Category: Okla Elliott

Existential Echoes: Toward a Genealogy of Ideas in Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus”

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Existential Echoes:

Toward a Genealogy of Ideas in Albert Camus’s

“The Myth of Sisyphus”

by Okla Elliott

In the decades since their deaths, much has been made about the rivalry between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, but it would be a mistake to forget that before this rivalry—which has become the subject matter for numerous articles, books, and at least one documentary—Camus and Sartre were collaborators and friends. And Sartre at first played the role of mentor for Camus, a fact that comes through in Camus’s work, both when he is offering positions that align with Sartre’s own and when he is responding negatively to them; in both instances, Sartre is the origin of much of Camus’s thought. To illustrate this, let’s look at Camus’s essay-cycle “The Myth of Sisyphus” and attempt to delineate where his thinking is either an echo of Sartre’s or a direct negative response to it.

Sartre’s stature as the most famous French intellectual, and perhaps the most famous public intellectual of the twentieth century, is practically undisputed. His work as a novelist, a philosopher, and a playwright were equally well-known and dominant in the culture of occupied France and in the post-war years. It is therefore almost impossible not to hear the echo of Sartre’s famous description of tree roots from his 1936 novel La Nausée (Nausea), when Camus writes in his essay, “An Absurd Reasoning,” that “[t]he primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us” (11) and that “here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface” (15). As Sartre writes:

So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. (126-127)

It is worth noting also that Camus is taking up the Sartrean as opposed to the Heideggerian view of being-in-the-world. Heidegger, in Being and Time, will have Dasein interacting with objects as tools and with care or concern (both of which are inadequate translations of the German Besorgen or Sorge). Sartre’s position is that we do interact with the objects of the world in a ready-to-hand fashion (to use Heideggerian language) but that we initially encounter them as blunt objects, as the en-soi (in-itself) beings they are, before we comprehend them as ready-to-hand tools (or as elements of our projects, to use Sartrean language); and after we are done with them, they revert to blunt meaningless stuff.

We can find several such echoes of Sartre’s thought in Camus’s essay-cycle, and Camus makes several references to Sartre’s work without directly naming him, though anyone in the intellectual milieu of France at the time could not have missed them. For example, Camus writes that “[t]his discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea,’ as one writer of today calls it, is also the absurd” (11). Of course Camus is referencing Sartre here, even though he does not name him directly.

Camus also writes that “[i]t can be seen at this point that the initial themes of existential philosophy keep their entire value. The return of consciousness, the escape from everyday sleep represent the first steps of absurd freedom” (44).  Isn’t this passage an excellent rephrasing of Sartre’s notion of mauvaise foi (bad faith)? And what are these initial themes of existentialism? It is perhaps both Sartre and Heidegger whom Camus has in mind here. Heidegger’s notion of inauthenticity and Sartre’s notion of bad faith have much in common, in that they are both attitudes of truth-avoidance. There are subtle differences in the two ideas, but for our current purposes, it will suffice to say that Heidegger’s inauthenticity and Sartre’s bad faith are forms of self-deception or existential falsity that are to be avoided by keeping one’s eyes open to the facticity of one’s situation and on the possibility/necessity of our death.

Furthermore, on the quite crucial issue of God and how God’s existence affects the considerations of existentialism, Camus and Sartre seem to be in close alignment. Camus writes:

The absurdity peculiar to this problem comes from the fact that the very notion that makes the problem of freedom possible also takes away all its meaning. For in the presence of God there is less a problem of freedom than a problem of evil. You know the alternative: either we’re not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but God is not all-powerful. All the scholastic subtleties have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything from the acuteness of this paradox. (41-42)

This is not the exact wording as Sartre uses on the subject, but it’s not far off in terms of content. In Existentialism and Human Emotions, Sartre writes:

Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God does not exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. (51)

But even though they do not use the same wording and Sartre’s claim is bit stronger and clearer in regard to his overall purpose, the basic move by both thinkers is to dismiss the question of whether God exists, because it is not essential to their projects. It is hard to single out whether Camus is echoing Sartre or whether they just happen to hold quite similar views on this subject, but whatever the case may be, their shared dismissal of theological hairsplitting and their shared lack of interest in proselytizing for atheism (despite both being atheists) ought to be noted.

But Camus’s relationship to the work of Sartre is, as I mentioned previously, often one of a negative response; not one of intersection but rather divergence. Later in “An Absurd Reasoning,” he writes the following:

In order to remain faithful to that method, I have nothing to do with the problem of metaphysical liberty. Knowing whether or not man is free doesn’t interest me. I can experience only my own freedom. As to it, I can have no general notions, but merely a few clear insights. The problem of “freedom as such” has no meaning. (41)

This statement is in clear contradistinction to Sartre’s position:

When I declare that freedom in every concrete circumstance can have no other aim than to want itself, if man has once become aware that in his forlornness he imposes values, he can no longer want but one thing, and that is freedom, as the basis of all values. (45)

Sartre is positing a universalist position on the nature of freedom as such here, as opposed to Camus’s position, which has a more individualist or particularist bent to it. This, in fact, is a key difference in their methodologies—Camus often privileging the particular and individual, whereas Sartre privileges the universal and humanity as a whole (a difference that grew more pronounced over the course of their careers, but which can already be found in these early works on which I am focusing here). For example, Sartre makes the classic Kantian move of making the universalizability of an action or choice the measure of its ethical status:

When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men. In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. (17)

Here again, Sartre is making the move of universalizing what it means to make a choice, to be free and human, whereas Camus wants to focus solely on the individual and the choices and desires of the individual. Sartre clearly states, however, that “[w]e may say that there is a universality of man; but it is not given, it is perpetually being made” (39). Sartre is not attempting to define a fixed or stable human nature by any means, but he does want to define the pour-soi (the for-itself, which his rough equivalent of Heideggerian Dasein)—that is to say, he is very much interested in man as such and freedom as such, which Camus explicitly states do not fall under the purview of his own project. This is a distinction that in many instances is a purely academic one. Whether there are many free men, or whether it is in the nature of man to be condemned to freedom and there exist many instantiations of man, is a matter of mere hairsplitting in most daily matters, but not in all. It does, as we saw above with Sartre’s Kantian move, change the ethical import of human action if we view it as constituting universal man (as Sartre has it), as opposed to a particular man’s actions in the face of an absurd wall (as Camus has it). It is harder to derive an ethics from Camus’s position, which is why he claims that “there can be no question of holding forth on ethics” (66). A final distinction ought to be made in regard to our comportment toward others. For Sartre, we are at least in part defined by and against others, whereas Camus conceives of his “absurd man” as more atomistic. This is ironic, given Camus’s habit of defining himself by or against Sartre.

My purpose here has not been to reduce Camus’s work to a purely derivative status vis-à-vis Sartre’s, but rather to show how Camus incorporates the philosophical insights of one of the twentieth century’s most famous and productive thinkers. There is also something of a genealogical impulse at work here, insofar as I have attempted to show where Camus, one of the best-known and most important public intellectuals of the twentieth century, found the ore and the refinement of his ideas. The initiated readers of the time knew precisely when Camus was appropriating a Sartrean concept and precisely when he was defining a position against Sartre’s stance on a matter. Camus often rephrased Sartre’s ideas into his own language, or when he disagreed with Sartre (which he did more and more frequently as their lives went on), he disagreed specifically with Sartre; that is, one can find traces of Sartre in Camus’s attempts to define himself against Sartre as much as one can find traces of Sartre in those instances where Camus is directly or indirectly echoing his ideas.

***

Bibliography

Camus, Albert and Justin O’Brien. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1955. Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: Philosophical Library, 1967. Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Lloyd Alexander, and Hayden Carruth. Nausea. New York: New Directions Paperback, 1964. Print.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: OKLA ELLIOTT

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ON PERFECTION
By Okla Elliott

1.
My arrogance is perfect—
I want everything I say taken down
in italics. I want
footnotes longer than the original text.
Every woman and many men
will want to look into the green almond eye
of my perversion.
They will thank me
for the privilege of disinterested touch.

I claim to be made of starstuff
brought here across a million million miles.

I claim to be happy
in the inevitable loneliness.

2.
The sanctified blade is perfect.

The colossal slowness of dying is perfect.

Everything is exactly as it should be
here where a goat’s shit glistens with the water
of an idyllic river
he drank at hours ago,
hydrating his living (and dying) cells.

I have become a mystic
a perfect destiny
after all these years
of studied incredulity.

The unsanctified flesh is perfect,
I tell you,
because it always-already knew
every kind of love
our holy pornographers pretend
they invented.

3.
The slick tongue of metaphysics
flicks between stained teeth.

A tongue that could wet
dry lips or give a lecture
on Wittgenstein or lick the needy
flesh we hide (stupidly)
most of the enormous time we have.

4.
The spindle pricks the thumb wants
the needle.

A vest of goldthread
should be buried
with the dead.

Everything will rhyme
in the afterlife
as it does in the beforedeath.
It’s as I’ve
said: perfection permeates
the sound fundament
and the cracked firmament.

It’s as I’ve said, tsk tsk,
it’s perfect
just as it is.

The feast prepares itself.

***

(“On Perfection” previously appeared in Zone 3 and in the poet’s latest chapbook, A Vulgar Geography, and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)

Okla Elliott is currently the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he studies comparative literature and cultural theory. He also holds an MFA from Ohio State University. For the academic year 2008-09, he was a visiting assistant professor at Ohio Wesleyan University. His drama, non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, North Dakota Quarterly, A Public Space, and The Southeast Review, among others. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks–The Mutable Wheel, Lucid Bodies and Other Poems, and A Vulgar Geography–and he co-edited (with Kyle Minor) The Other Chekhov.

Editor’s Note: Okla Elliot is the Co-Creator and Webmaster of As It Ought To Be. But today’s post is not about nepotism. Today’s post is about excellent poetry and the fact that you ought to be reading it. Recently Okla sent me a copy of his latest chapbook, A Vulgar Geography, at my behest. The first night I read it cover to cover, something I am almost never able to do with books of poetry. There were moments I literally had to put the book down and exclaim out loud to myself with amazement at the brilliance of a line, a moment, an idea. The second night I re-read the book, cover to cover, this time aloud. My mouth took to the words like a finely crafted dessert. The way one consonant rolled into another, the words were tangible morsels on my tongue.

I say this not because Okla is my Editor here at As It Ought To Be. Not because he is my friend, nor because he is an inspiration, though he is these things. I say this because it is true: A Vulgar Geography is a near-perfect book of poetry. From its outward appearance (a simple clean design with a lone, intricate image that reflects the book’s title) to the types of poems chosen (ranging from left-aligned to prose to experimental) to–most importantly–the poems themselves, which are finely crafted masterpieces of thought, idea, story, and word. I highly recommend you don’t take my word for it, but rather, read A Vulgar Geography and find out for yourself.

Want to read more by and about Okla Elliot?
Buy Okla Elliott’s new book, A Vulgar Geography.

Consider the Rant: A Book Review

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Consider the Rant

by Okla Elliott

On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant
Dina Al-Kassim
University of California Press
ISBN 978-0-520-25925-6
$34.95 Paperback
$28.00 E-Book

In Dina Al-Kassim’s new book On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant, she takes up (among other things) Michel Foucault’s interest in the limit-experience of reading certain texts (particularly Georges Bataille) and turns it around by asking what it means to write such a text—that is, under what conditions, with what linguistic tools, and to what purposes such texts are written. Al-Kassim focuses mostly on Oscar Wilde, Jane Bowles, and Abdelwahab Meddeb—giving each of these authors an entire chapter—and makes regular use of Georges Bataille, Charles Baudelaire, and Aimé Césaire, thus making her project an utterly comparative one that insists on its portability across national and linguistic borders.

The basic argument of the book runs as follows: Speaking truth to power has been co-opted by institutions of power in many instances; these institutions, such as elite universities, exclude more people than they include, thus making them part of the Foucauldian schema of the microphysics of power in society (as he lays out in Society Must Be Defended and other works); therefore, the rant (whose tradition harkens back, Al-Kassim explains, to the “rakish libertinage” of the seventeenth century) is often the only form of discourse available to the dispossessed or the subaltern. She is clear, however, that the literary rant is not a genre. “Postscripts, letters, afterwords: marginal genres aat the edges of masterful texts are often the site of the rant’s emergence, but what I am calling the rant is not a genre in itself.” Al-Kassim engages yet further definition by privation, emphasizing that the literary rant is also not parrhesia (“fearless speech”). It is a speech act or series of speech acts that run counter to the powered entities of a society, but it is not necessarily confrontational (though it can be and often is). The essential aspect of the literary rant is that it is unintelligible speech that takes place when no speech is possible.

The theoretical DNA of On Pain of Speech can be easily determined by a quick look at its paratextual elements. The book opens with three epigraphs—one from the philosopher-pornographer Georges Bataille, one from Michel Foucault, and one from Judith Butler. By picking a single line from each of the epigraphs, we can get a reasonable picture of the project Al-Kassim has put before herself. From the Bataille epigraph: “Qu’on me fasse taire (si l’on ose)!”; from Foucault: “We are dealing . . . with a discourse that turns the traditional values of intelligibility upside down.”; and, finally, Butler: “This relation to the Other does not precisely ruin my story or reduce me to speechlessness, but it does, invariably, clutter my speech with signs of its undoing.” A look in the Index lets us see that there are fifty-one references to Freud and sixty-three to Lacan, six for Judith Butler, but only two for Jameson and two for Derrida. This is fitting since Al-Kassim uses many psychoanalytic terms and tries to rethink (rather successfully) Lacan’s theory of foreclosure, and she focuses considerably more on speech acts as they constitute the self than on speech acts qua speech acts. It is surprising, however, to see that Gayatri Spivak receives only one mention in the book, and that her widely influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is not the occasion of this single reference—surprising because Al-Kassim’s central effort could be seen as exploring how the subaltern attempts speech via the rant.

Here I feel compelled to point out that Al-Kassim chooses never to clearly define what a literary rant is. This is not to suggest that she does not give ample examples and even certain quasi-universal features to literary rants, but it would be anathema to the nature of a literary rant, as Al-Kassim conceives it, for it to have rigid genre specifications. Its purpose is precisely to explode genre specifications and expectations.

Al-Kassim’s analysis could profitably be applied to much modernist and avant-garde writing, ranging from the feminist-experimentalist Gertrude Stein to the Communist-Dadaist Tristan Tzara to many contemporary post-colonial avant-garde artists (such as the Raqs Collective in India). It can also, however, be applied to the fascist-Futurist Filippo Tomaso Marinetti and others of his ilk productively, though given the book’s focus on leftist and post-colonial resistance, it might come as a surprise to Al-Kassim to see her work thus employed. As she conceives her theoretical model, it is already remarkably portable across decades and nations and movements, but it has an even larger scope than the author herself seems to give it. So long as the writing in question “turns the traditional values of intelligibility upside down” and challenges the dominant paradigm of thought at a given time, it seems it could be profitably read through the lens of Al-Kassim’s book.

This wide portability and the refreshingly readable prose of the book make On Pain of Speech an ideal text for courses on post-colonialism, Modernism, and avant-garde literatures at the advanced undergraduate level and beyond.

[This piece was originally published in Inside Higher Education online.]

Incomplete Thoughts on Wisconsin and Political Enthusiasm

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Incomplete Thoughts on Wisconsin and Political Enthusiasm

by Okla Elliott (with photos by Jenna Bowen)

“In Kant’s philosophy of history, crisis or tension is necessary for human progress. He is pessimistic about individual success[es] but confident about mankind.” —Sidney Axinn, “Kant, Authority, and the French Revolution”

Much was made in leftist circles of the fact that an Egyptian protestor purchased a pizza online to help feed the protestors in Wisconsin—and rightly so; it was a touching and telling moment. The international solidarity and the shared humanity this gesture showed are truly inspiring. But aside from the feel-good aspect, not much else has been discussed about it, which is in fact indicative of a larger gap in our discussion of recent world events. There have been some minor gestures at connecting the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Greece, France, and Wisconsin, but no serious theoretical investigation has yet been undertaken. This is not entirely a bad thing, since there are moments when action is called for, not theorizing. That said, however, mass movements that do not have a (self-)critical or theoretical component have a habit of either failing or turning into things almost as bad as what they sought to depose. READ MORE

Sin’s Fatal Taint: the Felony Murder Rule and its Discontents

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Sin’s Fatal Taint: the Felony Murder Rule and its Discontents

by Okla Elliott

We’ve all heard of outdated laws that remain on the books from earlier times — such as laws about how many pigs are allowed inside a house or those defining a pickle by means of a bounce test — many of which are good for a few laughs, given their perfect absurdity. There are untold numbers of such laws, and most of them are harmless enough, worthy of little more than a shrug of amazement at what people will make law. Unfortunately, not all outdated laws are so harmless. The felony murder rule dates back to sixteenth century Common Law in England, was adopted by America in the nineteenth century, and is all but entirely unknown, except of course to those who have been affected by it directly. The felony murder rule has at its heart a noble goal: to punish a murderer more severely if the murder is committed during a burglary, kidnapping, rape, or other such felonious offense. Why then did England repeal the rule entirely in 1957? Why would anyone want to see such a noble-spirited rule repealed? The reasons are numerous, but before we discuss what’s wrong with the rule, we should properly define it.

The felony murder rule, as defined by The Social Law Library of Massachusetts, states that “the defendant is guilty of first degree murder if the Commonwealth has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the deceased was unlawfully killed during the defendant’s commission or attempted commission of a felony.” Sounds okay so far. Now let’s take a look at the definition of first-degree murder: “Murder committed with deliberate premeditation and malice is murder in the first degree.” First-degree murder is the most heinous of crimes, requiring the most vicious mens rea (the “mental state” of the perpetrator at the time of the crime, used as the means to determine the degree of legal culpability). It requires a truly cruel person to extensively plan and execute the malicious demise of another. Aside from child molestation or brutal rape, most of us would agree that there is no worse crime imaginable, and we would agree also that the worst punishment should be reserved for the perpetrators of such crimes. It is for this reason that first-degree murder has such a specific and unambiguous definition. And it is for this reason, coupled with the ambiguities inherent in the felony murder rule, that the rule must be repealed or, minimally, amended to allow for consideration of mens rea.

The most striking illustration of how these ambiguities can lead to a first degree murder charge which jars rational sensibilities and flies in the face of common sense is the 1997 case of Lisl Auman in Colorado. Auman and three friends drove from Denver to Buffalo Creek to retrieve some of her belongings from a lodge she had shared with an ex-boyfriend. They took her things, and the friends, in what can only be described as childishness, stole some of her ex’s belongings. So, now we have the requisite felony: burglary. Auman and friends drove back to Denver in separate cars, Auman ending up with Matthaeus Jaehnig, whom she had met that day for the first time. Before they reached Denver several cops, alerted of the break-in, tried to pull them over. Auman urged Jaehnig to pull over, but he refused. A chase ensued. Jaehnig, at one point in the chase, produced a gun and fired at the police. When Jaehnig stopped the car in front of Auman’s new apartment in Denver, Auman ran to the police and gave herself up, wanting nothing to do with Jaehnig, and attempted to warn them of what sort of gun he had. Jaehnig ran and, before the events were over, had killed a cop and then himself. Now we have a death connected with the commission of a felony.

Auman was safely handcuffed in the back of a police car when Jaehnig shot and killed a police officer. The felony occurred miles away in a different city. She was later convicted of first-degree murder by strength of the felony murder rule. According to my count, she was guilty of, at most, breaking-and-entering and burglary, crimes I feel she should pay for (though perhaps not too harshly considering how romantic break-ups and domestic squabbles tend to go). Yet she was found guilty of one of the worst, if not the worst, crime imaginable and was sentenced to life in prison as though she had committed murder “with deliberate premeditation and malice,” when in fact she committed no murder at all. (Fortunately, in 2005, her sentence was overturned after much lobbying by the likes of Johnny Depp and Hunter S Thompson, but not every victim of this outdated law is so lucky.)

Judge Rudolph Gerber suggests, in his book Cruel and Usual: Our Criminal Injustice System, that the origins of the felony murder rule may date back to medieval times when “sinful tainting” was still a popular notion. A person was tainted with the crime, even if she didn’t commit the crime herself. This was doubly true of Auman’s case, since Jaehnig was vaguely connected with a neo-Nazi group and the cop he shot was black. Jaehnig—not Auman—was vaguely connected with a neo-Nazi group, and Jaehnig—not Auman—shot a police officer, yet during her trial Auman was accused of being a white supremacist and was, as I’ve stated, convicted of first degree murder. In effect, her few hours of acquaintanceship with Jaehnig so tainted her that she must now serve life in prison without parole in order to atone. (The suggestion of racism was not ultimately necessary to convict her of first-degree murder. I mention it here only to illustrate the psychology of “sinful tainting” still in our legal practices.)

There are of course less morally clear cases, such as Janet Danahey’s in Greensboro, NC. Danahey, as a valentine prank on an ex-boyfriend, set fire to a futon on the balcony of his apartment. The fire grew beyond her expectations and set the entire building ablaze. In her panic she fled to her parents’ house in the nearby city of Weddington without calling the fire department. Four people died, several others were injured when they leapt from second- and third-story windows, and the property damages for both the building owner and tenants were tremendous. Here we have an emotionally electrified case in which four innocents, all young adults striving to achieve careers or college degrees, died in a painful and horribly frightening way. Some (though not all) of their family members were, rightly, so angered that they demanded the harshest punishment possible against Danahey, who had done them irreparable emotional and psychological damage. The community was—again, rightly—outraged.

In court, District Attorney Stuart Albright chose to use the felony murder rule, and Danahey was charged and convicted with four counts of first degree murder and one count of arson (the felony necessary to invoke the powers of the felony murder rule); all of which earning her life in prison with no chance of parole. Without the felony murder rule, Danahey could have been convicted of four counts of involuntary manslaughter and one count of arson which could have earned her anywhere between 30-120 years in prison with a chance for parole after 10-30 years, depending on the judge. It is therefore possible that Danahey would have remained imprisoned until her death.

“But what if she didn’t?” an angered voice from the back of the room yells. “She deserves the worst she can get for what she did.” And though I am sympathetic to this call of outrage, it strikes me that she doesn’t deserve the worst punishment possible. As mentioned earlier, the worst punishment should be reserved for the worst crime. Imagine now the case of a person who set the same fire in the same apartment building “with malice and deliberate premeditation” to kill those four people and harm the others, as opposed to a prank gone horribly awry. We would all make a moral distinction between the person who maliciously planned to kill people and the person who—stupidly and childishly, though not cruelly and bloodthirstily—played a prank that ended up killing people. The mens rea of these two persons would be radically different. The felony murder rule, however, with its brutal ambiguity, does not distinguish between these two cases. Both perpetrators would be convicted of four counts of first-degree murder and one count of arson. It doesn’t require a lawyer or professor of ethics to see that there is a clear moral difference, yet the only option in most states, when the felony murder rule is invoked, is a charge of first-degree murder.

Currently, almost every state has the felony murder rule still in place. Twelve of the thirty-eight states that have capital punishment allow for no charge other than first degree murder when the rule is invoked, and even in states such as Arizona, where a defendant can no longer be sentenced to death by strength of the rule, life sentences are the most common punishment doled out in felony murder cases.

I will now turn around an earlier question: Why wouldn’t anyone want the felony murder rule repealed? There are two groups of people who generally object to repealing the rule, DAs and the families of victims. The emotional anguish and urge for revenge on the latter’s part is understandable (though it’s that natural tendency to over-punish personal offenses that caused Hobbes, and the whole of the civilized world, to put faith in an objective, third-party judicial system). Many DAs, however, enjoy the existence of the felony murder rule, because it makes their jobs easier. In order to win a first-degree murder conviction (which, coincidentally, looks very good for their track records), they only have to prove intention to commit the felony and that a death occurred somehow connected—however loosely—with said felony, and the defendant is automatically found guilty of first-degree murder. I would like to think that the DAs who fight to keep the felony murder rule on the books are doing so out of a misguided sense of justice, though I have my doubts.

Our laws should adhere to a rational sense of moral rightness, whereby the degree of the crime and the mens rea of the perpetrator determine the degree of the punishment. The cases cited in this essay illustrate how the felony murder rule can lead to a conviction of first-degree murder when the defendant killed no one, and how it fails to make clear and obvious moral distinctions. The felony murder rule is therefore neither rational nor morally sound, and should for these reasons be repealed unequivocally. Our justice system should busy itself with discovering the guilt or innocence of a defendant and then—if she’s found guilty—punishing her for the crimes she’s committed, not the crimes of others; and her sentencing should be equal to her crime. If a DA wants to win a first-degree murder conviction, then she should be required to prove that the death was caused with “deliberate premeditation and malice,” which is the defining quality of first-degree murder. The felony murder rule is a throwback to an outdated and overly ambiguous law that has been repealed in its native country. If our justice system is meant to serve justice—as its name implies—it must rid itself of this fatally antiquated legacy.

Erlking

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[The following translation was originally published in Per Contra.]

Erlking

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(translation by Okla Elliott)

Who rides so late through windy night?
A father holding his child tight.
He has the youngster well in his arm,
He keeps him safe. He keeps him warm.

“My son, what twists your face with bother?”
“Don’t you see the Erlking, father?
The Erlking with crown and shroud?”
“My son, it’s but a sliver of cloud.”

Lovely, lovely child, come with me.
Such wondrous games you will see.
What bright flowers there are by the shore,
What royal clothes my mother has in store.

“Father, my father, are you listening
To what the Erlking is promising?”
“Child, calm yourself, be calm, please.
It’s just the wind rustling dried leaves.”

Sweet boy, don’t make such a fuss;
My daughters are waiting on us.
My daughters sing the nightly tunes
to cradle you beneath the moon. READ MORE

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: OKLA ELLIOTT

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By Okla Elliott:

THE IDIOT’S FAITH

Three lanterns floated in the dream she told him, but he didn’t want to hear about lanterns. He wanted factories unbuilt, windows smashed open. He wanted libertine wailings. She denied being a builder of factories, but he knew her reputation. A wind blew in from Montreal, or she said it was from Montreal, said she could smell the bars of Rue St Laurent. He was skeptical but didn’t want to argue. What good are arguments on a Saturday night? What good are arguments at all? She told him again about her love of the French language, and he thought maybe they were getting somewhere. The modern sunset outside her window was spilled wine tinged with pollution. They went down the mountain to town, found the trouble she had decided they wanted. She called a homeless man a fallen Chinese god, and they mourned his sad descent, forgetting (almost) their own. That is the power of generosity, one use of our idiot faith in human love.

 

THE LIGHT HERE

It sets a mood
of clownish tragedy,
of ecstatic failure waiting to happen.

It is not a static blue light
nor the throb of a strobe.

It is not a light to read by
nor to be naked in,
unless you are desperate
or barbarously horny.

I would use it to look for you
in a cave or catacomb
or an ossuary crowded by the famous dead–
that is, if you were in such a place,
I would use this light to find you.

It is a light that yellows the periphery.
It is not a light that brightens the center.

It is mixed from an overcast morning
and the electric urban dusk.

It is a light I could live in
if I came to terms with certain failings
in my character
and the character of others.

I know you have light where you are,
better light even,
but I wanted you to know
about the light here.

 
Okla Elliott is currently the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he studies comparative literature and cultural theory. He also holds an MFA from Ohio State University. For the academic year 2008-09, he was a visiting assistant professor at Ohio Wesleyan University. His drama, non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, North Dakota Quarterly, A Public Space, and The Southeast Review, among others. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks–The Mutable Wheel and Lucid Bodies and Other Poems–and he co-edited (with Kyle Minor) The Other Chekhov.

Editor’s Note: Today I am honored to present to you the work of As It Ought To Be‘s managing editor. His work speaks for itself, as does the significant body of publications in which his work has appeared. Okla is an impressive scholar, a fearless leader, and a wonderful person to know in the writing world. He believes strongly in the idea of building and sustaining a community of writers, and I am honored to be a member of that community. Regarding today’s pieces I will say that Mr. Elliott effortlessly combines vignettes of straightforward narrative with crisp images and moments of simple yet brilliant language such as “What good are arguments on a Saturday night? What good are arguments at all,” “if you were in such a place, I would use this light to find you,” and this kicker of an ending, “It is a light I could live in / if I came to terms with certain failings / in my character / and the character of others. / I know you have light where you are, / better light even, / but I wanted you to know / about the light here.” Simple. Elegant. Stunning.

Buy Okla Elliott’s new book, A Vulgar Geography.

An Uneasy Revelry: a review of Before Saying Any of the Great Words

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An Uneasy Revelry

by Okla Elliott

“Unease in the ochre-filled skies, unease in the silky /labyrinth of the gut, unease / in the artist’s double, triple nibs”

—David Huerta, “Song of Unease”

Since many American readers may not be familiar with David Huerta, let me introduce you to the poet, before I go on to discuss this career-ranging selection of his poetry and Mark Schafer’s excellent translation of it. Huerta has written nineteen books of poetry and has received nearly every literary award a poet can win in his native Mexico. He is associated with the Neobaroque movement in Latin American literature and with postmodern language poetry. In 2005, he received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for lifelong contribution to Mexican literature. Suffice to say, he is one Mexico’s (and the Spanish language’s) major poets. He is also well known as a political columnist, translator, and activist. But fame and recognition are not enough to convince a discerning reader, and one ought not to be impressed by awards but rather by the work itself.

The first poem I’d like to look at, “Machinery,” is a good example of both Huerta’s strength as a poet and the difficulties Schafer had to overcome in translating him. It is a longish poem (65 lines), so let’s only look at the opening movement:

What’s the use of all this I ask you your fever your sobbing
What’s the use of yelling or butting your head against the fog
Why crash in the branches scratch those nickels
What’s the point of jinxing yourself staining yourself

The odd syntax and the overflow of poetic energy are well represented in the English. My only complaint is that in the first line, the English allows for a double reading such that the speaker asks the “you” his question and perhaps asks “your fever” and “your sobbing,” while also allowing “your fever” and “your sobbing” to still be the “all this” of his question—all of which is a really pleasant possible double reading, but which is unfortunately not in the Spanish. The Spanish reads “Para qué sirve todo eso te digo tu fiebre tu sollozo.” The verb is decir (“to tell, to say”), thus allowing for the more literal “What’s the use of all this I tell you your fever your sobbing” but which does not eliminate the possibility of a double reading, since the issue isn’t really so much the verb as the indirect object “te” in Spanish that is placed before the verb instead of after it in English, thus eliminating the possible double-meaning in Spanish and creating it in English. Basically, what we have here is an example of why Umberto Eco calls translation “the art of failure.” Spanish grammar clarifies what the English cannot without major alteration to either the sense or syntax. And so my complaint is not with Schafer’s translation but rather with the onerous task of translation itself. Schafer meets with dozens of these sorts of impasses throughout the book and generally finds innovative ways around them, and when no way around exists, he limits the loss in joy from the original, as he has here. (My complaint, I trust most will agree, is rather nitpicky and perhaps entirely unimportant in some readers’ minds.)

Let’s now look at “Sick Man” in its entirety, which exemplifies the productive strangeness of many of Huerta’s poems. Here, illness disrupts reality and language, making technically nonsensical language carry an emotional resonance that a more direct psychological realism could not:

The nighttime dog eats
two rings of blood
but the twilight dog chases him away.
The diamonds in his chest
burn and scatter.
The daytime dog licks
the entrance to his chest
but the nighttime dog
knows the way out.
All the dogs
want a backbone of diamonds.
Two rings of fresh blood spin around.
His chest finds itself increasingly alone
with the scent of barking.

That threatening bark is perhaps the threat of debilitation at illness’s hand, the fear of death, the crushing loneliness of serious illness. And the synergistic confusion is (and isn’t) the impenetrable meaningless of death/illness. I don’t mean to shrink Huerta’s poetic language to prosaic interpretations, since he could just as easily have written a straightforward thought-piece on illness and animal imagery, had that been what he intended to communicate, but I think the above-mentioned notions are some of the things he is after. Also, notice the perfect use of the title to force our understanding of the poem. I likely would have thought the poem was only mediocre if it were, for example, titled “Dogs.” His title (“Hombre enfermo” in the original) adds an emotional valence to all the words of the poem that would otherwise be mere pretty language without emotional import. This technique of title-as-lens is one Huerta uses to great effect throughout the book.

Schafer tells us in his introduction that he has two goals in mind with this book. “On the one hand, I want to offer English-speaking readers an overview of Huerta’s poetry since he published his first book, El jardín de la luz, in 1972. On the other hand, given that Huerta is alive and well, writing and publishing prolifically, I want to give readers ample opportunity to revel in his more recent work.” And revel is exactly what the reader does.
The publication of Before Saying Any of the Great Words is another in a long line of great contributions Copper Canyon Press has made to American poetry. In a post-monolingual world, and especially in the USA, which is quickly becoming officially and unofficially bilingual, I hope Huerta’s work will be read widely. Works in translation have a long tradition of influencing English-language poetry—from the Earl of Surrey, who invented blank verse in order to translate Virgil’s Ænead (which was metered but not rhymed)—thus allowing for Shakespeare’s plays to exist as we know them—to the importing of such forms as the sonnet from its Italian progenitors or the couplet from the French, and so on. What better time than now, in the age of globalization, for us to learn from our literary compatriots who live in other countries and write in other languages? I would therefore suggest Before Saying Any of the Great Words not only for classes on Latin American literature but also for poetry workshops, working poets everywhere, and anyone interested in the marvelously rich culture of Mexico.

***

[The above review was originally published in Florida State University’s The Southeast Review in a slightly different form.]

Interview with Mark Smith-Soto

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine


Smith-Soto's 2003 Collection

[The following interview and introductory remarks were originally published in Cold Mountain Review in 2006.]


Mark Smith-Soto is difficult to classify. He is a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature, a playwright, a poet, a translator, the editor of the International Poetry Review—and he fills each of these roles with style to burn. It would certainly be a lapse not to mention his Latino roots, but it would be an even greater one to define him by them. His work appears in Nimrod, Carolina Quarterly, The Sun, Poetry East, Quarterly West, Callaloo, Chattahoochee Review, Literary Review, Kenyon Review, among others. His books include the chapbooks Green Mango Collage and Shafts, and the full-length collections Our Lives Are Rivers (Florida University Press, 2003) and Any Second Now (MSR Press, 2006). His short plays have been published and produced locally in North Carolina and nationally.

The following interview took place in Greensboro, NC, early October, 2005.

Okla Elliott: You’ve taken an unorthodox path to becoming a poet—you earned a PhD in comparative literature at UC-Berkeley and went on to become a Spanish professor.  It was only later in life that you focused more on your creative writing.  What were the reasons for this choice, or was it even a conscious choice at all?

Mark Smith-Soto: I’ve thought of myself as a poet since I was a boy. In the Costa Rica of my childhood, poetry was an important part of any educated person’s life whether you were a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer. In my mother’s family, poetry was always highly regarded, and some of my earliest memories are of my mother or my uncle or my grandfather quoting a poem by Ruben Dario or Sor Juana during after dinner conversations or while on a drive to the beach. But if from my mother’s side of the family I inherited a love for literature, from my father the lawyer I inherited a strong practical streak, and very early on I realized that I was not the sort to starve for the sake of my art. By the time I entered as a freshman at the University of Maryland, I had made up my mind to become a teacher, very consciously having decided that it was a profession both congenial to my temperament and more likely than most to give me ample time to write. As it turned out, I was only partially right.  Scholarly endeavors ended up requiring much more of my creative energy than I anticipated, and while I never stopped writing poetry altogether, it definitely took a back seat to the business of getting my academic career on its way. I should add that from early on I found it a lot easier to publish articles and books on other people’s writing than to discover anyone willing to print my own poetry. Had it been otherwise, I might have gathered the courage to dedicate myself more fully to my vocation as a poet. Of course, it may have been for the best that my early poetry did not get accepted for publication. Looking at it now, I feel that most of it was imitative and immature, and I am glad I was not encouraged to continue in that same vein.

OE: How has having studied Latin American literature changed your creative sensibilities?

MS: The first poetry I learned to love and to recite as a child in Costa Rica was in Spanish, of course, writers such as Jorge Manrique, Sor Juana, Ruben Dario and Gabriela Mistral who were often quoted at family reunions, parties, and at dinner-time conversations. But there was no formal study involved, I just absorbed the rhythms and music of poems I found beautiful often without fully understanding them. I could not begin to say how profoundly this early experience shaped my creative sensibilities. I would not be surprised if everything I write or even think might not be traceable back somehow to that primal apprenticeship.  When it comes to the actual study of poetry and its influence of my work, I should say that although I continued to write for a while in Spanish when I first came to the U.S., I very quickly fell in love with the English language, which I learned in part by memorizing poems by Poe, Frost, Wordsworth, Yeats and many others. In high school and then as an English major at the University of Maryland, it was primarily through the reading and analysis of English-language writers that I fully began to understand what poetry was about. Later, as a graduate student, I came to know and love Neruda, Lorca, Storni, and many other Spanish-language poets who I can only hope have left their mark on my work—as they no doubt have on my soul.

There is one aspect of my work which no doubt bears the mark of poets such as Neruda and Vallejo who were unabashedly political in their writings. With occasional exceptions, modern poets in English have pretty much shied away from the expression of social and political concerns, as if, in the fashion of Oscar Wilde’s butler in The Importance of Being Earnest, they did not think it polite to listen to the sounds of sorrow all around. While it is not typical of my work in general, I have written through the years a number of poems with a specifically socio-political intention, and I might well have written more had I not found it nearly impossible to publish them in literary journals. Luckily, I discovered an outlet for some of those pieces in The Sun, a thoughtful rather than academic magazine which does not consider an ethical sympathy in a writer to be, and this is Wilde once again, an unpardonable mannerism of style.

OE: Some of your poetry seems very informed by your Latin American heritage, but much of it shows none of that influence at all.  Your work doesn’t seem defined by your ethnicity.  In what ways does your personal heritage enter into your work?

MS: It took me a long time to realize I was a Latino writer.  Although in Costa Rica people use both the father’s and mother’s family name, when we came to the U.S. in 1958 my American father simply dropped the Soto from his children’s surname. Because my skin is not particularly dark and because I spoke English without much of an accent, I soon became accustomed to being seen, and seeing myself, as just another Smith.

My family’s economic position was relatively comfortable, and I did not have to grow up suffering the kind of privations, oppression and prejudice that informs the work of many Hispanic poets in this country. Unlike Luis Rodriguez, I don’t bear the scars of inner city gang life, and unlike Gary Soto or Tino Villanueva, I am not a product of the Southwest that often has oppressed and exploited its Chicano and Mexican populations. The Nuyorican experience is as foreign and exotic to me as any other aspect of Manhattan.

Still, as an American kid who lived with a Spanish speaking mother in the house and who felt close ties to the family I left behind in Costa Rica, I was never in danger of losing sight of my Hispanic background even if that awareness never became politicized for me. In fact, with one or two exceptions, all the poetry I have written with a Hispanic theme is not so much “Latino” as it is familial, that is, it is personal rather than intentionally political.  I do believe, of course, as the cliché goes, that the personal is political, and in so far as the poetry I’ve published inspired by my Costa Rican experience might bring to the consciousness of my readers the fact that they are holding in their hands the work of a hyphenated American of the Hispanic sort, in that sense, I am pleased to be perfectly political.

OE: You have also recently begun writing short plays.  What is the connection between verse and short dramatic pieces?

MS: The language of poets, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, is a dialogue between self and soul, and their poetry offers us a chance to eavesdrop on this vital, essential conversation.  But there is an aspect of myself as a human being that only comes into its own when I am in the company of others, when I am in conversation, in dance, in laughter with other people. Writing plays satisfies a need I feel to delve into the dynamics that human interaction.  I love the way we humans give ourselves away every time we open our mouths, the way our choice of words, the way we scratch our heads, the long or short steps we take across a living room all can signal the state and nature of our souls, which we imagine we keep deeply hidden.  Of course, poetry and playwriting can go hand in hand, and when they merge seamlessly as they do in Shakespeare, the most obvious example, they can attain heights of expressivity that can only be called sublime.  It is commonplace to say that plays in verse are now anachronistic and have no chance of being produced, but I have written one short verse play which won a prize in a national contest and will soon be published.  This has been very encouraging, and I expect to try it again before too long.

OE: What specifically about the 10-minute play excites you?

MS: It has been a good way for a beginner like myself to break into writing for the theatre because the initial investment of time and energy and soul are not so great as to be daunting. Similar to trying your teeth on a few short stories before committing to taking on a novel.  It brings home to you how brevity really is the soul of wit.  “Less is more” can be a difficult lesson for writers who are accustomed to lean heavily on language to carry our meaning.  A mere ten minutes of stage time to work with teaches you quickly that what can be well expressed is often less important than what can be left unsaid, and that a well-placed gesture can suggest a story beyond words.

One important advantage to the very short play– your chances of actually getting your work produced are much greater than with a full-length piece.  I have had six put on locally myself.  More and more community theatres have found that an offering of six or seven ten-minute plays can be very appealing, especially to younger audiences with ever shorter attention spans.  Here in Greensboro, the Playwrights’ Forum presents two such evenings each year, always to very respectable houses.

And, finally, well, it’s liberating to write in a form that’s new, whose parameters, requirements and limitations are still in the process of being discovered.  I mean, the ten-minute play as a subgenre has only been around for a few years, so, in a sense, those of us practicing it now are in on the ground floor, shaping it, determining what its nature will be.  It’s a relief for a poet and would-be playwright not to have to labor under Shakespeare’s shadow for a change!

OE: Do you think you’ll ever write fiction?

MS: As for fiction, well, I have been an insatiable reader of fiction since my childhood, and am seldom without a novel in my hand, whether it be a P.D. James or an Elizabeth George, or a Dickens novel I finally have gotten to, or the latest by Kazuo Ishiguro.  But much as I regret to say so, I have no talent for narrative whatsoever.  My few attempts have taught me that to create a fictional world—to evoke the minutiae of every day life in an exciting and engaging way so as to provide the necessary context in which character can be explored and understood—requires a kind of creative patience which has been denied me.  So no, I think the world is pretty safe from any attempts at fiction from my pen.

OE: Your newest collection of poetry, Any Second Now, due out in spring 2006, contains many political poems. Would you discuss the new collection and your choice to include so many political poems?

MS: Publishing my first full-length book of poetry took me some thirty years, and I had almost despaired of getting a second collection accepted when Main Street Rag Publishers fished me out from among the finalists in their annual poetry competition and offered me a contract this year.  In preparing that manuscript, I got together every poem I had ever published in literary magazines and every poem I felt deserved to have been published by someone somewhere and then looked to see if I could find a way of giving the collection a sense of overarching unity.  I couldn’t.  The problem was that I have many voices in my head, almost distinct poetical personalities, if you will, in the fashion of Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese modernist who went so far as to publish his work under several different aliases.  There was no way, ultimately, that I could impose some artificial thematic superstructure on those poems.  So what I decided to do was to divide the manuscript into four sections, each one representing one of the principal “voices” in which my poetry tends to come to me, and hope that my readers will intuit how these disparate parts conspire in the creation of a coherent whole.  The title, Any Second Now, suggested itself as possibly the one preoccupation that underlies almost everything I write, and that is a sense of urgency about the element of time in which our mortal selves unwind.

As for the overtly political themes in the section I titled “President In My Heart” I can only say that if, as the saying goes, the personal is political, then what interests me above all in these poems is rather how the political is personal—that is, how am I, how is my own humanity—complicit in the political and social realities which I decry?  Of course, I have often through the years enjoyed writing direct political attacks in limericks on figures like George W. Bush and his ilk, but I do not consider them serious poetry because writing them did not teach me anything about myself.

OE: With Nation Books’ 2003 publication of Poets Against the War, which included such luminaries as Marvin Bell, Rita Dove, and W.S. Merwin, and which met with great success, do you feel that there may be a place again for the political in the literary?

MS: Yes, of course, there always has been and always will be a place for the political in the literary.  That fact has not always been recognized, but it is undeniable.  Even in the U.S., where we so often hear the complaint that poets live at a remove from the sorrows of the everyday life around them, writers through the years from Whitman to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Bly to Carolyn Forché, among many others, have penned powerful work with socio-political concerns.

But I am not bothered that in this country we have few poets of the first rank who have written overtly political poetry.  You have to consider how the pragmatic, mercantile and utilitarian forces here oppose a crushing weight against the pursuit of spiritual values that writing poetry represents.  For a person in the United States to embrace the identity of a poet—which miraculously still happens!—rather than that of a football player or an Exxon executive or a lawyer or a Bible salesman is to take a political stand.  In such a context as ours, to write a few lines of poetry about a rose should be understood as an intrinsically subversive act.

OE: You recently received an NEA grant.  What plans do you have for the near future?

MS: Only one: I want to write!

The Cognitive Turn in Theory and Cultural Studies: A Review of Patrick Colm Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism

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[The following review-essay was originally published in Inside Higher Education.]

The Cognitive Turn in Theory and Cultural Studies: A Review of Patrick Colm Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism

by Okla Elliott


1. Academic Triangulation: An Analysis of the Paratextual Aspects of Understanding Nationalism

In critical theory—or, perhaps, Theory with a capital “T” as some would have it—many scholars’ use of such thinkers as Marx, Freud, Lacan, etc (all thinkers whose fields have been heavily updated with empirical research since their contributions) can seem like an attempt to explain the movement of celestial bodies via Copernican mechanics. This of course is not to suggest that these thinkers are entirely non-productive or that they got everything wrong. After all, Copernicus’s model for equinoctial measurements is still used today (roughly putting March 21 as the marker of spring’s coming and September 23 as that of autumn’s), and his calculations of the Earth’s precessional period (a sort of wobbling on its axis) was within 99.9% of current astronomers’ calculations. Also, the so-called Copernican Revolution informs our current ideology much more than any contribution Niels Bohr made to the field of science. That said, Copernicus would not be able to get Verizon’s satellites into orbit, allowing me to email this review to my editor, so it is worth thinking of the advances that have been made.

In order to locate Patrick Colm Hogan’s book in the overall academic discourse, I propose we continue to borrow from the field of astronomy, this time the term “parallax shift”—which Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek has also made use of, though in a much more radical way than I propose we do here. A parallax shift is the apparent displacement of an object caused by actual change in the position of the point of observation; most importantly, the angular amount of such change in position. Using some basic geometry, these angular shifts can be used to triangulate the distances between various objects, thus locating them in space.

But what objects ought we to use to triangulate location within the academic cosmology? For a rudimentary location, we can use the paratextual aspects of a book to measure the parallax shift and thus triangulate its location. I offer here such a triangulation of Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism.

First off, we see that the book is part of Ohio State University’s Narrative Series, edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz. This lets us know certain things about the book. It will be concerned with the structures of narrative and with cognitive psychology. It also lets us know it will be first-rate overall (even if one happens to disagree with all or part of the book), given that series’ excellent reputation.

Secondly, the Index to the book tells us volumes alone. Number of references to Derrida: 0. Number of references to Foucault: 0. Spivak: 0. Lacan: 0. Hegel: 1 (but only in passing). Antonio Negri: 1. Chomsky (both as linguist and political thinker): 5 (though my count has it at 7, if you include the Introduction, which the Index doesn’t). Judith Butler: 0. Freud: 3 (though the Index doesn’t list any of them, despite their being in the book’s main text). Benedict Anderson: 26 (and 1 more in the Intro). There are over a hundred references to various cognitive psychology experiments, papers, books, and theorists. And while Marx gets no direct mention, “Marxists” are mentioned 6 times.

And the last paratextual aspect we’ll consult is simply the author’s bio: Patrick Colm Hogan is a professor in the English Department, the Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. From this, I think we can safely assume that we’ll get a comparative approach that incorporates several languages, literatures, and disciplines. And, indeed, we do.

As the final word I’ll offer on the book’s and its author’s location in the academic cosmology, I’ll say that the clarity of his writing style, his consistent use of cognitive psychology and analytic philosophical techniques, and the authorities he cites generally (though not dogmatically) locate Hogan on certain sides of current academic debates. He seems more sympathetic to the analytic philosophical tradition than to the so-called continental tradition—though he doesn’t have any axe to grind on this matter, since he happily makes use of the likes of Marx(ists), Freud, and Negri; but his methodology is clearly analytic. He also clearly falls on the Chomsky side of the Chomsky-Foucault debate about linguistics and human nature—that is, he believes that there are similarities between human languages and that these are due to neurobiological and cognitive psychological factors found across the species. I wish I could offer an unbiased assessment here, but Chomksy’s Universal Grammar model has been proven time and again to be as accurate as any scientific theory could hope to be. Foucault’s work on power and biopolitics is groundbreaking, and it is likely a (minor) flaw of Hogan’s book that Foucault’s talk of power and the mechanisms of biopolitics are not mentioned, but this reviewer at least is happy to see a more careful and scientific discussion of linguistics among literary theorists. Foucault was right about a lot of things, and his thinking has proven productive in several fields, but there is zero evidence that he was right about human language acquisition and composition, while there is and continues to be more and more overwhelming evidence that Chomsky is right, but perhaps more importantly, Foucault’s linguistic approach is all but totally nonproductive, especially if the task before us is understanding nationalism, which here it is. Also, given the total domination of the Foucauldian view in literature departments, it is heartening to see another approach taken. This is what I will refer to as the cognitive turn in theory and cultural studies (echoing the similar turn in the social sciences), and it’s a movement I would like to see carried further.

But again, I want to stress that Hogan does not have any axe to grind and never brings up these academic turf wars and even ought to be excluded from them, since he makes use of various competing traditions, using whatever tools will yield the most productive results and provide the strongest explanatory accounts of nationalism and its mechanics. I only mention these turf wars here for the purpose of locating him within these intellectual traditions.

2. Five Hierarchies and Four Metaphors

Hogan’s primary interest in this book is how in-group and out-group identities are formed and reinforced. He writes: “…each of us has countless identities. But these do not have equal importance to our self-concepts and they do not have equal motivational force. I have isolated five parameters governing the hierarchization of identity categories—salience, durability, functionality, opposability, and affectivity” (65). Let’s look briefly at his definitions of each of these five hierarchies.

His explanation of salience is thus:

…some conceptual categories and some objective properties are more salient than others. Suppose I look into a room. The room has some furniture, a few gum wrappers on the floor, a movie poster, and a corpse. If someone asks me what is in the room, I am likely to ignore the furniture, gum wrappers, and movie poster, mentioning only the dead body. This is because the corpse has a high degree of salience. Salience has two aspects. First, it involves the intrinsic properties of the object…For example, things that are smelly or loud tend to be highly salient. Second, salience involves relational characteristics. These are a matter of subjective propensities that link one to the object in attention-eliciting ways. (58)

Notice here that he claims objects have intrinsic aspects. This is the kind of thing scientists assume regularly, whereas most Theorists do not. But let’s set our triangulation aside for the moment and carry on with the terminology Hogan introduces.

Of durability Hogan writes:

Other things being equal, we prefer categories that refer to more durable properties. In connection with categorical identity, we need to distinguish two levels of durability. On the one hand, there is the degree to which an individual’s category status may change. On the other hand, there is the degree to which the social group isolated by the category is itself enduring…In the case of identity categories, then, high durability means that I am unlikely to leave the group and the group itself is unlikely to dissolve. With respect to both levels, nonelective identity categories, such as race, tend to have an advantage over elective categories, such as religion, nation, or class. (60)

And so, durability is key to the hierarchization of in-group/out-group considerations. There are racial tensions between, say, African-Americans and Irish-Americans, despite the their sharing the second half of that hyphenate; and the differences, even if they don’t lead to tensions, are more durable in regard to race. One can convert to Catholicism; converting to another race is, to say the least, slightly more difficult (though cosmetic surgical techniques are and will likely continue to change this fact). But durability alone is not enough to explain in-group/out-group divisions that are the undergirdings of nationalism.

Which brings us to functionality. Hogan writes:

But durability too is insufficient. Consider a very simple case. I am presented with a $100 bill in a plastic bag. Paper is not very durable. Plastic bags (I gather) are. However, I am very unlikely to categorize this gift as “plastic.” I am likely to say, “Wow! One hundred dollars!” The reason for this is straightforward: We also choose characterizations based on importance, usefulness, value. Not that this is not confined to positive value. A large credit card bill in a plastic bag would have the same consequences. In the case of identity categories, it not quite accurate to speak of value. Rather, we would say that categories have greater or lesser functionality. (60)

So, while there are many categories of varying durability, it is essential to look at the social functions of the categories as well.

That said, however, Hogan goes on to explain that “a very common property may be highly functional, durable, and salient. But it is unlikely to trigger categorization. When we are treating identity, one of our main concerns is distinctiveness” (61). But how do we get at distinctiveness? Hogan offers the following:

If a particular feature varies in slight increments from one person to another, then it is a less likely choice categorization than if a feature varies in large steps. The limiting case of this is bipolar division Thus, a sharp, bipolar division is more likely to be high in our hierarchy of categories than is a more smoothly graduated set of differences. I refer to this as opposability. (62)

This makes an immediate sort of sense, though I am immediately reminded of the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda who shared nearly every physical and cultural trait, except for the slightest of distinctions, and those largely made up and not even discernable to most. That said, Hogan’s theory is not without merit. One type of identity category scores very high in opposability—sex. And here we see distinctions of the broadest sort made across all cultures.

But Hogan adds one more category to his list—affectivity. He writes:

It is not, then, simply a matter of ideas. It is also a matter of motives. These motives derive their force from our emotional engagements or the category’s affectivity, our final parameter.

In order for nationalism to have concrete, practical effects, citizens must feel something about that national category. Our emotional response is in part a simple result of labeling, as we have already seen. It is a matter of categorical identification triggering responses in the amygdale or insula in the case of out-groups, and perhaps regions such as the basal ganglia (which are connected with trust; see King-Casas et al.), in the case of in-groups. (63)

Here is another strength of the book, one that my other quoted passages have not sufficiently illustrated. Hogan makes regular use of striking cognitive psychological and neurobiological experiments as evidence to back up his claims, and while he admits these experiments are not 100% accurate yet, they do at least offer excellent scientific guidelines for how the brain processes events and data of the sort pertinent to a discussion of nationalism. (Here I am again reminded of our friend, Copernicus, who did not get everything right, but who brought our thought and scientific accuracy centuries forward with his book Revolutions.)

Hogan also offers an interesting account of metaphors in order to set the groundwork for how metaphors work in the discussion of nationalism. What is admirable and most useful here is that he takes into account so many languages and finds the commonality among them. This is another place where Hogan strikes me as Chomskyian. One might even be tempted to say he is looking for a Universal Grammar of Metaphors.

It is via this work of metaphors that literature becomes particularly interesting in terms of nationalism—and I think we should define the term “literature” as broadly as possible.

Here are, in brief, his four categories of metaphors: “inferential (metaphors that guide our thought about a target), articulatory (metaphors that facilitate our communication of ideas about a target), emotional (metaphors that facilitate our communicative transferal of feelings regarding a target), and unmotivated (metaphors that express a spontaneous recognition of parallels, initially without further functions)” (130).

Hogan goes on to make a quite convincing schema of how these metaphors are used in both organized propaganda and organically arising nationalist sentiments. There isn’t space here to elaborate on his analysis, so you’ll simply have to read the book for this and other reasons.

3. Conclusion, In Which I Argue That This Book Matters and You Should Buy and/or Teach It

Nationalism is a force that has driven much of history—ranging from recent debates on the Iraq War or immigration here in the US to the India-Pakistan conflict to more distant phenomena such as Nazism and earlier ones going back as far as ancient Persia and Rome, and so on. It is, however, worth noting that while the word has taken on a generally negative connotation among activists and intellectuals, there are also anti-colonial nationalism(s) and pro-democracy nationalism(s), to name but two of the types of nationalisms many activists and intellectuals would likely feel at least some sympathy for, if not support outright. Nationalism might therefore be the single-most important point of cultural and historical study—that is, if we judge importance in terms of human lives (or deaths) and historical forces. It is for this reason that Patrick Colm Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism is such a necessary investigation.

It is not, however, merely the topic that makes the book valuable. Many books are published on the subject every year, and many smart and useful ones even. But what makes Understanding Nationalism unique is its methodology. Hogan attempts to explicate nationalism via an admirably interdisciplinary approach. He makes use of cognitive science as fluently as political science; quotes as freely from the Persian national epic, The Shanahmeh, as he does from Walt Whitman; imports the insights of Noam Chomsky the linguist as or more readily than Noam Chomsky the political thinker.

Understanding Nationalism is an excellent book, one that could (and should) be used in a variety of classrooms—e.g., political science, cultural studies/critical theory, literature, sociology, cognitive psychology, and even advanced rhetoric courses (depending on the class’s focus of course). It has been often said that all critical theory (or Theory) must be interdisciplinary, and that it must be productive and applicable in many fields. Despite going rather strongly against the stream of post- and anti-structuralist trends in critical theory and cultural studies today, Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism certainly qualifies as critical theory of the highest order.

In airing his frustrations with the task before him, Copernicus wrote in Revolutions that “the courses of the planets and the revolution of the stars cannot be determined by exact calculations and reduced to perfect knowledge.” This is the difficulty of doing careful evidence-based scientific analyses—the constant frustrations of failure—but the rewards of such inquiry are, if you’ll excuse the pun, astronomical. I applaud Hogan for his contribution and wish his book great success. I can only hope it receives the attention it deserves.