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“What’s Eating Ahab? The Logic of Ingestion and the Performance of Meaning in Moby-Dick” / 1
Thomas Fahy
“Iteration as a Form of Narrative Control in Gertrude
Stein’s ‘The Good Anna’” / 25
Joan Douglas Peters
“Rhetoric as Idea: D. H. Lawrence’s Genre Theory”
/ 36
Dan Coleman
“Tuning in to Conversation in the Novel: Gatsby
and the Dynamics of Dialogue” / 52
Jack Stewart
“Objects in Space and Time: Metonymy in Durrell’s
Island Books” / 78
Donald Hardy and David Durian
“The Stylistics of Syntactic Complements: Grammar
and Seeing in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction” / 92
Martin Bidney
“The Aestheticist Epiphanies of J. D. Salinger: Bright-Hued
Circles, Spheres, and Patches; ‘Elemental’ Joy and Pain” / 117
Chip Rhodes
“The Hollywood Novel: Gender and Lacanian Tragedy
in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays” / 132
Gustavo Guerra
“Psychoanalysis and Presuppositions” / 144
To challenge an unexamined critical alignment with Ishmael’s limited epistemology in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick shows how the placing of confidence in Ishmael as witness to Ahab’s monomania leads to a misreading of Moby-Dick. Ahab lies at the center of a highly developed epistemology that competes with and eludes the narrator’s comprehension. The various trophies that appear throughout the text are manifest examples of this other-than-interpretive system of knowing, and Melville uses the act of possessing trophies, particularly the act of eating trophies, to show graphically how such a system works. In other words, Melville has developed a complex epistemological system of ingestion around Ahab to model how language can be materially invested with meaning and how that meaning is performed.
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Thomas Fahy, “Iteration as a Form of Narrative Control in Gertrude Stein’s ‘The Good Anna’” / 25
In Three Lives, Gertrude Stein explores the heterosexual and lesbian
relationships of three common women—Anna, Melanctha, and Lena. In “The
Good Anna,” the first of these three stories, Stein uses repetition to
criticize the cultural norms that have tried to shape women’s sexual identity
through repression. Structurally, each part of “The Good Anna” hinges on
particular reiterated sentences, and as these recur the narrative exposes
Anna’s absurd and futile attempts to repress both the sexual behavior of
young heterosexual men and women and Anna’s own homoerotic impulses. As
one reads and becomes increasingly critical of Anna’s behavior, one must
revaluate what Anna represents—mainstream patriarchal beliefs that privilege
heterosexuality, disavow lesbianism, oppose premarital sex, and support
the subordination of women to men. As Stein uses linguistic repetition
to put her readers in a position to mock the way Anna understands and upholds
these beliefs, she forces her audience to examine their own cultural and
moral assumptions about female sexuality and homosexual relationships.
As a result, these ironic reiterations subvert the reader’s cultural biases
and make a space for accepting sexual freedom for both heterosexual and
homosexual women.
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Joan Douglas Peters, “Rhetoric as Idea: D. H. Lawrence’s Genre Theory” / 36
It has been over ten years since anything significant has been published
on D. H. Lawrence’s critical prose, and nothing of note has ever been written
on the subject of the short essays—“The Novel,” “Surgery for the novel—Or
a Bomb,” “Morality and the Novel,” and “Why the novel Matters”—containing
his theory of the novel. The rhetorical style Lawrence adopts is so informal,
so comical, and often so bizarre that the impulse of critics, when they
do refer to these essays, is to ignore the rhetoric and somehow extract
a system of logocentric doctrine, a doctrine that does not bear scrutiny.
To appreciate Lawrence’s genre theory, one cannot ignore the style in which
it is written but must instead focus on the dynamics of discourse comprising
the rhetorical text. Grounding my reading in Bakhtin’s carnival, I argue
that Lawrence celebrates the novel in terms of its “joyful relativity”
(Bakhtin’s term), a theory that articulates itself performatively in different
ways through its own deconstruction. Read deconstructively, Lawrence’s
genre theory offers an important contribution to modernist concepts of
language, an area from which Lawrence has traditionally been entirely excluded.
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Dan Coleman, “Tuning in to Conversation in the Novel: Gatsby and the Dynamics of Dialogue” / 52
Novels are full of what “he said” and “she said,” yet formalist critics
often listen so intently to the voice of the narrator that they ignore
entirely the things that characters say to one another. In so doing, they
miss what might be the most important part of novels: the presence of dialogue.
According to Bakhtin, it is the novelist’s capacity to “[employ] on the
plane of a single work discourses of various types, with all their expressive
capacities intact” that distinguishes the novel from other genres. If true,
Bakhtin’s contention challenges critics of the novel to make sense not
only of narration, but of conversation—to tune in to the characters’ speech
as well as to the narrator’s voice. Illustrating such an approach through
an analysis of The Great Gatsby allows an exploration of the range of ways
in which dialogue works in novels more generally. By focusing on passages
of fictional conversation from Gatsby (and alluding to Fitzgerald’s other
novels, stories, and manuscripts), the different voices that echo through
the novel—such as Daisy’s banter, Tom’s decisive discourse, Nick’s ventriloquistic
speech tags—can be isolated. Through methods borrowed from contemporary
discourse linguistics, the various ways in which Fitzgerald exploits those
modes of meaning unique to dialogue and unavailable to the novel’s other
kinds of discourse are discussed.
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Jack Stewart, “Objects in Space and Time: Metonymy in Durrell’s Island Books” / 78
In Prospero’s Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus, and Bitter Lemons,
Durrell builds up his island worlds from singular, yet interrelated, objects,
grasping the thing-in-itself as part of an ethos. He reads Greece synecdochically,
in a version of the hermeneutic circle, privileging spatial contiguity
over logical continuity. Durrell’s vignettes have the compression of imagist
poetry, distilling an essence from sight and sound. In this language of
presence, objects resonate in space and time, unmodified by a preconceived
logos. Durrell’s “angles of vision,” like Jakobson’s “metonymic ‘set-ups,’”
create a dynamics of space, in which eye movements are directed by kinetic
verbs and prepositional signals and syntax processes objects in a visual
Gestalt. The palimpsest offers a vertical (or temporal) dimension of memory,
inscribed upon horizontal (or spatial) patterns of landscape. In Durrell’s
catalogues or panoramas, serial connection prevails over paradigmatic structure,
stressing perception and “Is-ness.” Only a metonymic poiesis could express
such a polymorphic reality.
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Donald Hardy and David Durian, “The Stylistics of Syntactic Complements: Grammar and Seeing in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction” / 92
Finite and nonfinite syntactic complements to the verb see in Flannery
O’Connor’s fiction are examined and shown to contribute stylistically
to O’Connor’s explorations of the fallibility of human knowledge.
A statistical analysis of the entirety of O’Connor’s fiction and the general
fiction subcorpus of the Brown corpus demonstrates that O’Connor’s fiction
has a significantly greater concentration of see tokens resulting in focalization
through character reflectors rather than the narrator. Qualitative analysis
demonstrates (1) that the boundaries between each of the pairs semantics-pragmatics,
physical perception-cognitive perception, and implication-presupposition
are porous, (2) that the foreground/background gestalt distinction is multi-leveled,
and (3) that the multi-leveled nature of foreground/background helps to
explain the pragmatics of complements to the verb see. Furthermore, the
porous nature of these boundaries is central to O’Connor’s use of these
complements to show that both physical and cognitive seeing are revealing
of human limitations and revelatory of God’s will and grace.
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Martin Bidney, “The Aestheticist Epiphanies of J. D. Salinger: Bright-Hued Circles, Spheres, and Patches; ‘Elemental’ Joy and Pain” / 117
One pattern unites the epiphanies of Zooey, Holden, Buddy, Seymour,
and Franny. Components of epiphanies one may call “Salingerian” include
(1) elements—a combination involving earth, air, or water; (2) spheres,
circles, cylinders—or else painterly patches or dabs—of bright color; (3)
a motion-pattern featuring the frustrating disappearance of an epiphanic
colored circle or patch, or its sudden reappearance (on the model of the
Freudian fort-da scheme); and (4) intermixture of pain and joy. Of these
epiphanies, the most elaborate example is the paradigm-epiphany of Zooey-and-Buddy:
a girl with a red tam suddenly appears from behind a tree and then vanishes;
a woman with a jug climbs and descends a hill while the seer dies. In the
epiphanies of other characters, Salinger varies the paradigm. These epiphanies
imply (1) the supreme value of heightened aesthetic sensation and (2) Salinger’s
narcissistic nostalgia for an idealized childhood.
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Chip Rhodes, “The Hollywood Novel: Gender and Lacanian Tragedy in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays” / 132
Play It As It Lays remains one of the most astute—and troubling—literary
investigations of the causes and consequences of the Hollywood-led culture
industry. The novel is unique within the subgenre of the Hollywood novel
since it is one of the very few that focuses exclusively on the effects
of the culture industry on women. Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, Norman
Mailer’s Deer Park, and Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister are just three
of many Hollywood novels that exemplify the subgenre’s over-reliance on
the equation of artistic integrity and masculinity. Hollywood novelists,
like modernists, encode mass culture as a “feminine” discourse that functions
as a convenient other for the sanctified, but beleaguered aesthetic discourse—a
discourse, moreover, that is based on patriarchal, subject-object epistemology.
Play It As It Lays eschews all such embedded ideologies as it tells the
story of a disaffected actress without recourse to any culturally available
counternarratives. In its overt revision of Hemingway’s existential modernism,
Play It As It Lays suggests how little this pair (patriarchy and modernism)
no longer speaks to the current historical conjuncture. The novel thus
belongs to what has recently been called the postpatriarchal, postoedipal
universe theorized by the “New Lacanians” within which the “lack in the
other” is in fact a constitutive lack in the subject herself. Herein lies
the novel’s distinctiveness within the canon of the Hollywood novel: unlike
earlier, male-written Hollywood novels whose tragedy is a consummately
modernist tragedy, Play It As It lays is best read as a “postmodern tragedy”
according to which the narcissistic, empty subject is infatuated with death
in actual or symbolic forms.
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Gustavo Guerra, “Psychoanalysis and Presuppositions” / 144
Cogito and the Unconscious, the second volume of the sic series (consisting of collections of essays dealing with basic topics in psychoanalysis), despite many very good pieces included, is unsatisfactory as a whole. Although apparently devoted to the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis, the book leaves it unclear why that relationship matters in the first place, while it is even less clear how the two disciplines relate to each other. The editors, Slavoj ðiñek and Renata Salecl, seem primarily interested in placing the two disciplines in a hierarchical relationship, with psychoanalysis on top. Thus the volume is characterized by an inexplicable refusal to engage the very issue that the title proposes: few of the essays included address concepts related to the Cogito, the Unconscious, or even philosophy and psychoanalysis.