Dr. Metablog

Words of My Life -- Text

I first encountered the word "text" -- as did everyone else of my cohort -- as the first component of "textbook." At P S 217, textbooks were issued on the first day of school. Then, later in the day, we ritually scissored brown paper grocery bags and improvised protective book covers. It was not unusual for the covers to be in better shape than the retirement-eligible books. At college, I was surprised to find that I was required to purchase my own textbooks -- a discovery that busted a hole in my precarious budget. 

And then the word "text" sat still for a number of years until it emerged as a term of art in critical theory. "Text" became a generic word for anything written: novels, poems, plays, signs, advertising slogans, tattoos -- anything that could be analyzed and discussed. I think, in retrospect, that the idea was not to "privilege" one form of writing over another. "Text" is to poem as "provider" is to doctor.

Nowadays, "text" has emerged from the gloom of academic criticism and has become the most frequently used of words. Who could have predicted it? I myself, formerly a writer of letters and postcards and until recently of emails, and for many years at one point a user of the telephone, now send and receive multiple "texts" in a day.

The noun has also acquired a variety of verb forms: "I'll text you"; "I texted you";   "Text me when you arrive"; "Talk to you later.  I'm texting."

All derived, ultimately, from L. texere textus, to weave; or textor, a weaver.

The use of "text" in religious ceremony, as in a cleric's, "today's text is..." has never been a part of my life.

Cornell English Then and Now -- 5

Elisha Cohn is an associate professor in Cornell's Department of Literatures in English. Her Still Life, Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (2016) strikes me as two books in one. The first is quite lovely and filled with a variety of splendid apercus. Cohn explores "lyric moments" in the novels (confession: I read closely only the chapter on Thomas Hardy, the novelist with whom I'm most familiar). She notes that Hardy (a poet as well as a novelist) occasionally stops the progress of the story and allows his characters to experience a moment of stasis or reflection or reverie that is more a characteristic of lyric poetry than prose. I was much impressed by her analyses of these moments -- and wondered why I had failed to notice such events -- or non-events -- myself. So criticism did what it's supposed to do -- widens our understanding and appreciation of works of literature. I returned to the Victorian novel armed with a new way of seeing. In fact, I'm now reading Little Dorrit again for the express purpose of ascertaining whether a non-poet like Dickens employs the same Still Life method. So far, not the case -- Dickens has his own particular (and very successful) methods of expanding the consciousness of his characters.

Ah, but then there's the other side of Cohn's book which attempts to develop her useful insights within the slough of "theory." I half suspect that Cohn felt obliged to make herself relevant or contemporary or tenure-worthy with her tumble into this quicksand -- but perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps she devoutly believes in an apparatus that I find so incomprehensible and transient. In this second part of the book, many famous names are invoked and admired; some of these are very French and very revered; others  are merely professors at American universities. Pages of text and footnotes defend against the horrid possibility that Still Life might be "insufficiently theorized." And in these speculative paragraphs Cohn discusses the deprivilegization of hierarchical thought in favor of forms of lateralization in which individuations are impersonal and singularities are pre-individual and which reterritorialize along the lines of preexisting structures of power which re-consolidate into static concepts, etc., etc. Which is when I either descend into a reverie (or nightmare) of my own or hurl he book across the room.

 

[February 23  Audrey ap Howell writes:  "Vivian de St. Vrain, you've go it wrong. The notion that there are poetic moments in the novels is well established. The originality of this book lies in its theorizing of these moments. You would know this if you had read carefully and not skimmed." 

[February 24] J C Occhiogrosso writes: "This is a well-written book. Complicated but not obscure."

[February 25]  Reuben Musgrave writes:  "I bet that Cohn is a delightful teacher -- if she keeps to the events in the novels and stays away from bewildering 'theory.'"

[February 25] Savannah Courtermanche writes:  "All novelists pause the plot for moments of reflection. Nothing new here."    

[March 5]  Joy Jourgenson writes:  "This difficult monograph would have been more useful as a series of short, insightful essays.  Too bad it had to be expanded into a repetitive static book. Not the author's fault -- just the tune of the times."

[March 6]  Eli Munn writes:  "Vivian, you're too old and out of it to have an opinion worth anything. Shut it down and go back to your knitting."

[March 15] Rogers Roggen writes:  "I wonder, Vivian, how you can work yourself up into such a snit about Cornell when the USA is going to hell in a handbasket. Shouldn't you put your effort into more pressing matters."

[March 18] Homer vanNess writes:  "Reuben Musgrave, are you possibly the "Cousin Rube" that I heard my parents mention? I know there's a Musgrave branch to my family. (I found your name doing a random googlesearch). If you are Cousin Rube, could you pm me at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you. I know you went to Cornell; so did I but much later."

 

Cornell English Then and Now - 4

Vivian de St. Vrain writes: "Cathy Caruth is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of English at Cornell University. She has written quite a number of books but the one that I selected for this Cornell English Department project, partly because of its engaging title, is Literature in the Ashes of History. Alas, the title is misleading, because Caruth doesn't concern herself with literature in any recognizable way. Rather, the book investigates psychoanalytic theories, especially of loss and trauma. Although in an earlier part of my life I read and studied all of Freud's major works, I found this book to be far too subtle and abstruse for my downright brain. I have therefore asked assistance from my long time friend A. Barnett Langdale, Jr. Barney is a very smart medical school graduate, a therapist, and psychologist (though not a psychoanalyst) and a person for whose opinions I have great regard."

A. Barnett Langdale, Jr., writes: "Thanks, Viv, for entrusting me with the of task of reading and evaluating this book. I fear that I shall disappoint you, because I had a hard time understanding Literature in the Ashes of History. In order to profit from reading this book, one must accept certain assumptions about Sigmund Freud and about the art of psychoanalysis. Caruth sets out to modify and reinterpret the famous fort-da episode in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This became an immediate problem for me, because I have never agreed with Freud's analysis of his grandson's play -- perhaps because his interpretation clashes with what I have  learned from long years of closely observing children in my professional practice. Events such as fort-da can generate a spectrum of meanings and a variety of interpretations equally as valid or invalid as Freud's. As I result, I read this book with a great deal of resistance to its assumptions and their ramifications.

Many of the arguments that Caruth creates ("suggests" is her usual verb) are too arcane for me. She carries her readers away from common sense. She inhabits an intellectual world in which every event or fact carries its own negation. And that negation bears a consequent negation, and so on ad infinitum, like the images in a pair of opposed mirrors, leading inevitably to a situation in which, as Macbeth says, "function/ Is smothered in surmise and nothing is/ But what is not."

Vivian de St. Vrain responds: 'Many thanks, Barney. In the course of reading Literature in the Ashes of History, I came to think that its procedure is, in a sense, a lot like theology. If you make certain assumptions about god and angels and creation, you can generate a fantastically complicated superstructure of ideas that has absolutely no relations to the world in which we dwell. This book is not theology, it's psychoanalytic theory, but it shares a similar procedure, because, despite its highly-elaborated complexity, its assumptions are unprovable if not absolutely false. Intelligence and sophistication can take you only so far. I'm afraid that in the end, there's no more heft in this kind of study than there is in theology -- the "subject without an object." Ultimately, it's Cloud-Cuckoo-Land." 

 

 

[February 15] Walter Balletto writes: "Before you dismiss this intelligent book out of hand, you might want to read the ecstatic review by Michael Levine in The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. It's online. Levine makes the effort to read carefully, which neither you nor your friend Langdale do."  

[February 15] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "At first I thought that Mr. Balletto was being ironic, inventing an improbable self-parodic name for an academic journal. Who would believe there is actually such a publication? But I looked it up and, by golly, it's real. Moreover, it's published, mirabile dictu, by the University of Nebraska Press!!!"

[February 16] Janet Rich asks: "You haven't said anything about Caruth's presence in a Department of English. Shouldn't she relocate to Psychology?"

[February 16] Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) asks: "I wonder how many of Caruth's colleagues can read and understand her work?"

[February 16] Anita Robillard writes: "Caruth is on an island, and instead of welcoming friends to join her, she erects walls and barricades to keep them out."

[February 17] Joel Salzberg writes: "What do you mean by "island." She teaches at Cornell; Cornell's not an island."

[February 17] Anita Robillard writes: "It's a metaphor, Joel."

[February 17] Herman S. Levi writes: "I don't understand why you compare psychoanalysis to theology. They're nothing alike."

[February 18] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Professor Levi, let me refer you to a familiar passage in the Leviathan, where Hobbes writes of "names that signifie nothing, but are taken up and learned by rote from the Schooles, as hypostatical, transubstantiate, consubstantiate, eternal-Now and the like canting of Schoolemen." Similarly, the words of psychoanalysis, such as pleasure principle, Ego, etc. signify nothing at all. Theologians and psychoanalysts can be very smart people, but the net practical result of their involuted speculation is transitory, wrong, useless, specious, and false."

Wisdom from my Father

When dealing with a child, always make your appeal to the better side of his/her nature. 

No one owns anything; the most you can say is that you have a lifetime lease on it.

As far as I can tell, I am just a long link in a chain going from nowhere to nowhere.

If you lose your man, go directly to the basket. 

Never omit an opportunity to do a favor for a friend, and never be embarrassed to accept a favor from a friend.  People like to help one another.

Anyone can make money if he makes it the sole business of his life to do so.

When the stock market is going up, everyone is  a genius.

The czars and the rabbis kept our family in darkness for a thousand years. It took hundreds of years for us to fight our way out of the ghetto, and they (the orthodox and the Hasids) want to put themselves back in it.

Don't forget to wash behind your ears.

Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1911)

I have just read Mary Antin's autobiography, The Promised Land, first published in 1911. It is a book that I should have known much earlier in my life but only discovered a week or so ago. The larger part The Promised Land is the familiar story of immigrant life in a new country -- the author's struggles to adapt to an unfamiliar culture, her achievements and triumphs, and her unabashed flag-waving patriotism. More strange and more informative, is the picture of life "old country," as viewed through the eyes of a young woman.  Antin grew up in provincial, impoverished Polotzk, a small city now in Belarus, but which at various times has been administered and exploited by the ungentle hands of Varangians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans. During Antin's youth (she was born in 1881), Polotsk was a part of Russia. It was not a good time to be a Jew in Polotsk or indeed anywhere within the Pale of Settlement. (Her story is especially pertinent because I myself have a hunk of Belarusian-Jewish genes -- as do, therefore, my children and grandchildren.) 

Antin's life in that bleak part of the world was, I think, triply suppressed. In political freedom and standard of living, by the Russians; in domestic and personal relations, by oppressive Hasidism and the rabbis who enforced its demanding rules; and thirdly, because Antin had the misfortune to be born female. She had every reason to leave Polotsk behind.   

Antin recognized early that she was a "prisoner" because "the Czar" commanded Jews to stay within the Pale. She "accepted ill usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather. The world was made in a certain way and I had to live in it." Polotsk was a place of constant ethnic strife fueled by dangerous superstitions. "The Gentiles said that we had killed their god and that we used the blood of murdered Christian children in the Passover." The Jewish community of Polotsk was always under threat of violence -- "the peasants would fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill Jews. They attacked with knives and clubs and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them, and burned their houses. This was called a pogrom." There was also the threat of the draft, where recruits served until the age of 41. (My maternal grandfather, Joseph (Usilewski) Green told me that he had been drafted into the Russian army for a twenty-year term; I now understand that he must have entered the army at age 21. In 1904 Grandpa, age 26, deserted and came to America. Good move.) Some men escaped the draft by paying crippling bribes to conscription officers. Taxation was onerous. "Peace cost so much a year in Polotsk."

Antin also explains that as stifling as was the Czar, the rules of religion were harsher. "Within the wall raised by the vigilance of the police, another wall, higher, thicker, more impenetrable was the religion of  the Jews." The rabbis favored piety (as they conceived it) to independence or freedom or prosperity and they enforced the most minute regulations and prohibitions of all actions day and night. Antin tells of a wife who found a blemish on the chicken she was preparing to cook. She consulted the rabbi who pronounced the chicken traif. That night, the family went hungry.

Polotsk seems to have had no dissenters or freethinkers, or at least none that Antin notes. I imagine that those who challenged orthodoxy either left of their own accord or were shunned.

Girls were offered little outside the family kitchen or nursery.  They were expected to marry young and produce many children, especially sons who could distinguish the family with their Torah studies. Schooling was discouraged for girls, who were taught to pronounce but not understand Hebrew. 

At its prime, Polotsk had 60,000 inhabitants, perhaps 60 per cent of whom were Jewish. There were twenty-three synagogues. Today there are no synagogues and no Jews.

Gravestones

I've never visited my parents' graves. I don't even know where they are buried. I've been told that my father is buried between my mother and his sister Mollie, but I don't know where they lie. I have a paper that tells me where my sister Susan, who died as an infant, is buried, but I've never been there. I don't know where my brother Eugene lies.

I know exactly where Althea and Phyllis are buried -- just up the hill, under the big maple. I visit once a year and bring a stone to place on their markers. Phyllis's is a bronze plaque affixed to a stone; Althea's is just the capital letter A and her dates (1939-2016). It's what she wanted.  

Dan Goss is buried in Staten Island somewhere. I visited once, with Althea. A's mother, Grandma Anne, wanted her ashes divided in half and spread, part with Phyllis and part with Dan.  She has no gravestone, nor wanted one.

I have told my family that I want my tombstone to read, "No more insomnia, forever." But that's a joke.  

Nowadays it's the custom to scatter the ashes on a favorite place, which is nice, but there's no place to visit. Especially no place for those buried at sea.

On the Mall

After a severe cold snap, it's a welcome warm Friday afternoon. We're on the semi-famous mall enjoying a long-postponed promenade. A woman, in her seventies, stops us. "Can you help me?" I'm embarrassed to confess that my first reaction to her plea was that she must be one of our many panhandlers. But not so. She continued: "It's my husband, he has Parkinson's, can you help me get him to the car?" He, Bill, was standing frozen, unable to speak, unable to move, his balance precarious. "Two years ago," she said,"he was robust. He's having a bad day." And indeed he was. I took Bill's left arm under the shoulder, his wife the other arm. Lynn grasped my left hand and carried Bill's useless stick, and together we shuffled him infinitely slowly and gently to the curb. "I thought we could go out for coffee," she said, "but I was wrong." While we stood quietly, Bill's wife went to fetch their car which was parked only fifty feet away. She backed it to where we stood (Lynn now supporting Bill on his right side). We helped Bill into passenger seat. His wife buckled him in.

I asked her, "do you have help?'  "Yes, she said, "friends." "Do you have children?" "Yes, but they don't live nearby." She thanked us generously and drove off.

I was sad for both him and her. He, because his dreadful disease is going to kill him very soon. And she, because her life now consists of morning-to-night care taking -- in bed, out of bed; dressing and undressing; into a comfortable chair for a while and then and out of it; brief awkward walks; three times a day lifting the spoon to his lips. And what's known in the care taking trade as "toileting."

I'm convinced that she doesn't know how bad he is. Caretakers are always behind, always catching up. If she knew, she'd have had a wheelchair at the ready. He needs constant care-- not just family or friends, but professional assistance. Can they afford a place in a memory care facility or nursing home? Not everyone can.

Afterward the incident, we went to a coffee shop -- a normalizing activity for us. But, sitting there, I was shaken. Certainly profound sadness for the ill husband and the encumbered wife, and in addition a touch of personal PTSD. 

And then the inevitable pondering. "To this favor must we come." It's not just Bill. We're all doomed -- even that cute infant in the next booth, rapturously examining her fingertips. A host of diseases, some as bad as Parkinson's, waiting at the door, waiting.