unfolds is that Josie does after all turn out to be fine. She makes a full recovery, moves on to adolescence and college, while Clara is discarded, obsolete, consigned to the junkyard: a more dignified fate, the mother says, than her becoming a subject for Mr. Capaldi's experiments. "Klara deserves better, she deserves her slow fade." Klara neither becomes Josie nor does she remain Klara. Instead, Ishiguro's novel plays out a primitive anthropological plot of sacrifice to a solar deity. Klara, who is solar powered, strikes a bargain with the sun to restore Josie to health. In a startling, audacious, indeed outrageous turn, the sun fulfills the contract. Josie's human friend Rick wonders: "If what happened that morning, if it had to do with you making some secret deal. At the time they I thought it was, well, all AF superstition, but these days I keep wondering if there was more to it." And there is more to it: a magical or mythic pre-novelistic topos, or at least a pre-realist novel topos. Sacrificial bargain with the gods erupts through Ishiguro's futuristic post-human narration. Peter situates Klara and Sun within a long genealogy of the modern novel, marked by an ekphrastic scenario in which a literary character confronts a significant image or effigy.

(35:30)

Reading Ishiguro's novel I thought of another novelistic tradition, and my insight here is fortuitous. It's entirely due to a dissertation in progress I was also reading last week, by one of our Berkeley graduate students, Katie Hobbs. Katie's discussion of mid 19th century debates around Jane Eyre prompted me to see Klara and the Sun is a variant of that quintessentially Victorian genre, the governor's novel, much as The Remains of the Day reprises a 19th century tradition of country house novels narrated by a faithful retainer, from Castle Rackrent through Wuthering Heights, The Moonstone and The Master of Ballantrae. The governess is the alien caregiver at the heart of the upper class family. Katie cites Victorian reformer Anna Jameson's pamphlet for relatives social position of mothers and governesses on the moral harm that the governess's "anomalous, artificial position," these Jamison's words, can bring, generating rebellious resentment as in critics complaints about Jane Eyre, or worse obliterating human feeling all together, making the perfect governess into an automaton, a machine: words that are used by Jameson, as well as by Charlotte Bronte's heroine. Klara is utterly, selflessly devoted to her charge, she's more than a governess, she's a friend, by virtue of her being a machine: pure of any trace of Jane Eyre style ressentiment. As Jane Hu writes in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, more terrifying than the robots rebelling, as Klara shows, is they're never even considering rebellion a possibility. Klara's virtue takes the form of an extreme empathy, triggered by her uncanny virtuosity, in reading human bodies and expressions--not only exactly reckoning a person's age as soon as she sees them, but also deducing the authentic core of feeling within a fraught social interaction. Klara's empathetic art makes her more human, or maybe a better human, than the human actors around her. And it consists in her absolute inhabitation of the social medium that constitutes humanity according to a philosophical tradition that goes back to Shaftsbury, Adam Smith and other Enlightenment philosophers of human nature. That social inhabitation is so absolute as to purify Klara even of self pity, or paradoxically, of experiencing her last loneliness as suffering.

(37:54)

I have to confess now, I found it a humbling experience to reread portions of The Prosthetic Imagination for today's event after having reviewed it several months ago. And perhaps that's a discipline all book reviewers should submit themselves to. I was impressed and not happily, by how much I had left out, how poorly I had done justice to some of the books manifold riches. Notably, its powerful account of where we are now and how we've got here. Two related things strike me: offshoots of an earlier observation. The prosthetic operation which Peter analyzes with such panache resides in a relation between mind and matter, between an observing, feeling consciousness and an inanimate object world, which is at once radically outside the observing mind and, as its constitutive biological substrate, radically inside it too. The primacy of this relation tends to posit mind or consciousness as an individual phenomenon, its existential solitude reinforced by the inhuman, inanimate condition of what lies putatively outside it. I'm interested in this light in the convergence between this model of the conscious self emerging as a liberal sovereign subject with the advent of Western modernity, and a post romantic model of the lyric subject given theoretical heft in the writings of Paul De Man. for De Man and critics in his wake, the foundational trope of lyric poetry in the romantic tradition is prosopopoeia: the rhetorical act of putting a human face on or giving a human voice to an inanimate world. The operation reinscribes a radically individual, existentially isolated status of a living self in inhuman world. The vital difference between this lyric model and Boxall's novelistic model is the novel's dialectical commitment to world making, to imagining and populating a reality that's larger than the individual subject. Here, one of the compelling moves Boxall makes in The Prosthetic Imagination is to locate the origins of the modern novel in Renaissance utopian fictions with their inventions of an imaginary world that does not substitute but overlays the world the reader inhabits. The visible gap between empirically real and imagined worlds constitutes the work's fictionality, and hence the visibility of the join between consciousness and world, at once they're connecting seem and the scar tissue of their separation, what Peter has just called the prosthetic ground, the kind of transhistorical truth that the novel opens onto. It's an insight which novels are uniquely equipped to make legible. In the argument itself and the history of the novel through which it unfolds, mind takes effective primacy over world. Although biologically, historically, matter generates what we experience as consciousness, the book reproduces the phenomenological order by which the mind is there first, or so it thinks, and then in the prosthetic operation thinks its way across and into the world. This order informs what I've characterized as the Hegelian, or Bildungsroman form of Boxall's history of the novel: a particular model of consciousness, an idea, drives an evolutionary progression through a sequence of historical stages to its realization in relation to contingent conditions, culminating in its full revelation, and it's critical self awareness in the prose fictions of Samuel Beckett.

(41:17)

As I suggested in my review, this is a sort of meta Bildungsroman, a story of the formation of the novel. Now I mean to point to the clarifying force with which The Prosthetic Imagination exhibits the relation between a theory of literary form and a history of that form, a relation that is all too often buried or slighted in critical writing–– we have plenty of histories that do not analyze the theoretical model that is their premise, as well as theories that dispense with historical contingency––Peter Boxall's history of the novel as artificial life is all the stronger for its extrapolating a theory of the novel at once robust and nuanced, which it does not simply assume, but argues across the framework of a progressive evolutionary history. To harp again on my question, reading the book is a Bildungsroman of the novel prompts me to ask about the social medium the novel explores, biologizes, as the constitution of its and our world.

(42:13)

Enlightenment philosophical accounts of bildung describe the formation of the poor, naked human self born into the world––unequipped with instinct unlike other animals––through socialization, education, the acquisition of language and the arts. Can we think of this as a prosthetic operational process? What if we revolve the axis of the prosthetic relation to reach across the self to other thinking and feelings selves? In his last chapter, Peter characterizes our present historical moment in terms of a catastrophic game changing redistribution of cognitive life between human and inhuman, natural and artificial realities such that nature is now manifest as an alien artificial force remade by us and reciprocally returning to unmake us. Recent work emphasizes the entanglement of cognitive life with its environments, which is social, as well as more broadly ecological and material. Individual cognition is a phenomenological illusion, entangled not just with nonliving matter, but with other subjects, non human, but also human subjects. And here I'm invoking, in short, an old fashioned account of the novel as in Hannah Arendt's phrase, the only entirely social art form. And I do so not to point to any flaw in Peter's argument, but to say that there are other novels which may offer themselves as exemplary of other histories of the novel. Like any history of the novel, The Prosthetic Imagination is a history of some novels, or of a particular novelistic genealogy, rather than of The Novel, an idea that may not actually exist in the world. But Peter Boxall knows this and his title issues the appropriate caution. The Prosthetic Imagination does not bill itself as The history of The Novel, but A history of The Novel does artificial life, and it's hard to imagine it's been surpassed. Thank you.

Margaret Cohen (44:09)

Thank you so much, Ian. Okay, Nancy. Professor Ruttenburg is William Robertson Coe Professor of American literature in the English department here, and she also holds courtesy appointments in the department of Comparative Literature and Slavic languages and literature. Professor Ruttenburg has written a number of books, and she's currently completing a book that's titled The Hidden Diaspora, which asks, in the context of global trafficking of Jewish women during the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, whether it's possible to recover from historical oblivion, those who were unremarkable in their own time and whose lives were stolen from them. And she takes up the inevitability of fiction as a supplement to that recovery and the troubling ethical questions that surround it. So Nancy, thank you so much.

Nancy Ruttenburg (44:57)

All right. So I'm really very taken with Peter's vision of the unmade ground of fiction, as he put it, "the place from which narrative being emerges." And as he says, this place is enormously and even magically generative, and it brings voices back from the condition of never having been, back from the dead. The novel voice as Peter calls it is, in this sense, redemptive, it speaks at once for both the artificial and the real, the living and the nonliving. Both/And. This is why the novel exceeds mimesis, the real comes first, as if reality were one thing and representation another, each with its own integrity. Instead of a break, there's a space between: the prosthetic ground, the hidden join where consciousness meets with its extensions. The novel issues from that join or fold as a voice or voices capable of sustaining at length, an ever shifting vitality that makes variousness cohere. The novel sustains the oppositional energies of binding together and unraveling. This is how Bakhtin understands language itself, as centripetal and centrifugal forces that are always in powerful opposition, but that cohere nevertheless: always vitally, never statically, and across time. Not seamlessness, but continuation, an ontology of the artificial. So my question is whether there can be an internal resistance to The Prosthetic Imagination, or more strongly a refusal, in effect a short-circuiting internal to the fiction, that would disallow the miracle of bringing voices back from the condition of never having been, a refusal that would break that vital continuation. I see the question of an internal refusing of the prosthetic ground as a question that asks how minimal represented consciousness can get in the longest narrative form, the novel. The depth and extent of Peter's claims in The Prosthetic Imagination leads me to think that the prosthetic can't be refused in the novel, except in the case of a character, like for example, Ahab, who's refusal of his whalebone leg, his fury at it, is expressed in his monomaniacal drive to avenge its loss. That drive is what generates the novel's plot. So his refusal doesn't bring the novel to its knees. It doesn't sink into the unsayable. On the contrary, it generates his amazing soliloquy about the pasteboard mask and Melville's wildly proliferating prose itself. It sustains the novel, it works the magic of continuation. So there's a refusal of the prosthetic, but that's not the same as a refusal of the prosthetic imagination, which I think is a non-starter in the novel, it can't be refused. And I want to propose that this is what distinguishes the novel from shorter narratives, which I think can accommodate that refusal.

(47:57)

So I want to spend the rest of my time trying to figure out how they do it, and what the consequences are for narrative itself. So I want to consider four scenarios. Three involve noses, and one a pen. So the first three set up the fourth, which is an essential refusal of the prosthetic imagination, and that's Bartleby the Scrivener. So the first scenario, very brief, is the living thelyphron in Apuleius' The Golden Ass, who discovers to his horror that his nose is artificial. He's distraught. There's no question of his refusing the prosthetic, it would be absurd to rebel against the absurd, so we're in Kafka land. And just to note in passing Peter's reading of the living and dead thelyphron suggests that the emergence of the double in 19th century fiction––and I'm thinking of Poe and Dostoyevsky––is an exemplary instance of the prosthetic imagination. Second scenario is about defacement when a nose goes missing in Gogol's short story, The Nose. So in that story, a barber finds a nose and a loaf of bread his wife has baked for his breakfast. And he's horrified, as one would be. He's afraid that in a state of drunkenness, he may have cut or twisted off the nose of one of his customers. So he wraps the nose in a cloth, he's frantic to get rid of it, and on the way to his shop he throws it into the river. But sure enough, one of his customers, an ambitious and pretentious social climber named Kovalyov, discovers that same morning that in place of his nose, he has quote, "a most ridiculous flat and smooth surface, like a pancake fresh off the griddle." So he's panic stricken, because he has a date that night. He walks through the city frantically looking for his nose when he sees an elegant carriage pull up in front of a mansion and a gentleman climbs out of it, wearing a plumed hat, a golden broidered uniform with a big stand up collar, and doe-skin breeches, and he's carrying a sword. This gentleman is Kovalyov's nose, all nose, nothing but nose. The nose-less Kovalyov unhappily asks himself, "how could a nose, which as recently as yesterday had been on my face, and could neither ride nor walk–– how could it be in uniform?" He finally catches up with the nose in church, genuflecting, and he works up the courage to ask for his nose back, and the nose somehow knits its brow and says: "You are mistaken my dear sir. I exist in my own right." There are similarities here to Peter's reading of Christine Brooke-Rose's short story The Foot insofar as primacy is given to the alienating body part. But of course the nose is no phantom. The nose wears a uniform, it knits its brow, it genuflects, it insists on its independent existence and insists that it has no relation to Kovalyov––doesn't even know him. So I'm going to leave it at that, you can find out what happened, but this is the absurdity of the prosthetic taken to the nth degree. If the prosthesis wants to take on a life of its own, it can, and there's nothing to be done about it. The nose perfectly illustrates Peters observation that "we are not identical with our manifestations. The forms in which we know ourselves are always at a remove from us."

(51:15)

The third scenario is taken from the British philosopher Gillian Rose's memoir loves work, which is about existential terror in the face of terminal cancer. Before her diagnosis, Rose meets a very old woman named Edna, whose apartment she stayed in briefly. So Edna was well into her 90s, very mentally and physically active, and she has no nose. She had a prosthetic nose that Rose says "lacked any cosmetic alleviation whatever. This probiscis could have come from a Christmas cracker." It was just this smooth flesh-colored generic nose, no attempt at making it look anything but prosthetic, and proboscis isn't a word we typically use for human nose. Edna asked if Rose would mind if she took off her nose when she was at home. And what's Rose supposed to say, it's Edna's house. So she sees when Edna takes off her prosthetic nose, there's just a neat oblong black hole in Edna's face, not a space that's flat as a pancake, but a black hole. Rose says that she'd stopped noticing the nose anyway, but she preferred the black hole when she saw it. It's worth noticing here that if the nose is the prosthetic, which it obviously is, then the black hole is the reality of the prosthetic as a representation of a nose, and Rose prefers that blank reality. So anyway, here we're talking about the prosthetic in the context of illness, Edna's face was deformed by cancer, and you can't refuse illness. And this memoir is all about that fact. But Edna does refuse the prosthetic. Here it seems that refusing the prosthetic is a choice, although a highly unusual one. And of course, we're talking about a literal prosthetic. But an artificial nose that doesn't make it possible to breathe isn't the same as an artificial leg that does make it possible to walk. The nose's function is purely social, to look the same as other people, though Edna's proboscis doesn't serve that function very well. She doesn't seem that invested in putting in the effort to buy a more lifelike nose and she refuses the prosthetic in her own home even when she has guests. Unlike living thelyphron and Gogol's Kovalyov, she has the choice and can exercise her preference. Edna prefers a black hole to a prosthetic nose. And that takes us to the fourth scenario. Melville's Bartleby the most complicated example of refusing the prosthetic, which is what Bartleby is entirely about.

(53:44)

You could argue that the reason Bartleby is such a strange text is because it's about refusing the prosthetic, which no one thinks it's possible to refuse. In the story, everyone thinks he's just refusing to work. Here the prosthetic is the pen that would turn him into a human Xerox machine. He famously prefers not to pick up a pen and be the person he was hired to be, a scrivener. So Bartleby seems like the exemplary prosthetic character in Peter's definition of the prosthetic ground. That ground intervenes between the living and the dead, which is precisely, explicitly where Bartleby is located. The prosthetic ground is between origin and copy, quite literally here since Bartleby is where is supposed to be a man whose only role is to copy originals. The prosthetic ground is between mimesis and prosthesis. In Bartleby's case there is the most minimal actuality for mimetic representation, which is what the lawyer who narrates the story struggles unsuccessfully to get his mind around. There is no inside narrative in Bartleby, and Bartleby's refusal of the prosthetic pen doesn't mean he's uniquely fully present to himself. So I wanted to stop here for a second to consider Peters discussion of the unsayable and its effect on narrative in his really illuminating reading of Benito Cereno, which tells the counter history or inside narrative of a slave revolt. It's not that the story of Bartleby can't be told, obviously, since Melville wrote it. The difficulty is that in Peter's words, "the logic of Melville's fiction suggests that the revolution that the novella calls for requires an overthrow too of the very narrative terms in which the human had been conceived. This overthrow entails the unsayable, and the urgency of saying the unsayable." This is precisely where the lawyer can't get traction, it's hard to imagine that Bartleby could ever have been a novel. In his discussion of Melville and Toni Morrison, Peter talks about a fugitive bond that cannot come to expression, but can make itself felt as a prosthetic difference, and can be expressed even only in the form of the self-preferring, tautological self-same. But there is expression, finally, to sustain the bond, and Bartleby's repetition of "I prefer not to" sustains nothing. The novel could not have sustained the refusal of prosthesis in a character like Bartleby, and in his maddening unsayability, there's no future for Bartleby other than death. There's no burgeoning of a different story. The story is radically minimalist, Bartleby's consciousness is radically minimal. And its minimalism really hasn't been superseded in literature. It tortures critics and theorists to this day. So I guess it leaves me with the question, if the novel can accommodate this kind of radical minimalism, and if so, for how long? And if it can't, it seems to me we have a very strong argument for the distinctiveness of the novel in the prosthetic imagination. Thank you.

Margaret Cohen (57:03)

Thank you, Nancy, Ian and Peter, for just really brilliant papers. Peter, let me give you the chance, if you want to respond?

Peter Boxall (57:10)

Yeah, first of all, to thank you both. That, for me was deeply exhilarating to hear you give much more articulate accounts of my book than I could ever give. So thank you, that was really truly wonderful for me. I'll, I'll start by saying, yeah, what you've done there, Nancy, is to formalize and formulate something that was very implicit in The Prosthetic Imagination. I call it a history of the novel as artificial life, but of course, it's shot through with readings of shorter narratives. And I think you're absolutely right, that one of the ways we could define the novel form and one of the ways we could distinguish between the novel form and long-short narratives, one of the ways we could define them, I think, is through that capacity to live briefly in a world without prosthetic enhancement. In Bartleby this, this takes us to the space of the dead letter office, doesn't it? For those of you who haven't got this at the front of your mind, it turns out Bartleby, this strange creature who won't copy, we find that he used to work in a dead letter office, that is letters that have been sent but haven't reached their destination. So they end up in this middle ground, which I think is the way that you're thinking of a prosthetic ground, which can perhaps remain unrealized in these short and stranded forms in a way that it's hard novelistically to achieve. I think that's, that's a really intriguing thought. An example that works very hard to refuse a prosthesis and I know you've written on this author extensively, is Coetzee's Slow Man.

Nancy Ruttenburg (58:44)

Yeah.

Peter Boxall (58:44)

Where the whole plot really is, is around Paul Raymond, refusing to replace the leg that he loses in a biking accident. And that novel holds the refusal of the prosthesis at the level of plot, against all the kind of play with Elizabeth Costello, the author of the novel, turning up in the middle of the novel, and so the prosthesis of narrative turns out to be the prosthesis that Raymond as character refuses. Which seems to turn around everything that you were saying.

(59:16)

Which then leads me to Ian's interventions, all of which I found incredibly revealing, the relation to De Man and lyric and prosopopoeia turns, again, around how we make this space between what lies beneath the mask and the mask itself palpable. And I think your reading of what separates my understanding of prosopopoeia from De Man's is exactly right. I wish I could have put it as clearly as you did. Your thinking of Klara and the Sun as a governess novel––I mean, that's absolutely brilliant. And then the novella I'm thinking of is of course Turn of the Screw. Although we'd have to kind of work that out in a longer time than we've got. But it strikes me that right at the heart of James's Turn of the Screw is something like the dead letter office in Bartleby. If you remember the plot of Turn of the Screw turns around writing letters back to the employer who employs the governess and not sending them. And the line that the governess uses: "These letters were too beautiful to be posted." So the ways in which we might formalize the governess child relation, in Turn of the Screw, has to do with how we recover that space of the dead letter or recover that prosthetic ground that underlies representation without coming to representation. And a history of the novel might be a history of the ways in which that ground is made articulable. And you and I might have slightly different senses of what a bildungsroman of the novel would look like, as you say, again incredibly eloquently, that we are going to get different models of that bildungsroman, when you look through different kinds of traditions. But thank you, thank you for those those thoughts. They enrich my understanding of what my book was doing.

Margaret Cohen (1:00:57)

Let me turn things over to our audience. And if you'd like to intervene or ask a question, just raise your hand. Ato?

Ato Quayson (1:01:06)

Thank you, Peter. Of course, I've read the book, which as Ian was saying, it's humbling to see how you stitch together close detailed analysis to this larger and quite stimulating argument. In fact, as I was listening to you I was trying to translate it into an analysis of postcolonial texts and I have an example that you might actually be interested in. Its Kamel Daoud's recently published The Mersault Investigations. He's an Algerian writer, and basically in the old idiom we would call it an intertextual text, because he is evoking Camus's The Stranger, L'Strange, and trying to rectify an absence in L'Strange. Basically, when Mersault shoots the Arab on the beach, the Arab is not given a name. So the entire novel is about animating the nameless Arab. Now the character in Kamel Daoud's novel is the brother of the nameless Arab and the entire novel is him being resentful and outraged that his brother was not given a name, was not acknowledged, and so on. But the guy, the narrator is called Harun, he's so resentful of Mersault that he progressively and I think fully consciously, becomes a prosthesis of the novel that he's critiquing. His intense desire to correct it, and also to show that Camus was essentially depopulating the historical context and conditions of the Arabs' world, but the only way he can correct it is to become like Mersault. And so for example, he becomes an atheist given to Absurdism. He is very morose and despondent. But the most important thing is that he shoots someone, he kills a Frenchman. It's almost like the killing of the Frenchman is an act that allows him to become something other than a nameless Arab. So the entire novel is a good illustration of the prosthetic effect. And in his case, the effect is generated not through a painting but reading a novel, which is Albert Camus's novel. And in fact, this same prosthetic framework can generate productive readings in postcolonial studies where the prosthesis is generated through trauma. But I rest my case.

Peter Boxall (1:03:43)

Thank you. I mean, I agree with everything you've just said, and in a sense that if there's a hidden bridge, in my opening remarks between The Prosthetic Imagination and Fictions of the West, it will be trying to get deeper into the ground between fictions and what fictions make real, as an effect of relations between the West and the non-West, which are everywhere at work in my understanding of The Prosthetic Imagination, even though I've undertheorized it in postcolonial terms. This isn't a good example, in the example is a 19th century white American writer]s example, but the process whereby Benito Cereno holds Babo as a kind of crutch at the end of Benito Cereno, is a powerful kind of exemplar, where Delano who reads Benito Cereno as using Babo as a kind of crutch to support white power. Where there's another text at work, where in fact Babo is seeking to overcome white power. And the reading of Babo as a prosthetic for the white master sits right at that junction, that postcolonial junction, between prosthesis as sustaining a set of imperial power relations and prosthesis as an apparatus for reframing them. And I could easily imagine reading postcolonial prosthesis as one which turns around that doubleness. Does that make sense?

Ato Quayson (1:05:07)

Yes, it does, of course. Definitely. Thank you.

Margaret Cohen (1:05:11)

Thank you. So Mae Velloso-Lyon?.

Mae Velloso-Lyon (1:05:14)

Hi, thank you so much. So I'd like to ask about the historical emergence of the prosthetic imagination, which I understand from the book you tie to, or maybe see as contemporaneous with the emergence of anatomy as a science. And in your introduction, you point out that the early modern state is built on the model of the body politic. But of course, one of the most influential and important discussions of the state or perhaps proto state as a body is John of Salisbury's 12th century Policraticus, and I'm a medievalist myself as you can probably tell, and I think about how important the extension of the body through compositions of objects is in medieval culture and fiction. For example, I'm thinking of diagrams of knights, which label all of their equipment and their horse as part of the whole, or medieval romance and all of its scenes of identity crisis emerging from the loss of prosthetic parts, or from damage to the natural body, which then causes it to lack, whatever, its former capabilities, or recognizability was. And so I wonder if you could just speak a little bit more to how you understand the prosthetic imagination emerging historically? And what specifically makes More's Utopia kind of inaugurate a new age? And is there a kind of historical moment behind it that you could kind of articulate a little bit more? Thank you.

Peter Boxall (1:06:27)

Yeah, that's a that's a tremendous question. And I'm going to make this extraordinarily ridiculous claim, without having thought about it enough, but I'll make it anyway. I think I think something like a prosthetic logic attends all acts of expression. So the earliest place where I find a prosthetic logic in that book, and we've already touched on it is in the Golden Ass, and in the relationship between dead and living thelyphron. And a colleague of mine, and me as a sort of silent partner, did a collection of essays on prostheses from medieval to early modern culture. So I don't think that a prosthetic imagination emerges in 1516, like from the inside of somebody's head and newborn. I think that there's something quite specific about the way that Thomas More, clearly working on Plato's Republic as a much earlier model, the way that Thomas More invents a fold between a purportedly real account of himself as a political member of court, and himself as a fantasy or idealized version. And there's something like the early form of a recognizable early novel born in that junction, and in making that junction fictionally realizable in the way that he does in Utopia. It's that formal junction between Antwerp and No Place––

Mae Velloso-Lyon (1:07:55)

Right.

Peter Boxall (1:07:56)

––that distinguishes it from Plato's Republic. And that, for me, makes it the beginning of a certain kind of novel imagination. Of course, the prosthetic imagination you can find running through classical antiquity through medieval to early modern, absolutely. There's something there's something specific about the stirrings of a kind of recognizable fiction, I think––

Mae Velloso-Lyon (1:08:18)

Right.

Peter Boxall (1:08:19)

––in More, but someone might correct me and tell me that's not the case. But I think there's some backbinding between anatomy, Hobbesian statecraft, new models of fiction, that means that utopian thinking and fiction and the novel kind of emerge in a forcefield together,

Mae Velloso-Lyon (1:08:38)

Thank you.

Margaret Cohen (1:08:41)

Thank you, Alex?

Alex Sherman (1:08:44)

Hi, I'll try to be fast. So this is for all the panelists. You all talk a lot about why The Prosthetic Imagination should be a history of the novel, thinking about the novel generically differentiated from the lyric, or from the novella. And I also agree that there's something to this tight link between the prosthetic and the length of this fiction that does something. And I wonder what you think, though, about the medium specificity, like actually that it's in writing and how writing is tied to prosthesis? Peter, your presentation, you talked about portraits, and in Ishiguro's case, you know, these are things that are made into films, that excerpt you have from Klara is very, like cinematic, you know, going around the corner and seeing her, it's easy to see how this will be made it to a film. And yeah, what is it about writing that lends itself to prosthesis? Is it something about how, you know, there is no speaker present? It is just a disembodied voice separated from a human body? I don't know.

Peter Boxall (1:09:34)

Do, do other panelists want to take that?

Nancy Ruttenburg (1:09:37)

Yeah, I mean, this is just obviously off the top of my head, but I think that Ian was getting to that because, you know, you talked, Ian, about substitution. Continuation, obviously, transition, but especially substitution, and that sacrificial bargain. And I think language, because this is something that kind of unfolds in time, that it's suited to writing. I mean, I suppose film narrative is very close. But I find the answer in substitution. Maybe Ian you want to say something more about that?

Ian Duncan (1:10:08)

I think yeah, I would just very briefly say, Nancy, I think what you've said about language and time. In other words, there's a medium specificity to the novel, which I think is one of the great strengths, I think, of Peter's book is that it really is about the novel, I think. If we turned to cinema or to the drama, right, we can think of, as I mentioned, briefly, the persona, perhaps the enabling trope of the drama as a genre as analogous to the prosthesis, but it's not the same thing. And it works differently in the in the sort of social embodied space of dramatic representation. I'd like to think more about this, it hooks up really interestingly with your thoughts, Nancy, about how scale makes a difference, right? The length of the novel means that something else has to be going on and the kind of minimalist reductions––

Nancy Ruttenburg (1:10:49)

Right.

Ian Duncan (1:10:50)

––that we find, that the freezing of historical progress or development that we find in something like Bartleby.

Peter Boxall (1:10:57)

One thing I'd say in response to that question, Alex, I do spend some time early in the book, reading Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, and I think I do that in order to address precisely that question. How does painting make the gap between consciousness material, formalized kinds of knowledge? How does painting make that gap visible? Or thinkable? And how does the novel dwell in that gap in a way that painting can't? And I think painting makes kind of space that we've been calling a prosthetic ground, it makes it fleetingly thinkable whilst closing it down, whereas the novel kind of camps in that space.

Margaret Cohen (1:11:36)

Thank you, Cynthia, do you want to ask a question?

Cynthia Vaille-Giancotti (1:11:40)

Yes. So first of all, I love your presentation on portraits, I work on them. But I don't exactly work on painted portraits, but rather on verbal portraits of characters, how a 17th century socialite practice is translated in a verbal form. And so I wanted to push your analysis a little bit and ask whether you have envisioned a further layer, because yes, you are considering painted portraits, but they're still in a verbal form. Because the more I work on it, the more I realize that portraits are not described, they are mentioned, or...it's more about telling than showing, so we cannot really picture them, but we have a summary. And so that affects if we fully see? And so I was curious about that. And then the second reaction is, I was curious whether you have read, The Killing Commendatore, by Haruki Murakami, because the book opens with a nightmare of the protagonist who is a painter, and he dreams of this boogeyman who asks him to have his portrait painted. But the problem is that the boogeyman does not have a face. And so the painter asks, "How can I paint the portrait of a person without a face?" And then the whole novel is about trying to solve that question. And so you know, in 2018, here, we have again, the same question, how do we paint the resemblance of something that doesn't exist? So in a way, he's addressing the question of fictionality, how can a novel be mimetic?

Peter Boxall (1:13:18)

Thank you. I don't know whether Ian or Nancy want to make any comments on that. Nancy, have you got...?

Nancy Ruttenburg (1:13:25)

I just think it's a great example. I mean, it is the perfect, it's the perfect novel to talk about this. I agree. And there's the whole anxiety of influence with the, you know, legendary painter in whose house he stays because the legendary painter is in, let's call it a memory facility. In an old age home. Yeah, it would be it would be a good example.

Peter Boxall (1:13:48)

Yeah, thank you, Cynthia. I've written it down. I think I think I didn't get very closely in my opening remarks at the very extraordinary merging of Klara and Josie in Klara and the Sun. As you say, push further behind portraiture, how it relates to Ian's brilliant work on likeness, that, I don't know if you've read Klara and the Sun yet, I find it deeply, deeply uncanny the way that the novel animates a coming together of a person and their imitation. So that you can't see the join. It does just disappear. So I think the question of how far Klara does or does not replace Josie is sort of, there's a false climax at that midway through the novel where portraiture does produce a coming together that's more than a likeness, but there is a recognition of a shared ground between a portrait and its sitter. And a share ground that is something like the verbal ground that you're describing, I think, but that allows for kind of saving, yeah, that, that is specific to the novel and is specific here to the novel as a kind of portraiture, I think maybe. I don't know whether that really addresses your question.

Ian Duncan (1:15:10)

I wonder if what's also going on there, though, is that Ishiguro's novel is staging that medial difference, right? The climax you're describing, which is very much about freezing time, the confrontation with the effigy is then undone, as the novel keeps going. As it proceeds as a narrative. Klara does save Josie but not by becoming her, by this weird reversion to this sort of magical thinking.

Peter Boxall (1:15:36)

Yeah.

Ian Duncan (1:15:37)

So there's a way in which the two media sort of being played against each other by Ishiguro.

Peter Boxall (1:15:42)

Yeah. And in some pact of substitution, yeah and some theology.

Nancy Ruttenburg (1:15:48)

Definitely theology. [Laughter] When I wrote to him, I said, Klara and the S O N. [Laughter]. It was a tybo, but...

(1:16:00)

Can I also say something about empathy in this regard? Because that's the space between, and I was really struck by, you know, this, this characteristic of kindness that Klara has. She's, she's, she's kind. And Josie is kind to her as well. And that struck me as something that takes two. So that seem to hold these two, to prevent some complete merging, as well.

Peter Boxall (1:16:24)

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And in both those points, I found myself thinking about that moment in Toni Morrison, where a character mistakes and umbilical cord, she's trying to just call it a lifeline, and she calls it a "like line." The idea of a physical connection between mother and child as being a kind of likeness, that it's also a conduit of life. And it's maintaining a difference between beings, while still a kind of bridge between them seems to be a way of thinking about portraiture and likeness to me.

Margaret Cohen (1:17:01)

So I really wish we could now go have drinks and have dinner and continue to discuss. It's really remarkable to be here together on zoom and to feel this intensity of thinking together. So thank you so much for your time and for your engagement with us here. It's really been a pleasure to host you at the Center. Thank you.

Peter Boxall (1:17:21)

It's been very wonderful for me. Thank you very much.

Casey Wayne Patterson (1:17:30)

Thank you again for joining us in this episode of the Center for the Study of the Novel's podcast Cafe. We would also like to thank Peter Boxall, Ian Duncan and Nancy Ruttenburg for their generosity and joining us in this conversation. Thanks to our team at the Center for the Study of the Novel: to An Truong Nguyen and Maritza Colon for their operational support; to our graduate coordinators, Allie Gamble, Alex Sherman, and Ido Keren; to Casey Patterson for production, editing and sound engineering; and to our host and director Margaret Cohen. The Center for the Study of the Novel is a subsidiary of the English Department at Stanford University.

Crime Narratives with Andrea Goulet, Michelle Robinson, and Héctor Hoyos (4/30/21)

Andrea Goulet; Michelle Robinson; Hector Hoyos; Margaret Cohen

Crime Narratives with Andrea Goulet, Michelle Robinson, and Héctor Hoyos (4/30/21), or read the full transcript below.

Casey Wayne Patterson (0:11)

Welcome, and thanks for joining us in another installment of "Cafe," the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. In this episode, our host Margaret Cohen is joined by guests, Andrea Goulet, Hector Hoyos, and Michelle Robinson for a discussion of crime narrative. Andrea Goulet is professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-chair of the 19th century French Studies Association. Her books include Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction; Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Space and Science in French Crime Fiction, and a co-edited volume on the scifi television show Orphan Black. Her current project, titled Shady Quakers and Humbug Inventors, is on anti-American types in 19th century France. Hector Hoyos is an associate professor of Iberian and Latin American cultures, and by courtesy of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of Beyond Boloño: The Global Latin American Novel, a study of globalization critique in the post 1989 novel, as well as Things With a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America, a genealogy of materialist thinking in the region's fiction. Michelle Robinson is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Her book Dreams for Dead Bodies examines how stories and novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins and Rudolph Fisher drew on the puzzle elements of detective fiction, to explore shifting configurations of race and labor relations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We're thrilled to be sharing this conversation with you, so thank you again for listening in as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Margaret Cohen (2:29)

Thank you all so much for joining us at the center. I guess I'll start with one of the most sensationalist aspects of crime fiction, which is blood. Do you think crime fiction needs blood?

Andrea Goulet (2:46)

Margaret, the idea of bloodless crime fiction seems to be one that's put forward by the most purified models of like the Agatha Christie puzzle, the deduction format, and the S.S. Van Dine, Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Fiction, that leaves out anything gory or Gothic, and both supernatural or too bodily. And so it becomes this puzzle of intellection, right? But I think that my co-panelists would agree with me that that model never really holds, in practice. There's always murder and murder is by––well, not always, but in most crimes, there is bodily harm and violence and in the most extreme forms, murder, which whether by poison or by knife, involves gore.

Hector Hoyos (3:51)

Your question makes me wonder about why is blood so satisfying to read about? Or to see? It is such a delight, even when it's scary. I'm thinking of that scene in 100 Years of Solitude, I think it's the last of the 17 Aurelianos who gets killed or one of the children I don't remember the moment but there's a long trickle of blood that is described for many a page and you never know who shot the individual in question, but the trickle of blood is very satisfying, even when it is scary.

Michele Robinson (4:28)

I obviously agree with I'm very I'm thinking back from Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the decapitation there all the way to say the unbelievable crimes that Dexter commits in that show were one of the first crimes i think is a killer, an ice truck killer who actually drains all the blood out of his victims bodies so you get big barrels of the stuff there. I think there's plenty of attention to blood and most detective fictions.

Andrea Goulet (5:00)

What What kinds of? I mean, I take your point that that the puzzle, I guess, well, actually I'm a little bit confused now. detective fiction, crime fiction? Is there a difference? I think detective fiction is a narrower form is narrower, more narrowly defined. And one way in which it can be distinguished is through that intellection model, the emphasis on the deductive resolution of a mystery and the mystery can for hundreds of pages, be fully rationally described. But crime fiction, I think would incorporate the bloody corporeal aspects more. On the other hand on the kind of edge of that generic definition. I think people have a sense of crime fiction, even in the most capacious definition as different from horror. And so the frission, the disgust, and fear evoked by horror films, or novels or stories seems to be different from the––even the most bloody of crime narratives.

Hector Hoyos (6:20)

You also have a triangle between detective crime and victim and some stories would place more of an emphasis on one of the points in the triangle than others.

Michele Robinson (6:31)

And there's another definition that Charles Rzepka uses where he differentiates even between detective fiction, which simply has the character of the detective, using the detective as its dominant, to fiction of detection, where the puzzle element is paramount. And maybe those are often the least bloody, because we're so wrapped up in a lot of minute clues. But there's that as well as a way of demarcating the various types of detective fiction that we deal with a crime fiction that we encounter.

Margaret Cohen (7:03)

Hector, can I come back to what you said about the satisfaction of the blood and you know, just be able to get into the gore––I was struck in your, in your thinking about it that you evoked a very specific visual, like figure of the blood and the way there was this trickle of it. And so I wondered if I could ask all three of you to talk a little bit more about the types of ways in which blood is is offered to the reader and maybe the voyeurism of that in detective fiction?

Hector Hoyos (7:40)

Well, certainly there's an element of aestheticization, right, in the representation of blood, and, and there's always the conceit, because when you actually see blood, it's not pleasant. When you read about it, when it is enveloped in art, then it can be. But without the kind of filtering or elaboration, you wouldn't be in the terrain of, you know, crime fiction or real crime fiction, but in real, *real* crime fiction, and you don't want to go there.

Andrea Goulet (8:12)

You talked about satisfaction. I think there's a kind of double movement in the most typical of crime or detective stories, which is the initial seduction and the titillation of entering into this punctured state of things, punctured by violence, often by grotesque bodily violence. And then there's a movement toward a different kind of satisfaction, which is that of the resolution of the unknown. And that, I think, has led a lot of people to think of the genre as fundamentally conservative, in that a satisfactory resolution gives us an answer to the mystery and a kind of closure that is then going to be reopened in the next installment because it is a very serial genre.

Hector Hoyos (9:03)

Let me footnote that by reminding us of Thomas De Quincey's Murder is One of the Fine Arts, which is such a great read. And I guess it evidences how in every reader there is the sadistic and masochistic and that's part of the titillation also that Andrea was talking about, right? We we indulge in one of these, you know, sides of, of our personalities, the sway of the pendulum in everyone.

Michelle Robinson (9:30)

Just to add on to what Hector said, I'm interested in the way that blood can sometimes be a mark of elegance, as in that really beautiful image you described. So if we think of the murderer, in some cases as a kind of artist, the way that the blood is, is on display becomes really imaginatively, really exciting. But there is the other hand, that kind of brutality or the index of cruelty, that the proliferation of blood and human remains can signal.

Andrea Goulet (10:01)

So I really interested by the aesthetic appreciation, you're giving a blood and it speaks to something you brought up in the conversation, Hector, about your struggle to have people read Marquez, not as a social, just as a social writer, but as a brilliant, poetic and literary writer. And so I'm wondering if I could kind of pivot from that to a question which I think you all addressed in your panels in different ways the jeux les juex and the issue of class, America's foundation upon enslavement and how American fiction works through that, relations that you described Hector, about honor killing and patriarchy and ask about how the political and the aesthetic work together in, in this specific literature discussed or maybe more generally, you know, in crime fiction.

Hector Hoyos (11:03)

I'm happy to say one thing about this, and I really appreciate by read how you say the political rather than politics. I think that is pretty spot on. And one of the characteristics of crime fiction, as far as I can tell, is to reveal certain social ontologies they make visible certain social types. So, you know, the detective is cool, cerebral, traditionally upper class or has a certain, you know, certain manners and so on. When that model starts to break down, and other social ontologies become visible in crime fiction, we intervene in the realm of the political of what is possible to imagine as a subject, I think that's one great feature of crime fiction.

Andrea Goulet (11:55)

And, and when Hector says that it provides a way to imagine political, I think you're also talking about the emancipatory potential for crime fictions, right, as a way to imagine alternate models, but also as a way to critique current ways that the state or that institutions or that ideologies, create inequalities or the circumstances that lead to violent rupture,

Michele Robinson (12:31)

in the work that I was discussing, by Mark Twain, one of the things that we see when detectives emerge, and I only was able to mention this briefly, because there are many detectives, is they are following more of the model of the Pinkerton and there really are interested in the work and then the money and don't have this kind of connection or loyalty towards any kind of conservative project except for capitalism, which is plenty conservative. So I think that Twain is very excited about imagining politics, but the detective is not necessarily a figure that will take him down down these avenues.

Andrea Goulet (13:10)

I was going to ask you, Michelle, in your paper, whether opium came in, in because when I you know, in my work on the sea in the 19th century in the US, the opium trade with China is such a prominent feature of kind of the dream states and the, the ways in which the Orient is envisaged.

Michele Robinson (13:32)

It's not in that particular fiction. I do think it comes up in other places maybe in his double barrel detective story like kind of parody where there is a Sherlock Holmes figure, who is really inept, and actually has a body explode in front of them, and doesn't understand why that happens. So yeah, so he does see that kind of Sherlock Holmes ritual of opium in one of his works.

Andrea Goulet (14:00)

Yeah the Sherlock Holmes addictions I think, are connected to that tension between the the bodily and the incorporeal, rationalized side of things. And if I can address the aesthetics of crime fiction ttoo in relation to one of the authors in the French tradition, Leo Malet, who wrote in the mid 20th century, had been a surrealist poet, before using the American noir as a model to shift into crime fiction and some of his contemporaries, especially the surrealists found this to be a complete sellout. But people like Jonathan Eburne and others like me, have read a continuity between the aesthetic surrealism of Malet's poetry and the scenes and language of his crime novels. So I don't think they're oppositional.

Hector Hoyos (15:07)

And following up on the opium question, one thing that came up in Andrea's presentation was the role of the nonhuman, the role of cars. And I would love to see more scholarship about the nonhuman in crime fiction. You have these chain smoking detectives, it seems like like thinking and smoking are of a piece. So there seems to be a lot to explore there. And then something harkening back to an earlier moment in the conversation, though, it's interesting to think about the political context of crime fiction and how that impacts, you know, fiction itself. A great Cuban author that I was going to present on and then I shifted and ended up working on Garcia Marquez was Leonardo Padura. And, you know, to write detective fiction under communism, like in the island of Cuba, means you have to change every rule, right? Because obviously, a detective wouldn't make sense. Privacy doesn't work in the same way. And so you learn so much about the, you know, the Cuban regime, its ideology, and also about daily life by reading someone like, like Padura, that I would, you know, encourage people to follow up on and then when he writes about the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico City, he is able to do all sorts of like, you know, lateral moves on the Cuban government. Well, we're living to this day in Havana where I hope this podcast is never listened to.

Margaret Cohen (16:33)

Do you think that, uh, I was gonna ask, and I, because I'm thinking of serial TV shows today, I guess, that are so powerful that we've all been watching during the pandemic, so many of them are crime based. I guess I'm interested in the continuity of these TV shows with the earlier crime fiction that you work on, and how crime portrayal shifts across media. I think there's been a lot of interesting work done on serial TV, as inheritor of the 19th century feuilleton serial novel form in newspapers. Do you agree?

Andrea Goulet (17:20)

Yes, I, I wrote an article once about The Wire as a 20th century version of Eugene Sue's urban mystery, Mysteries of Paris, which is a transnational genre. It includes the Mysteries of Philadelphia by George Leopard, which resonated––resonates for me with the Mark Twain story that Michelle was talking about.

Margaret Cohen (17:47)

You wanna say more, does anybody want to say more about this features? I mean, I don't know who's read all twelve or nine, ten volumes of The Mysteries of Paris, I guess I myself have. So we could we could get into the all the intricacies of what's going on there. But, um, but it might be it might be helpful just just to say a little bit more about serials and their relationship to crime.

Hector Hoyos (18:15)

So So I wonder, you know, what order is being restored in the different serials? that that would be an interesting question to ask. And also on the on the French vein, I recently watched Lupin, which is a remake on you know, the great Fantomas. And that's interesting, right? Because every episode is like a restoration of a sense of of racial equity in a multicultural multi ethnic French society. So the bad thing though is that if you are aware of this, then it becomes a little repetitive and dull after a little while. But at least the opening, you know, remake of the whole painting stolen at the Louvre scene is amazing. It's just really quite something, it's an event.

Andrea Goulet (19:02)

It absolutely does and the Maurice LeBlanc Arsene Lupin stories were very much about the restoration of money and artifacts and national treasures. So when the new TV series Lupin plays on the theft of the the you know, Louvre piece, it's nodding, of course directly back to the Maurice LeBlanc Arsene Lupin. And that Maurice LeBlanc, nods back to an ever receding earlier model. For example, one of the adventures of Arsene Lupin is called Arsene Lupin Contra Herlock Sholme, so playing with the you know, British predecessor.

Margaret Cohen (19:57)

I love that I mean it's so resonant about heist, heist drama as restorative, I think that, you know, I'm sort of scrolling through all the heist, movies and stories I can think of. And at the end, always the like, the order seems to have to step in there. They're very few where you don't get, you know, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid kind of jumping off and then freezing, there's always some––but up until that last minute, there's a sense of restoration that that occurs. Thelma and Louise, I mean, they're just there's so many that come to mind. It's really interesting.

Andrea Goulet (20:41)

And there's a Robin Hood fantasy too, I think, in a lot of them that comes back to the was it Brecht quote that Hector was citing, about founding a bank being as much as a crime as robbing one?

Margaret Cohen (20:58)

What do you think the first heist drama is?

Michele Robinson (21:02)

I think that maybe the most monumental one, and there's got to be plenty before that, would be The Moonstone. And that is certainly about the restoration of a treasure.

Margaret Cohen (21:12)

Yeah, right. I mean, I guess this also then gets into, in a way––which I mean, the subject of your paper, Michelle, which was like the meeting of crime fiction and inheritance literature, which is, I mean, I think of inherited the inheritance plot, or Dickens, is so much like, so central to 19th century literature, and to what we would think of as realist literature. But in the Twain piece, is it a novel, it's unfinished?

Michele Robinson (21:44)

It's about 200 pages––

Margaret Cohen (21:45)

Ok, so we're gonna call it a novel

Michele Robinson (21:49)

I'm interested in and maybe why, you know, of course, Twain wrote himself, painted himself into a corner, I think. But why that would not be something he would have revised for publication. Since there's so many different kind of scattered, unfinished pieces that went on to be finished.

Margaret Cohen (22:06)

Can you say a little bit more about that, you know, for people who were at the event.

Michele Robinson (22:10)

So I was speaking about an unfinished novel called, Which Was That, which is a dream experiment. So Twain had a couple of these, where he imagined the experience of someone who was highly successful, and which was the dream, it's someone who is on his way to becoming president after having succeeded in in you know, beyond all imagination in the Mexican American War, and then, in a dream sequence, that individual went on to lose all of his money, to become an outcast in society for some mix up that he's been drawn into. And for Twain, sometimes these leave off in the dream. There's, you know, the horrifying situation that he's interested in exploring, can't be closed off, and kind of settle there. And that's something that's very important, which was that the piece I was discussing, because it does go on for so long, this dream is, you know, how he can get out of a dream once he's gone really down this rabbit hole, and discovered, you know, that this endpoint, where I guess it's too difficult to wake up, once the protagonist finds himself in a locked room with a man who is a former slave and being subordinated to that black man, it's just such a horrifying endpoint that how you emerge from that how you can reconcile that and return to waking life as if it never happened is just hard to understand.

Andrea Goulet (23:44)

I think that that dream motif is really interesting as a counterpoint to the hyper rationality right? Mauricio Ascari I think has has written about the irrational roots of the form and the dream comes in the Wilkie Collins, right, The Moonstone the question of somnambulism and also in Gaston Leroux's Le Mystere de la Chambre Jaune, these alternate states are in a way apparently the exact opposite of the lucid Cartesian detective's mind. Right. So the fact that these dreams are there from the beginning of the genre, kind of clouding that transparent rationality, I think is interesting.

Margaret Cohen (24:39)

I mean, I guess I just feel it you know, if if crime fiction in some ways is the dream of realism, or you know, it's sort of able to bring to the fore the very disturbing elements of the society portrayed say in 19th century realism that have to be put to the margins in order to focus on, like, I guess the social hierarchies that are, I don't know, I'm now I'm talking to myself into a corner, that are considered dominant. You know, it seems to me that the surrealists are really in there throughout the whole...You can see why the surrealists love crime fiction, even if they really didn't like the fact that they might be betrayed by Leo Malet, but it seems like there there is a fantasmic quality to crime fiction and I guess you've been talking about how it sits with the hyper rationality.

Andrea Goulet (25:33)

Well, there are two––I'll mention Jonathan Eburne's book The Art of Crime, which is about surrealism and crime narrative.

Michele Robinson (25:42)

and Eburne brings up Chester Himes, doesn't he? I think there's quite a bit on him there. So there's that kind of nice crossing. We're Himes's Harlem is so dreamlike in many ways, and it's so––the the [...] are so fixated on like economies within Harlem, and that the kind of subterranean transactions that are taking place, and at the same time, it's absurd, and it's completely dreamlike.

Hector Hoyos (26:11)

And also, you know, look no further than Edgar Allan Poe, with the supernatural and the detective, I'm thinking of the Cask of Amontillado, and The Iron Mask and you know, all of these other tropes. And that's the point of contact between the supernatural and the super rational was very successful in Latin America, for instance, where you have Julio Cortazar doing the translations of Poe into Spanish. And so add in someone like a Borges, as well, right? He's his own, you know, for Borges fantastic literature and philosophical literature and literature of ideas, were one and the same thing. And so someone like Poe provided like the example I think, more so than, than others in the Pantheon. Poe, I think was was the more eloquent to folks in in different places in Latin America.

Margaret Cohen (27:08)

Maybe I'll just shift a little bit and ask you, um, crime fiction: tragedy or comedy? And I guess, I guess, I guess starting thinking about tragedy in your paper Hector, I was thinking of Antigone, actually, and I know we had a question in the chat, which you didn't get to respond to about Hegel and the sublime, but I was thinking about, you know, Antigone and the law of blood versus the law of the state, and the way in which that's resolved as tragedy, for Hegel is the genre of tragedy. And that you were describing, in some ways, a very different generic take on it, but nonetheless, involving some of the same issues. So I am wondering if there's any kind of lightning, about that.

Hector Hoyos (27:51)

You know, Antigone looms really large here. I would direct folks to Moira Fradinger's book on the Antigones in Latin America, there's something like 1000 versions of Antigone that she considers, but you know, some of the more prominent ones and related to the book I was giving a talk on include In Evil Our, one of Garcia Marquez's early novels, and, and he also has an epigraph from Antigone elsewhere. So I think that crisis at a very, like, literal level, like "does the State allow to bury remains here or not," has been experienced, you know, unfortunately, by so many 1000s of people in connection to different oppressive regimes, some military some, some, some no, that, Antigone just really resonates. Now at the same time, but the Hegelian reading of Antigone, and the idea of restoring an order and of putting, you know, reason and society together, that part doesn't resonate. So so you have the premise of Antigone, but not the resolution, springing in all kinds of ways. Another book that's interesting in that regard by by Sara Uribe is Antigona Gonzalez, it's one of the many rewritings, it has to do with femicide along the US Mexico border. And so Antigona Gonzalez is is a really interesting working in that way too. And I'm sorry to retreat to like sub disciplinary expertise, because your question was a little broader than that.

Margaret Cohen (29:23)

I guess I was also thinking about comedy in crime. I mean, this, it has an aesthetic quality to it and does go back to the sensationalism that you that you talked about, but I was just interested in me hearing everyone talk a little about that.

Hector Hoyos (29:39)

Maybe just a tiny thing about comedy, there's comedy that one laughs about and there's comedy that one kind of like laughs and cries at the same time about. So sure, I mean, comedy by all means, and and sometimes the you know, what people are experiencing like duress and are close to crime, you know, they are in the vicinity of crime. It's not something about abstract that you have to read in a book, but you know crime is right there, that's sometimes when the when the, you know, most like perverse humor emerges. And people really relish you know, and laugh but they laugh with with a little sadness and sometimes with anger and it's all bundled together it's it's like a powerful, like somatic experience. It's it's in the body that kind of laughter, I guess.

Andrea Goulet (30:21)

And there again, Edgar Allan Poe really encapsulates that kind of dark humor and the the tricky edge between horror and humor. But can I say, Hector, when you apologize for being being field specific, you shouldn't. In my paper, I was calling for keeping a national distinctions in play when we think about the entanglements of local and global right, I wanted to keep that kind of national tradition as one of the points of reference. And, in part, it was out of a recognition of distinct scholarly fields of expertise, like the ones represented by the three of us. So um, just as an anecdote, a University Press editor once asked me, Why are you writing just about French crime fiction? Isn't this a global genre? Why aren't you writing about Scandinavian and Latin American? And I thought it was a strange question, because it presumes that I would be capable of writing about American crime fiction as well as Michelle can, or Latin American as well as Hector can, and I can't. And I think what really came out in their talks is that knowing not only the political context and the historical context of a specific national tradition, but also the literary history really adds something important to readings. Otherwise, you just get a mega-formalist presentation of the Todorov, you know, shape of detective fiction or something.

Hector Hoyos (32:06)

There's something that I really liked in the three papers together, which was Andrea you were saying it right, though, the national slash international dimension of all the papers, they were very grounded, you know, French literary studies and American and Latin American. But in Michelle's paper, you have this imaginary Orient, and, and, you know, the types of stereotypes that are indeed more than just, you know, American, if you want to understand that very narrowly. So when I think of someone like, like, wait, Wai Chee Dimock, who I know has been an interlocutor at the center, and that idea that, you know, US literature is criss crossed by the literature of the world. It's interesting, but I feel that the three presentations were already there, you know, they they are at a resolution of a dialectic between being like, narrowly nationalistic, and, and being vaguely cosmopolitan and open to the world, but without granularity and, and we're trying to do that, I know that I enjoyed a lot really, I would have enjoyed a lot more in person, to see people's eyes when I included the Mishima image, after the falconry image, you know, I was I was going for the defamiliarization, I was going for "this is the Spanish Middle Ages are alive here. But you know, what, also the Japanese Middle Ages." And I wasn't doing that out of Impressionism or equating everything kind of like a postmodern melee. But because I do think there are like threads that you can follow across these different domains.

Margaret Cohen (33:38)

I mean, just to speak to one of the French elements under what you were talking about, when you were showing the rond-points, I have here in France, over the past 15 years, I've noticed this, like increasing movement to put those giratoires everywhere, you know, so they've gotten rid of the stop signs, and you can't go anywhere without giratoires, and they're always on the the edges of town and like the exurbs and so that sense of the street as you would have it in 1848, or the Paris Commune, that's really so different from the emotional valence of these, you know, blank spaces that are built upon probably, you know, landfill with this kind of artificial grass, it looks like, around them. And in that image you showed from Saint-Malo, it's just a really different space from from the kind of, I would say almost the warmth and the hot space of the street and, and so I wonder like, if this is specifically for your paper, but I'm I'm and just keeping with Hector's, you know, which I, it all of you are showing like both the very local inserted aspect of the crime narrative, and yet their entanglement with problems that stretch beyond the local, so I'm interested in how like the, those excerpts in France give a really different feeling to like a crime scenes in 2019, than you would see in something in the streets of Paris or Marseilles.

Andrea Goulet (35:14)

Right, I think you're right. It is a different kind of typography. And so I think that if you try to trace as I did a sort of street crime genre, back to the 19th century, there's continuity and there's change, the continuity that I was trying to bring out is that the street, whether it's a 19th century cobblestone or a Haussmannian Boulevard, or a 20th, or 21st century rond-point, continually exists as a site of conflict between domestic and national, private and political, etc. But there's discontinuity as well, which I think you're hinting at, because the terrain changes. And so when, as I mentioned, Kristen Ross sees continuity between the Paris Commune uprisings and the gilets jaunes, rond-points, insurrections and blockages, that's a political continuity. But there's also a different shape to it. And so the shape of the rond-point that as you said as often peripheral, not central, connects more to what I was saying about revolution and circulation at the question of revolution as a cycle with no exit or revolution as rupture and change.

Hector Hoyos (36:50)

would be super intrigued, Andrea, to to hear you say something about Serotonin, Michel Houellebecq novel--

Andrea Goulet (36:56)

[laughter] I can't!

Hector Hoyos (36:58)

All right. All right. Well, that's it's not his best it's not his best I am a fan of the of the early work and I know he's problematic in many many ways, but I am––but the thing in Seratonin is there as a standoff at a highway blockage between––he doesn't call them gilets jaunes because they hadn't been constituted at the time, but he's writing but he imagines these like rabble based on Jose Bove types against the state and you have like like this, you know, line of fight on the highway. So it's a highway blockage. So, but yeah, maybe for some future conversation, it's also a really appreciated connection with situationists because what would a site psychic map of Paris look like these days with, you know, everyone sheltering in place, or in quarantine and after Bataclan and whatnot, I mean, geez, you're really, you know, redoing the whole thing

Michele Robinson (38:02)

That kind of takes us back to, I'm not sure it was Hannah, or another person in the larger talk who, who spoke about the protesters in the street being vulnerable to murder, and that that kind of shape of the street now. I'm so fascinated Andrea by this idea that the shape of the street in Paris also informs the structure of crime fiction there and vice versa. And going back to to I guess its murders right where the cobblestones that have been thrown, are there for the throwing and the idea of revolution behind that too, how susceptible the streets are to revolution seems so important.

Andrea Goulet (38:43)

Right and, and part of it is the street toponymics, the namings of the street. Because in the French history, as you probably know, each successive political regime changed street names, right. So after the revolution, they got rid of names that evoked saints or kings, and put in sort of like "La Rue du Citoyen," "the citizen" or something right, and then each subsequent regime changed street names again. And what I found in some of the crime stories was that those street names became red herrings as plot points, so that the detective was trying to solve a recent murder or mystery, but had to understand the history and the National History in order to realize that, "Oh, wait, this didn't happen on this street. It had a different name at the time." Right. So there's the there's the kind of archaeological layers that are at work that that anchor, even the most contemporary crime fictions in sedimented history that you can get at through those streets and the street names

Hector Hoyos (40:00)

There's also that meeting point between urban fiction and crime fiction to think about and crime fiction in rural context. I mean, that was the big success of Fargo back in the late 90s, I believe and it has been remade a number of times that, "could there even be crime," right. Could it be imaginable in those vast wide expanses. There is one very rare––I don't know if maybe someone who's listening to podcasts and wants, like, a rare reading tip––there's a novella called To Lose is a Matter of Methods––Perder es Cuestion de Metodo by Santiago Gamboa. I don't know if it has been translated, that has to be both one of the best urban novels of the city of Bogota, and also a really fun, like, like page turner crime story about this character who appears to be impaled next to a lake in the outskirts of the city and so how did this come to happen? And in that book, at the end, so huge spoiler, it turns out that some construction mogul, you know, someone who wanted to develop like real estate around the lake area, had staged the whole impaling. And this person had gone to school at Stanford. [laughter] It's a novel from 1996, what can I say?

Margaret Cohen (41:21)

Well, always the bad guys. [laughter] It's pretty hard to follow up on that one. Hector, I think you've given us our note to wrap up. So thank you all for joining us for this, this really fascinating conversation, I feel like just as the pandemic is ending, and I'm now going to be able to get out and travel a lot and don't have to sit in front of the TV every night and watch, you know, crime crime series, maybe I have a huge number of books I could pick up and start reading as I as I move about. So it's also been personally very enriching.

Andrea Goulet (42:00)

And thanks to you all.

Hector Hoyos (42:01)

Thank you.

Michele Robinson (42:02)

Thank you.

Casey Wayne Patterson (42:10)

Thank you again for joining us in this episode of the Center for the Study of the Novel's podcast, Cafe. We would also like to thank Andrea Goulet, Hector Hoyos, and Michelle Robinson, for their generosity in agreeing to this conversation. Thanks to our team at the Center for the Study of the Novel to An Truong Nguyen and Maritza Colon for their operational support. To our graduate coordinators, Victoria Zurita, Cynthia Giancotti, and Casey Patterson, to Erik Fredner for editing, consultation and sound engineering and to our host and director Margaret Cohen. The Center for the Swqtudy of the Novel is a subsidiary of the English Department at Stanford University.

Nicholas Paige, Technologies of the Novel (2/8/21)

Nicholas Paige; Chloe Edmondson; John Bender; Margaret Cohen

Transcript for Nicholas Paige, Technologies of the Novel (2/8/21), or read the full transcript below.

Casey Patterson

Welcome, and thanks for joining us in this episode of Cafe, the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. In this installment, our host Margaret Cohen is joined by Nicholas Paige, Chloe Edmondson and John Bender, following a discussion of Nicholas's new book Technologies of the Novel. Nicholas is a professor in the Department of French at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous book Before Fiction offers a history of the novel from the point of view of fictionality, and Technologies of the Novel aims to be the first quantitative history of the novel, using a systematic sampling of formal devices from French and English novels to trace their development from 1600 to 1830. John Bender is an emeritus professor of both English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, and is the John G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. And Chloe Summers Edmondson is a lecturer in the Thinking Matters program at Stanford University. Her research is situated at the crossroads of literary criticism, cultural history and media studies, with a focus on letter writing practices in 17th and 18th century France. She has also worked on numerous digital humanities projects in affiliation with the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Modern History, and in Digital Humanities Quarterly. And she recently co-edited the volume Networks of Enlightenment: Digital Approaches to the Republic of Letters. This conversation was recorded on February 8th, 2021. We're thrilled to be sharing this conversation with you. So thank you again for listening in, as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Margaret Cohen

Nick Paige, it's really, really exciting to have you here to discuss your book, which I understand is really––as we used to say––hot off the presses. Is that true?

Nicholas Paige

Well, it's print on demand, actually, so it's always hot off the presses. (laugh)

Margaret Cohen

So the title of the book, Technologies of the Novel. A little bit shocking to anyone who grew up with an Enlightenment understanding of literature as non-instrumental. What do you mean by technology, the novel as a technology?

Nicholas Paige

It's not the first time that a book has been published calling the novel a “technology,” there’s one called Technology of the Novel, which is trying to Walter Ong’s distinction between orality and writing. So this is different, it's a notion I developed. I think it's better to start rather with technology than the idea of the artifact. So as I was kind of trying to parse the, say, 200+ year early history of the novel in France––running from about 1600 to past 1800, by 1830––is where I go in France. It seemed to me that the best way of getting at this was to kind of look at kind of fairly discreet, formal iterations of novels that kind of came and went. And so I started to call these things “artifacts.” And in order to kind of understand the coming and going of those artifacts and the way they changed in time, both as a percentage of the market and changed in themselves––like, the very early epistolary novels didn't really look anything like what we kind of think of as epistolary novels by the time we get to the heart of the 18th century, that's just one example––in order to kind of think these changes, I went for this idea of artifacts and the way artifacts evolve, and might these literary artifacts evolve like technologies evolve? So just think, you know, smartphones and toilets and all the rest, right? So, I did finally find so I did a not insignificant amount of work reading around science and technology studies, just to see, you know, how they talk about technological evolution. This idea of evolution has been kind of controversial in literary circles. Obviously, there was Franco Moretti’s attempt to kind of use a try to pass that kind of idea of natural selection for cultural products, and I would say that that did not take off as an idea. But historians of technology use it a lot to explain how various technological artifacts arose, and then were worked on over time, changed their shapes and became good at doing things that they didn't really do well at the outset. Technologies, then, kind of maps on to this concern with thinking of literary forms as artifacts, and artifacts that are in some sort of evolution, “evolution” meaning a constrained change, a process of change that is constrained by the idea that whatever we do tomorrow may be new, but its newness is always kind of confined or constrained by a manifold of possibilities which is given to us by what people have done yesterday, and what they are doing today. Right, so that's basically it. I mean, I’ve made a lot of use of Brian Arthur's book on what is technology and how it has evolved, how it evolves. And, you know, he offers a definition of technology that I like, that basically it's an organized purpose system for doing things, for doing things that people want to do. And it can be material, and it can be more material. But that's basically a definition of what technology is.

John Bender

So how do you see the join between this broad notion of technology––which may overlap to some degree with the notion of system that you also use––how do you see the fit between these highly specific studies and analyses and that big idea of technology? There seems to be a kind of have a fracture in the book.

Nicholas Paige

Yes, there is a there is a split between, you know, what happens at the level of the system and the various artifacts there are that make it up. So I mean, one issue, one question that arises, sometimes, is: “well, given the system, given this understanding of literary technologies and artifacts, how does this change the way you read? [For instance] Tom Jones, right? And my first answer is that it doesn't have to change the way we read Tom Jones. It kind of depends on which questions you're answering of Tom Jones. If you're answering questions about, you know, why is it split into chapters? And why do we have this voluble narrator? It may be useful to kind of consider that as an effect of practices that are inherited. So you might want to understand that way, that’s what it could be but it doesn't have to. I mean, there are all sorts of ways in which individual works are fascinating and productive of meaning that really don't enter into these kind of questions of the macro behavior. So it's very abstract. In a way, what I'm doing is super abstract, I'm abstracting from content. I'm abstracting from who are the producers ones? One question I never ask in this project is “who is writing these novels? Where are they being published? In a capital, or to be published in the provinces?” These are questions I don't ask––male writers, female writers, don't ask this question. Aristocratic? I don't know. So there's a lot of abstraction. Now, one of the reasons I think that nonetheless, what I'm doing is does have kind of a coherence to it is because even when you do all that abstraction, you still get very interesting patterns and recurring patterns. And for me, that that is a confirmation that I am asking the question that actually has historical meaning. If I just got back noise when I graphed out what I was looking at, then I think I would kind of asking the wrong question. And, I mean, to a certain extent there's selection bias in the book itself, because only the graphs that actually revealed something which made it, and alright, there are other graphs that didn't do anything. But actually most of the most of the hunches, most of what I was doing lead to information and patterns and I think that this might just be the fact that I have kind of been working on the novel for a while and kind of had intuitions because of my fairly long term interaction with the archives. But other things didn't play out––for example, I was convinced that if you measured the amount of time that was given over to character portraits in novels, that as you went on that would decrease, and it totally doesn't decrease. What happens, it turns out––and this is part of the chapter I have on this, on a third person novel that seems to me to kind of be formally coherent and new, so I call it “the new third person novel,” but “new” does not mean modern, it doesn't mean “our” novel, it doesn't mean the novel of the 19th century, it just means it's new at the time––one of the properties of that novel was to start out with scenes. So you actually didn't introduce characters, you didn't say, you know, “so and so was the third son of so and so and had inherited,” you know, it wasn't a character portrait, it wouldn’t be that kind of biographical, or moral character portrait, or possibly even a physical one, they would start with scenes. So physically, they'd kind of set a location, and then they'd have their human actors start to do things within that physical space. It's virtually non-existent in the first half of the century, with some exceptions. And so I discovered that while I was looking for character portraits, which were getting longer, and in fact, I ended up finding this other thing.

Margaret Cohen

it does seem to be that that a lot of the tags really do turn around this notion of reference and fictionality. And are almost like a shock, which in that way, I do see in continuity before fiction, to try to relinquish that sort of Austen universe, you know, and think about all the different ways that readers could imagine the relationship between the world depicted in narrative and the world depicted the world in which they were living. I don't know if those are just the tags that worked out and those are the ones that you include, or if that, that kind of shape somewhere in it shaped your perspective.

Nicholas Paige

Yeah, I mean, so you know, there was this earlier book Before Fiction that came about 10 years ago, where I wasn't really tagging things yet, I kind of postulated these ‘regimes,’ preferential regimes, you might want to call them, and there were three of them. And one was the Aristotelian regime, which was: in order to make novels you take you take important heroes from legend or history that people love and have been talking about for a long time and then you show them doing the things they're known for doing and you know, you invent a little love story to you know, flesh it out or do whatever you do it, you do what you need to do to put you put your mark on it. It's something that tragedians did all the time, it's not that strange. So that was one regime, and then the second regime was the pseudo-factual regime where you don't have these kind of well-known characters, these somebodies, you invent your characters, they're these nobodies. No one's ever heard of Roxana, you know, before they open the book. They're not supposed to have. But you say that Roxanna existed, you know? Or Crusoe, whoever. So I call that pseudo-factual because there's this truth pretense in it. Right? And that's different. It's very different from the Aristotelian method. In the Aristotelian, if you're an Aristotelian novelist, you never have to say that Nero existed, because everyone knew that Nero existed. You only have to do that when you start to try to push out and invent a literature of nobodies, which, as I think you were hinting is great for you if you really want to talk about what's going on today. I mean, there are a lot of advantages to using to using nobodies who, you know, people Paris and London and so on, so forth, [don’t know] rather than talking about the classical past or maybe the Renaissance. You know, obviously that that has a certain powerful usefulness. And then the third regime was, you know, I call it the fictional regime, which was still nobodies, but then you just kind of give up this pretense that they're true, right? And so basically, I never really gave up those three categories. I don't really call them regimes anymore, because I just think it's not too helpful. [Because] we think of segmentation of history in a certain way, and once you start graphing things, you realize that there are essentially no periods there. So if there are no stable periods, then the term ‘regime’ doesn't make a lot of sense, right. But so that's sort of where I came from. And these were tags that kind of continued to work. I did have to elaborate variations, and I had to tweak them. Because these were terms that I essentially, first I applied them to the 18th century where they worked very well. But then when I started moving back to the 17th century, in France, there were all these other artifacts that actually couldn't really be classified by these terms. And you start to have a lot of essentially roman a clef, right. So you have these keyed novels. And even within the category of the Aristotelian novel, there was kind of a variant in which usually your protagonist was invented, but all the other characters were taken from history. So that's kind of an interesting variant that appears and then fades out again in a very in a patterned way. It all does kind of make a certain sense. So the tags are, you know, partially there, they’re a guess based on, you know, one's experience, and then you refine them. But you know, that's what you do. If you were a pollster, and you wanted to investigate people's sexual preferences, you'd start out with a number of things, and you start to meet people and they're like, I don't identify with any of them, so you have to come up with new checkboxes for people. That doesn't show the process is broken, that shows the process is working, you know. Chloe Edmonsdon I think to speak to what you were saying earlier about how abstract your project is, and how it doesn't entertain this data of who the producers are, and, you know, the gender of authors, etcetera, I do wonder if in some ways your project is actually opening an avenue for a scholar to come along and kind of take up the baton and look at the data that you have generated against some of that other data and see what kinds of crossovers you can find, or if somehow qualifying the data that you have with other data might actually answer some of the questions that I think were coming up in the discussion earlier about, you know, some of the questions about: why innovation at this time versus another time? What is that feedback loop of the consumers and the producers?

Nicholas Paige

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And of course, you know, a lot of people they write a book, they're like, “Yes, I think someone else should do that.” So I'm in a little bit in that position of saying, “I think, yes, that's a great subject for someone else to do.” I mean, I think the gender thing could be really interesting, I think the question question of geographical location, as well. There's some difficulty with gender because so many 18th century novels were published anonymously, so then you’ve kind of got to figure out what to do with those. But your basic point is great. I mean, like, translations I think is an awesome one, right? I mean, you know, what does the effect of translations do? Can we trace some sort of a formal feature actually being imported from a different country? So in England that would go through France for a certain part of the novel's history, and then in a slightly later part of the history probably go back the other way, because France was importing a lot of novels from England, right. So, you know, a great question would be: is there any evidence that these practices spread through diffuse through translation. So, I think that that's another great question along these lines. But … I mean, I'm happy to entertain the idea that––how shall I say––that the production figures of novels might be important? Or, you know, libraries? These are some of the possible affordances of novels that John mentioned in our earlier conversation. Yeah, I mean, I'm obviously completely open to more granularity, right. I think, you know, in a way this book is really low hanging fruit. It’s really amazing how little we kind of knew about the way people wrote before some of these graphs. I mean it. They surprised me a lot. A lot of the time. No, I had no idea that there were this many kinds of so-called French nouvelle, or, I didn't know the market penetration of the epistolary novel, I assumed it would be way higher. I mean, it's higher in England than it is in France. But even in England, kind of a flash in the pan, it doesn't last very long. In terms of just sheer production numbers, this is the first book that really compares French production figures to English production figures and finds they're uncannily the same for most of the 18th century. Uncannily, I would say. I mean, granted, England has a smaller population, so that's interesting. Then you guys talk about, like about literacy rates and stuff like that. But for brute numbers they are exactly the same. There's a lot of low hanging fruit there, the stuff we didn't know that’s like, “Oh!” and once you know it, it does become more difficult to spend certain types of [--].

John Bender

I think you’re wise about translations, because they're usually adaptations in the 18th century. And the translation of Clarissa bears surprisingly little relationship to the novel. But I can see that there might be finer grained areas that you could go into, for instance, Frances Bernie's novel, Evelina. I don't know whether you've read it. Its form is epistolary. But as the novel moves along, the letters get longer and longer and longer. And you get to the point where the letters will be like, 30 pages long in the printed text. So if the novel were wanting to be a third person novel, not an epistolary novel, where I’d say that isn't true of like […] at all, there's things like that. But let's continue with Tom Jones, that specifically asks to be looked at with regard to the epic, a novel that is chaptered, it is booked and chaptered like an epic. Which of your categories does it go into? Because the characters are all invented, I believe?

Nicholas Paige

Yeah, well, I mean, there are a number of different tags, right? And some types of novels share certain tags. So it's a little complicated for people who actually read the book. So it depends, but we could talk about the truth posture of the book, we could talk about its division into into books and chapters, we could talk about it as a third person novel. So there are all these kinds of different tags that we could give to understand its place and understand its relationship to other literature of the time. You know, how representative is it of other books that were being written at the time? So that's kind of some of the things that one would do, but it doesn't mean in its basic kind of form, it would look much more like so-called, you know, what we often call “romance” that for me, simply, there is no distinction with the novel. Romances, they’re novels, they’re novels that share a certain family resemblance of characteristics and they’re formal, they’re axiological. They have the types of characters, they have the number of characters, they have that sort of thing.

John Bender

They have their particular journeys, which Tom Jones has.

Nicholas Paige

Very often there is a journey there, which can be in the original form kind of Mediterranean in scope, but has all sorts of of national scopes as we move into later periods. So there'll be a lot of different ways of talking about classifying Tom Jones. I don't think it was in my sample of English novels from that decade, So I'm just wondering, I don't think I actually did tag it. But then it would just be one point, you know, it'd be one data point. And sometimes the data points of important books are actually very representative of what's going on, and sometimes they aren't. Sometimes they're ahead of the curve, sometimes they can be behind the curve. It really depends. And that doesn't seem to have anything to do with success.

John Bender

It would seem to me your system is not well calibrated to deal with the traditional conception of influence, for example, the influence of Richardson's Clarissa on Rousseau’s Julie, or say the influence of Tom Jones on Thackeray, Vanity Fair, or Dickens’ Bleak House.

Nicholas Paige

Yeah, no, that is absolutely true. And I don't deny those influences. I did come back to something that did come up during an earlier discussion, that was, you know, I tend to think of this book as just kind of displacing a bit the focus from more obvious types of influence, sometimes more obvious types of classifications of novel. So genre classifications in which things like setting and character type and plot arcs are all kinds of very familiar, because they can fit in with genre, right? So instead of kind of qualifying novels that way, or instead of kind of tracing evolutions through influence, right, I'm kind of looking at a level that is, you know, again, a little more abstract, and, and potentially could seem completely without interest. I mean, so: how interesting is it to follow how many first person novels are written? Or how many epistolary novels, or how many third person novels with chapters, how interesting can that be? And I mean, that the gambit of the book is that, actually, that's more interesting than you think. How important can it be to know how many novels were written with kind of bonafide historical protagonists? I mean, I think it is interesting. It's not that type of influence that you're talking about, which I think is super interesting and it's undeniable. But for example, you know, despite the uptake of a novel like Rousseau’s, Julie, right, I would argue that the influence of that novel is much more visible in later plots, in later characters, and the values that the characters of later novels espouse than in its specific epistolarity. So Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie is obviously totally Rousseauistic, But formally, it looks completely different. It's a very interesting artifact in itself. It's not particularly––I wouldn't say it's a one off but it's not a particularly frequent artifact that one finds. But he wasn't following Julie as a polyphonic epistolary novel, right? That's not what it was doing.

Margaret Cohen

Chloe, can I come back and just ask you something if you happened to have it in the back of your mind? When you asked Nick, “Well, could this lead to material or give conclusions that scholars could take in other directions, for example, to answer questions about gender and authorship,” I know you've done a lot of letter reading in the 18th century, and reading both letters and novels and letters and other genres. And I'm just wondering if there were conclusions that were suggested to you, or directions for research that you thought were interesting?

Chloe Edmondson

Absolutely, I think what I was really thinking about while I was reading this book was, I think there was definitely––I had a yearning for some of those questions of causality and thinking about why are these very interesting patterns happening when they are? And I was actually drawing on this less from my work reading correspondence, but more actually from my experience working on other digital humanities projects, and thinking about how we could map different cultural value changes or societal changes with thinking about gender, thinking about social class, thinking about diffusion and geographical location, and how actually mapping some of the data of the novel forms against that data might qualify it further. It's not to say that we might be able to say that, “oh, clearly, this is causing that,” but maybe it might just qualify how we interpret some of those, those peaks and declines. And I think that actually, Nick, you do that, I think, in some chapters more than others. So for instance, when you talk about the phone’s impact on novel production, you know, that that graph was a very clear graph of looking at the, you know, the direct influence of a, you know, political event on how many novels were being written and published, and I think that there are opportunities, right, and maybe we could do more of that thinking about, you know, libraries or relations, but sales, additions being printed, and or even tracking, for instance, some of the literary criticism or the discussion about these books, and seeing how that might impact what comes next. And I think it was also interesting, because in John's remarks, you mentioned affordances, and I thought that was really interesting because I also work a lot at the intersection of media studies and literature. And so thinking about affordances, and, you know, “is the novel as having affordances, or the novel as an affordance, or thinking about even some of the many institutions, John, that you mentioned earlier about the postal system, circulating libraries, thinking about all of those different things and think about how those have as affordances in relation to the object of the novel, how that impacts these different systems rising and falling. So I thought it was interesting that John you invoked that word affordance, because I think that's another great term and concept to bring out in from STS for thinking about literature and literary objects.

Nicholas Paige

So I think that works really well, with kind of production figures of the novel, in kind of a brute way. I'm not sure it's going to explain as well, the coming and going of artifacts. So I mean, I think one does want to know, you know, why, in England, is there such a large increase in novel novel production and 1750s and then again, like, 1770s, 80s, there's another take off, if I recall correctly, I don't actually recall all the variation in the graphs. I mean, by and large, those increases look very similar to what's happening in France. So I think it may be interesting to kind of ask if we can kind of pinpoint some sort of shift, right. And, sometimes the shift might be due to the technology, and sometimes the shift might be due to these affordances that are really outside the novels themselves. So what I mean by the technology, for example, when the CD replaced the cassette, sales of recorded music went way up. So an obvious explanation is that actually, you know, CDs were simply much more useful than cassettes, they could they just be used in ways that just made people buy more music, because this is a way better format. Now, it's kind of a hypothesis, but it's interesting that you know, the replacement of records by cassettes didn't actually do the same thing. Because everyone, if you remember cassettes, they're not very convenient. They’re convenient because you can put them in the car, but otherwise, they're horrible to use, right? Because you can never find your song. Whatever. Yeah. I think there may be an example of that in the data where, and I think you alluded to this before Chloe, where in the in the in the 1730s in France there's a bit of a large rise in the production of novels and I kind of postulated it may have to do precisely with the fact that this was actually when the memoir novel was coming online. And my hypothesis was, well, could it be that basically, this this new formal possibility that had kind of been worked on slowly over time but that for some reason, right then was developing some sort of a kind of a coherence, or recognizability? Could it be that because of that, that formal possibility, it actually kind of induced more people to become novelists, or more novelist write more novels, because there was something, a narrative, a narrative kind of position or posture there, that never existed before that all of a sudden, they thought could be made to do all this stuff. It's only a hypothesis, I can't know. The only other thing I'd say for these, these, these external affordances, post offices and so on and so forth, is that it can be hard to locate in time with any precision, right? I mean, you know, more and more libraries, and more and more literacy and greater postal networks, you know, but most of these things are usually kind of: more, more and more, right. So it strikes me that it's kind of hard to pin down specific changes to those things, because there's no kind of, or there's rarely a kind of, boom moment.

John Bender

Maybe there is a boom if you take the raven bibliography seriously, and the introduction to it. There is a boom not only in novel publication, starting in the late 70s, early 80s in England, but in publication period, people are reading and more buying more books. So maybe we shouldn't give so much stress to a novel-publication boom, because this is: more people can read and more people are reading more books. Some of them are cheaper––not all, the so-called triple decker is actually more expensive, but say the Minerva books, which 800 of them published between the late 80s and early 20s––were very cheap. And so, I mean, in a way separating out the graph of novel publication is misleading.

Nicholas Paige

Totally, and I mean, I do point to this actually, at the beginning of I think chapter 10. In a way, this doesn't tell us that the novel is becoming more important. This just tells us that there are a lot more novels, but there may be a lot more plays a lot more poems, you know, etc, etc. So we really don't necessarily know, but we can try to figure out. There is some, you know, fairly recent good bibliographical work that would suggest that these increases don't show the solidifying hegemony of the novel, they just show just expansion of the publication market in general, which might be due to literacy, and so on and so forth. So that's really important. And then one could imagine, you know, also doing other analyses that would involve trying to figure out, if and when novels do actually capture a larger proportion of the market for what we want to call literature. That would be interesting. And I'm sure it does happen sometime in the 19th century. But when, I don't know. But that is absolutely true, that the brute numbers don't give us data because they themselves have to be contextualized. Yeah.

Margaret Cohen

I have a question for all three of you, which is to what extent can we think of the novel in the 18th century, for example, as a national novel, and I understand why archives make it very difficult to work across national traditions. And, as Chloe was saying at our event, there's so much work that's gone into your book and that goes into DH production that it feels a little bit ungrateful to ask for more, but if you look at you know, novel readers that are at least well known in the 18th century, there is this enormous cross channel exchange, and it's not only through translations, it's through people reading, you know, in the two languages. And I mean, I know Chloe, you've worked on mapping, you know how all the letters circulate. So, I'm just wondering, how does that skew what you're showing us? If novels sit in print corpuses, does the nation sit in a kind of international republic of letters?

Nicholas Paige

I think the graphs for the 18th century basically show that what happens in France happens in England as well. And there’s some differences, but the similarities are clear––like, the way the epistolary novel spreads and kind of homogenizes formally into its kind of pulp, polyphonic variant, the exact same thing. Even things like the way the novel chapterizes on both sides of the channel, extremely similar. Use of scenes as well, extremely similar. There are differences so that the truth pretense hangs on France much longer than it does in England, and I have my explanation that basically the way that we interpret the English situation––especially in the midcentury, the midcentury in England is characterized by some brusque movements that you never see in the previous 150 years of the French tradition. So my hypothesis, which is quite simple, is that basically there was basically no tradition of the English novel before then, and so it was very easy for the system to be rewired, in that the system was barely present at all. It was very easy for novelists to adopt the epistolary novel because it’s not really displacing anything. But at any rate, there are these very interesting differences but the broad similarities seem to me to be evidence that there’s just total porosity between these two countries, at least, which are not the only two countries, but I think it’s very porous.

John Bender

Well that’s a finding in itself, because in terms of traditional readings as I would understand them, the French novel much more heavily saturates the English novel with, say, Behn, Manley, Haywood, Defoe, and these core forms like the roman secret, the roman a clef, and then the later 18th century, the mid, say Fielding and Richardson, aren’t especially French, whereas Defoe and Mannley and Haywood and Behn, who’s a little older, have very significant French dimensions. I mean, in many ways Roxanna is a French novel. But that’s at the level of content, not at the level you’re dealing with. So in a way what your abstraction yields is something important, it seems to me that your frank acknowledgment that you’re dealing in abstraction is crucial and very important, not an apology. I mean, the main achievement of structuralism as a movement was to show the power of abstraction in cultural and literary analysis, I think. I mean, you’re not a structuralist but the power of abstraction can be very very great. I always think of Jerry McGann’s statement that if you follow the critical paradigms as an assumption of your object of study, then you’re not generating real knowledge, and the move toward abstraction is a move toward real knowledge, it seems to me.

Nicholas Paige

It also, to me, is a means of struggling against a fetishization of cultural specificity. I mean, cultural specificity is a great generator of knowledge, of super causal claims that, “Ah, there’s this form that only arises in this place and it’s so tied to that, and it makes our literary analyses super important,” and anyway, there’s a kind of fetishization of difference there, and I think abstraction helps us realize that, you know, a lot of people in different cultural circumstances––well, you ask how different is England? In the great scheme of things, how different is England from France? In these different cultural circumstances, you know, actually people make very similar choices in these two cultures. One is protestant, one is culture, one is aristocratic, one is poor, and look. They’re actually making very similar choices. Their values are actually not all that different. It’s not that different. It’s different, but it’s not that different. So that is something that is kind of important to me, is to get away from a type of emphasis on cultural difference that is basically achieved through simply not looking anywhere else. Asking, if the novel is caused by the daily newspaper in England, should we be looking to see if somewhere that doesn’t have a daily newspaper is also producing novels, like France, for instance.

John Bender

With regard to structuralism and abstraction, I think it’s wise to stay away from the question, why, and just focus on the question, what. And Daubenton says that in his essay on description in the Encyclopédie, he’s relying on Buffon when he says that. But “why” is a kind of rabbit hole to go down and when you go down it you come out in Alice in Wonderland, you know––

Nicholas Paige

But it’s enjoyable, you know, it’s like QAnon, when you go down [you get lost but] everything starts making sense. When you go down that hole, everything starts making sense. [laughter]

Margaret Cohen

[laughter] “it’s enjoyable!”

Chloe Edmondson

But I also find it interesting that it seems that our discussions, both earlier and now, it seems that there are two threads that emerge, which one is the evolution, if you will, of the different novel forms and artifacts that as you’ve pointed out are remarkably similar. Similar things happening in London and France, [etc…]. But at the same time it seems that we’ve been talking a little bit about content and the differences in content and also the influence as you point out of, you know, the epistolary form of Julie may not have influenced Paul et Virginie but there is a certain kind of content aspect that undeniably is being tracked through other works, and so I wonder to, to introduce this other question of the national novel, if perhaps that might reside more in content and subject matter and themes, perhaps, and how those are deployed in different cultural contexts, and I think that, that also brings us to a question that I have been thinking about along the lines of gender too, and Margaret’s book on the sentimental education of the novel, and how perhaps mapping gender might also provide an interesting lens back into, Margaret your earlier argument about how French male authors kind of coopted this form from female authors.

Margaret Cohen

Absolutely, I mean, I’m both very curious and very apprehensive of what the literary field would look like if it were subjected to Nick’s kind of abrasive and, you know, invigorating abstraction. [laughter] And it would turn out that I had read a little subset of novels and in fact there was a whole other world out there, which I think is probably the case, you know. But, but all arguments are kind of local and partial, and if you don’t make them you can’t go any further,––

John Bender

You’ve read a lot of novels though.

Margaret Cohen

I did! I read them in the old bibliotheque nationale, you know––

Nicholas Paige

And you read them! I didn’t even read them. So, you know my education […]

Margaret Cohen

Well I kind of got really into, a like, digital reading avant le lettre because I got to start checking off codes, and like “oh, right, the scheming women of the world,” you know, “the duplicitous man,” you know, whatever––

Nicholas Paige

That’s neat, that’s really neat, and that does remind me a little of folklore categorization or something like that, yeah. Which is really pretty fascinating.

Chloe Edmondson

I was excited about your proposition earlier that one aspect that your data reveals is this much much longer history of novels in France before, you know, it happens in England and thinking about the history of the novel more as the history of the French novel, actually, and I thought that was a really exciting finding from your book. Which is a nice argument for not closing French departments in the U.S. [laughter]

Nicholas Paige

That’s the only one, I think––it’s the writing on the wall. [laughter] I thought it would be interesting to try to produce some figures and do some samples for the English novel in the 17th century. You know, there are bibliographies, they lump together a bunch of different stuff, a lot of republications and stuff like that. But there just aren’t many novels in Britain, but for that reason I thought I probably could whip that out pretty quickly. But, you know, I’m done. I’m done with that. I enjoyed talking about what it all means, but as for the actual data I’m satisfied with what have here.

John Bender

You might just read Aphra Behn’s love letters, if you haven’t, because it’s first of all very very French and it’s a hybrid of epistolary and third person narration.

Nicholas Paige

That was very typical of the time, basically all the early epistolary stuff was very sui generis, so you could get for example a little third person novella and it would feature, like, an appendix of the letters exchanged between the people, you know. That stuff was really, it was all up in the air and that’s fascinating with the epistolary novel, it’s uptake is so so, it takes forever to take off, you know we think it’s obvious to imagine all of these kinds of people with various degrees of relation, some of the letter writers know each other and they’re over here, and there’s another packet of letter writers over here, and they kind of partially match up like a venn diagram. So that’s like, the polyphonous epistolary novel. And you might think that’s kind of obvious but I think the record shows that it took people a long time to figure out, “oh, that’s how we can make an epistolary novel work.”

John Bender

Except for Richardson, he goes from the familiar letters to Pamela at once, and though there are a few other correspondents in Pamela it’s chiefly Pamela, and seven years later he’s at Clarissa.

Nicholas Paige

No, yeah, Clarissa, it’s…it’s amazing. Listen, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters is amazing as well, however, you can show that Persian Letters didn’t have that sort of uptick. Because it was kind of, basically a twist on an early epistolary novel, it was a novel of observation, where you’d have characters exchanging observations about, usually a local culture, often foreigners, and so it’s twist on that and he adds this great harem plot and so on and so forth, and he achieves this polyphony but there’s like no uptake of this, you could say until Richardson. But Richardson’s was kind of its own thing, he wasn’t building on Montesquieu, he did his own thing. So that’s kind of what I call––that’s an example of invention that does kind of take up the model that most people think of, that’s like, “wow, there’s this great instance and then people copy it.” And basically: yes, though, to look and see how long it took people to copy it is amazing, it took them twenty years to really uptake on that.

John Bender

But your point of the learning curve remains, thinking just that with Richardson it’s a fast learning curve with him.

Nicholas Paige

Yeah, it takes people a long time to change the way that they do things. It took a pandemic for us to stop burning all of this hydrocarbon just to go to these stupid conferences, when actually we don’t have to do all of that, right? There’ll be some happy medium but basically it took us the pandemic to shake us out of doing things the way we always do.

John Bender

That’s why we don’t get to have dinner with you!

Margaret Cohen

Yeah! I wish you had burned some in your hydro-electric vehicle, but you know––

Nicholas Paige

I know, it’s sad but we will––just in the same way that people still write books featuring heroes of the past, people still write Aristotelian novels, there’s still a lot of Aristotelian films they’re called bio-pics, they have a reason for being and they will continue to be. So we will continue to see people in person but it does kind of offer these other possibilities where I can be invited to give a talk in Germany, where I was never going to take off in the middle of the semester and go to Germany, but I can do it now and, you know, no one would have thought of doing that before, and you know, why not?

John Bender

Speaking of audience, I saw that there were 59 people here earlier, and I saw at a talk with a former colleague who is now at another university, it was attended by a thousand people, so––

Margaret Cohen

I know, I saw that we had an attendee from Denmark who had just started dropping in on our Center for the Study of the Novel events and seemed to really enjoy them. Well Nick, I wish we could have a drink, and dinner, but––

Nicholas Paige

I know, we’ll just have to drink alone! [laughter]

Margaret Cohen

It’s been really great to talk to all of you, and thank you so much for your time and your interest.

John Bender

Yes, thank you Nick.

Nicholas Paige

Thanks to all of you, you’ve been super, super, super generous.

Casey Patterson

Thank you again for joining us in this episode of the Center for the Study of the Novel’s podcast, Café. We would also like to thank Nicholas Paige, John Bender, and Chloe Edmondson for their generosity in agreeing to this conversation. Thanks to our team at the Center for the Study of the Novel: to An Truong Nguyen and Maritza Colon for operational support; to our graduate coordinators, Victoria Zurita, Cynthia Giancotti, and Casey Patterson; to Erik Fredner for editing, consultation, and sound engineering; and to our host and director Margaret Cohen. The Center for the Study of the Novel is a subsidiary of the English Department at Stanford University.

Books at the Center: Dorothy Hale, The Novel and The New Ethics (1/15/21)

Dorothy Hale; Nancy Ruttenburg; Alex Woloch; Margaret Cohen

Transcript for Books at the Center: Dorothy Hale, the Novel and the New Ethics (1/15/21), or read full transcript below.

Casey Wayne Patterson (00:06)

Welcome, and thanks for joining us in this episode of Cafe, the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. In this installment, our host Margaret Cohen is joined by Nancy Ruttenburg, Alex Woloch and Dorothy Hale for a discussion of Dorothy's recent book, The Novel and the New Ethics. Dorothy Hale is a professor of English literature at the University of California Berkeley, and is the author of Social Formalism, which is an expansive study of the history of the novel, which The Novel and the New Ethics then builds upon. Alex Woloch and Nancy Ruttenburg are professors of English literature here at Stanford. Alex is the author of The One versus the Many, and Or Orwell, both of which join Dorothy's in productive conversation about the novel form. And Nancy is the author of Democratic Personality and of Dostoyevsky's Democracy, and she is completing another book called The Hidden Diaspora. This conversation was recorded on January 15 2021, following a Center for the Study of the Novel event. We're thrilled to be sharing this conversation with you, so thank you again, for listening in, as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Margaret Cohen (01:30)

Thank you so much for joining us at the center. You mentioned that this was the first conversation you've had about the book since it was published. Were there any comments that emerged that were surprises to you?

Dorothy Hale (01:46)

Let me first just say that I feel that I couldn't have had a better conversation about the book. The first one may be the ultimate conversation. And I really it was just thrilling to to get Alex and Nancy's response and to have the energy from that audience. So really, very profound moment for me. So thank you for that. I guess one, one thing that's on my mind that Alex mentioned at the end of his remarks––at least I that wrote down––"what about the 19th century novel?" And given that we have an expert in the 19th–– well, two experts? I would love to hear both of you. Actually, I was going to direct it toward Alex, but of course, Margaret, I'd love to hear your ideas. Because again, just to repeat, you know, what I've been arguing is that something new happens, the new, you know, the novel and the new ethics, something new happens in the modernists' moment where an idea of the art of the novel and therefore also, an idea of an ethics of form comes into systematic, you know, being. And you know, as much as I'd love to read in the 19th and 18th century novel, you know, I would love to hear what you two experts think about that claim and whether you would challenge it or support it or look for counter examples.

Alex Woloch (03:09)

Well, maybe I'll jump in. Yeah, I was thinking about that, as you were talking, and I was kind of running test cases, through my mind, you know, and I have to say that the the novel that I thought of that is kind of the Jamesian equivalent for a much earlier moment of the novel is Madame de Lafayette's Cleves, which is very much a novel about the opacity of the other. And then I was thinking, as you were talking, well, does that really matter? I mean, this is just the claim of the new matter, or are you pointing to something which is just integral to the novel as a genre, which is an aesthetics of ethics? And does it change it to say that Lafayette is doing this in court society of the 17th century? And I guess where I came down, as you were talking, I was thinking about it is yes, it does really matter, because we think about this notion of ethics as a liberal humanist notion. And yet, if Lafayette really is creating in her inscrutable princess and her entry into the princess's character in the ethical choices that she has to make about how to balance her love for Nemours with her duty to her family, to her rank, and the extent to which that's part of the whole complex of aristocratic society. If that actually predates bourgeois individualism, then what does that tell us about the novel and what does it tell us about ethics? So that's where I would go into that question.

Margaret Cohen (05:01)

The funny thing to me is that, because I was a reader for the book in Stanford Press, this is my second go around. And it just felt a little funny that I didn't really––like, I definitely noticed the question of the 19th century. And I was kind of interested, like, I was interested to hear how you would weigh in on it, but I didn't internalize it. And I didn't actually like sit down and really think through how I felt about that. I think my general inclination was like, in a certain sense, a 19th century novel would pose a problem in one of two ways. If it's not, if it has nothing to do with the tradition you're talking about, then, then that would sort of reduce the scope and the claim, I think, but if it's already doing everything you're talking about, then it would sort of like challenge the the centrality of Henry James right. So I think I would tend to think that a lot of what you're talking about is going on. Already. So before, before Henry James, it's, it feels like your book generates so easily these like, "Well, what about this?" Or "what about that?" "What about-" all the things you don't talk about? And in the way that a certain kind of strong criticism does. Like it's it's a classic instance of like, no, no good deed goes unpunished. Because like, if you've proven the case with your material, then it's like, well, what about what about 19th century American literature? What about the Victorian novel? But also, what about all––what about––I mean, I just put all the "What abouts", some of the key ones that I could think of on the table, it's "what about the French contemporary novel," or all the world, like world, the world novel outside of the Anglo American tradition? What about other media? So film? Like, is there any, like other other forms of representations to put it that way. Or even short the short story? And then, but I think, to my mind, the key one was like this––well to two other two other things. Henry James is so, it's so, he's so elevated in this tradition. And I mean, you do talk about Woolf, but not nearly as much there's like no one else can occupy that central role. So are there any, any, basically are there other counter traditions? Are there other, and you sort of in the preface now, you do say, you sort of say there probably are, but you're not, you're not going to get too involved with them one way or the other. I would think for me, that's the, that would be the question. That's the most interesting, more interesting than 19th century, actually, it's like, are there really other novels like 20th century and 21st century novel aesthetics? I mean, the two that I thought of were basically: cultivation of the self, is there some version of like, self cultivation, like where it's really about the refinement of who we are through a novel. And then some embrace of collectivity, like representation of totality, of the collective, of...I was curious if you had any interest in like, a really strong counter example, either, just like, you know, and, and I can totally understand why you didn't––I think you were careful to not get too caught up in such questions. There's a hell of a lot to talk about with the, with the work with the tradition. And, and, and, you know, the key players and what you're looking at so, so I think I ducked the question about the 19th century a little bit, but...

Dorothy Hale (08:19)

Well, and and so...Nancy, did, did you want to say something about the American tradition? You know, 19th century tradition, tradition that that you had thoughts about? Or?

Nancy Ruttenburg (08:30)

Well, yeah, I mean, it is the case that reading the book all along, I was thinking, "Oh, but can I think of, can I think of something that doesn't fall into this?" And I'm thinking it as kind of, "is there something that exits from it?" And that was kind of, you know, one of my questions, you know, is there any novelist, you can think of, actually, is actually aware of this in a way where they're, you know, they're writing the novel against it, they're trying to kind of escape that circularity. So I went back to the 19th century, and was interested in the 19th century American novel because, you know, the word on the street about that is that it's experimental. This is what distinguishes it. My primary example of something that's kind of, that your work kind of describes, but that it also works against––doesn't undermine it, but it's different––would be something like Moby Dick, where there's such a strong kind of ethical component to that novel. Melville is certainly focused on form. I mean, he's not just, you know, putting this grab bag of stuff into the novel. He's, he's certainly trying to achieve an effect through form and I think a novelistic ethics of alterity through form. But on the other hand, it this kind of goes back to my question about the body is that the main thing going on is that you have this absolutely tragic but inevitable failure, this kind of total failure of that ethics because of the body of the whale, which has inspired Ahab to kind of hammer against that body, And, and just absolutely kill the whale or be killed. There's nothing in between. And yet that need for that kind of encounter is so intense, and then so tragic at the end. So it seemed in all these ways, certainly pre bourgeois, or possibly even not at all interested in bourgeois subjectivity. And yet, you know, seems so germane. And also so other to this tradition.

Dorothy Hale (10:45)

Very rich questions, so let me see if I can do justice to them. So first of all, Alex, can I point out that your question was about the one in the many? [laughter]

Alex Woloch (10:56)

Yeah, that's true.

Dorothy Hale (10:57)

Is there a tradition of the self? Or is there a tradition of the collectivity? So I wonder why those occurred to you.

Alex Woloch (11:05)

I was not aware of that, but...

Dorothy Hale (11:10)

Um, so um, so I guess I guess I want to say two things. First, so one would be about the issue of form. And this might relate Margaret's example of the Princess of Cleves, and Nancy's example of Moby Dick. Because my, my, the distinction that I had wanted to draw in my book, is that the representation of character is an ethical issue from time immemorial, you know, as I said, with Plato, and then I have a little bit of in my book that that was really fun for me to find where Trollop and Thackeray are talking about being taken over by their characters. So you know that that part isn't really news, it seems to me and Alex, as you were saying, I hope that it strengthens the claim that I'm making for the tradition, I'm interested in to see that this has been of interest, you know, concern for novelists right from the very beginning, is that they feel invaded by characters or that they're, they're wanting to commune with the characters. So self and other you know, Margaret, as you were talking about at the enigma of the of the subject, or you know, there's a whole variety, the the example that came to my mind when I was writing the book was, you know, Pamela, but she couldn't be more different than Samuel Richardson. But I believe, correct me if I'm wrong from the research that I did, nobody complained when he wrote that book that he didn't have the right to, to to represent Pamela, they complained about a lot of other things. Which is why he wrote Clarissa, but but nobody said, Samuel Richardson, you do not have a right, you're violating the, you know, integrity and the otherness of Pamela by speaking for her right. On the contrary, he was trying to cultivate ways of autonomy effects that would render her subjectivity. So the point that I'm trying to make is that the problem of character invites these issues in the novel from the very beginning, in a particular way. But what's different is, and if we take Moby Dick as an example, Nancy, you know, no, no question like, like George Eliot, Melville's a master of form. But the question that I would occur to me to ask is: but did he think the novel was a certain thing that he was writing, and that it should be written according to certain values that were specifiable and that he could, you know, claim, so the example that I would have in mind, you know, that that I've taught in a class that I teach, called "The the Novel is a Book of Other People" is The Blithedale Romance, which seems to me, by Hawthorne, you know, really concerned with this problem of self and other and the degree of representation and even inventing a symbolics of, rather than a realist, you know, breaking the realist frame, to use a symbolics of representation, and then ironizing all that on top of it. But again, it's interesting to me that Hawthorne thought of that as a romance structure. And he looks back to you know, he has a whole theory of romance that we know about. So there wasn't, there, there was this tendency, in, in, in these in the novels that I know about to care about these concerns, but then nobody, you know, sort of stopped and said, "okay, the novel should be this one thing, and we're, you know, we can constrain the novel, and it can come into focus as a high art form. If we if we can say that form needs to match content in a systematic way."

Margaret Cohen (14:45)

What about Tolstoy? And Dostoevsky? I mean, I don't know if I'm one of them. I feel like just randomly throwing that in but another level it feels like it's addressing some of what you were just saying, Yeah, there's more than, because I, I was following, was following what you're saying about Blithedale. And that makes a lot of sense. It's it feels harder with Tolstoy definitely, and Dostoevsky, to say that they're not kind of, I don't know, pretty attached to an ambitious about like novelistic form.

Dorothy Hale (15:15)

So, so again, maybe, like I would see, you know, interestingly, Tolstoy in particular, and not so much just Dostoevsky, but Tolstoy is one of the big examples that gets, you know, imported into the Jamesian tradition through Lubbock. You know, he has a whole whole big chapter on on Tolstoy as well. And, of course, the wonderful moment in Anna Karenina, when he's giving, you know, a point of view of the dog, which I'm sure is on Coetzee's mind in Elizabeth Costello, when John, the character, says, "My mother has been a dog," you know that that's got to be an allusion to Tolstoy. So there's definitely, I would put Tolstoy and Elliot in that same pre modernists world of perspectivalism that James inherits and and in Eliot's case is actually trying to refine, but um, did, did Tolstoy then theorize and aesthetics of, of the novel as a genre as an art form out of that?

Nancy Ruttenburg (16:16)

You know, I mean, that's a really big question, because it, and this kind of goes back to my thinking about Melville too, you know, the fact just to go back to Melville for for a minute, it's, you can see him through the course of his novel writing, grappling with the form, and feeling that he failed from step to step. So he tries to write fairly traditional narratives with Typee and Omoo, has a total breakdown with Mardi and writes something that's just kind of not recognizable, as anything. I mean, it's long, and it's kind of elaborated, but it seems to be a failure, let's just say that as a shortcut. And then and then by the time he comes to Moby Dick, it seems clear to me that he has an enormous, an enormous kind of ethical project. And it does have to do very deeply with otherness. And you know, the context of that, I think, and this, we probably can't pursue, but it, I think it comes out of the, you know, historical environment at the time. And this, you know, you've you've got this conformity on the one hand, big problem, and you have this focus on individuality on the other hand, and this becomes along with all the political and social problems, this just becomes something that I think American writers, to speak very generally of that time, are––have to come to terms with. So then you have Melville producing this formally––to call it experimental is probably an understatement––I think that that project of alterity, and one's ethical relationship to that is absolutely at the core of Melville's writing. And you can see him not fumbling for the form because formally, it's just, you know, such a massive work. But it seems to me, at the very least kind of a preview. And certainly, I mean, I would say, it's very hard for me to connect Melville to James, to understand how, you know how the influence would work if you went in the other direction, but he just seems to me at the very least a kind of interesting predecessor to him, because the elements that the intense the mission to find a novelistic aesthetics out of almost the fragments of it, he just, you know, blows the novel apart to find those fragments in the way he reassembles them a kind of an aesthetic that would match the ethical intensity of that novel. And I think the reason that it's, you know, in such a problematic novel for people, it's either because they succeed, that they can feel this, or to them, it's just an absolute mess.

Dorothy Hale (19:08)

Well, and I and also think, again, to think of the Melville on the one hand, Moby Dick on the one hand and Middlemarch on the other, I, that's really productive for me, because, again, from James's point of view, he would call I think, there's no statement about this, I think, I think he would call Moby Dick, a baggy monster, right, which is his term for the form, what he believed was the formlessness. And then with Elliot, he feels that she lacks, he says in reviews, an aesthetic sense in particular, you know, you can see what starts bothering him about how social traces emerge as problems of form because what he doesn't like about Elliot, and frankly, what a lot of people still don't like about Elliot, is the chatty narrator. But on ethical grounds, it seems like the narrator is taking up too much room from that characters and can't control herself and very––all of this diagnosis of the narrator starts taking place as an excrescence and an invasion of her characters rather than realizing them in their autonomy and individuality. So, you know, again, the with, with Melville, representing this experimental, as you say, innovative form that might have almost come in, you know, the late 20th century. And the modernist period, pursuing those those values, but, but again, I think, again, it's the systematization of the narrative techniques or bringing them into visibility and, and reckoning with them and identifying them, that might be the difference between the past and the present.

Margaret Cohen (20:41)

I was trying to before we met to find the passage of the introduction, where you talk about Proust and you say, I'm not going to go in this direction, you know, and talk about the way in which are all these different perspectives are kind of emanations of the narrator. And I guess also, I would throw in there narratives of the imagination, which are highly crafted and highly concerned with form and with the form of the novel, but which are very unruly and recalcitrant. And so I wondered if you could just elaborate a little bit more on Proust, if you want, or on this potential, you know, for using that novel, or whatever it is, you know, speaking of loose, baggy monsters, to open up an alternative tradition?

Dorothy Hale (21:35)

Yeah. Well, first of all, I also just want to say I wrote the preface after I read Alex's comments on my novel––I'm sorry, my book. And I tried, as Alex had said, you know, like, what, what fits in there and what doesn't fit, fit in there. And so I feel Proust is a wonderful example of kind of a hinge figure for me. Because, without question, the remembrance of things past is about self and other. And one could argue an ethics of self and other as part of the philosophical concerns. So I'd like you know, that makes it really good for me, because that's what I've been trying to highlight our novels that thematically are about these issues as well. And certainly we can find that in Proust. What I would want to say is that I quote that one passage from Swan's Way, I think it is, where Proust seems to be articulating an aesthetics of a novel, the novel, and there are certain resonances with some of the attitudes that I'm investigating, but the real differences as well. And Nancy, I actually wondered if, if some of the things that Proust is saying about how he thinks novels represent character and bring readers and writers to that project, kind of resonated more with what you're saying about embodiment. So I just want to tag that for a minute. Because in the quote that I offer, in the preface, he's saying, what's really the novel's special virtue or capacity is that it dematerializes people. So he, remember he says, in real life, we only know people by a gesture or some material encounter, and there's so much more to them beyond that, and they're fleeting, these these real life encounters. But then what the novel does, as I understand that passage from Proust, is that it texture realizes everybody, I mean, that's the word that I would use, he says it dematerializes everybody. And once everybody's dematerialized, he says, there's an equality, like the Franzen thing that we talked about earlier with the gift of our imagination and emplacement, you know, then he says, through reading a novel, we can know these characters more fully, or, or wholly, and make them ours through their accessibility. One thing that really interests me about Proust is that you don't get a lot of free indirect discourse in Proust, you don't get the prolonged imaginations of another character's point of view. You know, it's all mediated through Marcel and his impressions. And him, you know. That autonomy effect is much limited, he breaks into those dial–, dialogues, you know, forever in the middle of the thing when I start losing pace with him, you know, when they, when they have the parties, and everybody's just talking and it becomes like, to me like Ulysses with the, you know, nighttime night town scene, so that you, one could argue there are autonomy effects there, you know, just through the dialogue, but I don't see him engaging in so many of the practices that characterize the tradition that I'm looking at. So that doesn't mean that he couldn't fit into it as a really interesting kind of hinge example, but I think he wants to take us in a different direction ultimately with his idea of novelist aesthetics as being dematerialized and making selves available through fiction

Nancy Ruttenburg (25:00)

That's really interesting, because I was wondering when when, that you pair Proust with Philip Roth of all people as offering a counter aesthetics. So I'd like to hear more about that. Because when I think about the literary tradition that you're tracing, Philip Roth seems like he would be, you know, he would be right in there with the in crowd. And so Proust, I could sort of immediately say, "Well, yeah, I can understand that." But could you talk about Roth and the way you see him as offering a counter aesthetics?

Dorothy Hale (25:33)

I, you know, I use Roth as an example, because I feel like something like in The Human Stain, he's con-, you know, completely consumed with the kinds of issues that we're talking about. He also, by the way, I mentioned in my book that, in one of, I think Roth's first novel, Letting Go, he actually has a character who is doing his dissertation on Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. So I wanted to work that James connection, I thought, wow, you know, Roth should fit into this tradition. But maybe those who know Roth more deeply or, you know, I couldn't find the interest in technique. So, although I saw the thematic concerns there, I was trying to make that distinction between novelists who you know, like what we're talking about at the very beginning, who are concerned about self and other and social heterogeneity, and those who then think, oh, my goodness, this really affects me as a novelist. And I better be very, very careful about what I do formally, and have a responsibility.

Alex Woloch (26:36)

I just wanted to pick up on like, when you said the James angle, because I feel part of the problem, why, like, I mean, while that question seems important, but there's something that seems off about them. And I think part of it is that, and I also started thinking more people Dickens, Flaubert, Austen, there's all these different figures you could think of, but the thing is, like, to do it fairly, what I'd first have to do is like, make a case for the refraction of Proust, which I don't think would be that hard to do. But I couldn't do it, like to demonstrate sort of, like sort of inductively and empirically, all these other figures, taking up Proust in this, in an abundance of ways and like once you've shown that, then you can enter in. And I feel like that's like the specific operation you do on James to... I think you're doing a big favor to James, Jamesian scholarship, because it's such a, this book makes such, is a such a powerful reactivation of James, in a way that I think would make other scholars that work on other novels kind of envious, like one would want to be able to do that with Flaubert. And I think you probably could with any number of novelists to show to get the constellation of later writers who are inarguably dealing with this figure, it seems more like something that happens with poetry, but like one one example that popped in my mind was actually Mark Greif, his his chapter on, In Age of the Crisis of Man, where he has a great chapter on Kafka and like, Kafka, like these figures from the 40s suddenly going back to Kafka, and I think what you're doing with James isn't done that much in like history of the novel where there's... it's not just showing the refraction, it's, it's this combination of like a reading of like a very close reading of the author together with this kind of empirical survey of how other novelists are taking, taking up that author and I mean, methodologically, that just seems important, and I want and I wonder if, that would seem to be––you'd have to do, like, that would be what you would want to do with Proust or with Joyce or with George Eliot to really, that'd be the only way to actually sort of really make a strong argument that no, you're, "Dory Hale is wrong to put James at the center. Because in fact, here's another constellation with a different writer at the center that has its own strong aesthetic, right."

Dorothy Hale (28:50)

Thank you. Thank you for that. And could I just say, that was part of the thrill of doing the research for this. Yeah. On the one hand, it was finding all the people talking about ethics, I was like, wow, you know, more and more and more kept coming into my hands. And then I kept, you know, like, found then I thought, "Okay, well, let me look at you know, these statements by novelists and I'll see if I can find this ethics of alterity earlier," and then lo and behold, I kept finding all this praise of Henry James in particular. So I just have to say, as a researcher, it was, it was, you know, so like, you know why we're in it, you're just like, "oh, evidence, I've got hard evidence here that this is the case." And then you have someone like Ford Madox Ford, beginning, you know, his discussion of Henry James, with the statement saying, you know, Henry James is the single greatest novelist ever, you know, so it isn't just the James was in there. And then you have Gish Jen saying, Henry James is of course the Bible, you know, for novel writing. So you know that the fact that that legacy is still there was very exciting for me. If you wanted to go back to Roth, I just want to say all just to finish that for a second. I just wanted to say so I felt because he wasn't concerned with form that it was just more of a realist project. And there's nothing wrong with that. But he just wouldn't, wouldn't fit into the aesthetics of alterity. For me. I mean, as I said, as we've been discussing, I hope that once I pointed this out, and this is the distinction Alice was just trying to make, you know, the writers who are writing in this tradition, kind of full blown, but then I, you know, once I've articulated it, I think we could go back to Dickens, that was my point of using David Miller as an example, like David Miller's reading of Dickens just blows me away. And I also think Dickens had none of that in mind when he was writing. So that an aesthetic comes forward, that is very palpable and articulatable, and then you can apply it so amazingly on, on Dickens seemed to me the register of the family of ideas that I was talking about, and the utility of it, but Dickens wouldn't be an origin figure for it or know that was happening.

Nancy Ruttenburg (30:55)

Okay. So that so that, I mean, that's very interesting. To me, Roth was a kind of great example of what you're talking about, because he's so dialogic. So I wanted, you know, this, this was I wanted to at the end of at the end of our event, Alex, you brought up the question of whether Bakhtin and Lukacs are now sort of fading into the past, and something new will come forward to replace it, namely Dory, which is a whole different way of doing novel theory. So so in way I'm thinking about that when I asked you about Roth, because, you know, he's like Dostoevsky, I think of him as a follower of Dostoevsky because his novels are dialogue. I mean, there's very little description. First person, well, you've got Nathan Zuckerman as narrator, but, you know, so you've got very dialogic novels. And then you have Bakhtin saying, "This is the novelistic form, dialogism," and then, you know, he moves to polyphony, which amplifies that, but for that reason, well, I guess the question is, you know, does, does the dialogical novel have any particular place? Do you think within this tradition?

Alex Woloch (32:14)

Can I just kind of jump in on the just on Roth, I feel like there's a lot of who––I feel you would have more fodder just in finding Henry James and Philip Roth. If I'm remembering particularly like The Zuckerman Trilogy, I feel like Henry James is all over there. Like there's just a lot of mentions of Henry James and the master and, and, like, like Zuckerman, like learning, like reading Henry James at the University of Chicago and all that stuff. So...

Dorothy Hale (32:38)

Okay, that's really wonderful to know. So thank you. I think I got an article there. Right. And then Nancy, just to answer, you know, to address your question about Bakhtin. And this is where again, I was so grateful to Alex for re, remembering Social Formalism, and connecting the two projects, because, you know, certainly I would want to think of Bakhtin's theory, and then it's specific translation and entering into the critical scene, in the 80s. And in the Anglo American Academy, you know, circling back in at that particular moment, and, you know, just being caught up then by––that's what I talked about, in my in my fifth chapter, you can see something like Bakhtin being referenced by Judith Butler, as she's articulating her post structuralist idea of ethics. So, Bakhtin still remains very important to my thinking and to this tradition. So just, I mean, so the first thing I would say is that, yes, his his ideas of alterity and not only novelistic character and autonomy, the way he describes it, and Dostoevsky's poetics, but even more interesting to me, in Discourse in the Novel when he talks about language itself as being, you know, quotable, and having degrees of autonomy and materiality, that then define characterological states. Right. So that is a version of alterity right there. But what again, what it got interested, what I got interested in this, in this new project is all that Bakhtin doesn't say about the art of the novel, because where he leaves us in Discourse in the Novel is, he says that the representation of of character is the representation of language, period. That's where he ends up in Discourse in the Novel. wherever he came from, in Dostoevsky's poetics, that's where he ends up. And whenever I teach that, my students are like, you know, "what, what about plot? What about this? What about, you know, what about all these other elements of form that we take?" Where is that in Bakhtin? And so then I thought, well, you know, that there is an idea of an aesthetics or an art of the novel developing out of James that resonates with Bakhtin, but goes in a different direction. Toward arguing for the novel as a high art form, which Bakhtin does not do.

Margaret Cohen (34:57)

He seems to me to want to, to tie the novel to the people, to the working class, to push back against what we would think of as, you know, liberal notions of sympathy and ethics. To use that to, to move to the contemporary moment, I'm wondering about your students who asked that question and whether they would have asked that 15 years ago, or whether they're the students who went through the high school curriculums that you talked about, and the extent to which, just to cut to the chase, I'm really fascinated by your claim, which seems to be true, that there is a renaissance of the novel that occurs against post structuralism against post modernism through valuing an ethics of the other or alterity. And then related to that the question of who has the right to speak for whom, and, you know, we had an incredible turnout today, we had 150 people, which I think is a record for the Center for the Study of the Novel. And your book is so timely, given the fraught political climate in the US and the question of, you know, who does have the right to represent, you know, who? Which is a literary question. And it's also a political question.

Dorothy Hale (36:21)

Can I just say, and so again, it so interested me that we're, and Bakhtin kind of resonates with this, that we're, that we're having this debate in literature classes over fictional characters, characters who do not exist, people who do not exist, but the politics still do exist! And again, that's a complicated thing. It's not a mistake, it's not a mistake, or anything. Why is it that we bring those politics to fictional characters? What claims do we want to make about those? And I mentioned in my, in the introduction of my book that, or the first chapter that, you know, this editor who suggests you know, that that novel that society should be could be improved, a contemporary editor for a creative writing journal, if people would just, writers would diversify their novels, that he thought that that was a good thing, you know, hey, represent as many people as possible, and that'll help improve the world. And then he had a, you know, quit his job, because it was considered to be so inflammatory. So on, on the one hand, this is a live political issue that––so to get to your question about students, which I, I really welcome, I find to two kinds of responses among my students, I find, and that helped generate this book, I found definitely an assumption about identity, that the students will come into the class say, with all sorts of preconceptions about Henry James, right, he's a white male author, they have a vague sense that he's elite or rich, he never worked. He doesn't write about working people. Why should they read him? He writes about women, you know, who is he to be writing about Isabel Archer? So there're these, that's their, their critical place that they're coming from. So then when you teach something like James and show that James is actually absolutely concerned with all these same issues, that these are the thematics of his of his novels, and then also apply or freight his narrative technique, then I hope to show that, you know, these these issues of identity and the best––the power of novels to have a political or an ethical effect, that these are problems that would, that need to be thought about, rather than just immediate ideas about about subject positions and political rights. And that helps the students become more thoughtful. I mean, and they do and they're excited, and they love, they love doing it. But that that's on the one hand, on the other hand, there is just to say, a student that will come in, who has a very, what I call the Bachian idea of novelistic aesthetics, and they say, you know, "shouldn't in a good novel have..." and then the list certain formal features, that, that that's a minority of students. That's one from the creative writing workshops, you know, but then I think they see that those formal features are actually value laden. And that's one of the things I tried to show.

Margaret Cohen (39:13)

Yeah, I think I'm going to use those arguments. Some of the questions I get about authors.

Nancy Ruttenburg (39:20)

Aren't we all!

Alex Woloch (39:21)

I think that's super interesting, like that last question and answer on politics and the contemporary moment and, and identity politics really, as a as it is implicitly surfacing at a time that's explicitly in the book. Yeah. I think another thing that Dory's book doesn't do is to try to historicize it in the sense of like, the social and economic factors that are underlying these cultural shifts and with identity politics in the US that would be, you're not trying to provide causality for this in terms of like economic or social or political factors, such as the obvious one of like the rise of multiculturalism in in the US.

Dorothy Hale (40:07)

Well, the, I, Alex, and I think this also goes back to what we were talking before about the older traditions of the novel. Because, you know, I was struck by Bakhtin and on the one hand, but also Ranciere on the other end and arguments for the novel being, let's use the term loosely, okay, a democratic form. What you know what Ranciere and other, Auerbach maybe also says this, as the novel, quote, unquote, "develops," we get different protagonists coming into visibility. And there's an equate, equation or a tendency to take subaltern or invisible groups, social groups and and give them voice, right. So we can look at Pamela and we can look at––

Alex Woloch (40:48)

Germinal or something.

Dorothy Hale (40:49)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. And Ranciere talks about Joe Christmas and Light in August, right, like so, whenever you think you've, you've, you've never done democratising. Right. So that again, that's sort of the way I think, rather than in terms of social and historical particular moment, I kind of think more, "this is the generic, generic tradition of the novel, it's always been concerned about that." And then at a certain point, it becomes self consciously made into an aesthetic problem in terms of the protagonist set. And just the other thing I would say, though, on a positive side, so you can see this like so with this, this novel, Girl, Woman, Other that I'm writing an article about right now, because it could have been the next chapter I feel in my book, Bernadine Evaristo says very explicitly that she wrote this novel, because she wants to give voice to the diversity of Black British women, female identity. And that is a social project, right, that she is explicitly taking on. And so who are the readers for that? Well, as many people as she can get, that she feels that she can create these characters that will change the vision of a certain social group and make it more of a protagonist rather than a subaltern group. But then all of these problems come into view for her, Everisto, about what her right is, and how to respect the differences among these women. She actually goes to typography, I mean, it looks like poetry on a page. So that was a particular formal problem that really just grabbed my attention. Like, you know, what is that doing in this new innovation, this new idea that the typography itself could somehow be engaged in the representation of otherness and this ethical project, so new forms of the novel forms were coming into view.

Nancy Ruttenburg (42:41)

You can even see that, you know, you could extend that to graphic novels as well, really. And that's happening more and more, I think. I wanted to go back to Alex's question at the beginning about other narrative forms. But if you just take the short story, always been the outlier, I mean, it's rarely taught. It is at Stanford, in our department recently, by Gavin Jones, but it's rarely taught all by itself. But since you have the same types of narrative resources, except size maybe, does that, you know, does it make any sense because your book is about that novel, but do you see that kind of, you know, replicated in the same way or to the same degree in in short stories?

Dorothy Hale (43:28)

I don't really read a lot of short fiction. I have other reasons for that preferences that I could specify. But I also, I don't know enough about the short story tradition to know that if, you know, who its theorists are, as it were, right? Oh, who would be their Henry James? Or maybe they're doing a version of Henry James, for all I know. So that I think as Alex was indicating earlier, if that were a project that we're interested in, I think I'd have to really start researching and find out, you know, what, is there, what are the traditions there?

Margaret Cohen (44:02)

Just to give a shout out to a former Stanford grad student, one place to look would be Long Le-Khac, whose dissertation and now book is on what he calls "transnarrative," which is like the specific sub genre of short stories that are connected, like so they're sort of halfway between short stories and novels. And it's, it would definitely, you definitely have a lot of grist for the mill of alter––aesthetics of alterity. With his with his book.

Dorothy Hale (44:27)

Yeah, you know, I'd love to look at that. Because, again, this Everisto novel, she has separate narratives that kind of intertwine, but they really are on a short story cycle. And her , one of her influences is ,is Under Milk Wood, and also Sherwood Anderson, The Story Cycle, so I could see how the novel form, you know, even though it wants to still weave these things together is in conversation with that story cycle genre for sure.

Margaret Cohen (44:54)

You have a lot of grist for your mill. [laughter]

Dorothy Hale (44:57)

I think there's three projects that we've assigned to you. You've got a monograph on influence, a whole thing about influence, you've got Girl Woman Other. So we've, we've, you know, and now this!

Alex Woloch (45:10)

You have a lot of homework!

Dorothy Hale (45:13)

And then can I also say Alex, you know when when you were reading my book and giving me comments and you pointed out you also said this in our, in the thing we just had, you said I that I refrain from actually doing hard readings, you know, of the novels that I'm more staging the issues, but I just got to tell you, I mean, you know, the other thing that I would like to write, as it were, but, you know, working on things like The Ambassadors, I would love to write a chapter, you know, just on The Ambassadors and do there what I did with Maisie, you know, so Coetzee's, you know, I could have done Waiting for the Barbarians, I could have done Disgrace. In fact, a slow start I got to the project is that I thought that I could the Coetzee chapter I was gonna do, like, five novels really, really deeply. And I thought, "Oh, my God. I'll be a hundred," you know, so. So I do feel for me, in terms of what else there is to say about it. I'd love to, I mean, not now, we're at the end. But I'd love to go deep into those novels and explain how this ethics of alterity is at stake in the thematics, as well as the specificity of the forms.

Margaret Cohen (46:23)

Well I think that's a great place to end even if it gives you a lot of work to do going forward, but we all look forward that. Thank you so much for joining us, Dory Hale. Thank you, Nancy, and Alex––Nancy Ruttenburg and Alex Woloch for being part of our conversation today.

Casey Wayne Patterson (46:47)

Thank you again for joining us in this episode of the Center for the Study of the Novel's podcast Cafe. We would also like to thank Dorothy Hale, Alex Woloch and Nancy Ruttenburg for their generosity in agreeing to this conversation. Thanks our team at the Center for the Study of the Novel: to An Truong Nguyen and Maritza Colon for their operational support. To our graduate coordinators, Victoria Zurita, Cynthia Giancotti and Casey Patterson. To Erik Fredner for editing, consultation and sound engineering, and to our host and director Margaret Cohen. The Center for the Study of the Novel is a subsidiary of the English Department at Stanford University.

Sharon Marcus on her Ian Watt Lecture from 10/30/20

Sharon Marcus; Margaret Cohen

Transcript for Sharon Marcus on her Ian Watt Lecture from 10/30/20, or read the full transcript below.

Casey Wayne Patterson (00:08)

Welcome, and thanks for joining us in this episode of Cafe, the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. In this installment, our host Margaret Cohen is joined by Sharon Marcus, following the delivery of her Ian Watt Lecture titled, "Reading As If For Death." Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and the author of The Drama of Celebrity, published in 2019 with Princeton University Press. This conversation was recorded on November 4 2020, and is our first episode since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We're thrilled to have resumed recording remotely, and to be sharing this conversation with you. So thank you again for listening in as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Margaret Cohen (00:58)

So we're going to post the lecture on the CSN website, and so since that lecture is there as content, I think it would be informative and appropriate to start with the topic of your lecture, which was incredibly moving and thought-provoking, spoke to me intellectually in terms of narrative, spoke to me about personal experiences I've had with people who are dying, and then with our larger cultural context of COVID. So in framing these questions, I was kind of debating between whether to go in through the door of narrative and different types of narrative temporality, or to go in through the personal, the experience of living with dying, which you so straightforwardly just kind of encouraged us to to consider. And I wonder if you have a preference as to which direction to start.

Sharon Marcus (02:02)

First, I'll start by saying the strange noises you're hearing are my cat, and you'll probably keep hearing them, since she seems very lively right now. I'm going to respond to that, Margaret, by saying I think that the questions of narrative and the personal questions of contending with my partner dying and the ways that inevitably made me think about my own relationship to death, my own death, not just the death of others, they're connected. So this talk was different than what I've usually written because it was more directly personal. I think everything I've ever written has been working through some kind of personal obsession or interest, or a place where my personal existence as a woman, as a lesbian, as someone who grew up in apartment houses, intersects with the larger culture. And certainly, the question of what it means to face death is--there's nothing more universal than that, although we don't all face death under the same circumstances. But, actually, let me back up. So I'll save for--I don't know if everyone listening to this will have listened to the talk first, but the talk is about a novel called On the Beach, where the premise is that there's been a nuclear war in the global North. It's set in Australia, when everyone in Australia is cut off from communication with the North, so the assumption is everyone in the North died as a result of a series of nuclear explosions. And they're in a situation of extreme certainty and uncertainty. The radiation is definitely coming towards them. What they can't know for certain is whether it will be lethal for everyone. There's some hope and some scientific basis for, at least, wondering whether it might dissipate as it comes along. So I feel like the novel has been talked about very rarely. When it's talked about, obviously, it's talked about in the context of fictions of nuclear war and apocalypse, but the novel's very anti-apocalyptic. It's very ordinary. It's set in, you know, suburbs near the large city of Melbourne. It's--everybody just goes about their business, waiting to see if they're going to die. And what was very striking for me when I read it is that the majority of the characters keep living exactly as they always have. Some are in denial. Some are not. But the commitment to everyday life among all of them, except one--it was very striking to me when I read it. And we usually think of everyday life as very anti-narrative, just the same thing all the time, repetition, routine, there's no development, there's no change. But what I noticed, both in the novel, but also in my life, and in my wife's life, as we were dealing with her almost certain death from a recurrence of cancer, was that part of what our same old, same old involved was almost an addiction to planning, whether it was planning what we would do the next day, or even planning what we might do in the future, if we had a future, even though we knew we probably didn't, because her chances of survival were almost zero. We pressed the oncologists about that when we first met with them at a critical juncture. They really don't like to answer the question, "how long does someone have to live?," because there's always a certain amount of uncertainty. And they hate to tell you you're gonna die, and then you don't. But you know, maybe you, like, spent all your money or something. And they also hate to tell you that you're not going to die, and then you do, so they just tend to say they don't know. But in fact, they do know what is very likely, and when we pressed them, they said that Ellis probably had 18 months to live. So there we were living in a situation very similar to the one of the characters in On the Beach, except it was different because we weren't in it together, in that one of us had 18 months to live. And Ellis was in a nursing program at the time doing a mid-career, a mid-life career change, she remained committed to that program--it felt like for her, there was no living if she couldn't think about having a future. And she sought out that future in any way she could, whether it was short-term, medium-term, long-term. The longer-term future plans were clearly, kind of, delusional, but the shorter-term plans made perfect sense. It's just the pleasure in planning--it was very striking to me that, I don't think human beings can live in the present. I think that we need to be able to project ourselves into the future. And that's an aspect that I'm still thinking through. So I guess, to answer your question, more succinctly, it feels to me like we think of death as the ultimate ending, and as therefore being very much about narrative. But of course, for the dying, it's not a satisfying closure. It's the end of all narrative. And I think that people often cope with the thought of death, or the reality of the fact that they are dying, by doubling down on what we might call micro-narratives. And everyday life is all about micro-narratives. And I think it's been a real lacuna or even error in the thinking around everyday life to think of it as being opposed to narrative. Maybe it's opposed to dramatic narrative. But there are all kinds of minor, non-dramatic narratives that nonetheless have a certain--they have an arc, we want that arc.

Margaret Cohen (07:43)

One aspect of narrative that your reading of the everyday helped me reframe was some of the adventure fiction that I work on, where routine is the backbone of the training that everybody receives in order to go out onto these perilous voyages, where the outcome very often is going to be death. I'm thinking, for example, of voyages in the Northwest Passage in the 17th century, when commanders would conceal from the crew exactly where they were going, so as not to have them lose heart or defect. But there, I never thought of that as everyday life. I thought of that as remarkable and extraordinary adventures in zones that people had not gone before, and that this--or Europeans--and that this focus on routine was a way to, kind of, make sure that a certain ethos of professionalism was maintained, and that everyone was always ready to contend with dangers that might come up. So one reframing that your talk did for me of this work and adventure fiction, was to think of it as maybe more about how we get through the everyday than seems apparent from all the decor and the trapping.

Sharon Marcus (09:09)

Yeah, well, I'll respond to the few things that were very noticeable to me in the novel I read, which has a submarine captain as one of the five main characters. So there's certainly that sense of a profession that is about using routines to contend with the unknown and the unexpected. So I think one thing about the everyday is that I think we tend to exaggerate the extent to which we really enjoy adventure, and the unusual, and the unexpected. We sort of--we like reading about it, because we're not experiencing it. And in fact, we like reading about it because we don't want to experience it, I would say. But when we're actually experiencing it, it's often quite dreadful and terrifying and disruptive and disconcerting, and we don't know how to handle it. I mean, we're recording this in the middle of a pandemic. And so I think a lot of us have seen [...] I mean, this is a world historic event we're living through. It's extremely disruptive. It's full of unknowns. I don't think we're enjoying it. I don't know too many people who are enjoying it. And I think one of the things that people don't enjoy about it is it's taken away our routines. It's taken away, also, what I might call our routinized mini-adventures, I keep talking about the mini and the micro, you know, like, I'm going to try a new restaurant. Well, not anymore. I'm going to go to a new play that I haven't seen before. So all of our--I think we tend to like novelty and risk in in very small doses. And we've been deprived of that. In the novel, what happens is that the characters, I think, are using routine both to stave off despair. But they're also--one of the things that I noticed, and I'm curious about how this works as a way to think differently about maritime adventure fiction--is that--so we tend to think of routines as habits, repetition, they're static, it's all about just always doing the same thing and almost fending off any kind of surprise or novelty. But what comes through in On the Beach with characters who are planting gardens and building fences and just trying to maintain their environment, their very, very small, local environment, is that a lot of what, in everyday life, we might call routine--washing the dishes--it's actually repair. We're constantly restoring a world that otherwise would be turning into chaos into something stable. So the stability is not static. The stability exists only because of creative, thoughtful labor that has to look and say, Well, this is about to crack. And this is about to crack. And this is about to go down the tubes, and how do I keep it all together. And I have not really seen that perspective on routine reflected in the humanities scholarship on everyday life. It tends to be more justification of a certain--of the mental energy that gets freed up by routines, as though routines themselves don't require mental energy. And again, just speaking to our COVID context, I think we've all learned how difficult it is to stick to a routine and just how much--you know, never mind that the routines themselves are repairing other things, like, we need to be constantly working on ourselves to hold to a routine. And that to me is part of what connects to what you're saying about life onboard a ship, that the routines are in place so that when the extraordinary happens, people can revert to something, because, as we know, it's very hard to think in an emergency, to evoke an Elaine Scarry term. And you need to have prepared yourself for the expected unexpected. But also everything that's going on on that ship is--I'm relating to this as I live out this pandemic in a 500 square foot apartment that I, kind of, though was supposed to be transitional and the transition's lasting a very long time--so to keep a small space in shipshape, it's an endless, loving labor. And I don't think it's the same thing every day. I think there's some things you do every day. But there are also things that pop up that you have to contend with. And so again, there's more narrative dynamism to something whose end product is stability and stasis then we would recognize. And I see that as something a narrative can tell us about, because one thing that narratives do is almost like accordions, they can take something that's been very compacted, like, "Oh, these people just live in a suburb and nothing really happens," and the accordion can open and you can see all the things that have to happen to create that aura of nothing happening.

Margaret Cohen (14:25)

Repair is an incredibly helpful concept, I think, and it certainly--it speaks to so much of the work on-ship which is just preserving, you know, wood and hemp from the damage of this incredibly hostile environment. So, you know, maybe one thing that resonates from COVID and what we--how learning about everyday life, that also for me does resonate with the the shipboard work is that our environment is hostile. It's like the ocean. It's got endless possibilities maybe, but it's also ready to destroy us. And that work of repair is really critical for us to just survive from day to day. And maybe I could use this to pivot to, I think, something that was running through the talk which you didn't bring out, but it's there: the heroic existentialist notion of being as defined by being towards the horizon of death, because I think of the ocean as this very grand-, kind of, scale phenomenon. And I think of the existentialistsas sort of operating in this grandeur about our actions. And I wonder if the novel and your talk speaks to the idea of existence as being defined in this being towards death, and really challenges that in a very vigorous way.

Sharon Marcus (15:51)

Existentialism was on my mind when I was rereading the novel and thinking about writing more extensively about it. It's published in 1957, so it's definitely a moment when existentialism was on everyone's mind. I mean, you can have a musical like Funny Face, where they're evoking existential--you know, a cliche parody of existentialism. So, I think it's safe to say that Nevil Shute was probably aware of some kind of existentialism-lite, at the very least, and possibly had even read Camus or some major Sartre texts. And so I talked quite a bit in a lecture about On the Beach being a middlebrow book. It's commercial fiction. Shute started life as a engineer. He had a brother he lost, I think, in World War One, who he always referred to as the real artist. So he wasn't one of these, sort of, aggressively proud middlebrow authors, like, "I don't go in for that high art stuff." He just felt he couldn't do the high art, but there was something to be said for what he could do. And he was fairly modest about the limits of his abilities. But he was also a very popular author. On the Beach sold 3 million copies within a few years. But he wrote many other novels that in his day were very high-selling, I think, like, call it Commonwealth fiction. He emigrated to Australia from England, so he was a very popular Australian author. And, even in Australia, I think he was not one of the literati. And he's not part of their high art canon. But he, he helped to define also Australia in literature as sometimes only an immigrant can do. And I think that he is offering a more anti-heroic version of the existential drama around death. I don't know that it is as pointed as a critique. But I think that where existentialism says, you know, everyone should assume their death and, like, live each moment as though you're going to die, and, given death, you can only find meaning by creating it yourself, refusing the transcendence of religion, but there is a very--there is a transcendence of the subject. I think Shute is saying like, "yeah, sure, why not? If you can do that, but most people can't, and won't, and don't." And, on the one hand, because the book is about nuclear apocalypse, there is-you know, the war isn't started by people in Australia who can't face up to reality. But I do think that part of what he's saying is people's inability to really think through the consequences of nuclear weapons and people's inability to really understand for themselves--"I am going to die. My life is finite."--is part of what produced nuclear war. If people were more able to really take in their own deaths, if there had been more of a mass protest about the proliferation of nuclear weapons--that is, I think, a powerfully understated way of being a, quote unquote, message of the book, and he thought of it as a book with a message. I value this novel as a literary experiment in having people facing death in ways that are really unusual, but therefore very representative. So everyone's going to die. The way he has it set up, no one is going to survive. So, in some ways, it's unrealistic because in life, we don't all die at the same time and the differences between those of us who are, like, immediately dying, and those of us who assume we're going to live for a lot longer end up being really important in every individual's experience of their own death or of a friend or family member's death. But what happens instead is the sheer commonality of death, which is a really important aspect of it, is built into the plot. And what he ends up suggesting seems to me not at all the existentialist way, which is people are just--I feel like I repeated this a few times in the talk, because it's repeated in the novel--people just keep doing what they've always done. The imminence of death does not make most of them engage in in this kind of existentialist assumption of their own mortality. But rather than only criticize their denial, as, for example, contributing to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, I think he has a certain, I'm going to call it, very humane acceptance of it. And I found that very instructive, because it is really--now I'll get a little more personal, but it's really difficult--I think a lot of people, when they're dying, do not want to recognize that they're dying, and that's very important to them. And it's very hard for the people around them. It is one thing I learned living with someone who had cancer twice, and so we had to talk about it to all our friends and family members is--people have a lot of equanimity about other people's deaths, and almost no equanimity about their own. And I don't mean that in a critical way, it's just--well, maybe I'm slightly critical of it, because I could have done without some of the things I had to hear people say. But it's just how we are. And so I think that it's very difficult to say that someone refusing to face reality is okay. I think that there's, you know, there's almost nothing that--anybody who values truth, and realism--I mean, maybe, maybe if I were somebody who is more invested in fantasy, whether it's in literature or in life, I would be saying something different. But I certainly found it hard to accept how difficult it was for my partner to just accept what was happening. She never really did, in my opinion, at least not around--and I think that part of what I had to learn, was to accept her lack of acceptance. And to accept that all that mattered to her was till the last possible moment to hold out the hope that she would be cured, that she would live a little bit longer, and then there'd be some other treatment that might work. And the less and less likely that became, the more intense she became on thinking that. And some of the ways also that she shut out what was happening was just as--this is to return to what we were saying earlier--was to make these plans, to make plans about what she was writing, to make plans about what she was doing with her nursing program--which she eventually had to stop doing, because her health didn't allow her to do it anymore. So I feel like the existential narrative is, like, we have all got to face our deaths. And I think that the Shute narrative is: we are not all going to face our deaths. And is there a way to accept that? And build--let's call it, an everyday quotidian philosophy around that.

Margaret Cohen (23:51)

It strikes me as a very fruitful, kind of, line of thought. I feel torn. I kind of want to talk a little bit more about On the Beach. I want to make sure I ask you about other current projects and share with our audience something of your career, and then to follow up on this. So I was surprised in the question thread that nothing about climate fiction came up. Because it seems to me that the Shute approach to trying to make people aware of this impending catastrophe, and try to rouse them to action, really resonates with some of the ways in which people are approaching climate change. Today, I was just reading The Overstory, for example, which I think would be, you know, a novel about trying to, kind of, raise collective consciousness about our need to address climate change. And I wonder if the fact that Shute's strategy didn't work, in terms of sensitizing people to nuclear warfare, if that suggests that maybe we need other strategies to address climate change, and--I guess, I mean, just to cut to the chase, what can literature or narrative bring to our current climate crisis?

Sharon Marcus (25:03)

So, first of all, I would not assume that On the Beach didn't sensitize people. It was one of the most-read books about nuclear war. And I think the everydayness of it really brought things home to people, that this, this could happen, and this is what it would look like now. The ordinariness makes it hard to distance yourself from it. So I think that that's something to think about in terms of climate fiction. But I have to say that seeing--living through a period where people are told something as simple as, wearing a mask would reduce your chance and the chance of others of getting a disease that for many people is deadly, not just unpleasant, or it can lead to chronic illness, and people don't want to wear a mask--we would think that narrative could help people imagine the consequences of our individual and collective actions. And it can. But people's ability to then apply that in our actual lives in even the simplest ways is so limited, that I think the real question here is not so much about "what would happen in the fiction?" It's, "when does fiction get people to change, not just their minds, but their behaviors?" Can we look at examples in the past, where fiction actually got people to change their behavior? And is there anything we can learn from that, that we could apply to climate fiction? But I'm inclined to think that, at this point in our cultural lives, if anything can get people to act differently, it's not going to be only a text, it's going to have to involve visuals, sound, it's going to be short, not long, it's going to have to be able to go viral. It's not going to be a novel.

Margaret Cohen (27:04)

Well, let me use your title of your talk to pivot to, I think, what's an abiding interest in your career and ask you about that: reading (as if for death). Reading is just--it's a thread throughout a lot of your work. And I wonder if you have, like, a kind of scene of reading that that you associate with your biography, or, you know, something that kind of got you interested in reading?

Sharon Marcus (27:28)

I started reading very early. I had parents who were very invested in my intelligence, I think I would say, which, as a girl, I think was a great boon. Probably uncommon for--if I think back to my friends and their parents. So my mother got me reading early. Books were everywhere. My father was a kind of obsessive collector of mostly paperbacks, so the house was overloaded with books and I--they were grown-up things that I was maybe not always supposed to touch the grown-up books. So that was fascinating, because they were forbidden fruit. And I was taken to the library a lot. I've never really thought about this before, but if I were to think of a sort of primal reading situation, rather than a specific book or a specific scene, and how it anticipates how I've spent my life, it would be just being let loose in a relatively small public library. Both the children's section which was--it was a two story library, kind of a very, like, 50s, 60s buildings, so very horizontal. I was allowed to pretty much do whatever I wanted in there. And I really liked looking at all the different sections. And I think there was something about a library that was small enough--it was the antithesis of a university library. I mean, it wasn't organized exactly according to the Dewey Decimal System, because there was--the recent books were their own thing, the large print books, which I found really fascinating, were their own thing. I think you could basically see the entire classification system on one floor, and I really liked wandering around. And I think that that has kind of characterized me. I mean, I just feel so lucky that we can do this in academia, that, even as I've always been very firmly situated in 19th century French and British culture, with a real interest in the novel and a real interest in gender and sexuality, I have this sense of being allowed to go anywhere, and I think it's from that library, where I could in, you know, two feet, go from books about movies to books about elephants.

Margaret Cohen (29:48)

Is Public Books your library for--?

Sharon Marcus (29:51)

That's a nice way to think about it. So, just for context, Public Books is an online magazine of arts and ideas that I co-founded with anthropologist Cate Zaloom of NYU in 2012. And, when we started it, I think what was primarily on our minds was that newspapers were starting to devote less and less space to book reviewing, that the main reviews, the main newspaper reviews, were less and less interested in reviewing academic books, or allowing academics to review anything, academic or non-academic books. And that some of the publications that did give academics more of a space to roam freely and to talk about what's being published in the moment, were very conservative. I commuted to and from Columbia University, and the subway platform had a newsstand, and given that it was the Columbia University station, there were always a lot of copies of the New York Review of Books. And if I wanted to make sure that I'd be kind of annoyed for at least two or three stops, I knew I could always go look at the cover of The New York Review of Books and be like, oh, everything is, like, a man writing about a man. And, oh, they let that one woman write about a man. I mean, and this is, like, you know, in 2010. It just felt so backward. And even some of the more exciting, newer publications would have a very limited set of authors writing for them. And so we felt there were a lot of academics who could write for a larger public and about broader topics then were being given outlets. And so we thought of Public Books as a place where people from outside the academy could go and read essays that felt like being in school again. I feel like what happens with Public Books is academics read the essays, and they're like, "Oh, that was so great, it was so breezy. It was like reading something in the New Yorker"--which it rarely is, but it feels more open and free-flowing to them. And people who are not in the academy go into the essays and they feel like, "Oh, that was so intense. That was a real intellectual workout." And that's exactly what we wanted to have happen. We saw it as a way to help give people a chance to write for a broader public for the first time, because we offered a lot--I'm speaking in the past tense, because I actually stepped down as editor-in-chief this year to be able to focus on other things. But all of what I'm saying continues to be true for the new editors. It--we're very editorially active at public books, so we don't--I think some of these other places, they want you to know how to do this kind of writing if you're going to write for them. And that's understandable, but it does naturally limit who can publish with them, whereas we saw ourselves as working with people, going through many drafts, having a real editorial back and forth, but not just telling people, "make it more lively" or "make it..." But really showing them how to do it and going through several drafts. And I think we have brought a lot of people into this kind of writing who, not only had never done it before, but would not have felt that they could take that leap on their own even if they wanted to, and that that was great, and I think there are a lot more publications like Public Books now. It was something that a lot of--it was one of these things where several, like at almost exactly the same moment, several things sprouted up, like The Conversation, Aeon, LARB, Public Books, that were kind of similar, and it's great. Also taking advantage of the relative rapidity and lower costs of being online. Everybody thinks that when you publish online, that they can send you their piece, and it will be up the next week. Not true. And it's also not cheap. You have to maintain a website, and websites don't just create themselves. But it's definitely easier than having a print edition that you have to get out in a very different way, and with mailing costs and things like that. So I think that it is kind of a golden age right now of intellectual magazines, kind of like the 50s, and it's wonderful to have been part of that.

Margaret Cohen (34:11)

Yeah, Public Books has really been amazing to watch since 2012, when you started it and, you know, now it's just like a reference. It's got a real authority in the field, which is, I think, a tribute to what you built. Well, I want to make sure that we talk about a book which was particularly important for me, which was Between Women. I think it just showed me how much I had censored myself as a reader throughout my whole life from the time I read Little Women, you know, to not notice the relationships among women as so powerful in fiction that I love to read about women's lives, daily lives, you know, from Jane Austen on through Virginia Woolf. And it was just like, you know, the scales fell from my eyes and I thought, oh my gosh, I just sort of ignored it because it, sort of, seemed not contributing to the main, you know, biographical arc of the heroine finding her partner or her husband and, you know, getting married and establishing herself. I wonder if you could pick a novel which you would recommend to someone listening to this podcast, that would be a kind of a great example for connecting to Between Women,

Sharon Marcus (35:25)

I'm gonna try and come up with two, one, sort of, like a usual suspect one and one that is more obscure. One of the things I discovered when I was thinking about the chapter in Between Women that's about the marriage plot was that, although a lot of the criticism that was closest to my heart focused on the marginalization of relationships between women, that in fact, those relationships aren't marginalized. I mean, they're marginalized in the sense that it's very hard to find a classic 19th century realist novel that's, that's read widely where the two women end up being the couple. But, once we set that aside as our standard of what it would mean for there to be intimacy--because I don't think that's a very realistic standard, it would require that every 19th century novel basically be a lesbian romance, and, you know, to this day, when we have many more out lesbians than there were in the 19th century, there's still not that many novels that have a lesbian romance at their center. But if instead we focus on friendship on its own terms, rather than friendship as failing to turn into a romantic sexual couple, the female friends were everywhere. A classic example would be Jane Eyre. And sometimes it--there's a bit of blurring between female friendship and certain kinds of extended familial relationships. But Jane really only resolves her romance plot with Rochester when she acquires two female cousins. So, in the plot, everybody always focuses on how St. John Rivers proposes to her and she turns him down. But the strength that she gets from having friendships with his sisters is very, very important to her. And even though they kind of like to see her marry him, they're also understanding of the fact that this isn't what will satisfy her and having--not just having the inheritance that she gets by knowing them, but the friendship with them, is, it's both circumstantially and coincidentally very important. So it turns out, when you go back and you read these classic 19th century courtship plots, it's almost always the case that female heroine who ends up happily married has a female friend. Sometimes it's stronger, like the female friend plays a pivotal role in the friendship, but it's really almost always the case. And so Jane Eyre is an example of where, it would be very easy to not see that because the friendships are often good friendships precisely because they lack the Sturm und Drang of the romance. And so it's easy to overlook that they're there and that they're providing a kind of foundation. A novel that I think deserves to be read more that also illustrates this is Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook, 1830s novel. And it is--it's a novel actually about contagion and plague and medicine. But it is also a novel about the complicated relationship between two sisters and a third woman who plays an important role in their plot. And, not surprisingly, many of these novels are by women. Men are much less interested in relationships between women than women are. I would also say that canonical novels tend to play a--by which, I guess, we could rephrase as, the novels that the culture at large, particularly in the 1950s and 60s, when our canon was being formed in the academy, they tend to be much more taken up with novels that foreground female rivalry, because people are very invested in the idea that women are at odds with each other and competing over men, because it maintains the notion that men are the bearers of value. And so, you know, novels like Portrait of a Lady--I'll try to avoid a spoiler here, because it might be that people don't know how that turns out--but there's a female friendship that turns out to be not at all friendly, right? It's a pure manipulation. That said, Isabel Archer is also very good friends with Henrietta Stackpole. And though James, no real friend to the ladies, I don't think,at the end of the day, is very scathing about Henrietta Stackpole's feminism, and he makes fun of her, but it is pretty clear that, sort of, the only shot that Isabel Archer has at a happy conclusion to her romance plot is going to come from her knowing and being connected to Henrietta Stackpole. But I do think that some of our most famous novels set themselves apart from the norm by showing women being somewhat at odds with each other. So in Emma, for example, I think Jane Austen is--who is a satirist at heart, is sardonic about some of the chestnuts about female friendship and Emma can really only realize her friendship plot if she separates herself from the female friend that she has. And I think that's a real thread in literature, but I see it as the aberration, not the norm. It just looks like the norm because of how we form our canons.

Margaret Cohen (40:45)

Okay, I'm going to go look at Harriet Martineau. I don't know that novel.

Sharon Marcus (40:49)

It's very long, but it's really good.

Margaret Cohen (40:52)

Well, I'm looking for long novels. I find it's a good way to get through COVID and not-- like to read a novel before bed instead of checking on my phone, whether it's the COVID statistics or, last night and this morning, you know, how many votes there are outstanding in Pennsylvania and where we are, is, is really therapeutic.

Sharon Marcus (41:16)

If people are looking for recommendations of novels to read I'm just going to say that one of my great discoveries during my pandemic reading has been Eva Ibbotson. I-B-B-O-T-S-O-N. Imagine Barbara Kim crossed with P. G. Wodehouse with just a little sprinkling of fairy tale dust. And you've got Eva Ibbotson novels--a Viennese refugee who, in real life, who made it to England, I assume, as part of some kind of Kindertransport. She was from a, at least, partially Jewish family and then became a real British writer, but she often evokes Russia and Austria, sort of, between the wars or after the Bolshevik Revolution. And she's really interested in refugees and emigres and outcasts, but she has such a light touch, and it's just so--it's perfect. It, like, flows really easily, really helps you forget all the stuff that's happening for a brief moment. But it's not pure escapism, and she's really got a great eye for the vivid detail and looking at things just a little bit aslant. She's incapable of writing a cliched sentence, even though some of her topics are a little cliche, like romance. So if you want a balance between escapism and something really artful, I really recommend Eva Ibbotson.

Margaret Cohen (42:43)

Thank you. You know, we're coming up to the top of the hour, to use NPR language, and we haven't yet talked about surface reading, and we haven't talked about Sarah Bernhardt and The Drama of Celebrity, but I'm just gonna maybe end in a personal way with one thing that I know about you, that I really appreciate, is that you, you are very interested in satire and humor. And I remember watching an Adam Sandler movie with you, in fact, at an academic conference, which seems so transgressive and at the same time very pleasurable, so I wonder if you've thought of working on humor.

Sharon Marcus (43:17)

I've sometimes thought of teaching a class on humor, but of course, humor is very hard to analyze. I keep a shelf of books that I consider my stylistic beacons and easily 80% of them are humor like Nora Ephron. I mean, I'm not giving up any of my digits, but I might give that part of my left pinky, I'd have to talk to someone about which finger you need the most, to be able to write just one thing that was funny and fluid as what Nora Ephron wrote. I mean, there are other people on that shelf, Joan Didion is on that shelf. I love the writer, Gayl Jones, who is actually quite funny, but is has a bleaker view of things. But I also think that the the humorous and the bleak often coincide. And I definitely think that it is much harder to be a comic author than to be a serious author. And, I would over all––and I don't think anyone who knows me would disagree––say that I'm a sort of pessimistic, realistic person, but I don't see my pessimism doesn't make me want to stop living or stop trying. Like look, things aren't so great. Maybe, maybe it's a cultural thing. But I, I just always prefer the the light and the bouyant and the funny. So I'll take Ella Fitzgerald over Billie Holiday any day and I know that many people would disagree with me both temperamentally and even from the point of view of musicality by just don't care, like Ella Fitzgerald, to achieve that kind of lightness––everything she sings sounds kind of fun and happy and I don't think it's because she herself was...I've read a lot about her, she wasn't a person who had an easy, fun life or who didn't look at the full range of what's going on in the world––but to be able to contend with the grim realities that surround us and still find some humor and lightness, and it seems to me the greatest skill and achievement, whether in art or life.

Margaret Cohen (45:24)

I think that that is a path forward, if not hope. Anyway. It's just been really, really great to talk to you. I can't wait to see you in person one of these days. I'm so sorry, we haven't been able to welcome you to Stanford.

Sharon Marcus (45:40)

Well, thank you for doing this. And thank you for making this whole event feel as real and connected as possible right now.

Casey Wayne Patterson (46:00)

Thank you again for joining us in this episode of the Center for the Study of the Novel's podcast, Cafe. We would also like to thank Sharon Marcus for her generosity and agreeing to this conversation. Thanks also to our team at the Center for the Study of the Novel: to An Truong Nguyen and Maritza Colon for their operational support. To our graduate coordinators, Victoria Zurita, Cynthia Giancotti, and Casey Patterson. To Erik Fredner, for editing, consultation and sound engineering. And to our host and director Margaret Cohen. The Center for the Study of the Novel is a subsidiary of the English Department at Stanford University.

Fashion Stories: Emily Apter, Rhonda Garelick, and Anne Higonnet on the Cultural History of Clothing

Emily Apter; Rhonda Garelick; Anne Higonnet; Margaret Cohen

Fashion Stories: Emily Apter, Rhonda Garelick, and Anne Higonnet on the Cultural History of Clothing (1/9/20), or read the full transcript below.

Casey Wayne Patterson (00:08)

Welcome, and thanks for joining us in this episode of Cafe, the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. In this installment, our host Margaret Cohen is joined by guests Emily Apter, Rhonda Garelick, and Anne Higonnet to discuss the relation between fashion as a social skin and modernity. Emily Apter is the Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at NYU. Rhonda Garelick is Dean of the Parsons School of Design at the New School. Anne Higonnet is a professor of Art History and Archaeology at Barnard College. This conversation was recorded on January 9 2020, shortly before our guests gave papers and a panel titled "Fashion Stories." After Margaret asks her question, Rhonda answers first, then Emily, then Anne. We're thrilled to be sharing this conversation with you, so thank you again for listening in as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Margaret Cohen (01:02)

I'm really interested in your papers, that you all brought up some aspect of classicism or neoclassicism, when you sent me the paper topics, and I'm wondering, is there a spirit of the time or were you talking to each other or what might have inspired that?

Rhonda Garelick (01:19)

Well, I actually changed my paper topic after some conferring with our colleagues. And I realized that we had all been thinking about fashion and classicism and I had not planned to do this paper, but then hearing from the others, I realized it was more appropriate. And I've been thinking about classism in fashion, and neo-Hellenism in particular for a while. And my take on it has everything to do with that social justice aspect of fashion that you and I were talking about before, which is that, I think Greek...stories, let's call it, but we're talking about Greek drama, and myth, are a part of our DNA, in a way, in the Western world anyway, right. And I think we react to politics, through story and through fashion. And for me, fashion has a kind of Pantheon, and a series of narratives that are deep in us that we express whether we realize it or not. And it's a kind of everyday person's mythology. And for me, that's the beginning of the conversation about the accessibility of fashion studies, which I think is a democratic thing. And it is part of my teaching, but it's also part of my writing work as a journalist, in addition to being a scholar, I feel it reaches a wider audience and includes many more people, especially many more women, in important conversation.

Emily Apter (02:37)

I actually saw a catalog a big book called Goddess. And this is, of course, one of the mythologies that you grew up with. But I was also interested in the structure of pleats. And so one, one of the things I'm going to be talking about today has to do with that, but, I'll say a bit more, but drapery, pleats, how that gets kind of imprinted on fabric.

Anne Higonnet (03:06)

In a ways we're echoing what Rhonda was saying, fashion is cyclical, we all know that. And this beginning of a cycle that is deeply embedded in our ideas about time, is the story of ancient Greece. And so I think often, when there's a very big social change, which fashion expresses, you get a return to some version of that ancient Greek story. And part of what I'm looking forward to in our talks is that we're each talking about a different cycle, in which the ancient Greek story is invoked. And to pick up on what Emily was saying, in a way the, the metaphor of the pleat, I think, is a very good one to add to the metaphor of the cycle, because we, we sort of keep pleating, that story of, of classicism in new and different ways.

Margaret Cohen (04:10)

What about the body? I mean, I feel if you ask me, "What are things you associate with classicism," I would bring up democracy and the [...], I would bring up myth and story. And I would certainly think about the celebration of the human body, which, in the 21st century, here we are in Silicon Valley in the age of AI, all sorts of cyborgs. I wonder if that doesn't have something that is at some way at stake.

Emily Apter (04:40)

So I actually will be discussing this a little bit more in my paper. But one of the things that interests me is the way in which stone drapery becomes a kind of embodied materialism. And I was also reading an essay by Brooke Holmes. I don't know if you've come across her work. She did a catalog––or I guess it was a collected volume, called Liquid Antiquity, which is quite wonderful and it doesn't deal with fashion, but the, the whole way in which time is pleated in, but it becomes a form of embodied materiality, that sculpture was––created this miracle, which is stone drapery. How do you really do that? How do you create an impression of fabric? And then it goes on from there, is it a kind of skin? So I think we can get into the way neoclassical fashion in the 19th century, plays around with the proximity, first of all have a kind of organ or nudity that comes through the cloth because the cloth is gossamer or its fabric. But then it's also in a sense, like a Greek body, that is both perfect and polished, so there's the rough and the smooth that come into this, the the qualities of, of a kind of sculptural embodiment, which is transforming. So the the other question is mutation. And I've actually been thinking that using the work of the trans artist named Cassils, who creates an embodied... first there's a kind of relationship to stone, there's a struggle with the clay stone, but for his––they's––body is also slicked in clay. And so there's this mutational sense of, of stone as a medium of sort of walking statuary. And it gets into these questions of the way antiquity tries to, to philosophize, embodied materialism, or materialities. And fashion is a form of frozen drapery or a kind of body form. It both mutates, but it also has this peculiar sort of arrested quality.

Rhonda Garelick (06:44)

It's really funny that you are talking about that particular kind of material body, embodiment of fashion, because today I'm going to be talking about Martha Graham's famous piece Lamentation, which you may remember has a solo dancer, enrobed in an elastic tube, essentially, which then becomes her second skin. And the dance is a series of geometric three dimensional forms that she makes spheres and triangles, as the dancer dances with and struggles under this tight elasticized fabric, and it winds up suggestive of both birth and death, and any number of struggles in between. And when Margaret said a moment ago, something about the resonance of fashion with democracy and the current moment, I think it's important to remember that fashion, neo-Hellenic fashion, is very connected also to fascism, not just democracy, and the vogue for Hellenistic aesthetics during the rise of fascism in the middle of the 20th century, I think has some connection to why we're having this conversation now. And I've been thinking a lot about the current political moment globally, but also, especially at home. And although I, I'm sad always to bring up the name of the current president, I think of Donald Trump in a way, and I say this, with all due respect to the transgender community and not sound––I want to put every caveat on this at first––but there is something transgender about the current president, in that I believe he invokes certain codes of traditional femininity, but harnesses them in a spectacularly damaging way that I think has to do with fashion and has to do with women and has to do with classical architecture and everything else we're talking about, in a kind of negative evil inverse of other movements.

Emily Apter (08:45)

That's, that's a lot to try to get my head around but one thing, and we promise we won't dwell on Trump, but there's a kind of back to the 80s feeling of the trophy woman, the woman has gigantic shoulders, a lot of flash and glam and the, in a sense, the the rise of a certain figure who's come back, roaring back, like a nightmare from from the 1980s, bringing with it the, all kinds of codes around predation and, and what you can get away with, and this in some ways goes against the, what for me classical the classical turn in fashion historically represents, which is something more to do with fluid clothing on bodies that have been freed from corsetry, that have been––so it may be an idealized democracy or a kind of idealized sense of a goddess being someone who is free––the Athena model––who is free, but it seems to me that the, this gets reproduced in the fortuny gowns of the very early, the 20th century, early 20th century. Where, you know, we're getting away from, from the S-curve into something that is more free flow and less conventionally defined. But with the political marking for me of the 80s was something that was, it could be classical in the sense that there were these gold robes and sort of regal costuming, but that the the hyper structure of it somehow re-corseted the woman in them as opposed to...I mean, it's complicated because it was also when women were massively entering the workforce. So all of these things, go, I think, go to show you that there's no way one way to read a fashion style.

Anne Higonnet (10:44)

Well classicism has always been very gendered. So the statuary ideal of the ancient Greek man is the revealed body, the classical ideal of the woman is simultaneously revealed and masked ,or pleated, encased in some kind of gown that in the form of statuary becomes really hard and rigid. And, and those two opposing poles I think, are usually in play when classicism comes back. And it's often very liberatory, as you say, the neoclassicism of the French Revolution, or the fortuny dress, or the Martha Graham. But then there's always the reaction against that, the horrified reaction against that which expresses the revelation of the body as a kind of terrifying nudity, which has to be ...has to be turned back.

Emily Apter (11:44)

So I have a question for you, Margaret, what was behind your idea for this panel, when you were what was the inspiration for it?

Margaret Cohen (11:51)

To put my cards on the table, I wanted to do a panel at the Center with a feminist subject. And I thought long and hard about how to bring people in who would, given people's complicated relationship, which is totally mystifying to me, but to the word "feminism," who would come to such a panel without having any kind of negative reaction to it. And I thought about, the first thing that was on my mind was sexual assault, was consent, was Me Too, to try to think about some sort of a panel about Me Too in the novel. And of course, one of the things that the entire 19th century novel as one long Me Too, you know. But then I... it felt very assertive and confrontational. And, you know, I wanted to think of a topic that would bring up feminist issues of empowerment, but––and and constraint, both––but not discourage people from coming. And so that was how I ended up with fashion.

Rhonda Garelick (12:57)

I'm so glad that you shared that, frankly, with us, because I don't know about my colleagues, but even now, I get blowback about some of the topics I choose to write about, both in the academic setting and commercially, which all suggests that there's something shameful, something lesser, something embarrassing about taking seriously fashion in any way. And so the idea that fashion, as a topic, would be more acceptable, is, it's almost funny to me, because it's so often the subject of ridicule, or dismissiveness. So, that feminism would be too objectionable, but fashion might sneak it in, reproduces in some way, the, the idea that there's something sneaky about fashion, but in a jujitsu move, we can harness that, right. And one thing I said to Margaret earlier is that I grew more passionate about taking this seriously as a big part of my writing life, when I started giving talks around the country about my last book, which was a sort of political study of Coco Chanel. And I would speak to women's clubs and museum patrons and luncheon groups and all kinds of non-academic groups largely composed of women. And I would get grandmothers and granddaughters and sisters and college roommates. And they would rush up and tell me how much they loved thinking about this topic together, how they, you know, read a book and book club together or how they knew it was important to talk about these things, but no one had told them it was and so their husbands or fathers or boyfriends had made fun of them. And they felt suddenly this was a safe place where they could indulge something greatly pleasurable to them, but also feel empowered that they were always already thinking about something meaningful. And to think of––and my students respond similarly, and I have many students officially studying fashion as graduate students and they tell me, their family and friends deride them for this, and so it's a strange way of telling, not just women, but largely women, that what you're already thinking seriously about matters. And you matter. And what you do every day to present yourself to the world is not a secret that you need be ashamed of, but something that is worthy of real intellectual consideration.

Anne Higonnet (12:59)

Yeah well, I think you're touching on two really important things that can only now be said. So one of them is that clothing is something that everybody puts on every single day, or maybe two or three or four times a day. So it's a subject of aesthetics and design that affects every single person on the planet. And then the gender component is that I think many women, and maybe some men, too, are looking back on the history of fashion. And instead of sweating the small stuff, like the rise and fall of the hemlines, they're thinking about really big issues, like the women who within the bounds that were set, were tremendously creative and inventive. And in, in the history of fashion, there are many untold stories of tremendously, tremendously creative, original women.

Emily Apter (16:19)

I got very interested in the clothing designs of Claude Cahun, who was in the 20s, she, there's a, there's a fantastic photograph of her in partial profile mirrored in a black and white checked coat, which of course, in context, she invented many costumes. She was a photographer and kind of performance artists and kind of Cindy Sherman avant la lettre, her but what, what was intriguing too is to––it embarked me on thinking about geometries, and the use of modernist geometries, where instead of women being part of a decor that was decorative, it was combined with a new approach to structure. So I mentioned the S-curve before, but these were often boxy, or they were trousers, sometimes they were borrowed cultural influences that, that were linked to folk art or to masked figures or to dance or, but the point is that they were going way outside the frame of reference of strict fashion evolution. These were developments that were happening as aesthetically that we're both inside a kind of mainstream fashion history and outside of it in that they took their impetus much more from, say, corbusien modernism: white walls, interior design, there was something–– and then of course, we can evoke the name of Sonia Delaunay, whose treatments of fabric––and it's of course, also a commonplace that so many women who couldn't get a foothold in, as major artists, were, earned money or gained recognition through through fashion design or textile design, Anni Albers, and the list goes on and on. But it was interesting to me that there's this kind of geometric feminism that is also non-binary. It's not something that breaks down easily. So it isn't just a question of volumetrism, or the use of camouflage and the dazzle as a, the borrowing of military onto a woman's body, but that it was actually something, an embrace of something abstract that was kind of brainy as opposed to...it became a kind of wearable art, which which has seen another trajectory and through many decades with Commes des Garcons, with, you know, all kinds of approaches to volume to, to geometries, to how how bodies look degendered in any familiar way.

Anne Higonnet (18:49)

As soon as you abandon derogatory labels, like "decorative," and you start to think about what happens within fashion history and what women have done within fashion history, you realize that they're reinventing the body over and over again, and they're always pushing at the boundary between masculinity and femininity, acceptable and unacceptable gender, and in a way, like, what more more important topic could there be?

Rhonda Garelick (19:21)

No, I agree. And I'm sorry, Margaret go ahead.

Margaret Cohen (19:26)

No, I was just going to bring into dialogue, I think two different ways your answers have have pulled: one is towards reinvention, embodiment, creativity and ability to make a place for yourself in a patriarchal society. And then the other direction, which I think you spoke to in the the comments you made about our president and his use of women and fashion, is as a way to constrain to confine to put up you know, a kind of normalization that is very disempowering.

Anne Higonnet (19:59)

Action and reaction, action and reaction, over and over.

Rhonda Garelick (20:02)

It's true. And yet I have another strange twist on that, because I'm not just thinking about the women of the current administration, although I spend a lot of time thinking about their presentation and the aesthetics of the so called, the Trump women look, and there's a group called the "Trumpettes." I have a photo I can show you later of this group of Mar a Lago matrons who wear beauty pageant style sashes with the word "Trumpette" on them, but that's a separate and fascinating, fascinating topic. But I'm interested––

Emily Apter (20:32)

Isn't that just the Fox News Look?

Rhonda Garelick (20:34)

It is except that a lot of these ladies are in their 70s and are sort of reconstructed, surgically, prosthetically, cosmetically, to resemble the Fox looks, or Fembot look, sort of deuxieme degree and it's a fascinating connection to the Doris Duke estate and the kind of inherited privilege they're trying to simulate for the president and through the president, but I'm interested also in what happens when a male strong man wannabe, adopts certain feminine grooming practices quite spectacularly and dares the world to notice. Paints himself with makeup, visibly dyes his hair badly, has a soft, fleshy body, while still performing a kind of uber-masculinity. I don't think those things are discussed enough. And while there is this cadre of pilatified showgirl type women around him, he seems to me the inverse, the excess the the bounty that is being refused to those women. And I think that has a lot to do––I think it's a 21st century reproduction of a kind of fascistic aesthetic from an earlier time when we had Mussolini and we had camps for athletics for young men. And I'm very interested in the inverted relationship of Trump's feminized grooming habits, and the women around him, which are now all around us, Fox News, and there were films about them and so forth. I'm very interested in the classical body, not just the draped body, but the masculine, beautiful, fascistic Aryan body. And its inverse in 21st century politics, particularly in America right now.

Anne Higonnet (22:25)

Well we're at a very important turning point, I think in the history of fashion, in which all gender codes are being scrambled. And they're not all being scrambled in the same way. So there's Trump, of course there are transgender communities, but there are also phenomena like hyper masculine sports stars, male sports stars, who are dressing with a kind of flash and texture and color, which we haven't seen in masculine costume for a long time. So there are changes happening in the gender codes, not just on the left wing, progressive fringes of society. But I think you're right Rhonda, in all kinds of unexpected places and ways, in many marginal but also many very central pockets of society.

Rhonda Garelick (23:30)

I feel that very much. And I wonder if it has anything to do with the advances and changes in reproduction, biology and science, medicine. We talked about this a little bit last night, people's bodies, the limits of our bodies are being expanded medically, and conceptually, and then sartorially too. I see that, I agree with you.

Emily Apter (23:49)

What do you think, though, of generic fashion, norm core, unisex, athleisure? At this time, you know, in some ways, I feel like there's almost a wish fulfillment and talking about fashion, because we're in a supreme moment, where fashion is kind of off the table, at least for a lot of young people, it's not a topic of particular interest in terms of their every day. That's not to say the proof isn't, isn't in the details, you know, whether you have this kind of hoodie or that kind of, but it's still, in some ways, the with the collapse of retail, there's historically a moment where I see two trends that complement what we've just been discussing, which is the the acceleration or kind of exploration of non-binary in fashion, but it leads into something which is sort of generic fashion, fast fashion, anti fashion, a brand that's actually kind of empty because it's just another form of workout wear.

Anne Higonnet (24:48)

Well one factor that a lot of these different phenomena have in common, I think, is the idea that you present yourself as an image. And in a way, fashion is completely off the table in an old style way, but in a new style way, it's more on the table than ever because it drives self presentation on Instagram and Tiktok. Fast fashion is more and more popular as you go down the age scale. And there's an energy fueling fast fashion that's really about how you photograph yourself in your clothes for a one time social media image.

Emily Apter (25:34)

It's interesting, Anne and I, earlier this year, went to the Metropolitan Museum to see a show on Camp. And there were, of course, some great clothing models. But when we got into one room, we were trying to figure out the installation and Anne made the remark that we couldn't really see the clothes that well, they were way up in these lit up boxes. And even when those that were more accessible on the ground floor were sort of placed very far back, there was, it was, it was like walking into a giant display or department store. But you had the point that it was all about instagrammable fashion, it was about taking your picture in front of the fashion. And so the whole idea of "it's not even just the fashion items, it's the the way in which you insert your own look inside another box."

Anne Higonnet (26:28)

And the Costume Institute is so clever. Every one of those boxes was lit with of an Instagram palette, digital palette, lighting, so that you could stand in front of it. And each mannequin was in an Instagram set.

Rhonda Garelick (26:47)

I had mixed feelings about that show. Although I admit I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed that it was scented. I don't know if you noticed that it was a perfumed––

Anne Higonnet (26:55)

Oh we went on a bad day! [laughter]

Rhonda Garelick (26:59)

It was scented for sure! It wasn't the, it was, I don't know how they did it, but there was something. But lately, I have been tasked with some teaching assessment work, which means I go and I observe people in their classrooms and I watch what's happening. And I often take a seat in the back of the room, which means the students greens are facing me. And I can tell you that it's no discredit to the many instructors I've watched, that the overwhelming thing I see on those screens, you won't be surprised to learn, is not notes from the class, but shopping sites for clothes, for young men and women. And they are scrolling through shoes and the Instagrams of celebrities, but for fashion purposes, and then buying. And it's the see-now-buy-now phenomenon. And it's true that fashion, retail and runways and collections have all changed dramatically. But what is taking their place is this Internet relationship, which is like the photographable moments at the Met. But also the fact that you can look at your screen, your cell phone, your computer, no matter where you are, no matter what you're supposed to be doing, and you can imaginatively project yourself into the screen image and then take real world action, make a financial transaction virtually, and essentially ensure that you will then be able to emulate and copy what you have seen on screen, making the virtual real and the real virtual. And so if we're not talking about fashion in a university setting, we're just ignoring what's happening. This, to me, is––my students, it's true that it's a selected group, they are riveted by fashion, although it's not the fashion that we call fashion necessarily. And then when you have the attention of someone like Virgil Abloh, you know, you've got athletic streetwear, now, in the realm of the most rarefied couture.

Emily Apter (27:27)

That gets back also to this idea of a kind of central paradox, which is, there's... it's fashion without fashion, in the sense of structure, tailoring, the whole question of what... of a kind of embodiment that is more oriented, that almost literalizes social construction, this is a construction that is different from, from, say, this the 60s, jeans and a tank top anti fashion, of course, it was a fashion too. But this is something that I think has less political resonance, because from what you're saying, you can be an influencer in your athleisure wear. It's just... where's the content of it? It's not as legible. It's not, it's legible more in terms of labels and brand naming and the influencer being a kind of brand that builds its brand through Instagram, through social media form, but it, it, where does this lie? In the fashion itself? Not so much. I think that that's the great tension that a new generation has to resolve for itself, maybe with the help of some wise elders knows. That the form, as you say, is so powerful and seductive for them, the social media form in which they present themselves. And at the same time, this is the generation that is waking up to the content of clothing in an extremely material way, because they're just starting to realize what the environmental impact is of the actual materials, the actual physical substance of the clothes that they buy, and the quantities in which they buy their clothes. And the labor conditions.

Anne Higonnet (30:38)

The labor conditions in which the clothes are made. And the politics that govern those labor conditions could not be more substantive, and, and real and political. But there's a disconnect now between the form and the content of fashion. And maybe that's where we should like be making those connections for people.

Margaret Cohen (30:57)

Thank you very much for this exciting conversation. I really look forward to your papers. Thank you.

Casey Wayne Patterson (31:11)

Thank you again for joining us in this episode of the Center for the Study of the Novel's podcast Cafe. We would also like to thank Emily Apter, Rhonda Garelick and Anne Higonnet for their generosity in agreeing to this conversation. Thanks our team at the Center for the Study of the Novel: to An Truong Nguyen for their operational support. To our graduate coordinators, Victoria Zurita, Cynthia Giancotti, and Casey Patterson. To Erik Fredner for editing, consultation, and sound engineering. And to our host and director Margaret Cohen. The Center for the Study of the Novel is a subsidiary of the English Department at Stanford University.

Books at the Center: Stephen Best, Mario Telò, and Kris Cohen on None Like Us (10/10/19)

Stephen Best; Mario Telò; Kris Cohen; Margaret Cohen

Transcript for Books at the Center: Stephen Best, Mario Telò, and Kris Cohen on None Like Us (10/10/19), or read the full transcript below.

Casey Wayne Patterson (00:06)

Welcome, and thanks for joining us in another installment of Cafe, the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. In this episode, our host Margaret Cohen is joined by guests Stephen Best, Kris Cohen, and Mario Telo. To discuss Stephen's recent book, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging and Aesthetic Life. Stephen Best is a professor of English at the University of California Berkeley. Mario Telo, is a professor of Classics at Berkeley. And Kris Cohen is a professor of Art History at Reed College. This wide ranging conversation, recorded on October 10 2019, draws on all three disciplines to discuss subjectivity, aesthetics, and the archive. Our conversation continued in the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel's annual Books at the Center event, celebrating Stephen's work. The interview begins with Stephen describing his choice of format for the book, you'll hear Margaret join the conversation next, then Mario, and then Kris, we're thrilled to be sharing this conversation with you. So thank you, again, for listening in as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Stephen Best (01:25)

I think telling the story of how the book got written, is a good way of sort of explaining why it has the form that it has, which is a little eccentric, in that I write about a diversity of materials, all forms in my mind, works of art, poems, novels. And then I do, I also think of like the archive as a kind of form, looking at it as a literary critic. So I actually I had a book that I worked on, was writing, called "Unfit for History," which is now the title of the introduction. And it was a kind of series of meditations of like problems concerning slavery and the archive. So I had a chapter on, like the problem of witchcraft, like how to like account for witchcraft, magical thinking in the archive, the book actually began and I do say this with the chapter on rumor in the archive, like rumors that would sort of circulate amongst slave communities in the Caribbean, about their emancipation, that was like, the first thing I wrote, was the, it was the germ of the idea for the book. So there were a series of chapters that were all about these kind of problems of, of like slavery race, in the archive, I finished that draft of the book, and I kind of thought to myself, no one's gonna be interested in this book, because historians have looked at these archives, but literary critics are gonna, for the most part, not really have much to say. So I, it was one of these cases where I was, I was unhappy with the forum, that the book took in the draft. And at that time, I don't know if maybe Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy had just come out, I sat down and read it, I just, you know, to figure out what I thought about the book, I started writing about it. And then once I wrote that chapter on A Mercy, I was like, "Oh, this book, actually, it has to be about these problems of slavery, race, identity, the archive, but I really have to foreground works of literature that maybe helped me to think about the problem, if they aren't explicitly addressing that problem." So I completely, I was on, I was about to go on sabbatical. And I just completely was like, "Okay, I'm gonna spend my sabbatical like reorganizing this book." And at the same time, in the midst of my attempts to kind of write, I would sort of in the middle of the day sort of escaped to SF MoMA, to go look at art to kind of whatever keep the juices flowing. And there was this exhibition at SF MoMA, of the work of Mark Bradford. And it blew me away, visually, but also, because just the way the work itself invites you to kind of ponder the process of its construction. And I would, I just kept going back every day to like, look at these works, because they were helping me to think about these problems of the archive, of matter that's in there, but inaccessible, etc. And so at that point, I just decided the book needed to be about the aesthetic objects that are helping me to think about the problems, not so much a direct attempt to address the problem of the archive, if that makes sense. And the larger context for this is that sort of in the field of African American literary and cultural studies, and in literary studies of late––last decade or so––there's been a real interest in problems of the archive. Sort of some of it coming out of deconstruction and Derrida and Foucault. But a lot of it having to do with the, the difficulty of reconstructing the lives of people who left no written record of their lives. Like I think that feels like a good synopsis of like the problem of the archive in the humanities. So I wanted to address that problem. But I had to figure out a imaginative way of getting to it, a way of getting to it that would make the book interesting to a humanist. So that's why the book has the shape that it does, which is not the shape that I projected, when I started working on the project. It's the shape that came about through really attending to the problems I was having. While I was writing it.

Margaret Cohen (05:50)

Just thinking about process, building process into the work of criticism, I think is a really fruitful way forward, we would all want to talk a bit about your process.

Mario Telo (06:05)

So I generally in my work, I try to bridge the gap between traditional classical scholarship and critical theory. And my new project, which is now finished, fortunately, was an attempt to reconceptualize the aesthetic experience of Greek tragedy, which for a long time, has been dominated by the idea of catharsis. And what is interesting is that it's not just our struggle with beings when tragedy is all about catharsis, but is about a moment of reparation, and moment of restoration, but also, when Freud and also Lacan and also other psychoanalyst talk about tragedy, in spite of the fact that they are the ones you know, theorized all the theoretical apparatus for conceptualizing anti catharsis, they actually go back to Aristotle. So when Freud in beyond the pleasure principle talks about tragedy, in the same section in which he discusses the for the episode, he says, with tragedy is about the pleasure of recouping the loss. Same thing, Lacan when he talks about Antigone, he says that it's precisely the splendour of Antigone, you know that moment of beauty that, in a sense, offers a reparative moment, it's kind of protection from the loss that otherwise tragedy exposes us to. So I wanted to go against this tradition a bit. And so I was, I was looking for a model that could help me theorize, the anti reparative, the anti catharsis in tragedy. And so I, I was really interested in Derrida's archive fever, where really preservation, you know, is seen as something constantly haunted by the death drive. And so preservation always implicates destruction. So I was interested in what in the expression is "an-archivic" aesthetics. That is how you can turn the idea of the co-implication of destruction and preservation in the archiving to an aesthetic mode and into an anti cathartic mode of feeling. So that's why I was interested not just in different theorization of the death drive after Freud, but also in Stephen's book, which is about the archive, of course, and also about queer theory. And I also use a lot of queer theory, especially Lee Edelman to theorize anti catharsis. And then I tested some of his ideas in this course that I taught in complit last year for undergraduates. And we started from antiquity with Oedipus. And then we ended with Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive, which is actually something I'm going to talk about today trying to establish a dialogue between her and your book. And we, I assigned the chapter on Toni Morrison, to the students, even if we did not read A Mercy, but Paradise, which is also very archival, because of the oven and so forth.

Kris Cohen (09:21)

So I, my work sort of sits somewhere between art history and Media Studies. I'm interested in forms that the subject takes or that personhood takes or that humanity takes when it gets caught up in data collection, the data collection industries, but I'm not, I have always not wanted to start from the premise that the subject takes the form of a liberal subject. So someone with an interiority, who, if they're a proper subject, they speak their interiority out and they have a voice by way of that. So queer theory and Black Studies have been really important to me as ways of beginning with an idea of a different sense of how personhood is constructed or how it can be experimented with. So it does a funny thing to my process of working, which is that I, I often work with artworks, or works that have no ostensible relationship with media or networks. Partially because I'm interested in trying to sense out things that don't really get written on the face of either Twitter, right, or on the face of people commenting about social media, but that are sort of lived at the level of the subject and lived at levels of the subject that maybe have never existed before, some of which are really violent, horrible, and some of which maybe are interested in that possibility. So what I'm working on now, for instance, I look to early black abstractionist, Alma Thomas, as a way of starting to think about, in her kind of semi gridded patterns, paintings that she basically pursued for her life, as a way to think about the early incarnations of the computer screen, as, both as spaces where labor is sort of being reconceived as a way to think about how the subject exists within a kind of gridded structure space. So my process is very meandering at the start, because I'm trying to find my way into that problem, both through looking really hard at the paintings and doing all the responsible art historical stuff of learning about the literature about them, but also doing as much work as I can, on the technical side to understand that, so I'm, I'm always kind of working in both directions, I never quite know where to meet.

Margaret Cohen (11:35)

It's sort of have floating around as you're all talking: like, what is the archive to you?

Stephen Best (11:41)

Yeah, because on one level, it can feel a little bit like the archive is everything in the way that neoliberalism is that it's just sort of like everything you turn to is the archive. So saying, sort of specifically, in my case, it's like traces of the human subject that are not self representations, right. So it doesn't have to be in an archive, but it's like, someone's record of another subject. If I look back at the book, well, what seems to kind of come to the surface as like archival, it's like, yeah, the, it's that and that's that moment that Foucault is interested in, in "Lives of Infamous Men," it's like, it's not a self representation. It's, it is a representation by the state, of a, of a subject. But it's, it's also to go to Mario's point, it's like an-archival in the sense that it's also sort of destructive of the subject, it's, it's the only trace we have of these persons.

Kris Cohen (12:42)

And you're often dealing at least in this book, with archives whose express purpose has been to delete or erase or destroy the very subjects that you're interested in getting at. So in some ways, it's like you have no choice but to approach them at least non-representationally, if not a-representationally, because they don't, because otherwise, in the the representation realm, they just, really often don't exist, or they exist as erasures.

Stephen Best (13:05)

Mm hmm.

Margaret Cohen (13:06)

Yeah, I think that it's also, your take on the archive, in a sense, urges us to think beyond representation, to try to look, because of course, every time we try to connect with the archive, it's a form of non-connection, and we are facing this gap. And I'm trying to create what is now there. And of course, we try to fill out that space, but the only possibility is precisely to engage with the work of art beyond representation, through sensation as effects, are affect. By the way, we are reenacting what Foucault and Arlette Farge did, because, you know, they had a, there is a radio interview, in which they talk about the project of the archive of the Bastille. And actually, that radio interview has just been published by Luxon, in a very [...] companion book with that essay by Foucault, and then some essays, but there is also the translation into English of that interview, where Foucault uses that famous phrase in relation to the essay, "The Lives of Infamous Men." And he talks about the archive as the guttural cry, the voices, you know, coming out, you know, of the smooth surface of power as a guttural cry, that's a phrase, which uses well knocking with Farge who was was very interesting historian with whom he had planned, you know, this edition, and then I think he had a fallout with the publisher. So that what we have, you know, the rich collection of petitions which came out in 2016 in English is actually very different from the [...] that he had originally envisioned for which, you know, the, the essay that you start from was supposed to be the preface. But I mean, is the guttural cry like is that sound cathartic? Like where does it sit? Well, I think that for Foucault, the guttural cry is precisely the voice of these people whom the power tries to suppress, tries to incorporate into its own system, creating this surface which is impermeable, and then there is a tear at a certain point, which is with guttural cry, you know, while, what Stephen does, I think goes beyond in terms of the in terms of imagery and also of concept, because this tear within the surface is not just the emergence of what was supposed to be domesticated and cancelled out by precisely the relationality between that word and us, which cannot but be a kind of rupture.

Stephen Best (16:04)

Cannot be a..?

Mario Telo (16:06)

Well in your case, it has to be a kind of rupture.

Stephen Best (16:08)

It has to be a kind of rupture.

Mario Telo (16:09)

It's a kind of non-relational relation. So, I think you go beyond that image, I love that Foucault essay, my students also loved it. It's so beautifully written, in a sense, it really anticipates––phenomenology and, to the current interest in affect and the affective turn.

Stephen Best (16:36)

And that sensorium, between past and present, like––and it's, it's, it's not a bond of relation, you know what I mean? You know, that's what I tried to do. And, you know, it's, it's an interesting that Foucault essay is such a fascinating essay, because it structures a whole field of work, you know, in Queer Studies and Black Studies. You know, and, you know, I think it went from relative obscurity to then being, you know, the sort of––

Mario Telo (17:05)

Well now you it's getting republished constantly!

Stephen Best (17:09)

Yeah, the essay, yeah, but that sense, that sense of the sensorium, that, that is in the Foucault that's, you know, that, like, you I tried to track the way he uses that, language of vibration, to kind of talk about, you know, try to kind of address his implication in the guttural cry, like how he's implicated in that.

Mario Telo (17:34)

Clearly, the guttural cry is his own, in a sense. Or, or an image of his own project.

Kris Cohen (17:43)

Well seems like maybe, that given we've all stated some kind of interest in our work in what we call the non representational, it might be worth saying, why? What our ethical or [...] commitments are to that term or to that way of unthinking the subject? One of the reasons why I'm fairly committed to that idea is that––has to do with my archive, I suppose, which is networked life or digital capitalism, or, I'm not too committed to one particular periodization term, but but I am interested in what happens to the subject when they get produced by and interwoven with data. And in that sense, that, I think, is an importantly, non representational process, in the sense that it's not about harkening back to what a person was, that data isn't mobilized in that direction necessarily, even if it is an archive of one's past, it's an attempt to construct at least a place for the subject to inhabit, come to identify with, disidentify with, and then in that identification or disidentification with whatever image gets served up, amazon books recommendations, or whatever, that itself is data, that then helps the data align itself to you better. So it's a kind of an ongoing, unschooling construction, that's never quite you, but that you're always meant to sort of encounter and match yourself up with in some way. And so it's important to me that the vocabulary that tries to get at that is a non representational vocabulary, because I think it's sort of technically, that what that process is. And when when a kind of politics of representation gets put up against that, like we should have better data representations of us, then you come to get caught in the kind of toggle or oscillation that your book is so invested in tracking, which is like, it comes to look like, "Well, those are bad versions of us," in other words, bad representations of us, "and we need to make better representations of us." Or even something like the politics of obscuring your face with bad data. That seems to be a kind of a bad choice to me. And one of the ways to start to get out of that bad choice is to think about personhood and, in its non representational forms.

Stephen Best (19:52)

I think for me, it's about long... you use the phrase politics of representation. And that was I was going to introduce that phrase, because I feel like a lot of my intellectual life has been shadowed by the question of the politics of representation, race and the politics of representation. Right. So when I was in grad school, right, the form that that problem of like representational politics took, I remember the kind of the intervention that black British cultural studies did for like African American Studies in terms of like challenging African American Studies' politics of representation, of like, of American blackness as exemplary for blackness as such. But I've been like thinking, and this summer, I read Jeffrey Stewart's amazing biography of Alain Locke. And that biography just gave me a sense that the arc for this problem of politics of representation is much longer. And that, you know, the sort of battle––like, in some ways, the kind of intellectual battles and aesthetic battles between say, W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke are very much about the residues of kind of 19th century Victorian politics of respectability. And what is sort of the, the kind of queer coup d'etat that the Harlem Renaissance was of wanting to kind of disrupt that politics of representation. And so yeah, I guess for me, it's, it's like wanting to kind of think my place in that longer argument about race and the politics of representation. And queerness in my own affective experience, but also just intellectual experience, is often offering a kind of disruption of something like representational politics. Black abstraction, the terms of like, a lot of the kind of debates, I don't really talk about them, but the terms of a lot of the debates around black abstraction, in say, the 70s. And 80s, was very much about like, abdicating responsibility for producing a positive representation of blackness.

Margaret Cohen (22:04)

Can I ask a question, just about, you know, I teach the Middle Passage a lot, and the archive is so important to it, and the importance of melancholy historicism as almost the only attitude that one can have towards, towards it and, like a flashpoint, their narratives by African American seamen or Turner's The Slave Ship is a really powerful flashpoint. And I was thinking as I was reading your book, well, what would it be like to pair this with, you know, reading some archival artifacts from trying to recover the Middle Passage, and I'm wondering, I mean, Toni Morrison is obviously working through that a lot. But I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about that?

Kris Cohen (22:53)

Well, I think one of the things that's interesting about the way you deal with archival materials and not the Middle Passage per se, but, but materials like it and the way you do what you call melancholy historicism is, you don't actually turn away from them, from those materials. It's more about the disposition you have toward them. Right. So it's not as though the the solution to melancholy historicism is to leave the archive behind or the slavery or the slave past behind or leave the Middle Passage behind. It's to listen for a different thing. And it's to listen for the thing that we can know that we can identify with. That we don't know how to be intimate with. And that, it just seems important to me that it's, that in the, your discontent with the options posed by melancholic historicism, right, recovery on the one hand or erasure on the other, that it's still, you stay with the objects, still you stay with the materials. And the whole latter half of your book dwells in those materials and stories from the slave archive.

Stephen Best (23:56)

To the LA uprising, right? You know, like what to do with, in some ways, the rumors of what was said during that uprising, like what, you know, I don't want to say it's not true that someone or some group of people shouted they killed Martin Luther King during the LA rebellion, but I don't I don't take my task to figure out the truth or, like,what––the "what happened," it's more, what, like what is that as a form? Like the circulation of that?

Mario Telo (24:29)

Well "disposition," I think is a great way... Because has the idea of affect built into it, of mood, but also etymologically, "position" you position yourself, you know, in front of the work of art, in front of the archival trace, but then there is the dis-, so it's not a connection, but it's a negative connection. It's a connection that operates through negativity through disruption. Through destabilization, as opposed to the kind of identification that the melancholy criticism, you know, aspires to create with an identification, which becomes then, you know, being Freud's classical definition of melancholy introjection. And so then carries with itself the danger of incorporation, and digestion, and policing and all of that, but this normalization––so disposition, I think, is a great idea because it really encapsulates this confronting the work of art, literally facing, facing it, but in a problematic way, which is the "dis-" without imposing an interpretive, you know, reading, because, you know, reading also, I think, at a certain point when you talk about El Anatsui. It can go back to your work on surface reading, and you talk about...

Stephen Best (26:00)

––Disposition, and dispossession. It's like, that, what you just said, connects those things in my head, in ways maybe that we're sort of working out in the writing, but I never articulated really clearly, it's like––but that's right. I should say something about the shape of that first chapter, because it relates to my own intellectual history and biography. But also, you're absolutely right, there's something I want to do in front of that work that's not about interpreting it. It's about allowing myself to be repeatedly dispossessed by it. I want it to produce that effect that it produced the first time, I keep going back to it in the hopes that it will produce that, which it won't do but, but like I said, like my intellectual biography, right. So my intellectual biography is that I was an art history major as an undergrad. And I thought about getting my PhD in art history. But I, at a certain point, I sort of felt like something was happening in my art history classes, which is like I was being taught how to be a close reader, like just to really stand in front of a work of art, and describe and say what I see. But then I felt like I was being trained to write about works of art in the past tense, like, I was always having to sort of talk about what they did, yeah, what they did. I just like this is, you know, the very least this isn't producing its own kind of intellectual schizophrenia. But in with this book, I really, so for this book, I really felt like I wanted to write in the way that I was trained to look, which is to try to make the shape of the essay or the shape of the chapter, reflect my repeated returns, and the things I was expecting each time I returned, I feel like in some ways, I kind of got the courage to do this after I read TJ Clark's the Sight of Death. "Hey, he does it as a journal entry, I'm going to try to do it as a book chapter and see if that helps to figure out, again..."

Mario Telo (27:16)

I think your book is a kind of performative utterance, because it's so lyrical. That's why I like it so much. And in a sense, you're kind of enacting while writing the kind of static model that you are advocating for, you know, like your gray reading, or the El Anatsui, you know, it's not gold, it's not trash. And so we are situated in the gap between gold, and... and so you situate the hermeneutic process in that aesthetic moment, you know, in that interval between these two poles.

Stephen Best (28:41)

And this really does go back to my sense of the "we" that matters to me, which is the "we" of attentiveness and curiosity, that you can be, that you could be me, talking to myself, but that you can also be anyone else who sees the same thing as me. And it doesn't have to be everyone. Right? Like it's, I felt like I formally had to figure out how to, how to contend with the fact that like, we are always being, the imperative is always, to make claims about your object that are, they have some kind of validity.

Mario Telo (29:28)

That has validity, that captures something that is in [...].

Kris Cohen (29:33)

And one of the questions that I think you lodge in that space between you and the work that I think is really helpful, could be really helpful for a really broad range of projects is you, you don't presume that you know what a good outcome would be in approaching the thing, right. I learned something about the relation between African America or I learned how to see his work as a way to think about the role that the Middle Passage has played in the present era, you know, you I think you as much as you can you try to suspend your thought about what it would mean, to do something good in front of the worker for something good to happen, whatever that would mean. And the other question that you leave there that I think is really interesting is, you allow us to wonder about what one is wanting or desiring of in, sort of, in and around a "we". So that a reading, you can ask after reading your book, what do I, what kind of "we," am I wanting, in producing the reading, producing an outcome and producing what... what implications does it have for some kind of collective formation? Not just academically, although academically, disciplinarity, yes, of course, but also more generally, at the level of just connection between one person and the other that might happen through reading or that might happen through art or, like, all kinds of interesting things stop happening, when you have to ask yourself the question of, "how am I––what, what kind of 'we' am I actually presuming or constructing when I'm writing this thing when I'm producing..."

Stephen Best (31:13)

That came very late in the writing. The sort of brute, you know––like I said, the book, in its earlier draft was called "Unfit for History." And then as I was writing, that very amazing quote––I was maybe teaching David Walker, and that amazing day when I just, I just was like, "that rhetorical––". Because I wanted, you know, the book is about... So one of the ways the book deals with the, the guttural cry in the archive––it's a cry, it's like a scream, it's not it's not lexical, right? It's not, you know, it's not, it doesn't have a meaning. One of the ways the book tried to kind of deal with that was, I really, I really tried to use the tools of like, rhetoric, to sort of just deal with these negativities. The forms in which our relationship to them is like you say, dispossessive, negative. And then, you know, I came across that David Walker quote, while teaching, and I was like, that is all about rhetoric, and all about negative forms of rhetoric, none like––"I pray God that none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more," like a form of negative rhetoric that produces the very thing it sort of denied, its denying, or seeks to deny. Once David Walker kind of, at a certain point, he just like the whole book just got revised with the sense of the problematic "us," the difficulty of constituting the "us," both then and now. Or the contingent nature of that "us." In the name of what vision of the collective is this work, being produced like, that, it became clear to me that that was what I was grappling with, in all of the work in the field that I was trying to engage. It was the "us," the we that's kind of figured. So anyway, that's just sort of to say when, that, when did that question of like the scholarship, and the collective in whose name the scholarship is being produced came to the fore? And also, you know, I mean, you asked earlier about process, Margaret and I have to say, like, one of the things about, like having a book, not quite being satisfied with a book, and then having to kind of be honest, in your revision, was that, for me, I can't remember who it was. Annie Prouix, or..? Who said, like the process of writing, that final stage of writing is the stage where you take the lies out. You know, like all of it, all of the little stories that you tell yourself to get to keep writing, and like to say, "Oh, this book is really about that." Like that process, it's like I had to take all the lies out that this was a book about the archive, or that this was a book about...

Kris Cohen (34:12)

For all the grant applications you had to write.

Stephen Best (34:14)

Yeah yeah yeah, exactly, exactly! You really do have to go back and like, make sure none of that is in there. But that also meant that I had to be very honest and full throated in terms of my critique, like, "Oh, this is really sort of about Black Studies and the question of like, our relationship to the past or the question of our condition, the possibility, is far more kind of vexed and complicated than we are often willing to admit."

Margaret Cohen (34:43)

It's incredibly inspiring, I'm just thinking of like our listeners for this podcast and for students, who are writing their dissertation, and having the confidence to go through that process and then, you know, take out the lies. [laughter]

Stephen Best (35:04)

Like graduate advisors, a grad––fellowship committees! Thank you, Mario.

Margaret Cohen (35:12)

Yeah, thank you really for just opening up a space for reflection. One of our hopes from the podcast is that people can hear how scholars talk among themselves, in that casual way when they might meet each other for coffee or in an airport.

Stephen Best (35:28)

Good night America.

Casey Wayne Patterson (35:37)

Thank you again for joining us in this episode of the Center for the Study of the Novel's podcast Cafe. We would also like to thank Stephen Best, Mario Telo, and Kris Cohen for their generosity in agreeing to this conversation. Thanks our team at the Center for the Study of the Novel: to An Truong Nguyen and Maritza Colon for their operational support. To our graduate coordinators, Victoria Zurita, Cynthia Giancotti, and Casey Patterson. To Erik Fredner for editing, consultation, and sound engineering. And to our host and director Margaret Cohen. The Center for the Study. The Novel is a subsidiary of the English department at Stanford University.

Ato Quayson, John Kerrigan, and Richard Halpern on Postcolonial Tragedy (9/15/19)

Ato Quayson; John Kerrigan; Richard Halpern; Margaret Cohen

Transcript for Ato Quayson, John Kerrigan, and Richard Halpern on Postcolonial Tragedy (9/15/19), or read the full transcript below.

Casey Wayne Patterson (00:05)

Welcome, and thanks for joining us in this episode of Cafe, the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. In this installment, our host Margaret Cohen is joined by guests Ato Quayson, Richard Halpern, and John Kerrigan to discuss the place of tragedy in postcolonial literature. Ato Quayson is a Professor of English at Stanford University. Richard Halpern, recently retired, was Erich Maria Remarque Professor of literature at NYU, and John Kerrigan is a Professor of literature at St. John's College, Cambridge. This conversation was recorded on November 15, 2019, shortly before our guests gave papers and a panel on the same topic, hosted by the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel. The interview begins with an anecdote from Ato, then Richard's response. Margaret joins the conversation next, then John. We're thrilled to be sharing this conversation with you. So thank you, again, for listening in as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Ato Quayson (01:19)

Well, I have to start with an anecdote of how I got to tragedy. And it's at university, I had a teacher that, a professor that inspired me greatly, and he was noted for a characteristic--which I didn't quite share in terms of opinions--he was extremely lazy. He hated grading papers, so he never did. So if you give him your paper during the semester, there will be no sign of it. But to me, he had the mind of God. He introduced us to the history and theory of literary criticism. He also taught a paper on Shakespeare, and he was the one who introduced me, or us, to Aristotle, the Poetics, you know, very systematic. And he used to speak very slowly. He was a very slow speaker, but also a slow reader. He read slowly, and he spoke really slowly. And he was very concerned that we understood that all literary criticism was about method. And what better way to introduce us to method than through Aristotle? So that ignited my, my interest. But at the time, my, our, range of knowledge of tragedies was actually limited to Shakespeare. And a couple of the Greek tragedies, actually, mainly Sophocles. I was so taken with Mr. Denkabe, he was called, that I discovered through the grapevine that he had actually gone to Cambridge, to St. John's College. So that also ignited my interest in learning more about Aristotle, but also going to Cambridge. But, more importantly, the essay that submitted for my graduate studies, was an application of Aristotle to Achebe's Things Fall Apart. And I have always--I've looked for the paper many times, I can't find it. So when I came to understand the tragedy more fully or more elaborately, I never managed to completely separate myself from the Aristotelian scaffolding. So the book that I'm writing is [...] anyone that knows about Aristotle will see that it's essentially draped over an Aristotelian scaffolding, and it was that undergraduate professor who ignited the interest in me.

Richard Halpern (04:07)

I, as well am entangled in that Aristotelian scaffolding and happily so. For me, tragedy is about human action, and it's about the consequentiality of human action, and the coherence and intelligibility of human action. And it does that by depicting human actions that go awry, that go badly for some reason, and the degree of catastrophe produced by a particular action is a kind of register, in a weird way, of the significance of that action. So in essence, I don't have an original theory of tragedy. I adhere largely to Aristotle's, though I'm also impressed by Hegel's reading of tragedy as showing two ethical systems in conflict with each other. But I think Aristotle's is better for getting at the formal qualities of tragedy, why it's structured in a certain way, what it's trying to do, what its effects on, on the hearer, or reader are supposed to be.

Margaret Cohen (05:14)

I teach Things Fall Apart with Hegel's theory of tragedy, because I feel that the principles in the collective at the beginning map well onto Antigone and Creon. And I'm just wondering, Ato, if that is a theory that you've thought about?

Ato Quayson (05:34)

Well, I have, you know, I have used the Hegel, and he appears in the book at some point. But what I take from Aristotle is not just action, but the atrophy of the possibility of making ethical choices. You know, that is the conditions--so what he interprets as reversal of fortune, which, of course, it's a catastrophe, I look almost, as the prequel to the reversal. And the prequel to the reversal, for me, are conditions that undermine the capacity to make proper ethical choices, which, of course, I extract from the Nicomachean Ethics, where he elaborates the good life and impediments, the good life and so on. Now, I said earlier that it was the Poetics that I was introduced toand ignited my interest. And in fact, I [...] stayed in the Poetics for the long time. But I rather suspect that the Poetics does not give enough--it gives a lot of payout for thinking about the the form, or the plot of tragedy and so on. But it doesn't give enough room to explore the problem of action, shall we say. Action requires, or ethical action actually requires certain conditions, to enable it. The Poetics doesn't give enough room for that, you have to read a lot into it, whereas the Nicomachean Ethics, it's all about, you know, virtue, the possibility of virtue and so on. So, to go back to your question, of course, I mean, the Hegelian reading maps onto Things Fall Apart quite well. But apart from that, is the way that--unbeknownst to Okonkwo, he doesn't recognize it--that his world has changed so much, that when he declares what he assumes to be a military, you know, a call to arms against the District Commissioner, he's calling, making that call under conditions that have so changed, that his people cannot recognize it as a call to arms. So by the time he makes the call to arms--but he doesn't recognize it, he doesn't see that the conditions have altered, what might constitute a comprehensive call to arms. So they ask, for example, why did he do that? He overhears them saying, what would they say? Why did he do that? So that's how I see it, that progressive alteration of the life worlds, these traditional life worlds of this African community, and the contact with colonialism, the irony, or the serious difficulty for Okonkwo, he doesn't see it. He assumes that the wellsprings of action are the same as at the beginning.

John Kerrigan (08:36)

Well, like, Richard and Ato, I've always been engaged with the Aristotelian model, partly because my major statement about tragedy, a big book, called Revenge Tragedy, begins like Rich's, it [...] with the Greeks. And you can't think about the Greeks without reflecting on Aristotle. But also partly because my central concern in that book, with revenge, takes you very close to the Aristotelian notion that drama is an imitation of an action, because that is what revenge is too, you can't repair wrong unless you engage mimetically with it. On the other hand, I can see the force of what Margaret's saying about the Hegelian model. Because if you're looking at postcolonial situations, you're often watching societies under great stress, undergoing revolutionary development, from an older order, a kind of ancien regime, which might be tribal or aristocratic, into one that's attempting to find a democratic route into into the future and a modernizing route into the future. And this is what Hegel's account of the Antigone is reflecting. It's one reason why in the end, Hegel comes down on the side of Creon. I know that's not at the core of his analysis, but that's where his sympathies lie. So I wanted to put to Ato where he doesn't think that that means that Hegel is often a more useful, as it were, framework for thinking about postcolonial tragedy. Clearly, Okonkwo, is a kind of prince, and we see his fall. We see his tragic flaws in his Oedipus-like anger. And the error that comes from his, maybe flaw, if that's the right word, of being a stammerer, he couldn't get out what he wants to say. So he has to be physical. I see all the various ways in which one could very fruitfully apply Aristotle to Things Fall Apart. But I wonder, nonetheless, whether the background sense of a telescoped transition, a too-rapid movement of this society into modernity, doesn't mean that the Antigone is quite close to it.

Ato Quayson (10:32)

Yeah, I can see how the Antigone would be close to it in terms of the, quite dramatic, shifts in the basis for undertaking any form of epic action, any epic gesture. But the other thing that the novel illustrates is the gradual and slow emergence of different modes of validation, of self-validation, which are not necessarily in the grand way that Okonkwo would imagine. His son becomes a Christian. His son becomes a Christian, his friend, his best friend, Obierika has some doubts about, for example, the mode of punishment when Okonkwo inadvertently shoots the young boy and he's exiled. Obierika reflects in his mind, but he's not actually able to push the reflection to its conclusion, because that would be a form of--not blasphemy, because that is not--but a form of disavowal. So, he thinks up to a point and then he stops, but that stop, the point at which he stops reflecting, "why this major punishment?," is the point at which a secular mind or secular consciousness would have investigated other ways of judgment. So the point at which Obierika stops his reflections is the point at which a secular consciousness will have then gone on to investigate. So he doesn't do it, but there's a hint of it, which of course, Achebe develops much later. So this, as it were, imagines almost--attempted proliferation is more like an emergence of different modes of validation of aspirational matrices, shall we say. We will see it more fully in his later novels where the contestatory matrices of aspiration--so you are traditional, but I am a traitor, I'm imagined. So as a merchant, I no longer subscribe to the deity and the cult and so--we see, we see it incipiently in Things Fall Apart. So the clash is not simply between old order and new order, even though that exists in the novel. So, for example, the converts, the early converts in Things Fall Apart, are the ones who become court functionaries, they become translators, they become prison wardens, and so on. And so Christianity and colonialism introduce a new grammar, of merit and meritocracy. The old grammar is through hard work, military prowess, farming and so on. The new order is through mastery of the symbolic systems that are brought by--so there is a clash, quite clearly, but below that are all kinds of emergences of different modes of validation and so on. So if it is again at one level, but I think it eludes the exclusive Hegelian.

John Kerrigan (13:47)

Can I open a new front on what you're saying about Aristotle by returning to your reservations about his view of action? He is a scientist, he believes that one thing leads to another-- Greek models of causation are not what they became in the Roman and the later, as it were, Baconian world. Nonetheless, he thinks that actions have consequences and also causes. But if you look at someone like Soyinka who's obviously learned a lot from Greek tragedy, Greek models, it's a world of turbulence and causation, inconsequentiality and precarity. A play like The Road, for instance, or even Death and the King's Horseman, which is about flux and shift from one human state to another. It doesn't map very well onto the Aristotelian structures.

Ato Quayson (13:57)

Yes. In Death and the King's horsemen--back to the question of new modes of validation--Soyinka is very, as it were, elevating the Yoruba culture. But at the same time, he sneaks in a kind of auto-ethnographic critique. And where it comes from is that, in the early part of the play, when the priest is singing the praises of Elesin, the king's horseman, the priest's singing is supposed to be a form of ritual elicitation. He's eliciting his sacrificial self--the pharmakos, his self as pharmakos--but he's eliciting it through singing all kinds of praise names and epithets. "Do you hear me, oh so-and-so? Do you hear me?" And then I say, "Yes, I hear you." However, the role of Elesin Oba, it's supposed to be, or historically was supposed to have been, that of the military commander. So he's actually head of the army. However, the elicitations, the ritual elicitations, do not invoke anything about military prowess. All the ritual elicitations are of his prowess in bed with a woman. In other words, Soyinka almost put in there that this guy is not fit to be your pharmakos. The mode of of ritual elicitation-- the grammar or the idiom is a standard Yoruba heroic idiom. They call it oriki. But the content is deflationary. But no one notices this until it is too late.

Richard Halpern (16:11)

But then the the market woman endorses his choice, right? There's a moment hesitation that she does. Yeah, of the play and and says, Yeah, yeah, that it's right. And everyone seems to agree that it's right. And then no one knows for--

Ato Quayson (16:25)

For one night only.

Richard Halpern (16:26)

That's all it's going to be.

Ato Quayson (16:29)

That's all he needs.

Richard Halpern (16:30)

It's going to be very short term. Well, he says he wants to leave something behind. Right. He's going to--he's making the passage and the last thing he's going to do before this passage is, kind of, leave his seed behind, especially since he thinks his oldest son has been taken from him. I do want to talk about Death and the King's Horseman a little more because on the one hand, it strikes me as, kind of, in a way the perfect Hegelian tragedy

Ato Quayson (16:53)

Yes, yes, yes, definitely.

Richard Halpern (16:54)

Almost more than Antigone because-- --because it embodies Hegel's sense that not only are two ethical systems in clash, but the ethical systems are also institutions, right. So the family and the state are not just ethical principles, they're institutions as well. And so here you have the colonial state, and you have the, you know, the tribal rituals of the Yoruba. And you have two characters who, in a kind of absolute sense, embody them. Hegel would say, okay, so tragedy is a clash of two forms of the good. And I guess my question for you is, because this is something that's always bothered me, since Pilkings is so parodied--you know, he's so ridiculous, so obviously--

Ato Quayson (16:55)

Yes Mocked.

Richard Halpern (17:44)

--mocked, is his view, that it's wrong to let someone commit suicide? Is that given any ethical seriousness in the play? So do you in the end have a Hegelian situation, which there are two weighty ethical imperatives coming into conflict--clash with each other? Or is it just that one is empty and corrupt? And--

Ato Quayson (18:08)

I wouldn't say that Pilkings is corrupt, but he's oblivious--

Richard Halpern (18:13)

Yeah.

Ato Quayson (18:13)

He's oblivious of the--first of all, he doesn't know anything about the culture, he doesn't bother. Now, Soyinka uses Pilkings's wife, Jane, as a kind of critical counterfoil, and it is Pilkings's wife who, as it were, shows up how empty her husband is. So his declamation is about duty--"it is my duty"--because the play's also about different understandings of duty. He thinks he's doing his duty, as the district commissioner, to prevent what he thinks will ultimately come to a social-political disturbance. So in that sense, he is right. But, because of the degree of misunderstanding--and there are things, that he's not a person who is adequately--he's not compassionate, for example. He doesn't have--he has very few values that would make us admire him. He's not compassionate. He's clearly dismissive of religion. Also, you know, he dismisses both the Muslim and the Christian, the newly converted Christian in his household. So almost everything about him is laughable or dismissible, except his sense of duty. And his sense of duty is what echoes exactly the--Elesin Oba's sense of duty--they're both duty-bound in this--they're both duty-bound spirits, or persons, but this guy, that's all he has. The only thing that he has, that is, the only redeeming feature, characteristic, that he has is his sense of duty. Everything else is false.

John Kerrigan (19:47)

That's a really interesting way of thinking about it, that Pilkings is brought down by his rigid sense of duty and Elesin by his flexibility in his sense of duty towards the tribe and the customs. I would say that Death and the King's Horseman looks like a Hegelian tragedy, kind of wants to be Hegelian tragedy, but Soyinka really does not want it to be Hegelian tragedy. Remember the preface where he says that this must not be a drama about the dilemma that Pilkings faces. He doesn't want him to be a Creon, agonized by the choices, and that's probably why he's presented so parodically in the play as well, to prevent the audience sympathizing with his dilemmas. I agree that Jane's got a bit more to her. This is why the British Empire, of course, never just sent out diplomats, they made sure their wives went with them, so there'd be some common sense on board. You also mentioned Elesin's son, Olunde, and he's a very interesting character, because in the end, he carries the burden of the tragedy by dying for the group. And yet he also represents modernization. He's awkwardly straddled between the world of medicine and Western knowledge and a fealty to traditional rights. And I wonder whether the play fully realizes his potential or whether he simply, as it were, rounds off the story. I don't know what you feel about that, Ato.

Ato Quayson (21:15)

Well, what--Olunde's a very fascinating character, because the Pilkings's arrange for him to literally escape from tradition and go and become a doctor in London or England. But when he goes, he's thrust right into the, I think, the Second World War, soldiers and so on. He comes to understand the propaganda machinery and how they misdescribe, or they falsely describe, what is really mayhem. As a doctor in the hospitals, he sees it. Now, this, alerts him to the fact that all cultural values are ultimately relative. And the social contract is based on degrees of falsehood. This sense or this insight is what actually prepares him to sacrifice himself for his community. Since all cultural or social values are relative, his ritual sacrifice is at par with anything else that he has learned elsewhere. Now, this is also a second critique that Soyinka sneaks into the play. His father, anyone who becomes the king's horseman, is trained from infancy to be the sacrificial carrier. Now this kid has left, he has left, he's gone abroad. So it means that Soyinka is saying that, you guys don't--your rituals of preparation are not--a) they're not adequate to the event that has to be done, which is the self-sacrifice. But also, it may actually be redundant. Because this guy who finally laid his life learned how to do this not by being trained as the king's horseman, but by taking the complete--actually by disavowing that entirely. So I think that is also a critique of the, as it were, the apparent--the weaknesses.

Richard Halpern (23:18)

I want to go back to your reference to Soyinka's preface--

Ato Quayson (23:22)

Yeah.

Richard Halpern (23:23)

--and, and, how seriously, we should take it as a paradigm for approaching the play. Because I find it--I have to say, I find it completely unreliable.

Ato Quayson (23:32)

I agree with you.

Richard Halpern (23:33)

He says this is not a play about the clash of cultures. Of course this is a play--

Ato Quayson (23:37)

It is not Hegelian. Basically, he's saying it's not Hegelian.

Richard Halpern (23:40)

That's what I'm saying. He's saying he's not writing a Hegelian tragedy, but he is writing a Hegelian tragedy. I think that's what's going on. And he seems to be somewhat sensitive about the fact that he's trying to--and I understand why the phrase "clash of cultures" might sound a little pat, and he wouldn't want a, kind of, pat interpretation. But I think, in fact, this is--it is [...]. The other thing I find interesting about the play is we don't find--I'm forgetting the protagonist's name--

Ato Quayson (24:09)

Elesin Oba.

Richard Halpern (24:10)

His moment of decision never comes, right? I mean, that's the whole point. It's skipped over by the play, because he's taken prisoner before he has a chance to--whatever doubts we may or may not harbor about whether he's going to sacrifice himself are precluded by the fact that he's taken prisoner. And so this gets to your point about the preconditions of ethical action, right? I mean, he simply, he has that taken away from him. And that gets to something--I'll go back to Aristotle again in a minute, because you talked about, and I think this is important, sort of the silences of the Poetics ,and that Aristotle doesn't talk about--he doesn't say what the preconditions of ethical action are, which, as you pointed out, he does go into in the Nicomachean Ethics and largely has to do with being a citizen, right? I mean, you have to be wealthy enough that you're not working, because when you work--

Ato Quayson (25:00)

And you're not sick.

Richard Halpern (25:02)

--not sick, you're not a slave--

Ato Quayson (25:03)

You're not ugly.

Richard Halpern (25:04)

You're none of those things. But there's another thing he's silent about in the Poetics, which is, I think, equally important, and that's fate, or religion. Okay, so, because that's the mechanism in Greek tragedy that largely deprives--I mean, his favorite play is Oedipus the King, but it isn't a play about fate for him at all. There's no religious apparatus, he's determinedly secular, in his approach to--he still says this, this would be a play about, about Oedipus's actions, even though he tries to do a certain theory, the thing that is thwarted.

Ato Quayson (25:43)

But, Richard, I actually this--now, let me turn the tables on you, and ask you a question. You know, in the Eclipse of Action, which I read with great interest--for some reason, as I was reading it, Arthur Miller's The Crucible came strongly to mind. And it comes up now because it is the most, quote unquote, African play in the American tradition--

Richard Halpern (26:10)

Interesting.

Ato Quayson (26:10)

--a lot of ritual, a lot of belief in the otherworldly, a lot of the machinery, right. You know, the tragic machinery requires a certain, you know, subscription to these--all kinds of these belief systems. Now, you did write about a different Miller play,

Richard Halpern (26:33)

Death of a Salesman.

Ato Quayson (26:34)

Death of a Salesman. But don't you think that The Crucible would have fit in? And The Crucible is--can be subjected to, submitted to a Hegelian reading also.

Richard Halpern (26:46)

That's true. But isn't it--I mean, not to be too reductive, isn't it just a secularist critique of those beliefs? I mean, it's not--I don't think Miller is taking them seriously. He's showing them as a kind of counterpart--you know, whatever, McCarthyist, you know, trials and so forth as a kind of totalizing and totalitarian system in which people are caught. I mean, there is a kind of allegorical dimension to the play.

John Kerrigan (27:17)

I tell you a point. I'd say that witchcraft is one bit of connective tissue between African traditions and European. So it's no accident that Macbeth has been so big in--

Ato Quayson (27:25)

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Kerrigan (27:27)

Can I turn to another topic that we haven't quite addressed, which is derivation and the shadow of models of tragedy. I mean, even back in the Greek theater, of course, Euripides is immensely self-conscious about his precursors. But if you think about Soyinka, or even Achebe, certainly a tragic text like Season of Migration to the North, you've got the presence of the Greeks or Shakespeare, very much in the tissue of the reading experience. And I wonder whether you feel that a distinctive condition of postcolonial tragedy, rather like being after the empire, you're after the empire's literature,

Margaret Cohen (28:01)

I could piggyback on that. I just want to ask about tragedy in theater and tragedy in the novel, and maybe come back to what you originally said about the public and the importance, in Hegel's model, of reconstituting a public of theatergoers that will move beyond the crisis that's represented in Antigone, and in terms of talking about how novels interpolate publics and certainly Season of Migration to the North, and the unreliable narrator, and the difficulty of knowing what to do with so much of that novel is really important. I'm just wondering if you could throw the difference between the reader and then the public of theatergoers into yours.

Ato Quayson (28:44)

This guy, Terry Eagleton, I'm going to talk about later, in Sweet Violence, he has a really fascinating take on the novel versus theater as traegies. He says the novel--basically to reduce it to the kind of formula--is that the novel has too much time. You know, so--he thinks that the novel is not--of course, all of Sweet Violence is full of novels, so he discusses lots of them--but he says, that fundamentally, the novel has too much time. It has too much time to describe the arc of social relations and so on. Whereas the theater, the tragic theater, is precisely about there not being time to resolve the contradictions and the conflict and the clashes and so on. So that the transposition into the novel form--I think that the novel often requires a kind of dramatic--and by dramatic, I mean, both in terms of the staging of characters--but a form of catastrophe. The novel frequently requires a form of catastrophe to ensure that it is really a tragedy.

Richard Halpern (30:06)

But for Hegel, I think the novel is not essentially a tragic form. I think that this is something I'm going to argue--in my book, I'm going to argue [...] But the essential location of the novel for Hegel is tragicomic. It's a form in which the antagonism between tragedy and comedy gets blunted, that it's serious, but it's not catastrophic. It doesn't mean you can't write tragic novels, and Hegel would have been aware of some obviously famous examples, The Sorrows of Young Werther. But the novel is not in its essence and in its location a tragic form and it's--it's therefore always pushing a little bit against its generic boundaries, which are ill-defined for Hegel in the first place, when it when it takes to tell a tragic tale.

John Kerrigan (31:03)

Our friend, Aristotle, wouldn't have had any difficulty in using the term tragedy of a narrative poem like the Iliad. And I think there's no principled objection to the idea of a concentrated, grim narrative, a novel, being a tragedy. One thinks of [...] or Season of Migration to the North. And actually, most of the examples one would come up would would be very concentrated with a limited cast of characters, a bit like a play. It wouldn't be War and Peace, as it were. If you have too many connections, too many proliferations, too many qualifying narratives, you're going to disperse the spirit of tragedy, which in the end is a set of artistic choices as well as existential condition. So I think I'd approach the problem from that angle. Whether the novel has to be tragicomic, I don't know--I mean, one way of thinking about this will be to say, what would Aristotle have made of the Greek romance, which follows, you know, 100 years later? Probably he would have said, well, Homer is tragic, but that can't be. It goes on too long. There are too many interlacing stories.

Richard Halpern (32:07)

You could argue that Aristotle begins the movement of thinking about tragedy as novel before the fact, simply from the fact that he was an exile from Athens when he wrote the Poetics, he was not--he did not see theater, and this is famously reflected in the fact that in the Poetics, emphasis on spectacle, or, you know, the sort of mechanism of producing plays on stage is simply absent. And his argument says, These are the unimportant part. What matters is plot, right? What matters is narrative. So in a certain way, even before the fact, he's narrativizing tragedy, it's no longer a performance, it's no longer anything with a chorus, it's none of that sort of Dionysian abyss, that you two will go on about in the 19th century, is present at all for Aristotle. The drama is a story. And you can do just as well by having it in book form and reading it as you do sitting in front of it. And in fact, maybe even better, because you're not distracted by what for Aristotle--

John Kerrigan (33:12)

Well, the Aristotelian is full of such prejudiced remarks about the theater. Think of Dr. Johnson. There's an honorable tradition.

Ato Quayson (33:19)

The thing, though, is the, as it were, the social impact, because it's a group form of ritual consumption. You know, it's large numbers of people, and the fact that the characters-- we all know, the actors are enacting. And that feature of enactment itself introduces a different kind of energy and dynamic. In other words, the theater has a certain immediacy. Also the embodiment, the people, the human beings' flesh and blood, their gestures, their tears and so on, their anguish and anger--imagine Lear screaming at his daughters or railing aainst the elements and so on. That immediacy is somewhat attenuated, in tragedy--or, in the novel form, it attenuates it. I think, what the novel doe is that depending--if it wants to be grim, to use your word, if it wants to be grim, it can be by showing different sides of grimness, and elaborating it in a very steady way. The beauty of Season of Migration to the North--apart from everything else--and this is going back to the after, you know, the postcolonial after--is that it is after in a way that requires us to revisit and reread the things that ome prior. It is genealogy. It resituates genealogy by being--coming after them. I have a chapter on Tayeb Salih. One of the things that I say--and I don't know whether this will fly--is that Jean Morris actually wants him not to be a fake Othello. You know, he's been going around saying that, "I'm the man!" You know, going around. She says, you--to prove that you are the man, be a passionate Othello. So when he sees her handkerchief, a handkerchief that is not his own, in her room, and he asks her, she says, it is not yours, but what are you going to do about it? You're not even a real Othello, you punk. This girl is actually telling him. But when he saw--the ritual, he murders her and so on--when he's relaying the story to the interlocutor in the village, the thing that he says, which struck me as very fascinating, is that that is the one thing that he regrets, not killing himself after he killed her. In other words, she enacted Desdemona and invited him to be the true Othello, but he failed. He's like--and this is what I write about--he's like Prufrock. The moment of greatness is offered to him, and he can't do it.

John Kerrigan (36:26)

I don't think Prufrock slept with many women. No, I think he was quite right not to kill himself, because he's living out her fantasies of what Othello should be. That's what the novel is addressing. So he's right to resist the tragic paradigm. The pity of it is that he takes up so much of that burden.

Ato Quayson (36:44)

But he regrets it. He lives--

John Kerrigan (36:46)

Well, that's because, yes, he's a colonial production, as well as a conqueror of the heart of the empire. That's his achievement and failing.

Casey Wayne Patterson (37:03)

Thank you again for joining us in this episode of the Center for the Study of the Novel's podcast Cafe. We would also like to thank Ato Quayson, Richard Halpern, and John Kerrigan for their generosity in agreeing to this conversation. Thanks to our team at the Center for the Study of the Novel: to An Truong Nguyen and Maritza Colon for their operational support; to our graduate coordinators Victoria Zurita, Cynthia Giancotti, and Casey Patterson; to Erik Fredner for editing, consultation, and sound engineering; and to our host and director Margaret Cohen. The Center for the Study of the Novel is a subsidiary of the English Department at Stanford University.

Wai Chee Dimock, John Plotz, and Colin Milburn on the literature of Planetary Futures (5/23/19)

Wai Chee Dimock; John Plotz; Colin Milburn; Margaret Cohen

Wai Chee Dimock, John Plotz, and Colin Milburn on the literature of Planetary Futures (5/23/19), or read the full transcript below.

Casey Wayne Patterson (00:06)

Welcome, and thanks for joining us in this episode of Cafe, the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. In this installment, our host Margaret Cohen is joined by guests Wai Chee Dimock, Colin Milburn and John Plotz to discuss the place of climate change in contemporary speculative fiction. Wai Chee Dimock is William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. Colin Milburn is the Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities at the University of California, Davis, with appointments in English, Science and Technology Studies, and Cinema and Digital Media. John Plotz is a professor of Victorian literature at Brandeis University, and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. This conversation was recorded on May 23 2019, shortly before our guests gave papers and a panel titled "Speculative Fictions: Possible Futures for the Planet." We're thrilled to be sharing this conversation with you, so thank you again for listening in as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Margaret Cohen (01:12 )

I'm hoping we can have a conversation about the role of narrative in climate change and our current debate about it. So as the French would say, sans etre indiscret, what were you guys talking about breakfast?

Colin Milburn (01:26)

We were talking about––one conversation that I really liked, Wai Chee, when you were talking about people who are thinking about programs that merged together science and humanities departments.

Wai Chee Dimock (01:37)

Yeah.

Colin Milburn (01:38)

I know it's something you'd like to write about. But so, ways in which you can imagine, yeah teaching people how to write for the sciences, or the earth sciences, I think wasn't that––

Wai Chee Dimock (01:47)

Right, well, environmental humanities––

Colin Milburn (01:48)

Environmental humanaties, and in a way that actually takes advantage of what humanities...

Wai Chee Dimock (01:52)

Yeah, I mean, actually, I think that in some places, it's been demonstrated, you know, in terms of enrollment, that getting narrative and thinking about the environmental future, is a great way to attract students. This will be creative nonfiction, and students will be writing, they will be research based, they have to learn a lot of facts about climate change, and imagining what futures there might be for all of us. I mean, it is writing, there's no question about it, it is narrative writing. But it is completely dependent on some, a) the ability to do research, and to discriminate among different kinds of evidence, and also to weave everything together into an interesting story. So it's great training for the students, you know, all around. And it's a great way for English departments to get into the [...]

Margaret Cohen (02:45)

I'm wondering if you received a paper or if there's one example of something that stands out for you and your work?

Wai Chee Dimock (02:53)

I haven't, you know, I was thinking of trying to do that, but I haven't done it myself [...]. One is just kind of a personal anecdote, you know, that just heard from someone who taught a course, using exactly the same method. And she said, "it will be this way." But I think that at Illinois, Urbana Champaign, they actually have an environmental writing program, that is a certificate program, and its what is keeping the English department alive. It has a lot of recognition about undergraduates, because that's a program that they want to get into, it's a certificate program, both for undergrads and for grad students. So really, it has lots of appeal at different levels of teaching, and is a great way to put English at the center of lots and lots of, you know, intellectual and institutional traffic.

Colin Milburn (03:45)

It really does seem that these interdisciplinary programs that bring together the humanities and the sciences are increasingly popular among students, not only environmental humanities, but medical humanities programs, I see students really flocking towards those programs, because they're, they have a sense of the utility of having skills trained in the humanities, in the social sciences, in data analysis in some quantitative skills that they can then have tremendous flexibility going forward. And of course, they care about the future of the world as well. So these programs often appeal to a wide number of student concerns.

Wai Chee Dimock (04:20)

Yeah. And I think the public university is actually leading the way. I mean, they're just that much more innovative, just compared to––they're much more innovative in thinking about ways that can speak to the students, to the parents, but also intellectually exciting, you know, seems like something new that the students can do.

Margaret Cohen (04:38)

And I also think what you said Colin, it's their future. They I mean, they feel very keenly that this is a problem that they need to be involved in and they need to solve.

Colin Milburn (04:50)

the other aspect of it that I was thinking about when another thing we were talking about at breakfast was about, that where you see increases in numbers of humanities, it's often in the creative art. So, to use another buzzword, "content creation," they're less interested in analyzing the works of the past than they are figuring out the shape of what it is they're doing. And I mean, my experiences teaching like a science fiction class or a fantasy class, the moment that you give them space, to do their own thing, that's, you know, that's when the eyes started sparkling. So how did that, you know, how do we harness that energy? I mean, given that we're not going to turn into Creative Writing departments, but how do we, you know, keep that content creation part as consistent with our mission to get people to think realistically, or...

Wai Chee Dimock (05:32)

I mean, I think that maybe one way, and that's why, you know, I call myself a coward, because it did occur to me that the paper assignment, as is currently constituted, might not be the best. Maybe it shouldn't be the only way to educate students. So maybe instead of assigning three, you know, traditional papers we can assign two and then have one that is the creative nonfiction writing.

John Plotz (05:55)

I talked to a historian of science, who has them do podcasts, essentially responses, do you do this too?

Colin Milburn (06:00)

I also do podcasts I also sometimes give them the option to make games, whether video games or some other alternative assignments, and I do find them responding in ways that we would call "nonfiction" but in very creative fashions. They're analyzing cultural materials. They're analyzing social and political issues, but in the form of a great creative multimedia framework. And that that does seem to inspire them in ways that the traditional paper

John Plotz (06:23)

Yeah, I'm gonna try that. I was totally excited by that. Yeah. 06:26 So is there lab, IT lab at UC Davis that will help students do the––

Colin Milburn (06:33)

Yeah, at Davis, we––so I run Media Lab called Mod Lab. And so we, through that lab provides services for students in the courses that are run by the faculty and grad students affiliated with that program. The university itself doesn't necessarily sponsor the university-wide service center. I know some universities do with this kind of this so at some campuses, I think that's probably easier to activate than others.

Wai Chee Dimock (07:00)

Yeah. So I mean, so is this, this is funded by which department? I mean, how much funding does it require?

Colin Milburn (07:06)

So funding in my case is often coming from external research grants.

Wai Chee Dimock (07:12)

Well, that's interesting, actually, maybe maybe even talk about that.

Margaret Cohen (07:14)

I did want to ask you about your Mellon grant and your experience learning to code?

Colin Milburn (07:20)

Oh, well, yeah.

Wai Chee Dimock (07:21)

Oh, that's wonderful.

Colin Milburn (07:22)

The Mellon Foundation offers this wonderful fellowship for what seems to be primarily aimed at mid career faculty in the humanities to retrain in a different field in order–

Wai Chee Dimock (07:33)

I've heard about that, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Colin Milburn (07:37)

So I been working in digital humanities and critical code studies for a little while that I am feeling, especially running this media lab that a lot of computer science students who are coming to work in the lab with me, were operating at a level that was just well beyond my capacity to helpfully engage with their work. So I needed to go back to school. And so that foundation enabled me to take a year of taking courses in computer science and I learned much more than I had known before. And I feel I left that year feeling very, very confident in my capacities as a programmer and to be able to talk to the graduate students and the undergrad students in the computer science fields.

Wai Chee Dimock (08:19)

You know, it's not uncommon now for the richer of professors to take a year off and get some kind of degree in computer science. I mean, I think that maybe [...] was doing something similar? What courses did you take in computer science? I mean, that seems like a year is a long time, right? I mean, you should be learning a lot.

Colin Milburn (08:37)

Yes, yeah. In my case, even though I had a little bit of basic coursework in computer science, I actually did start again, with some introductory courses just to sort of refresh my capacities and some of the computer languages that I had learned back when I was an undergraduate or not the ones that are standard, a lot of the curriculum. So that was also a reason to start with the, the sequences as if I imagined myself as an undergraduate students [...] and having the luxury of being a lifelong student and learner, I was able to learn a little bit more rapidly than perhaps a lot of undergraduates who are encountered for the first time so––

Wai Chee Dimock (09:20)

So you were in class with a lot of undergrads?

Colin Milburn (09:23)

I was in class with undergrads, and I was also in online courses. Yes. which turned out to be fantastic. I've always been rather skeptical of moves to online learning. And I am afraid I've had to eat my words a bit, really and retract my criticism. Because many of those courses at least when it comes to computer science, and I think online learning works really, really well.

Wai Chee Dimock (09:44)

So can you talk a little bit about them?

Colin Milburn (09:48)

So for example, in a lot of the––and this I think it's true of the number of campuses––many of the introductory courses are offered online so the students will register, they have a series of video lectures that are offered by the main instructor for the course, they have a textbook, there's usually an army of teaching assistants who are available in some cases around the clock to help students virtually when they need help that the students work through their assignments online. And when they do coding exercises online, the courses are set up such that the rating and evaluation of the codes that students submit is evaluated automatically, a system can look at the code that the student has submitted and in the case of the courses I took, the system was designed to help pinpoint areas where things might have not been working quite successfully in the code and never gave you the right answer immediately, but have suggested areas where you as the student needed to look to hear your code. And I felt that was a really great way of learning. Because if it helps guide you to figure out where you are wrong. And then in order to move on, you still had to learn what right how to make it work correctly.

Wai Chee Dimock (11:02)

So this automated right?

Colin Milburn (11:06)

Aside from the fact that we're human teaching assistants, some where in the back, and they'll answer questions, the rest of the course was completely automated.

Wai Chee Dimock (11:14)

There must have been some incredible software that was able to do that.

Colin Milburn (11:17)

Yes, yeah. And I think that it, it's not going to be the case for much more advanced algorithm research, but it's certainly for kind of introductory courses and doing testing of code for errors and bugs.

John Plotz (11:32)

So was there a lecture component?

Colin Milburn (11:33)

Yes. But they're video lectures.

Wai Chee Dimock (11:35)

Yeah, yeah. This lectures are really deemphasized, right? Yeah.

John Plotz (11:39)

Do you meet your classmates at all?

Colin Milburn (11:41)

I never met them in person. Yeah, I often had conversations with them. So some times those were really wonderful learning experiences as well, because of course many of the students are struggling with the same questions. And then yeah, you know, you'd log on midnight, and there's 30,000 other students who are also logged on. One of the classes I took had 30,000, 60,000 students enrolled from around the world, simultaneously. But did you interact with them?

Wai Chee Dimock (11:47)

At MIT?

Colin Milburn (11:50)

Yeah.

Wai Chee Dimock (11:54)

Wow. 60,000.

Colin Milburn (12:12)

They're all available to help each other.

John Plotz (12:14)

How on earth can they have TAs for 60,000 people?

Colin Milburn (12:14)

So I have––

Wai Chee Dimock (12:17)

What is, what is the name of the course?

Colin Milburn (12:19)

This, this one was called introduction to computational––computation and data structures using Python.

Wai Chee Dimock (12:28)

So is Python the language that you learn?

Colin Milburn (12:30)

I learned Python, and c, c++, C sharp, and R.

Wai Chee Dimock (12:37)

You know, you have to tell the story to me.

Margaret Cohen (12:39)

Yeah. it's greek to me.

Colin Milburn (12:41)

So Python is a really useful first computer science language to learn because it is quite human-readable, but it's also very, very technically efficacious, you can do a lot of very advanced things with Python. But students who are still coming to grips with the formalisms of computer languages are able to get a grip on Python relatively quickly. So it's often taught now in many universities as, as the first language, and for many programmers, it remains a favorite language like very, very advanced programmers, they continue to use it for a huge number of applications that have improved.

John Plotz (13:27)

So can I take a step back and ask, like in terms of how we think about, like, you talked about being initially really phobic about online classes and how you had to eat your words. I'm not yet at the word eating stage, I'm still just phobic. So to hear, you know, like, it seems like there's a few different ways to think about this. And I'm wondering, which is the best way, and one is the distinction I've heard made by people who look at something like the Khan Academy, which basically says that online is good for anything understood as training. But to the extent that you actually get education, like advanced algorithms, I heard you say, then you can't do online. So that's a model that just says, This is basically, you know, the commodified labor of training instruction we can do, but the higher, classier sort of teaching...But, but that's not exactly what you're actually saying the algorithm did a lot of the teaching.

Wai Chee Dimock (14:17)

Yeah, it's a better teacher, in some sense.

Colin Milburn (14:20)

Yeah. But I don't think that is transferable across all domains. And they also don't, I think it's probably most strongly effective for introductory computer science. Yeah. I do agree with that assessment. Yeah, their education may in fact, be somewhat different. And I am I still remain skeptical that it can be adopted as a model for humanities instruction, like who knows, maybe maybe at some point algorithms will be able to be very, very good writing trainers as well, but I don't think we're quite there. Do we have a professional deformation, which means we're always going to over estimate the humanist––like the amount of value we are adding to the classroom?

Wai Chee Dimock (15:03)

Yeah, yeah. But But I want to hear more about the contents of what you learn, you know, I mean, how is Python? How would you rank Python in relation to the other languages that you mentioned? I mean, what are some of the disadvantages of Python that will make people want to turn to other languages.

Colin Milburn (15:21)

So there are industry standard languages used for different different purposes. And different platforms will often be pre adapted to different languages. So for example, Video game programmers who use unity as the game in general, C sharp is the language that you need. There's ways translating language, one language to another. But generally, if you're writing in a way that all contributors can, that their functions are harmoniously, meshing, well, and then some languages are well suited for some tasks better than others. So R for example, is very, very good for doing statistical work for digital humanities work that's based upon the quantified analysis of text mining, like R is a really rich for doing that, it's also very quick and easy to learn how to use

Wai Chee Dimock (16:18)

Right, well, I take it that for you, data mining might not be the primary focus for you, right? For me, no, not to do that work myself. But sometimes I'm interested in reading the scholarship and then...

Margaret Cohen (16:31)

So John, I'm going to put you on the spot. If you got a Mellon grant, and you could go back and or go and spend a year getting educated in a really radically different discipline related to your research, what would you do?

John Plotz (16:45)

So I have done two different things. One, Brandeis is this great, small place, so it's very easy to hop from one lecture class to another. So I've, I've sat in on neuroscience graduate classes, which I love, not because I want to learn to be a neuroscientist, but I like learning how scientists think. So those are, those are basically Journal Club classes. But I think that's not a good answer for your question. Because there's no way either that I could learn enough to practice. So the other type of class that I sat in on is linguistics. So I think for me, it would probably be linguistics. Yeah. I mean, because I think of because I think of what I do as a form of aesthetic history. And I think I understand the history methodology, I feel pretty good about it, but I think that aesthetic seems to be rooted in aspects of language that I don't understand all the way down. So I feel like I can understand how a line of poetry works. Like I may be okay, on the semantics level, but get below that, and it becomes like a black box, and I would like to know more.

Wai Chee Dimock (17:42)

Linguistics seems to be spearheading a lot of, kind of, kind of empirical, you know, to extent that we still, you know, believe in that word, of empirical research in terms of just getting us to think more about languages that people think is being extinct. I've just done a new column on the contribution of linguistics to indigenous languages. And that actually is so important to, you know, thinking about the environment as well, because suddenly, Native Americans have been, have been so important, you know, in getting us to think about the environment, both in terms of the future, but also in terms of past and, you know, just the history of land use or even healthcare. So, you know, getting us to think about indigenous languages from the perspective of linguistics is very, very different from thinking of it in terms of English.

Margaret Cohen (18:36)

Yeah, you're reminding me of a conference I was at in Utah, in February, about the oceans that was really, really interdisciplinary. And so there was a paper that was given about essentially the failure to bring together indigenous knowledge about the environment and contemporary science. And it found really interesting listing, it was by a professor whose last name is Ikou, I have to look for her first name, who was teaching University of Hawaii. And she talked about bringing together someone who had Hawaiian knowledge of marine climate and marine science, a graduate student with someone working in you know, 21st century Western paradigms and trying to see what they had to say to each other. And one of the, I thought, the most moving and like honest parts of her paper was, it was really hard And I kind of want to just put that on the table.

John Plotz (19:32)

Margaret, I'm actually meant to ask you whether you've read Christina Thompson's new book, Sea–– Sea People?

Margaret Cohen (19:38)

[laughter] Calling me out! Of course not, I haven't read it yet, the answer is no.

John Plotz (19:38)

It just came out! But I loved it. It's amazing, but it's about that. It's about––first of all, it's about Butler library or Butler Museum, which is obviously in Hawaii, which is one of the hotbeds of putting those languages, those different cultural encounters on the table, but it's also about, you know, Cook. Cook had this friendship with this guy, was his name...

Margaret Cohen (19:49)

Tupaia.

John Plotz (19:56)

Tupaia! Tupaia, right, exactly. And you know, they made a chart together, which people have been puzzling over ever since because it clearly contains some Western ways of depicting the islands, but other ways which, Polynesian ways of thinking, right, about sea currents, and also we're stars rise and fall. But the map itself is virtually unreadable because it represents this collision of these two different modes. But, but there's a great chapter about linguistics as well. Yeah. Because all the Polynesian language related to one another and you can make a kind of genetic tree, of like, you know, you can tell that people got to New Zealand last based on like, linguistic...

Wai Chee Dimock (20:38)

But also, I think that there's this great repository for thinking about food. I mean, I think that one of the ways in which Indigenous Studies is going forward, is to link up with food studies. So at University of Washington, they seem to be emphasizing with indigenous indigenous language is really important. food sovereignty is an important aspect. So that has laws of public health implications. And I think that, you know, just from the kind of attention that's given, you know, to the sous chef, you know, just alternative to ways of celebrating Thanksgiving, or just thinking about the human / non human interaction, in terms of how we think about food, you know, both the economy of food, but also the ecology of food. So that would be one way in which Indigenous Studies can be deghettoized? I mean, you know, I don't think that it's a good way to go forward thinking that okay, only Native Americans would care about Indigenous Studies. Yeah, you know, it really should be something that everyone should care about.

Margaret Cohen (21:42)

I guess I want to come back to the question of difficulty, though, we're talking across the science, humanistic or anthropological divide, because it's a really hard divide to cross. And maybe our current moment with the way in which narrative so involved in climate change gives us an opportunity to reach out and speak with scientists in a way that 30 or 40 years ago, may have not interested the scientists. So I'm wondering if you've had experience with that and could talk a little bit about impasses and potential ways forward?

John Plotz (22:19)

Well, can I just say, really quickly, in terms of the timing of it, I just think like Colin, I was reading one of your chapters recently, and you talk about these early hackers who are reading the E.E. "Doc" Smith, is that right? Those sort of space opera sized, sci fi, the Lensman. I was thinking, "so that's probably 40 years ago." But there's an even longer tradition where science fiction, you know, science fiction has to do with scientists, like Fred Hoyle, right? So I actually one of the reasons I like science fiction is that it doesn't seem to me necessarily just at the present moment, but like, throughout the history of science fiction, it's been a kind of complicated messy––it's a contact zone, actually. So yeah, in the sense of that, you know, the Mary Louise Pratt notion of like the site of conflict. So you get a lot of messy, you get a lot of bad experiments, you get a lot of failures, you get a lot of things that are like Olaf Stapledon that people loved at the moment and then disappear again. But you also get Frankenstein or, or HG Wells where there's clearly you know, I mean, it's very important, I think, that Wells was one of the first students of Huxley at the museum school in Kensington in the 1870s, that's not just pure coincidence. Like, there's spaces that open up constantly.

Wai Chee Dimock (23:31)

Absolutely. I happened to mention to my downstairs neighbor, who is a software engineer at Google. Anyway. So I mentioned that I'm going to talk about The Three Body Problem. And it turns out that he has heard of the book. I mean, he just hasn't, he hasn't read it. But there was this discussion, actually, there was a lunch thing, apparently, at Google, about this book. And they have host speaker series of inviting authors to come and talk about books, and this will be the book that they'll be talking about. So and I think that, um, you know, sci fi, absolutely, it's the one, its a really key contact zone, between humanists and non humanists, in fact, I think that Stanford can really spearhead this, you know, and get in touch with Silicon Valley and just to team up with them, just to make sure that, you know, we have some kind of partnership. I think that in terms of university administrations we, one way to demonstrate to them that, you know, we actually think in terms of partnerships, because I think that the, the currency is innovation and partnerships. So.

Margaret Cohen (24:34)

Have you done a pmla column on this?

Wai Chee Dimock (24:37)

I haven't. I haven't, I'm thinking of doing one. Yeah. I did do one on on the data refuge movement, at Penn, which is led by librarians who wants to save climate data. So that was featured. By all media. I mean, it was Washington Post, everything, New York Times, everything. WHY magazine, read your article. And it was bringing together the Union of Concerned Scientists, librarians, from Penn, lots of librarians from Toronto as well, which seems to be a really important hub for this kind of thing. And plus all the people capable of doing online archive, archiving, because what happened was that they were afraid that the Trump administration was just gonna go ahead and make the EPA erase a lot of important climate data. So it's really important to make a copy of the available web pages, the scientists consider important. And it is not the kind of archiving that we're equipped to do, right, because you need to, to be able to do online archiving. So it's primarily librarians who have some kind of technical training, who would be able to do that, and plus, you know, whoever is willing to learn, you know, may really take some kind of self education, new kind of education, to be able to do this kind of work. But this is one very concrete area, once again, the humanists, and scientists will be working side by side.

Colin Milburn (26:03)

And in relation to that kind of work archiving of data or data science in general, this is an area where humanists and literary scholars in particular, I think, can contribute a lot. And to help scientists who often are looking for this kind of collaboration. There's a recent semi recent field called Data Storytelling, the data science...

Wai Chee Dimock (26:21)

At Penn too, right?

Colin Milburn (26:23)

Yeah, it's spreading as a concept. And so the idea often coming down to: that data doesn't speak for itself. And data always needs to be communicated effectively amongst peers in the research field, as well as to broader public constituencies. And so data storytelling is a way of emphasizing that the notion that narratives are the things that convey meaningfulness to, to data and make data communicable that make data impactful in the world, and who better knows how to talk about narratives than literary scholars.

John Plotz (26:58)

So I, I get that idea. And I like it, and I'm in favor of it and all that. But the thing that is interesting to me talking to scientists, is that is that most people that you talk to, in that context, understand that as a "communicating to the public" question, whereas to me, when you think about the work of somebody like Edward tufte, it's actually not just about the outward facing presentation of the results. It's that actually like, in your poster your sessions, for example, which scientists do all the time, that actually putting together the narrative, I don't know, in house, I guess is the right word. You know, when you're still talking to the group, not the audience, like you're still in the phase of working through the problem. Like in other words, you need a conception of narrativity that isn't just PR.

Wai Chee Dimock (27:00)

Yeah, it's a conceptual tool.

John Plotz (27:17)

Yeah. It's a conceptual tool. Right. And this is formative assessment. Right. Yeah. Rather than being presentation.

Wai Chee Dimock (27:51)

Yeah. I mean, it should, theoretically helps scientists think as well.

Colin Milburn (27:56)

Yeah, to have a critical perspective on their own data. And I do think that is an emerging in some areas within data storytelling, particularly when there's a kind of critical data studies perspective that's entailed. Yeah, that exactly as you say, the sort of inward facing aspect of analyzing and communicating data amongst one's own research peers and thinking about the transformation of so called "raw data" into meaningful data is a, is a non––it's a process that has social dimensions to it.

John Plotz (28:27)

Totally.

Colin Milburn (28:28)

And understanding those social dimensions and being able to say where data comes from, why was this data gathered, for what purposes, what was the set of parameters that enabled this data to be collected as, as a database? Those questions have often been elided or included in thinking about data communication, but good, responsible data storytelling, I think, tries to grapple with some of those things.

Wai Chee Dimock (28:53)

Right. I mean, and also some specific stories that you know, I mean, for instance, the geology is telling. I think that evolutionary biology and geology, I mean those sciences they're almost committed to narrative, by definition, I mean, for those sciences, it really is important, you know, to be able to tell the story well, right. So I mean, there's certain concepts. What is the one that Stephen Jay Gould, punctuated equilibrium? Exactly. I mean, you really need that kind of two words, memorizable narrative that is going to stick to my head, you know, nothing else will stick to my head. Or, I think that for some geologists, there is this story called "Snowball Earth," once again, it tells a particular story. I mean, I don't think the scientists really do a good enough job telling stories about climate change right now. And that's why we're in the situation that we're in now. Yeah. I mean, so I think that this is really, you know, scientists definitely need some training. But I think the human those can also help tell the story.

Colin Milburn (29:57)

Ok so I have an interesting anecdote about this. But I have a colleague, a guy named Gael McGill, who runs something called the data visualization project at Harvard. And he had, well, he had a complicated background, but he actually was running an independent private company, which did data visualization. So what they did was things like, you know, they would make for the Museum of Science, a film that would take the data of what happens at a cell membrane when a molecule passes in. And they would present it in a way that, you know, child audiences at the Museum of Science could work. And that's how they got their money. But what they're really invested in is using data visualization, in the process of coming up with the paradigms while doing science. But there's a sort of bait and switch there where in order to make it attractive, you have to talk about it as kind of National Science Foundation wants you to do outreach, but what they really want is to be able to take, you know, if you could show what the membrane of a cell looks like, at the moment, that a molecule passes through it, that's incredibly helpful as you're doing the science.

Wai Chee Dimock (30:57)

Yeah, some public libraries are doing that. Boston Public Library actually has a data visualization panel. I mean, I didn't really I didn't go there. But I got an email notification about that. And it was partly, you know, just to educate the public, you know, using visual tools to get them to see exactly what climate change would do. And it just seemed to me that that, you know, I mean, I do think that libraries are really crucial in this. Yeah, I mean, I think that loss of both in terms of, you know, just, just libraries, as a place where disadvantaged people can have access to the internet, but also just for education, ongoing education, for everyone else, that was wondering if, you know, Stanford is doing any kind of outreach in their own terms, use any library.

Margaret Cohen (31:44)

I think it's very complicated. You know, it's an educated community. And it's also a community, which has some outreach, but the outreach is often done in more traditional ways. It's a strange aspect of Silicon Valley, that Silicon Valley invests a lot in blue chip, old fashioned values, when it comes to...here, I'm kind of gonna go off into a rant so I should stop myself, but but I feel that, that there's a certain––

John Plotz (32:12)

it's a podcast, right, you're supposed to rant! There would be no podcasts if there were no ranting!

Margaret Cohen (32:17)

[laughter] Alright, alright. The problem with Silicon Valley is that all the engineers who are creating, like, the kind of new innovative technologies are all bound up in that during the day, and fighting the wars over how to like create them, and the intellectual property and all that, and that at night, they want to go and, like have the assurance of, you know, blue chip, blue chip culture. And they can't both, like be fighting, you know, to get resources and for all the innovation, at the same time, be doing this more aesthetic form of work. Right. So it's a very strange place in that way.

Wai Chee Dimock (32:58)

Yeah, I mean, I don't think that actually I don't think Stanford would, I mean, I think that essentially public libraries, most like Boston Public Library, and Cambridge Public Library, for that matter. They do a lot of outreach. So, in fact, you know, I think the Cambridge Public Library is teaming up with MIT, although it basically is K to 12 education, but making sure that they are shaping, you know, the younger generation.

John Plotz (33:21)

Do you know what the National Humanities Center is doing about that these days? Because I feel like in the back in the day, they did a lot, you know, with curriculum design, they were very innovative with web based American history from below, curriculum design, but I don't know if they've gone forward with that.

Wai Chee Dimock (33:37)

So I did look up to see some of the grant recipients. I'm curious who's getting their huge grants, and what they've done to me, and it's really interesting, I've heard many stories that it's very hard for people from elite institutions to get a huge, grant, not so much fellowships, but grants, project grants. So I was curious to see you know, who is getting the grants? And it turns out that lots of community colleges, and also tribal colleges. So the Standing Rock Sioux College was getting a grant.

John Plotz (33:42)

And what are they doing?

Wai Chee Dimock (34:06)

It was linguistics. I mean, you should go to that. Yeah. And there was another one. Oh, Pawnee, Pawnee Nation, they also got a grant. So it's really I mean, I think it was very talkative and plus, they like collaborative projects, so if several schools are teaming up, liberal arts colleges, they tend to give to those, you know, people, schools that are not resource rich, which I can totally understand. I mean, so Berkeley got one. But it's, it's about the only named school, Berkeley and Virginia got grants, but I would say most schools like me, I don't see––Oh, Stanford! Stanford got one there was some kind of medieval, global medievalism.

Margaret Cohen (34:49)

Oh, yeah, that was our entrepreneurial medievalists!

Wai Chee Dimock (34:51)

Okay, so I saw that. But they'll say Princeton or Yale or any of those schools, don't get anything.

Colin Milburn (35:00)

I mean, public libraries are definitely at a scary moment. Right? Because public libraries have some of the same problems that like undergraduate libraries have, where they could be emptied out. I mean, you can go to some public libraries, and there's virtually no books in them. Because they've decided, Community Center is the models. So the thing you're describing is so inspiring. Because it gives the archival side of the of the research scholarship project back to the public library. Which, they've been just, they run the risk of turning into just collections of terminals and bestsellers. This makes them something more than that.

Wai Chee Dimock (35:33)

Absolutely. I mean, I think they are transforming education in a very interesting way.

John Plotz (35:37)

Yeah, but they kind of have to.

Wai Chee Dimock (35:38)

They have to. So this morning, I just heard on NPR, apparently free community college education is something that has been done in Georgia. I mean, that, this is not Bernie Sanders' idea. This is different kind, right. And it's been implemented already. So you know, if that could be, if just, you know, computer literacy and climate literacy could be made into a key part of community colleges. And in fact that has been done in Massachusetts, Bunker Hill Community College has a really thoroughgoing climate education program.

John Plotz (36:13)

I love Bunker Hill, they're the ones to give credit for in class, in prison education. Yeah. The credits get [...]

Wai Chee Dimock (36:21)

Yeah, I was thinking of doing a feature on them, yeah, yeah. It's really I mean, if that is the mother, but the loss of other I mean, Southern California is not... it's not the University of California, but the Cal State, Cal States. And then community colleges everywhere.

John Plotz (36:39)

Wait, Margaret, can I come back to your rant for a second? Because that is really provocative. You're––so if I understand your point, the point is that like, while they're busily creatively destroying in the internet space, from nine to five, or nine to eleven pm, and then they want to come come home, they just want culture to play it safe. Yeah, they want armchair art, more or less. So then maybe the challenge is, I mean to go back to why I love science fiction, then the challenge is, is there a way to convince people in the world of science and technology that culture is not that other thing over there that represents the safe armchair for them, but it's actually like a living conversation.

Margaret Cohen (37:13)

I think science fiction smuggles it in. And so what you're making me think is that maybe to have like a center or some sort of an outreach series on science fiction would be a really great way to try to...

John Plotz (37:25)

You guys know how that "The Martian," that Andy Weir book, was crowd sourced basically, like he put it up. Like, if you described the process that you arrived at with The Martian, you would think it was an oulipot experiment, right? Like he writes the draft, he puts it up, people shoot holes in it for various ways, he modifies it...maybe, Colin, you know more about the process than I do.

Wai Chee Dimock (37:45)

Yeah, you––well, you teach a scifi course, right? Yeah.

John Plotz (37:49)

So in other words, that's actually like a very unusual way of writing a novel. And only worked because of all these dweeby scientists. Who loved science fiction and who wanted to...

Wai Chee Dimock (37:56)

Right. Yeah. You guys should have a science fiction fans website as well. Yeah, that'd be really great.

Margaret Cohen (37:57)

Okay. And you're all gonna help me?

Wai Chee Dimock (38:03)

Yeah, absolutely.

John Plotz (38:06)

Well fandoms were invented for scifi, you know, in the 20s and the 30s.

Wai Chee Dimock (38:09)

Yeah, no, I mean, scientists are the perfect. You know, they are the perfect fans.

Margaret Cohen (38:14)

Yes. Right. Yeah.

Colin Milburn (38:16)

I teach a science fiction class that has about 200 students in it each time. And more than half of the students are like from the sciences. Yeah that's been my experience, or like 75%. Yeah.

Margaret Cohen (38:26)

This is such a great appetizer for later. But I have a question I really wanted to make sure we talk about just quickly, what about collaboration in the humanities? Are we done with the like, original genius, single author of the monograph, or an interview, move on and be involved in teams and give this up?

Colin Milburn (38:49)

We're definitely, I feel we're in a transitional moment here. I love collaborating, and I work on teams. Nevertheless, I still mostly publish single authored publications, even though so much of the research I do now is with my graduate students is with colleagues from other departments. I'm on so many grants with colleagues from other departments. But in the, in the end, there's still this kind of institutional pressure and often when I talk to friends in the humanities we're never entirely sure exactly where it's coming from. So some of it is very much self-imposed. But certainly from my own sense of pleasure as a researcher I enjoy the collaboration much more than the single authored work.

Wai Chee Dimock (39:28)

Yeah, I do you have one kind of big and sustained collaboration grad students, which is putting together an anthology. That is easier than writing, because you know when it comes to––so my American religion world anthology is not selling well at all, you know partly because of the particular kind of authorship, but it was so––maybe it's more important just doing it you know, that I learn more from the process. The outcome is, is not going to be profitable, but we may basically make all the decisions about the selections collectively. Every one of us voted for every single item included in that anthology. I did the intro, I have to confess I did that. It was easier that way. But everything else was collectively done. And I'm very happy to say that of the four students, actually three grad students than one undergrad. So of the three grad students, one is an assistant professor Chicago. One has been a hist-and-lit instructor at Harvard and he just got a tenure track job at Kentucky. One is––has just gotten his PhD. So he's going to be a postdoc at Dartmouth, and the undergrad, who is an economics major, he has been working for McKinsey. I mean, he was actually there as an intern before he graduated, and he's been working for, McKinsey, so I mean, I think that for them, you know, you know, I shouldn't take credit, you know, for all the good results that, you know, good things are happening to them. But nonetheless, it seems interesting that, you know, they all went on from that project and things worked out for them.

Margaret Cohen (41:07)

It didn't hurt them in an institutional way.

Wai Chee Dimock (41:08)

Yeah, it definitely did not. And I think that, just kind of going off in a slightly different tangent, I think that some companies are hiring on the basis of the kind of the wide ranging expertise of the applicant, so, you know, I had one undergrad, and he's, I mean, he's very unusual in the sense that he's been writing for The New Yorker ever since he was a freshman. So you know, this is definitely, it's not a generalizable case. But at first, at the outset, when he first applied, the first year that he applied to jobs, he applied, you know, to all kinds of things like TripAdvisor, he didn't get a job with TripAdvisor, he got a job with Microsoft, they flew him out, they, you know, so it was very intense was a one day interview, he was brought out, and he was offered the job on the basis of the fact that he was a double major, I think. I mean, you know, he said that, for most other companies, that was not an asset, but for Microsoft, it probably was. And I think that you know it, and now, you know, he basically is guaranteed a job at Microsoft if he wants to go back. So I think that, that in one way or another, having some kind of humanities component in the education of a software engineer, whatever, is definitely a plus at this point.

John Plotz (42:37)

So I, this is totally consistent with what you guys said, but I want to take to take a different spin on it, which is like, in terms of whether we're at a transitional moment or not. So I, at––Brandeis is great, because it's a small place. I spend a lot of time with the scientists in the social scientists, especially the physical scientists, the biologists, the earth scientists, the physicists, they just collaborate in ways that I really admire and we've worked hard to kind of emulate that in the humanities. So we, I have a couple of different sort of innovation groups that talk together. And while that... I love the fact that we partially import those models, it does seem to me there's something about the humanities that does still reward individual work. Like when you were describing the distinction between the moment of assembling the pieces versus, say, writing an introduction, like, I just don't think––there's a baby and bathwater issue. You know, like, because when I talked to the scientists, I had a friend, Gina Turrigiano, come talk at a conference about creativity that we do that the Radcliffe, and she was saying, you know, "I'm there, because I think of English professors as people who know how to go off and write things on their own. And as a scientist, I want to make sure I remember how to do that, too, because so much of what I do is done in the team." So I just think we shouldn't...Yeah, yes. Collaboration, but collaboration for part, the parts that reward it. And then you know, there isn't...there's something, I don't know, when you go to a party, you can tell the English professors are different from the scientists. Not just because they're awkward and stand in the corner. There's a deep thought thing going on!

Wai Chee Dimock (44:08)

Writing, it's a very individual thing. Very hard. Yeah, yeah.

John Plotz (44:11)

It's a very lonely thing. I'm not saying you can't get away from it. But let's not stigmatize the people who are just good at going off and writing by themselves.

Wai Chee Dimock (44:19)

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. At the same time, I did notice that a lot of the submissions to pmla, are actually jointly written. I mean, there really is a kind of interesting shift. Yeah.

Margaret Cohen (44:32)

Very interesting, yeah.

John Plotz (44:33)

Well, it just seems like it's, it's, there's no downside to putting pressure on the model and encouraging people to do things more jointly. But I would be surprised if the result of that is that individual writing goes away.

Wai Chee Dimock (44:43)

I mean, I think the [...] that I just mentioned, I mean, I think that he does all his work collaboratively. Yeah. And quite often with grad students as well, I mean, which seems a really admirable way of, you know, and I think that in his case it's because, I mean, so he uses different kinds of corpora for the kind of the novel thing, that I mean, it's not unlike the Lit Lab here. So, so the kind of corpora that he needs to consult, I mean some of them are actually other schools. So you know, he would collaborate with whoever it is at that school, and then jointly write the paper. And so we are going to publish one, and I can't remember that, you know, it just goes to show that pmla is really anonymous. So, that I'm blanking on the name of the other author. But anyways, very successful instance of somebody, because it's, it's been accepted, I can say this. So as anonymously submitted, we did know that it was written by two people because they refer to themselves as "we." And it was actually turned back, it was returned to them for revise and resubmit. So for me, that actually was the test because you know, you can start off two people working together at the first round, but the next round revision actually is really important. And whether two people can work well together. I mean, I think that actually is the real test. And they were able to pass that test.

John Plotz (46:09)

You know, that raises a really interesting question, which is that collective authorship in the sciences is actually a little bit different in its meaning, from what we talked about writing together, because lots of those collectively authored science papers, that just means somebody contributed the data, somebody contributed the [...] sample, somebody is that chief. But it could be written by one person, actually. So authorship is much more complicated.

Wai Chee Dimock (46:29)

It's a much higher bar. Yeah. But if we can, if there's a high bar that we can meet, you know, it says a lot about us too.

Colin Milburn (46:37)

In that regard, the science model of having multiple authors where different people may have contributed things besides the direct writing: certain journals require that there is an acknowledgement of their contribution to the, in the sciences, of their contribution to the writing of the article. But that general model, I think, is helpful for the Humanities for us to be able to acknowledge as scholars the kind of debts that we owe to other contributors to our research: to graduate students or others who may sometimes be left out of authorship but who may have contributed significantly to research or thinking. So to be able to have a flexible author byline to acknowledge these kinds of questions...

John Plotz (47:14)

That's such a helpful way of thinking about it. You know, I mean, I'm sure I'm not alone and feeling that "acknowledgments" is often the first thing I read in a book. But, and you feel slightly guilty because it feels a little personal. But actually, the acknowledgments page is, in a sense, an extension of the author.

Wai Chee Dimock (47:30)

But I think what that grants you is more than just an acknowledgement, too, they need their names right up there.

John Plotz (47:37)

The point is that if you could think about those, those two sections is having more fluid relationship between them, that might be...

Wai Chee Dimock (47:44)

I think that, you know, students are very, I mean grad students, in a way, I mean, they are more tech savvy than the rest of us. I mean, I'm, you know, I don't think that we should think that we're always in the position to teach, you know, our students. I mean, I often...students know more than we do. I mean, so this will be one place for them to showcase the skills that we don't have.

Colin Milburn (48:05)

One of the projects that might Media Lab, the mod lab team put together was a video game for Shakespeare in performance called "Play the Knave," and so we had computer science students who were involved, we had English literature students involved, we had historians of science involved. And so the game exists, and it's being used in a variety of schools for education. And then a number of research publications have come out that have been co-authored, and the first author has been my colleague, Gina Bloom, who is a Shakespeare scholar at UC Davis.

Wai Chee Dimock (48:33)

Oh I have heard of her! Yeah, yeah.

Colin Milburn (48:35)

Yes, she's a well known early modernist, but so, the students who contributed the programming to the game are named as co-authors on these publications as well. Because none of the research could exist without them.

Margaret Cohen (48:48)

It's interesting it has, it's a way also to bring back older periods, which for a while, I think we were afraid that they were being lost. I'm just thinking about the entrepreneurial medievalists or, you know, Shakespeare and, you know, digital that somehow this makes come alive.

Wai Chee Dimock (49:05)

I think so. I think that, you know, early modern and medieval are really coming alive, you know, with a new kind of, you know, new uses of archives, you know, and then new ways to make those archives accessible. And just making them interesting. So what is that game?

Colin Milburn (49:25)

The game is a 3d motion capture game, that requires players to essentially put on a performance of different scenes from Shakespeare. And the point of the game is to understand how changes in performance, changes in staging, etc, can affect the meaning of the play.

Wai Chee Dimock (49:40)

Wow, yeah, that's it. Yeah. that's perfect.

Colin Milburn (49:43)

It's now in a pilot program where we're sending it around to high schools around the country and also some colleges, but high schools often don't have funding to be able to buy the equipment. So we got a small grant at UC Davis to be able to buy kits to be able ship out free of charge.

Wai Chee Dimock (50:02)

So this is totally portable?

Colin Milburn (50:03)

Yeah, it's portable. So we, essentially the kit is a computer plus a connect 3d camera with the software loaded on the computer. We ship it to them and then they can do their exercises in class and they ship it back to us when they're, they're done.

Wai Chee Dimock (50:15)

They ship it back to you to do what? Then we ship it on to the next school. Oh, okay. Okay, so you just have one version of this thing that is passed around?

Colin Milburn (50:23)

Yeah, well we have a few dozen computers at this point. But this is, it's not a tremendously scalable model, until we have more funding, but it was one thing that we were able to figure out relative to so many high schools that were contacting us wanting this as a tool for teaching Shakespeare in their classes, but not being able to afford the hardware, the equipment that was needed.

Margaret Cohen (50:43)

Thank you for this amazing conversation.

Casey Wayne Patterson (50:51)

Thank you again for joining us in this episode of the Center for the Study of the Novel's podcast Cafe. We would also like to thank Wai Chee Dimock, Colin Milburn and John Plotz for their generosity in agreeing to this conversation. Thanks our team at the Center for the Study of the Novel, to An Truong Nguyen and Maritza Colon for their operational support. To our graduate coordinators Victoria Zurita, Cynthia Giancotti, and Casey Patterson. To Eric Fredner for editing, consultation, and sound engineering, and to our host and director Margaret Cohen. The Center for the Study of the Novel is a subsidiary of the English Department at Stanford University.

Rita Felski on her 2019 Ian Watt Lecture (5/3/19)

Rita Felski; Margaret Cohen

Rita Felski on her 2019 Ian Watt Lecture (5/3/19), or read the full transcript below.

Casey Wayne Patterson (00:10)

Welcome and thanks for joining us in this episode of Cafe, the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel podcast. In this installment, our host Margot Cohen is joined by guest Rita Felski. To discuss the central role of "identification" in readers' experiences of novels. Rita Felski is William R. Kenan, Jr, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. This conversation was recorded on May 3, before Professor Felski delivered the center's 2019 Ian Watt lecture in the History and Theory of the Novel. We have the good fortune to showcase some really fantastic scholarship at the center, and we're thrilled to now be sharing it with you. Thank you for listening in on another of our warm and informal exchanges, as we scholars have a friendly chat among ourselves.

Margaret Cohen (01:09)

Could you tell me something about the uses of literature for you as you were growing up?

Rita Felski (01:16)

Well, I guess I've always been interested in literature, I was the kind of classic nerd I suppose when I was young, I would just read constantly. At that time, we had a public library very close by and I would get my three library tickets and three from my mom and three from my dad and go to the library, get nine books, and I would make my way through those books, spending the whole day reading. So when I was growing up reading was really crucial for me. And because I grew up in England, I started with Enid Blyton, who's not very well known here, but she's real classic, really in England and through much of the world. So I made my way through all her books. When I was older, I got into, I don't think, like Tolkien I suppose in my early teens. And then later on, I became really fixated on a lot of European literature. You know, Thomas Mann, Kafka Jean Paul Sartres, Balzac. So these really became central reference points for me when I was growing up. So reading has really always been a huge part of my life. Not surprisingly, given that I'm now a literature professor.

Margaret Cohen (02:16)

Who did you identify with in The Lord of the Rings?

Rita Felski (02:18)

Well, it's interesting in terms of Lord of the Rings, actually, I think that's a case where I didn't particularly identify with any specific character but I was really entranced by the extraordinary rich and detailed nature of the fictional world, you know, it was the world as a whole, I think that drew me in and I remember, you know, I must have been 13, or 14, and just coming to the end of the last volume of Lord of the Rings, and just feeling this incredible sadness was being thrown out this magical universe and back into my sad little suburban life at 49 Southern Road, Birmingham, England. So there was a real sense of loss, I think, in being no longer being able to be part of that community. I was also a, you know, I shouldn't say of course, as many people when I was eight or nine years old, a huge fan of the Narnia books, were also very important to me. So I think in those cases, I wasn't necessarily identifying with the character, but I was really being, I found myself taken up in, absorbed in, in this fictional world, which I just found so inspiring. You know, and then when I went to university, obviously, I didn't learn to talk about books in those kinds of ways. I learned to analyze them and to think about them theoretically. And that should––I want to say was also really important to me. So I was not one of those scholars who thought that theory was alienating or, or took one away from literature. For me, it was really liberating and exciting to encounter the world of literary and critical theory. So it's a very important part of my own, you know, intellectual development. You know, I'm thinking of someone like Janice Radway, you know, who's another literary scholar, and she talked about how she used to love literature. And she became, she identified with all these characters in novels and she would become absorbed in fiction. And then she went to university and she was made to feel shame about those identifications. And I never really felt quite that sense of shame. I'm not––I really enjoyed, like reading literature, you know, as a lay reader. But then when I went to university, I also found these new intellectual vocabularies very, very exciting. And so I will certainly, as well as being infatuated with literature, or certainly for time also very much infatuated with theory.

Margaret Cohen (04:20)

And we're imagining the reader Felski who has just left the suburban town and is going to university and I'm wondering whether there was a book that made the transition for you or a set of objects like, how did you shift from the reader who loves literature and identifies with literature to the reader who's drawn into the world of theory, that that absorption?

Rita Felski (04:48)

Yeah, I actually don't think the differences are as large as they're often made out to be. You know, I'm just finishing a book now that's called Hooked: Art and Attachment. And one of the arguments in this book, actually that there are quite a lot of similarities between readers who identify with fictional characters and literary scholars who identify with famous literary theorists, you know. And in both cases, there could be a sense of a law that could be a sense of draw, there can be a sense that you're attaching to these figures, who are teaching you something who are enabling new forms of perhaps self recognition or understanding. So I don't find that distinction, actually, to be that dramatic. Sounds dramatic, it's almost made out to be.

Margaret Cohen (05:28)

That resonates for me, I think I was asking you that question, thinking of myself, and coming from a just an impassioned love of Proust and Remembrance of Things Past and reading that and taking courses in Proust at Yale and then becoming swept through that into the cult of discipleship around Paul de Man.

Rita Felski (05:51)

Oh, yeah.

Margaret Cohen (05:52)

You know, reading these passages in Proust, and what you're saying about the absorption in a world that is not about practical things, and has got this densely inhabited quality to it, that resonates.

Rita Felski (06:07)

Yeah, yeah, my, my training was perhaps a little bit different. As an undergraduate, I went to Cambridge University in England. And I, you know, I must say, it wasn't actually a very fruitful experience for me, because all I learned there was to do a kind of traditional close reading of literature, the kind of new critical methods that were there very much still in fashion. And while I was I was kind of reasonably competent at that, but I just felt it never really answered the questions for me about, you know, why why should we study literature? Or why does it matter? Why is it important? And then I ended up going to Australia to do my PhD. And at that point, this is purely, or half by happenstance, actually, I ended up at University of Monash in Melbourne. And it turned out at the time that in Melbourne, there were a bunch of Hungarian intellectuals, actually students of Lukacs', who'd been thrown out of Budapest, because of their controversial ways of thinking and had taken up residence in Australia. But what it meant is that I was a very dynamic group of Eastern European intellectuals working in Melbourne, who are very interested in these big questions about why does literature matter? You know, and they were mainly coming from a kind of loosely Marxist tradition, certainly not any kind of dogmatic Marxism, but they did believe that literature was very much close was very much related to questions of social transformation. And art had significant political importance. And so that was very helpful for me at that time, because it did get me thinking about these really big questions about why does literature matter which I never really, you know, found addressed in my undergraduate education in England. So those questions are still ones that very much interest me, I think we don't in literary studies who don't ask the question, enough, why? Why do these texts matter? And so central, I think for you know, art history or music, or whatever it might be, we have these very sophisticated techniques of analyzing works either formally or putting them in historical contexts. But we don't really, I think, answer enough the questions or at least raise the questions, you know, why should we care? Why does any of this matter? Ultimately.

Margaret Cohen (08:04)

These questions are very timely. It took you a while to come to that in your own critical writing, it seems like you went through feminism, and then came to ask the questions about why literature matters. Do you think that's accurate?

Rita Felski (08:22)

Well, I think I you know, I think I would say that actually, I've it's certainly true that I've emphasized these questions about why literature matters more explicitly in the last few years. But I think my interest in looking at literature outside of the university and why people read and how they read in every everyday life has really been an ongoing theme for me throughout all my, my whole career. You know, I think this is partly a question of my own class background. You know, I didn't come from a family where people read books, I came from a kind of low, low middle class background. And it was very distressing for me when I went to university––not that I learned critical theories, which I very much enjoyed, but sometimes the assumptions embedded in those theories, that non academics, people who had not read Proust or Foucault or whatever, who were just reading bestsellers will therefore in some way, deficient, that always really upset me and always really angered me. So, you know, really, I think, in all, in all my writing, including my feminist writing, I've actually been pretty interested in these questions of more popular response. You know, just to give you a few examples, you know, my my dissertation, which was my first book, I look pretty closely there, you know, at popular forms of feminist fiction, or those novels that came out in the 70s and 80s, sort of when feminism was just beginning. You know, and when you had these novels that were often confessional works, women were describing their lives, or forms of a Bildungsroman where, you know, a female protagonist would would leave her husband you know, very popular books like The Women's Room by Marilyn French, for example. They were sometimes looked down on a bit in academic circles because it was felt they weren't sophisticated enough. Well, I took those novels seriously. And I thought they were very important actually. And then I had another book called The Gender of Modernity, which looks at late 19th century literature and intellectual history and so on. And then one chapter was devoted to this author called Marie Corelli, who was actually the, you know, the most famous novelist of the late 19th century, she was massively popular, not just in England, but all around [...] then the British Empire, you know, her book sold in millions. And yet she's completely disappeared without trace, no one wrote about Marie Corelli. So again, I thought it was important to look at this right and say, "Why was she so popular?" You know, why do you why why were people reading her work so avidly. So I think really, throughout my, throughout my life as an academic, as well as being interested in, you know, theory, and in the more canonical literary works, I've always had also had a strong interest in more popular works of fiction and looking seriously at those works, and trying to work out why they connect to people.

Margaret Cohen (10:49)

So I 'm going to ask you a question for our Stanford students who are very much pressured by their parents who have put so much effort and resources into helping them get to study at Stanford and come to me in comparative literature, and they say, "I want to study literature, but my parents don't think it's worthwhile. "And I'm wondering what what your parents said to you, when you announced that you were going to go on to a PhD in literature?

Rita Felski (11:19)

What I think, you know, I think that there, I just have to respond, it was a very, very different kind of context. So for example, you know, there, as you say, people are now worried about I think, in some cases wrongly worried that studying literature will not give them you know, an adequate salary or will not allow them take the kind of job they want those such massive pressures on students and people are often have, you know, if huge debts from going to college, and so on, it was a very different world where I, when I grew up, I went to college at Cambridge, not only was it free, but I got a generous stipend. So there was never any issue. I mean, it never even occurred to me to think is this is this going to lead to a job, it was not something I hadn't thought about, I didn't have any financial debt, I could simply study for the sake of sake of studying. And then when I went on to a PhD, it was true at that point, I was not sure whether I could get any kind of academic job. But I figured, well, you know, I just like reading, if I couldn't get a fellowship, to go to Australia for five years, and read books that will be worthwhile in itself, and there wasn't quite the same anxiety there is now you know, we are living under these conditions of precarity, obviously, that, that, you know, the number of academic jobs are dramatically disappearing. Those students, whether undergraduates or graduate students now have this massive sense of anxiety that was simply not around, you know, several decades ago. So I do think the conditions have changed quite dramatically.

Margaret Cohen (12:42)

The Limits of Critique really touched a nerve. What are we doing as literary critics? And what do we have to offer scholarship, and our students, and where does politics fit in? And could you just tell me a little bit about what you were trying to accomplish? And then what the reception was?

Rita Felski (13:00)

Yeah. So you know, the last few years, someone you know, as you mentioned, I was involved ia lot in doing feminist work. And I still, that still remains very important to me. And a lot of it involved doing critical evaluations of various kinds of works with, you know, works of fiction or works of theory. But at certain point, I began to feel that I was making the same arguments over and over again, and they were becoming less interesting. They'd certainly been important for a while. I think it's necessary, obviously, obviously, to be able to question things and to read works critically. But I didn't begin to feel that certain things were not being given sufficient attention. You know, the questions I just alluded to earlier, why literature matters, why we get hooked on certain works, what that hooking means, if it's just purely a question of pleasure, if it can involve ethical questions, political questions, not only why do we care about literature, but why do we care that we care about literature, you know, these sort of second order questions of the importance of literature, or indeed other forms of fiction, including film in the public world?

Margaret Cohen (14:00)

So why do we read literature? Why does it matter to us?

Rita Felski (14:04)

Well, so in use of literature, I suggested that, you know, I tried to just point to a few, I thought, fairly common motives, or reasons why people read literature, I think they're not the only ones, but I think are some of the most important ones. I tried to identify certain aspects of response that I think are actually relevant both to popular reading and more scholarly forms of reading. And so the responses I reflected on there included the idea of recognition, which I think is a very important idea, there has not really been addressed much in literary studies, that often when we read a work of fiction, we find it pleasurable because we recognize some aspect of ourselves, which can you know, confirm our own identity, but it can also question our identity in some ways, you know, the, this phrase, the shock of recognition is not just a cliche, we can find aspects of our lives articulated in a novel or indeed a film in ways that can disconcert us then cause us to reassess what we're doing. And it can cause us to rethink our lives. So that was one motive for reading that I think is very, very important. Something else I talked about at some length was the idea of enchantment. That was something that at one time, we really couldn't talk about, you know, there was a strong sense in literary studies, that being enchanted by a work of fiction was something bad. I think you've mentioned yourself a famous figure like Brecht, who was very suspicious of enchantment. The idea was that if we became caught up in, in a play, for example, we could not therefore think critically about the Lord, largest social or political issues involved. And so I tried to develop a defense of the idea of aesthetic enchantment, and to say, there actually can be something very, very valuable about escapism, escapism is a really bad rap, I think, in the academy, and yet, sometimes escapism, you know, losing yourself in a work of fiction could actually be a very valuable thing to do. And it needs to be taken more seriously. So I looked at, you know, experiences recognition of enchantment, I consider the ways in which literature can serve as a form of knowledge. And then I looked also at experiences of shock, you know, there are certain kinds of works of fiction that disturb us, because they're openly shocking, they're disturbing. They may be very graphic in their representations of sex or violence, or they may do things, they're very provocative in aesthetic or formal terms. Again, I tried to understand the allure of that kind of aesthetic experience. So you know, so in this earlier book used to literature, I talked at some length about these different aesthetic responses. And then the feedback I got was along the lines of Yes, this is all very interesting. And it sounds quite plausible, and you have to identify these responses, which do seem to be my responses. But this is some are not going to fly. Because, you know, you're not really doing critique, and any kind of serious scholarship needs to engage in critique. So in the response to my use of literature book, I was hearing over and over again, that a certain kind of critical thinking was really the only kind of thinking that could count as being both really rigorous and radical scholarship. And that just didn't seem right to me. So at that point, I felt it was necessary to sit down, and to look closely at what it meant to engage in practices of critique, as they have been defined in a university context, to describe them more carefully, to acknowledge their value, but also, you know, to look at their limits.

Margaret Cohen (17:18)

And this gets us to the very energizing and controversial reaction to The L:imits of Critique, which I think has been really helpful to people and at the same time scary, in literary studies. There have been special issues devoted to your book, and there have been a lot, there's been a lot of conversation about it, what has come out of the conversation for you that––how has that reframed the book, if it has?

Rita Felski (17:45)

Yeah, so I mean, the book I was really one of the things I was trying to do was to get us to think about critiquing in new ways. So you know, when people talk about doing critique in the academy, they often then associate critique with certain kinds of political or philosophical questionings of literature on the one hand, or alternatively, they associated with praising literature for itself being critical, right, this becomes one of our main value schemes for defending our study of literature, we say, "Well, of course, we're going to study Hitchcock," or "of course, we're going to study Kafka," because if you read them in the right ways, we can show that they are critical, in fact, of their social milieu. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I felt that a lot was being missed. And so what I tried to do was to redescribe the idea of critique by looking at it in terms of both its moods and its methods. In other words, what I was trying to show is that critique is not just an intellectual way of thinking but involves a certain sensibility involves a certain disposition of being suspicious, skeptical, wary. And it also goes along with certain, fairly easily describable methods, interpreting in certain ways, constructing certain kinds of narratives, working with certain metaphors of texts, and so on. And so in doing that, I wanted to, as I said, in the book, not to reject critique, which has been very important to my own intellectual formation, but to bring critique down to earth, by just saying, "Well it is one tool among others," you know, sometimes we need to engage in critique, but if that's all we're going to do as literary scholars, we're gonna have a very impoverished, I think, set of tools with which to address the world. And so in terms of responses to the book, I mean, they really varied quite dramatically, you know, so on the one hand, you know, I did start getting a lot of fan mail, which I never got before, and it was really quite heartening, actually, I would get these email messages, not just from people in literary studies, I'm getting one from say, a sociologist in Hong Kong or, you know, I think letters carried from all around the world, from people in different fields saying, "Wow, this book has been so important to me because I had got so discouraged by the prevalence of a certain kind of critical and skeptical thinking in the university and so I was going to give up my PhD or not do a PhD. And this book has given me hope, in fact, that there are other possibilities." But then as you know, other people were much more negatively inclined towards the book.

Margaret Cohen (20:04)

Can you remember like the email that was the most moving?

Rita Felski (20:07)

Well, you know, it's just like, I'd get emails. And occasionally I'd see remarks on Twitter, you know, the thing that said things along the lines, you know, my life can be divided into the time before and after I read The Limits of Critique. So those are obviously very nice comments, or, "I was going to give up University, and now I've decided to go back and do a PhD, because I haven't read the book." So those all were really wonderful comments. But you know, you know, I shouldn't say there have been a significant number of people who who take issue with the book quite strongly. In some cases, I do feel they misrepresented my arguments. Like any book, the arguments of The limits of Critique have their weaknesses, and I'm very happy to be challenged on those weaknesses. But in some cases, you know, I felt the that antagonists of the book, were, for example, presenting me as some kind of pure aesthete who's interested only in the beauty of flowers or whatever it might be, and that is really quite a misrepresentation. I mean, certainly, in all my scholarly work, I've been very interested in the relationship between literature and the world. I think there are other ways of thinking about the relationship between literature and the world than through the lens of critique. 21:17 Yeah, I think your work in feminist scholarship, could hardly be represented as the work of a pure aesthete.

Rita Felski (21:27)

Well, in some cases, I think people had had never read anything else of mine, apart from that book. And in some cases, they had not read the book, or they just read the title. You know, one of the, in one chapter of the book, I present what I call a five part definition of critique that's slightly playful, but not entirely. And the fifth part of the definition says, critique does not tolerate rivals. And what I mean by that is that critique, you know, those who embrace critique, sometimes tend to think it's the only serious way of thinking, that anything that is not critique is a threat to critique. It's intellectually irresponsible, it must be flaky. It has no serious academic credibility. And so in some of the responses to the book, I felt in fact that that maxim was being reiterated that my what I thought was in some ways, when I wrote it, I thought was a relatively uncontroversial suggestion, which was simply the argument that "yes, we can do critique, but we can do other things as well," that cause you know, a few people to respond in these very heated ways and to say, "No, we cannot do anything else, we must continue to engage only in forms of political critique." Because if we're not doing political critique, then we're supporting a neoliberal university. And I'm afraid I just don't follow that syllogism. It makes no sense, no logic to me.

Margaret Cohen (22:47)

I think I told you in my email that what I had thought of myself as doing but then when I read your book, I also felt very much in alignment with the descriptive aspects of it, and the interest in revaluing and also getting out of that mood of brooding suspicion and that all the critics who are caught up in a certain kind of melancholy that goes along often with the hermeneutics of suspicion. So I'm interested in what Benjamin called rescuing critique, which is a type of description, which is political to the extent that it recognizes that what you are rescuing is about to disappear. And if you do not seize it now, it will, perhaps be lost to history forever. But that is interested in revaluing, he makes an analogy to the capitalistic notions that picking up the pieces of the vessel that contain [...] attributes that have been broken and trying to piece them together, but to revalue what is about to disappear.

Rita Felski (23:54)

Right now, that seems great. And that's actually quite relevant to some of the thinking I've done about how we might reimagine the humanities. So I edited an issue of a journal, New Literary History, a couple of years ago, where I had a long introduction addressing those questions. And again, I suggested there that criticizing is one of the things that we do in the humanities, and we should certainly continue to do it. But there are actually several other things that that people in the humanities do and that we perhaps should do more of. And one of those, in fact, was the idea of conserving. That's really one of the things we do as people in humanities, we conserve stuff we conserve, preserve the texts of the past these fragile artifacts, whether you know, sculptures or paintings or pieces of literature that most people would never encounter, if they did not take some kind of humanities course, for example, and that work of conservation and preservation is an incredibly important part of what we do. And yet often that's often been, you know, minimized or not seen as important because, you know, for a while the humanities had this rhetoric of iconoclasm, you know, we've got to be new and daring and outrageous, but now it seems in fact, it's the captains of industry who are interested in rupture and innovation, and perhaps you know, we need to switch things around a bit and say, actually, in the humanities, we want to keep the old stuff, we don't want to destroy it.

Margaret Cohen (25:12)

Well, let's talk about what you're going to be talking about with us today.

Rita Felski (25:15)

Sure, well, what I'm going to do today is just give an overview of one of the chapters of the book that I've just finished. So the book is called Hooked: Art and Attachment. And what I try and do in the book is to take this idea of being hooked, which we often associate, you know, with blockbusters and bestsellers, and actually say that being hooked is actually a great metaphor for thinking about how all of us are connected to works of art, literature and art. So the argument is really to try and build an aesthetic, that is oriented towards connection and relation, rather than, for example, separation, or defamiliarization, which tended to be the kind of language that we've had in the humanities. In other words, I want to rethink the general notion of ties and the value of those ties. I want to argue that in fact, we can't go through the world without ties and bonds. And we've had a tendency, I think, in literary studies in the humanities, generally, to think of ties as being synonymous with restraints so that we want to cut ties, we want to break away from things. We want to defend our autonomy, our separateness our distance. And the point of the book is really to say that, No, on the contrary, while we can certainly be attached to things that are bad for us, that attachments, ties, hooks, are also incredibly important that they're the way we connect to things that we care about in the world. They're to do with emotion, certainly, but they're also to do with thought, they're also to do with ethics, they'll also do with politics. So I'm trying to develop a way of thinking about the relationship we have to artwork, so it's based around the importance of ties.

Margaret Cohen (26:51)

Why do you think novelists spend so much time telling us not to be involved in ties? I'm just thinking, for example, like Don Quixote, who has a midlife crisis and is overly attached to his books, or Emma Bovary who is overly attached.

Rita Felski (27:08)

Right, right, right. Well, of course, those are the two classic examples rather come up over and over again, Quixote and Madame Bovary. But you know, it's interesting, especially in the case of Madame Bovary, just the one the, you know, the one I know better, I think it's actually more ambiguous case than it's sometimes made out to be. I mean, certainly, on the one hand, the novel is showing the problems of becoming completely caught up in fictional worlds. But I think there's a way in which the novel itself encourages us to identify with into attached to Emma in a whole range of ways. So that, you know, while on the one hand Flaubert is saying, here are the dangers of this kind of absorption. I also think in other ways, there's certainly actually a lot of empirical evidence that many readers have actually found themselves identifying with with Emma Bovary in ways that are actually they found very important to themselves. I mean, Emma Bovary, in fact, is a very good example of a character who's generated countless times, right, she's been adapted, she has been rewritten, she has been turned into a whole range of media and forms. So we have formed ties, you know, to Emma Bovary. And one of things I want to push back against is the idea that, you know, some of us form ties, and some of us don't, because I'm trying to think about ties in a very broad sense, you know, in other words, that one can be connected, for example, to a large social group. You know, I talked about how the film, Thelma and Louise, allowed individual viewers to become connected to a larger feminist community, but can also be it become attached to a single painting or a single novel, and you may feel closer to that novel or that painting than you might do to your neighbor or to a friend. So there are many kinds of ties that we formed to artworks and what I'm trying to do is to look at the variety of those ties, the aesthetic tie, the intellectual tie, the ethical tie, the political tie, and give them all, you know, due weight, rather than just focusing on some ties rather than others. So for today, I'm gonna be talking about, you know, the idea of identification, which I argue is actually rather more complicated that we've often made it out to be academics that have been very dismissive of identification, but as I suggested earlier, I think academics identify just as much as anyone else. They just identify on different grounds, perhaps, they might not identify with a character, but they identify with an author or they identify with what they see as the general intellectual project of a work, you know, Rebecca Solnit, who I gather is here at the moment, you know, writes about this very, in very interesting ways in relation to the Lolita you know, she talks about identifying with Lolita. And then someone wrote in and complained and said, you know, you shouldn't identify with Lolita, and Nabokov doesn't want you to identify with Lolita, but that that person who wrote in is clearly identifying with something right he has a strong attachment to Nabokov and what he takes to be Nabokov's literary project. So, part of part of what I'm interested in is how these everyday aesthetic experiences of identification or for example, attunement, which is another chapter of the book are actually much more complicated and variegated and interesting than we've acknowledged them to be.

Margaret Cohen (30:05)

Okay, so two questions. So you're a phenomenologist, along with a theorist and trained anthropologist or sociologist, in some ways, it's both a critic... Tell me about phenomenology. I just feel that runs so much through all your work and what you're doing today and The Limits of Critique, the analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion. I'm curious where you know, where you got that, and you sort of you don't proclaim it like as one of your calling cards, but I feel it's a really important one.

Rita Felski (30:38)

Anyone who's a serious phenomenologist in a in a philosophical sense, I think, would say I'm not a phenomenologist. You know, in other words, I don't spend time discussing Husserl, or Merleau-Ponty in any depth. I do mention a little bit Heidegger in the most recent book, but I do find phenomenology, very useful for addressing these questions about the texture of aesthetic response, because it's the it is the the way of thinking there is most attuned to the complexity, of aesthetic experience, and often the difficulty of articulating that complexity. So for example, in my chapter on attunement, you know, attunement is really this question of, why is it that we get one one painting, we don't get another why we totally caught up with one novel, or we're not caught up in another we recognize, for example, a second novel is a good piece of writing, we appreciate its excellence, but it doesn't move us and doesn't touch us in the way that the first novel does. So this is where I find phenomenology quite helpful, actually. And I draw a lot on a language for example of mood and of atmosphere, and of attunement, and the German word stimmel, in order to try and describe these very hard to pin down aspects of aesthetic experience. You know, there's been a lot of pushback against the idea of the ineffable. In in, in the humanities, for the last few decades, there was a sense we couldn't talk about the ineffable, because this was somehow, you know, pure mystification. But the idea that we can't, we can't adequately explain the strength and the power of our aesthetic experiences is actually a very ordinary observation. It's there's nothing kind of, you know, fancy schmancy or educated about it. You know, I draw, for example, on an Australian ethnography, a young man, a PhD student who went out and talked to two fans of popular and independent music. And they talked at some length about that, what they call their peak experiences of music, you know, they're lying in bed. I know, Bruce Springsteen comes on the radio, and they, and they, they suddenly hear they'd heard that so many times before, but they suddenly hear it for the first time. And they have this very strong sense of conversion, that somehow a button has been pushed, trigger has been motivated. And they somehow hear that work in a powerful way. And they often say, you know, people say, it's very hard to convey that experience. So the sense that we can have these strong aesthetic experiences that are difficult to put into words, actually, I think is a very mundane and commonplace phenomenon. There's nothing elitist about and that's what i do think for example, phenomenology can be very helpful for capturing those questions. Perhaps it might just say one thing, which is where I disagree with phenomenology is there often tends to isolate then the experience of the reader or the viewer from the social world, right, it sort of cuts out the larger context, if you like, it focuses only perhaps say, on the, the novel or the film on the piece of music, and the person who experiences it. Whereas what I'm trying to do in this book is actually say, yes, there is this very strong sense of an immediate relationship to an artwork where I've had the sense of intensity, we have the sense of aesthetic power, we're enraptured, we're caught up, we're transformed. I talked at some length, for example, about Zadie Smith being converted to Joni Mitchell, and why that's an important experience. And yet, in thinking about how that happens, even though that aesthetic experience feels very powerful and immediate. And we have to acknowledge that immediacy. It's also shaped by a ton of things, you know, it may be shaped by the friend who recommended Joni Mitchell, or the review you read in the paper, or the book you happened to read in college because it was on a syllabus. So there's a lot of mediations that come together to make those aesthetic experiences possible. And so what I'm trying to do with this new book is on the one hand, to acknowledge the way in aesthetic experiences feel powerful, overwhelming, intense and important, but also to acknowledge how they're shaped by a bunch of different things.

Margaret Cohen (34:29)

That's so enriching and so––it just brings all this experience in one's peripheral field of view into the work in a way that's very different, say from the Roland Barthes S/Z, you know, idea that artworks are citations of other artworks and there's always the already read. This is a much more humanistic and democratic and alive way of acknowledging the complexities.

Rita Felski (34:59)

Should I say a little bit about how might I might teach this stuff to students?

Margaret Cohen (35:02)

Yeah, please do.

Rita Felski (35:03)

Yeah. So you know, I've been teaching this way actually for a number of years now. So I teach critical theory which continues to reign, what we know is one of my primary interests, and especially Marxist aesthetic theory, which I know very well so you know, my classes will include Adorno, or Lukacs, or Fredric Jameson, or whoever it might be. I teach a bunch of different kinds of critical theory. But increasingly, my classes, you know, after I've familiarized my students with critical theory, we do do the nastiest question, which is the question of what I call postcritique, which is, what do these critical theories miss? You know, what have they missed, and one of the things they've missed, I think, is the way in which we become caught up in artworks and come to value them. And so that's what I try and encourage my students to reflect on those kinds of questions. And often, I think there's a sense of anxiety that if we introduce these kinds of questions, without the kind of stewarding guardrail of critical theory, students will simply lapse back into, you know, confessional responses, "I hate this character," "I'm bored with this book," "I love this character," and you know, all their, all their weight, or their serious thinking will go out the window. But I actually have not found that to be the case at all, you know, that students are actually capable of putting together very, very sophisticated arguments about why works of art mattered to them. And that's really what I see my job now. And that's something that really interests me, we have very sophisticated vocabularies for questioning society, questioning literature, showing power relations at work, being suspicious, but vocabularies for talking about why artworks matter to us have been rather impoverished they've been, you know, broadly speaking, kind of romantic ideas, you know, about imagination, or feeling that are often not very well fleshed out. And so what I'm trying to teach my students is that we can actually think about, reflect on, these strong, powerful aesthetic experiences, without therefore diminishing them, that we can actually give them a respect, and nevertheless, talk about the ways in which they are made, co made both by the work which is doing something both by you who's doing something, but then also, but as you say, by this kind of penumbra of other influences, we've shaped the fact that you care about this particular film, or that you find yourself irritated or put off by this particular music. And so actually looking at the range of actors involved in making aesthetic experiences possible, can be used not to diminish the experience, but actually to enrich our understanding of it.

Margaret Cohen (37:27)

And I guess, to enrich our sense of the communities that that we're part of, as well.

Margaret Cohen (37:33)

Exactly, yeah, I have a very different kinds. Yeah, exactly. You know, for example, I actually have a PhD student who started teaching some of these ideas to first years, and she just showed me, actually, some of the essays that her first year students had written, and they were just wonderfully rich. You know, so we had one student reflecting on, you know, why she can't stand, you know, a particular song by John Denver, you know, all her friends belt out with great enthusiasm. And so she was able to reflect on it in very sophisticated ways, you know, talking about how, well, you know, she was shaped by the fact that her parents are classical musicians. And so she learned a certain kind of canon, of what good music is, that was shaped also by the qualities of this John Denver song. But then she listened to another John Denver song, and she managed to find that more appealing. And she was able to reflect on how you know, her social background, the influence of a friend, or features of the actual piece of music came together to either, you know, help her to like a particular song or to dislike it. So I think we can learn to reflect on these on these matters in quite sophisticated ways. Rather than simply saying, you know, I like this song, or I hate this novel.

Margaret Cohen (38:39)

Yeah, I'm thinking, I'm going to take your, your prompt and use them. And of course, I'm teaching now on 19th century novels about Paris, called "Realist Paris, Romantic Paris," to students in Paris. And I think enabling them to bring in contemporary Paris and all the different experiences they're having while they're abroad, and the connections will be really enhancing and I hope make these works come alive.

Rita Felski (39:07)

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, it's very interesting, that word, "come alive." Because, you know, one of the words I use a lot in this book I'm just finishing is the idea of "actualizing," or realizing that works can only be actualized, they can only come to life in so far as we read them or listen to them or respond to them. And so our responses have to be part of the equation, we can't just pretend that the object is just sitting there. And the goal is to engage in some kind of formal analysis of its features, because those features are only relevant insofar as we're able to perceive them and respond to them. So the response of the reader or the viewer has to be part of the equation. I think, even as we also look at how that readers response is also shaped by some of these larger social factors.

Margaret Cohen (39:51)

Did you want to just say something about conserving and why that's a more robust project than an antiquarian type of history?

Rita Felski (39:58)

So I talked about these various things that the humanities do very well, as I just mentioned to you, I talk about conserving as being a really important point. But the the metaphor of conserving can be a bit misleading perhaps because conservation might cause us to think about conserves, you know, and jars of plums or whatever sitting in a darkened pantry, you know, the idea of being separated off from the world that the idea that humanity is cut off behind glass conserved, preserved separate from the world. But I think that will be entirely wrong, because of course, on the one hand, we conserve works of art there is we need to preserve them, we need to look after them, we need to make sure that they don't disappear. And yet again, the point would be to say that they can only come to life insofar as we respond to them. And so they come alive in new contexts, a classical sculpture or an 18th century French novel, whatever it might be, acquires very different meanings in the present than it had in the past. And that's a crucial part of their meaning for us. So along with conserving works of art, I think another thing we have to do in the humanities is actually to convey those works of art into a multiplicity of different contexts, right, we need to show why that conservation matters, we need to hook up those works are the past two concerns of the present. And that will also that involve becoming fluent in more languages that, you know, we knew to become much better I think of public speaking, we need to be better at you know, as a friend of mine, Ien Ang, once said, speaking about what we do to intellectual strangers, I think there's sometimes been a sense of defensiveness in the humanities, the the worry, which is not completely unjustified, that people outside the university are hostile to what we're doing. But I think, nevertheless, we have to be able to convey what we're doing as powerfully and persuasively as possible. And in some cases, I think, at least people are not necessarily hostile. They're just mystified. They don't know enough about what we're doing and why it matters. And so I think it's very crucial to do more along those lines. And of course, you know, many people are doing similar things. Already. There's an increasingly robust public humanities project. You know, Doris Sommer, for example, at Harvard has been doing a great deal of work in terms of public art, and so on. So there's lots of initiatives going on along those lines. And I think that can certainly be developed.

Margaret Cohen (42:14)

Well, thank you so much. And thank you for helping us start our podcast series and try to find a voice and reach out to a broader audience with the issues that matter in literary studies today.

Casey Wayne Patterson (42:30)

Thank you again for joining us in this episode of the Center for the Study of the Novel's podcast Cafe. We would also like to thank Rita Felski for her generosity in agreeing to this conversation. Thanks to our team at the Center for the Study of the Novel: to An Truong Nguyen and Maritza Colon for their operational support. To our graduate coordinators Victoria Zurita, Cynthia Giancotti, and Casey Patterson. To Erik Fredner for editing, consultation, and sound engineering, and to our host and director Margaret Cohen. The Center for the Study of the Novel is a subsidiary of the English Department at Stanford University.