Periodically, these days, I've been thinking I ought to suspend this blog indefinitely. I hear pretty frequently that it might be a liability to me when I go on the job market. Although I have been careful to remove any material that might seem too personal or embarrassing (outside of the normal embarrassment at being caught out in thinking unfinished thoughts), simply the fact of having a blog is, apparently, unprofessional. Public performance of the self – especially, I think, a self defined as female – is out-of-bounds when it comes to work. I'm not sure that's as it should be, especially in the world we live in now, and especially in a field, like mine, where being faceless or personless wouldn't really give me any definable benefit. Are my potential books weaker because I enjoy playing the ukulele? Am I likely to be a worse teacher because I think lolcats are funny? I don't think so.
But I can't change the perception that blogs are unprofessional. Not really. And yet, I'm reluctant to take it down. Even though I go through long periods of writing very infrequently (like now), this is the product of almost seven years' desultory work. And, moreover, that very unprofessional-ness, that sense of being too personally involved, is and has always been an essential part of my strength as an academic (and, I hope, a teacher). I am – and this is as much a liability as it is a strength – an extremely associative thinker, when it comes to analyzing literature and culture. For instance, I starting thinking about lemurs this morning, and I remembered this picture I drew several years ago (and posted on my old blog).
It occurred to me that it's a very good illustration of what all my thought processes look like, at least when it comes to academic work. It's a set of leaps and associations by concept – a sense, as the diagram suggests, that has everything also to do with mirrors and ghosts. And that, in turn, means that it has everything to do with my sense of identification, replication, or alienation towards the object of my attention. In the past year, one of the many threads of my thought has had to do with what it means to identify with a work, a character, a part, a group, and how important that is to the experience both of reading and of watching a play or a movie. Can we or should we even talk about identification as a primary part of the experience of reading or auditing or watching? Should we only talk about it for books, but nor for plays; or for plays but not for books? Should we only talk about it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or the eighteenth forward, or the 1920s to the 1980s? The idea of identifying, or identifying-with (and they're different processes), is a stumbling block as much as it's a help. (And I seem to be identifying with Lyly – I'm growing Euphuistic.) In some ways, to identify-with is a failed method of reading, at least if you want to separate the reading experience from other experiences. It seems amateurish, and it can lead to amateur interpretations: this is a bad poem because it makes you identify with Satan. This is a bad book because female readers can only identify with bad or incomplete female models. This is a bad novel because the white reader thinks he can identify with the African speaker, who is only a caricature of Africanness.
But then again, such judgments are undoubtedly part of the reading experience, and, what's more, they've been so since at least the 16th century, and so are a part of critical history as well. Part of what Philip Sidney defends against and what William Prynne criticizes about poetry is the way that unwary readers may find themselves tricked into identifying with bad role models by skillful texts. If you enjoy George Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F.J., doesn't that mean you'd like, on some level, to be a notorious philanderer, like FJ? Gascoigne tries to guard against this criticism, to some measure, by having repeated levels of narrators who note how shameful this all is, and how FJ went unrewarded and repented his behavior at the end, but it's a little hard to believe them. On the other hand, the problem that censors had with Gascoigne's text wasn't, precisely, a problem of identifying-with, but identifying: they suspected the whole thing was a roman a clef, exposing the scandalous exploits of real noblemen and women, so they suppressed the whole book.
From identifying-with to identifying; from a personal reaction to a political one – that's a slippage with which I am myself familiar. Last night, I wasted time by re-reading one of my favorite children's books by Diana Wynne Jones, Castle in the Air. Now, I love this book. But there have always been a few things that bothered me, chief among them a feeling of difficulty I had regarding the main character's love interest, a princess named (and it's supposed to be funny) Flower-in-the-Night. It's supposed to be a very conventional, fairy-tale relationship at first (Abdullah, the main character has to learn that that's not how real life is, though gently, by the end of the book), so the description of the princess makes sense, in those terms. She has huge dark eyes, long thick dark hair, a melodious voice, and above all she's slender and shapely. Jones notes that slender figure several times in the scenes at the beginning of the book when Abudllah and Flower-in-the-night meet, and again at the end of the book.
Moreover, also at the beginning of the book, Abdullah has to escape being married against his will to two young women his odious relatives want him to marry – young women who are giggly, insipid, and, above all, fat. Abdullah compares their fat bodies repeatedly to Flower-in-the-night's slim one, and is repulsed. So is the narrator, who glorious in their fatness and their "wobbling." It's all meant to be funny, of course, and – again – pointedly conventional. By the end, Abdullah realizes that the thing he loves most about Flower-in-the-Night is not her beauty, but her intelligence, a pointedly unpretty princess finds love too, and even the fat would-be brides are settled happily.
And yet, I realized this time though, I've always been simply unable to enjoy the romance part of the book, and the reason is identification – or perhaps misidentification. I simply cannot identify with a character who is pointedly described as being thin, and, more to the point, I do identify, even though the narrative obviously does not direct me to do so, with the despised fat girls. This isn't a strong identification – it can't be, since there's very little in the book about any of these women, and, anyway, the romance isn't really the point. I do identify with Abdullah well enough, and most of the book remains highly enjoyable for that reason – and yet, something about that misidentification – stronger than it ought to be – prevents me from feeling quite satisfied.
Is that a problem? Does it mean, for a start, that I need to be reading less naïvely, with a greater understanding of the pleasures of pure genre or form over juvenile self-projection? Does it mean that I'm attempting to get something out of the book – a kind of validation, maybe – that I shouldn't expect? I'm certainly aware of both of those possibilities. In fact, I consciously try to be a less naïve reader most of the time, and try not to project whatever sense of self it is that I have onto works whose explicit pleasure is in providing alternate selves, or alternate social pictures. Identification, in fact, when it is overly strong (and sometimes that just means "when it is present at all"), disrupts my reading process. I often have, for instance, to put a mystery down if I find myself too upset by the description of an evil, self-indulgent fat person or a bitchy, self-obsessed female lead. I'm not meant to experience identification with those characters, or even to identify them as representations of real people, or of identifiable real-world groups. When I do so, it derails my reading experience and shunts the book from enjoyable, interesting, or instructive othering to painful, disruptive, or dangerous mirroring. I'd rather that not happen.
There are, of course, works that aim to provoke similar feelings: Lolita, for instance, derives some of its power from the way in which readers who experience the book successfully are both carried along by identification with Humbert and appalled by that identification. The peculiar schadenfreude of both Borat and reality television provoke similar feelings.
But those plays on identification, I think, confirm, rather than deny identification as a legitimate part of the process of reading. What happens when I misidentify is that I become even more invested in the process of reading as a process of identification: I am now unable to see it as autonomous, but am forced to recognize the ways in which my input is necessary to make the text "live" or live again, and how that life may clash uncomfortably with the way in which I would like it to live.
Where am I going with all this? As usual somewhere loosely defined and difficult to follow. But at the moment, I think it's this: I do overinvest and overpersonalize. And that is precisely one of the most important parts of how I understand the things I try to understand. My skill as a literary critic comes precisely from a sense, not of detachment, but of over-attachment or disrupted attachment. I'm most interested in how readers and viewers make images live, and that's easiest to see when something disrupts the process – and that's something with which I am deeply familiar on a personal level.
So does that end up being a defense of blogging? Or a defense of naïve reading strategies? Or an attempt to connect the two? Maybe. It ends up being long, anyway.
But I can't change the perception that blogs are unprofessional. Not really. And yet, I'm reluctant to take it down. Even though I go through long periods of writing very infrequently (like now), this is the product of almost seven years' desultory work. And, moreover, that very unprofessional-ness, that sense of being too personally involved, is and has always been an essential part of my strength as an academic (and, I hope, a teacher). I am – and this is as much a liability as it is a strength – an extremely associative thinker, when it comes to analyzing literature and culture. For instance, I starting thinking about lemurs this morning, and I remembered this picture I drew several years ago (and posted on my old blog).
It occurred to me that it's a very good illustration of what all my thought processes look like, at least when it comes to academic work. It's a set of leaps and associations by concept – a sense, as the diagram suggests, that has everything also to do with mirrors and ghosts. And that, in turn, means that it has everything to do with my sense of identification, replication, or alienation towards the object of my attention. In the past year, one of the many threads of my thought has had to do with what it means to identify with a work, a character, a part, a group, and how important that is to the experience both of reading and of watching a play or a movie. Can we or should we even talk about identification as a primary part of the experience of reading or auditing or watching? Should we only talk about it for books, but nor for plays; or for plays but not for books? Should we only talk about it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or the eighteenth forward, or the 1920s to the 1980s? The idea of identifying, or identifying-with (and they're different processes), is a stumbling block as much as it's a help. (And I seem to be identifying with Lyly – I'm growing Euphuistic.) In some ways, to identify-with is a failed method of reading, at least if you want to separate the reading experience from other experiences. It seems amateurish, and it can lead to amateur interpretations: this is a bad poem because it makes you identify with Satan. This is a bad book because female readers can only identify with bad or incomplete female models. This is a bad novel because the white reader thinks he can identify with the African speaker, who is only a caricature of Africanness.
But then again, such judgments are undoubtedly part of the reading experience, and, what's more, they've been so since at least the 16th century, and so are a part of critical history as well. Part of what Philip Sidney defends against and what William Prynne criticizes about poetry is the way that unwary readers may find themselves tricked into identifying with bad role models by skillful texts. If you enjoy George Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F.J., doesn't that mean you'd like, on some level, to be a notorious philanderer, like FJ? Gascoigne tries to guard against this criticism, to some measure, by having repeated levels of narrators who note how shameful this all is, and how FJ went unrewarded and repented his behavior at the end, but it's a little hard to believe them. On the other hand, the problem that censors had with Gascoigne's text wasn't, precisely, a problem of identifying-with, but identifying: they suspected the whole thing was a roman a clef, exposing the scandalous exploits of real noblemen and women, so they suppressed the whole book.
From identifying-with to identifying; from a personal reaction to a political one – that's a slippage with which I am myself familiar. Last night, I wasted time by re-reading one of my favorite children's books by Diana Wynne Jones, Castle in the Air. Now, I love this book. But there have always been a few things that bothered me, chief among them a feeling of difficulty I had regarding the main character's love interest, a princess named (and it's supposed to be funny) Flower-in-the-Night. It's supposed to be a very conventional, fairy-tale relationship at first (Abdullah, the main character has to learn that that's not how real life is, though gently, by the end of the book), so the description of the princess makes sense, in those terms. She has huge dark eyes, long thick dark hair, a melodious voice, and above all she's slender and shapely. Jones notes that slender figure several times in the scenes at the beginning of the book when Abudllah and Flower-in-the-night meet, and again at the end of the book.
Moreover, also at the beginning of the book, Abdullah has to escape being married against his will to two young women his odious relatives want him to marry – young women who are giggly, insipid, and, above all, fat. Abdullah compares their fat bodies repeatedly to Flower-in-the-night's slim one, and is repulsed. So is the narrator, who glorious in their fatness and their "wobbling." It's all meant to be funny, of course, and – again – pointedly conventional. By the end, Abdullah realizes that the thing he loves most about Flower-in-the-Night is not her beauty, but her intelligence, a pointedly unpretty princess finds love too, and even the fat would-be brides are settled happily.
And yet, I realized this time though, I've always been simply unable to enjoy the romance part of the book, and the reason is identification – or perhaps misidentification. I simply cannot identify with a character who is pointedly described as being thin, and, more to the point, I do identify, even though the narrative obviously does not direct me to do so, with the despised fat girls. This isn't a strong identification – it can't be, since there's very little in the book about any of these women, and, anyway, the romance isn't really the point. I do identify with Abdullah well enough, and most of the book remains highly enjoyable for that reason – and yet, something about that misidentification – stronger than it ought to be – prevents me from feeling quite satisfied.
Is that a problem? Does it mean, for a start, that I need to be reading less naïvely, with a greater understanding of the pleasures of pure genre or form over juvenile self-projection? Does it mean that I'm attempting to get something out of the book – a kind of validation, maybe – that I shouldn't expect? I'm certainly aware of both of those possibilities. In fact, I consciously try to be a less naïve reader most of the time, and try not to project whatever sense of self it is that I have onto works whose explicit pleasure is in providing alternate selves, or alternate social pictures. Identification, in fact, when it is overly strong (and sometimes that just means "when it is present at all"), disrupts my reading process. I often have, for instance, to put a mystery down if I find myself too upset by the description of an evil, self-indulgent fat person or a bitchy, self-obsessed female lead. I'm not meant to experience identification with those characters, or even to identify them as representations of real people, or of identifiable real-world groups. When I do so, it derails my reading experience and shunts the book from enjoyable, interesting, or instructive othering to painful, disruptive, or dangerous mirroring. I'd rather that not happen.
There are, of course, works that aim to provoke similar feelings: Lolita, for instance, derives some of its power from the way in which readers who experience the book successfully are both carried along by identification with Humbert and appalled by that identification. The peculiar schadenfreude of both Borat and reality television provoke similar feelings.
But those plays on identification, I think, confirm, rather than deny identification as a legitimate part of the process of reading. What happens when I misidentify is that I become even more invested in the process of reading as a process of identification: I am now unable to see it as autonomous, but am forced to recognize the ways in which my input is necessary to make the text "live" or live again, and how that life may clash uncomfortably with the way in which I would like it to live.
Where am I going with all this? As usual somewhere loosely defined and difficult to follow. But at the moment, I think it's this: I do overinvest and overpersonalize. And that is precisely one of the most important parts of how I understand the things I try to understand. My skill as a literary critic comes precisely from a sense, not of detachment, but of over-attachment or disrupted attachment. I'm most interested in how readers and viewers make images live, and that's easiest to see when something disrupts the process – and that's something with which I am deeply familiar on a personal level.
So does that end up being a defense of blogging? Or a defense of naïve reading strategies? Or an attempt to connect the two? Maybe. It ends up being long, anyway.
Labels: reading, representation
I just came back from a run, during the course of which I devised the phrase "Schrodinger's Cake" as a clever if anachronistic way of expressing the ol' having/eating cake adage. Then, I googled the phrase to see if anyone ever in the history of the google-indexed internet has come up with the phrase. And lo - a 3 year old post by you was the first result.
So. That may exacerbate or dampen your desire to discontinue bloggery.
p.s. I have a small but soft spot for the Astrophil & Stella sonnet cycle.