Archives and Feelings

to be the tricksy narrator

Matthew Loudon

November 30, 2013

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 {the following is my attempt at doing something like a critical memoir thing detailing the academic journey that has been this semester as seen from my very biased viewpoint}

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0  

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 to be the tricksy narrator: Constructing the Critical Narrative

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 For all the Wrong Reasons

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 I elected to take ENGL 985: Archives and Feelings for what many would consider to be the wrong reasons. I had no real idea of what the course would be about despite having the academic background that should at least give me some clue. Obviously I would come to realize that the course was about archives and feelings, but at the time, I had a number, the “ENGL” designation, letting me know I was in for some variation of an English Literature course, and the name of a professor, one whom I trusted and liked studying under. Add on a necessity to add the “985” number onto my academic transcript, and I was essentially in line to get my credit.
The first reading was Raymond Williams’ “Structures and feelings.” Naturally I had heard of Williams, and had likely read and expunged his work from my memory (a woeful tendency that I admit to having as a sort of academic safeguard; I remembered what I needed and expunged most of the rest). Williams would discuss many topics within his work, but he eventually produced a definition of structures of feeling as follows: “For structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formation which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available” (133-314). So from this, I began to realize that we were looking at something social, something distinct, and something rather amorphous and consistently shifting and reforging itself. The structure of feeling existed in a purposefully fluctuating state, and thus became something rather difficult to pin down; already I was beginning to feel as though I would never claw my way out of this, and I ended up sitting there with these weighty works, wondering what I was doing and if there was still a chance for me to sign up for another course, perhaps the one on American Literature.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 The Tricksy Narrator

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Fast forward nearly an entire semester to the last official class period. These readings stand almost as far away from Williams as could be managed: Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s introduction to Economies of Abandonment, in which Povinelli responded to Le Guin’s work as well as utilizing it as a foundation for her own discussion. Having long been a fan, both intellectually and emotionally, of science fiction, I was eager to dig my intellectual teeth into Le Guin. She was a comfortable companion, one whom I had journeyed with before. As far back as my early teen years, I had been picking up Le Guin’s novels and reading through them. Only a semester before, I had encountered The Left Hand of Darkness, one of her novels, which, as I found to be a reoccurring experience with Le Guin, was both enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. It was certainly more comfortable than introducing some heavy structure of feeling or weight, indecipherable text.
“Omelas” would stir older feelings within me as well. I had studied Philosophy as an undergraduate, proving as adept in those concepts as I ever did at literary studies. Thus as I read “Omelas” my brain snapped back to the philosophical variation of reading: parsing a work to peel apart the thought concepts and play with them in a manner not unlike a cat with a particularly agile mouse. For Le Guin’s story worked less as a traditional science fiction narrative and more as a philosophical thought problem. Omelas was a land, one wherein all could be happy (and who doesn’t dream of that?). Many of my peers would wonder how this was possible, immediately pointing out flaws with the system and the idea, oftentimes justifiable. Yet Le Guin’s point was the create a community based entirely upon the idea of happiness. Whatever the reader thought would make the people the most happy, that was what existed within the realm of the text. It was, for me at least, a philosophical concept: what do people do when they are in a realm where their happiness is guaranteed?
While this concept would have no doubt been enough, Le Guin delves further, offering up the price to be paid for this happiness. A child, girl, boy, whichever makes you most unhappy, lives in a closet like cell tucked away where few can see him/her. This poor wretch, and wretch the child undoubtedly was, was to be treated as poorly as could be imagined. She/he was to be physically and emotionally abused, provided with only the barest necessities to live, and must consistently be in a state of suffering. The citizens all knew of him/her, they could even visit her/his cell if they wished. But no kindness  could be shown to the child. The child’s misery was what created the happiness for the rest of the society.
Which creates such a very happy situation to contemplate, one that seems almost impossibly confining, and again, the situation creates so many questions, so many alternatives, especially for the academic mind. Le Guin must have realized this, for she creates the titular characters near the end of her work: these people, “Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains.  They go on.  They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.  The place they go is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness” (259). Someone is walking away from Omelas, going some place less imaginable than a city of perfect happiness. Because if there is one thing less imaginable to most readers than a place where your happiness is positively guaranteed, it’s a place that someone would go to get away from that.
Povinelli utilized the situation as an explanation for the social injustices of the world. Reading her depressed me, though by this point in the semester, I had hardened at least somewhat to readings such as this. It was not as though I had not experienced the suffering of others before, if secondhand (as so many privileged do). Gayatri Spivak wrote of these same people in her seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?.” Spivak had first pointed out the same violence that Povinelli would indicate, if in a slightly different manner: “The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and hetereogenous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other” (Spivak 76). Spivak would then continue to encourage her reader to “consider the margins” (78). Spivak called them the subaltern, a popular term in postcolonial theory, but there seems to be little doubt that these people are the people in the closet. Povinelli makes this case abundantly clear, asserting that the West is essentially putting the marginalized peoples referenced by Spivak and so many more into the closet in order to ensure their happiness.
Again, none of this was particularly new to me. This sounds callous, and I wince as I write it, but it is still very much the truth. I had encountered Spivak repeatedly throughout my academic career, to the extent where she was a reoccurring theorist for me, possibly even moreso than Le Guin (though arguably less enjoyable). Yet by putting these two next to one another, then doing precisely what Povinelli wanted and putting all next to Omelas, I began to get that clenching feeling in my gut.
This feeling is only increased by Povinelli’s assertion that “Le Guin allows some people to walk away from Omelas rather than stay and fight its injustice may seem a cop-out” (4). One of my colleagues, Megha Baikadi, read this and commented it among our shared readings, bringing it to our attention. Baikadi pointed out the idea of the cop-out, demonstrating the challenge not so much to Omelas but to our position. We are the ones who know of the subaltern, the people in the closet, but we have chosen the “cop-out” instead of choosing to “stay and fight.” This idea would later be refuted by examining the end of Povinelli’s work, but it is this idea that caused Baikadi to present a selection of options to the class. Where did we see ourselves, she asked. Are we in the city? In the closet? Or are we taking the position of the tricky narrator?
Wait a moment. My head perked up at this last question. Here was a palatable option, one that suddenly caused the course of the class, the course of, in many ways, my academic path to snap into an almost painful clarity. The tricksy narrator, so tricksy that he opts to slide an extra “s” into an already tricky word is the person who is aware and spreading the word. He is the person who has looked at the darkness and the subaltern and realized that not everyone might be quite as aware. Not everyone is looking into the closet, at least without help. The tricksy narrator can convince his readers to consider these circumstances, and in doing so provide the brighter outlook and begin fighting against this darkness.

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 An African Closet

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 It’s the middle of the course again and I’m staring down Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman. The week’s unit is titled “In search of lost history” and the implication is rather clear. Again we are going to delve into the archive and dig around, rooting like scholarly pigs to search out the truffles of lost history. While I doubt that Hartman would appreciate that particular analogy, it does apply to her goal in this particular work. The pained academic wrote the scholarly memoir to detail her journey to attempt to recover some form of her past. Hartman returned to Africa and journeyed along the Atlantic slave route, finding various peoples and locations to reveal snippets of the past along the way. Eventually Hartman would receive a welcoming invitation to a home, one that even she confesses to having waited a long time for, and one that I as a reader was practically craving by the point in the narrative where it arrives. Hartman works to undermine it almost immediately: “more surprising than the chief’s invitation was how little comfort it brought. If secretly I had been hoping that there was some cure to feeling extraneous in the world, then at that moment I knew there wasn’t a remedy for my homelessness. I was an orphan and the breach between me and my origins was irreparable” (199).
I read this section and groaned. In all honesty, and part of me is ashamed to write this, I groaned my way through most of this particular work. I would eventually confess to it being the low-point for me, a work that I had to “slug through” in order to engage and talk about. The constant negatively wore at me like a weight about my neck, dragging me down and directing my attentions to the darkness, back to that subaltern, back to a closet I had all but been ignoring. Now, with hindsight to aid me, I can better see why I had such a visceral reaction to this particular text. Hartman was pointing to the closet her people came from. She was pointing at them and insisting that we all look at it. Hartman detailed taking pictures of the empty jail cells, looking at the emptiness, what wasn’t there. So it is hardly surprising that she cannot find solace even in the gesture given by the others. Her entire journey has been one of disappointment. The work ends with her attempting to find solace in listening to a children’s song, one where the girls “sing about those taken from Gwolu and sold into slavery in the Americas” (235). Hartman finds solace in this, but it feels off, especially given everything else, and I would attest, with my hindsight and these others to support me, that this is not Hartman’s end message. For instead, Hartman works to be her own tricksy narrator. She brings forth the people, or perhaps the lack of people in her closet and helping us see. She is doing, in other words, what Povinelli was hoping that people would end up doing.
At the time, however, I found myself grumbling and glaring at the book, wondering why we had selected this particular work to read. Why read this when there were so many better constructed books that detail the same thing? In point of fact, we had already looked at works that I believed worked to accomplish much the same goal that Hartman wanted. Avery Gordon wrote her book Ghostly Matters to look at, well, hauntings, though through a sociological lens. That lens made the work interesting for me and my peers in particular. We were literature scholars, well versed in our own particular variation of analysis. Gordon looked at it a different way. And I would end up encountering her almost too closely.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Hauntings

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 There were three presentations throughout the semester. Hardly surprising; presentations were pretty well a standard, and one that I greeted with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, though you really couldn’t experience much else when thinking about it, could you? Oftentimes the choices offered for such opportunities feel like selecting how best you would like to be executed. For example, I, an animation scholar with a preference toward the bright and sunny, would wind up examining the black and white Japanese film Woman in the Dunes during this same semester. In this case, the first selection was easy: there was a chapter by Judith Halberstam wherein scle would write on animation. My second selection was slightly easier, if produced via trickery: a chapter from Eve Sedgwick discussing the cybernetic fold (which regrettably did not factor quite so well into this particular writing). The third I picked, again, for dubious reasons: a chapter from Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters. It came down to that execution scenario: what seemed least unappealing. A pair of peers that I happened to get on with were already signed up to do Gordon’s work, and by selecting this, I aligned myself to work with them. This struck me as a sensible gesture to make, and it certainly helped that I would be examining haunting as opposed to something like, say, structures of feeling or closets.
Gordon’s version of haunting involved less actual ghosts, which disappointed me greatly. However, as I read her book, I began to come to the realization that I, and many others no doubt, was haunted to some degree. The chapter I had stumbled into presenting detailed a particular haunting that afflicted Gordon to such a degree that she felt compelled to include it within the work. She detailed her encounter with a photograph that did not include someone, a female someone, a female someone named Sabina Speilrein. Gordon would title her chapter “distractions” and in many ways, it felt like she was labeling something already. I ended up staring down at the pages and wondering if, again, I should reconsider my methods for selecting such things. I had seen the word “psychoanalysis” and had noted a relatively short page length, which had nudged me toward picking this particular selection. My astute readers will have noted by now that I was reading a book I had picked for readings not directly involving the actual work, and I was now delving into a selection for the very reasons that so often make professors cringe. However, by the time I read the final line of this particular chapter, I would find myself mulling over ideas that, well, haunted me to such an extent that when I sat down to write over my journey, I knew that I would have to include what amounted to my distraction.
Gordon got distracted by the lack of someone in her field, the lack of a particular person who should have been there. This was not a someone who was unimportant, though she was certainly someone ignored. Gordon would explain that Speirein was someone who ”changed that history by virtue of being there between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and by virtue of not being in the photograph” ( 33). Speilrein affected people essentially by not being there, or by being someone who tugged between two people. Now that I write this, I cannot help but feel like I’m repeating another closet circumstance, if one that seems a little less overtly horrible than Hartman’s slaves, Povinelli and Spivak’s subaltern, or Le Guin’s child, but a being in the closet nonetheless. And I can’t help but feel that I’m distracting myself with all these closets and the people within them. It’s as if I’m taking more enjoyment from flinging them open and gesturing, insisting that this is what we should be doing.
Then again, isn’t that the position of the tricksy narrator? Isn’t that what we should be doing to some degree? Noticing these little details, taking the time to step back and draw the web of connections, pointing out the details and then calling over other people, likely disinterested people who will stare at our works with disgust, and insisting that these same people look at what distracted us. See this thing that we found in the back of our closet? This crumpled up bit that people keep ignoring for whatever reason? Isn’t that neat? Shouldn’t we be looking at these people?
And now I realize that I’m essentially equating downtrodden, beaten down personages with the board games I was just looking at in my own closet, those marvels that I didn’t realize were actually back there. But again, that is the point: this is what lay hidden in the pages of the archive, the bits and pieces that we hadn’t realized were actually back there all along.
Relishing the Failure

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 It was the halfway point. In fact, it was almost exactly at the halfway point. I had spent several classes nodding along and engaging in riveting discussions with my peers about texts that I would insist I only halfway understood, simply because the ideas were so big and intense that I’d almost argue that any reader shouldn’t claim total ownership of what lay within those pages. I’d already dredged up my ghost and showed him for everyone to see. Well, I say him, but I almost think of my particular ghost as female. For me, that ghost was the study of animation, a field I hadn’t even realized was a legitimate direction to take for an English student. I had cut my teeth on books after all, and I still want to teach literature and Literature to students. I had, in fact, done that to greater and lesser degrees throughout my career. Yet like Gordon, I kept getting distracted by that ghost: the idea of studying animation, and it was only recently that I became aware that I could, in fact, engage my ghost, wrestle with her, and put her down onto paper. For me, it was less about pointing out what we were showing in the closet, and more about looking at our happiness and wondering why we got there. What was it that made everything so bright and shiny and what were we really saying when we got there? In retrospect, this does seem a little bit like a tricksy narrator, but as I’m the one writing this, of course I’m going to make myself sound like that. And at this point, I realize I have distracted from the midpoint of the semester.
Because at that point, I almost craved a distraction. My struggle with Hartman’s work still lay a week away. But this was the week for me. Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure lay on my desk, wanting me to sink my academic teeth into and swim amongst its pages (and isn’t that a delightful mixed metaphor for you?). The presentation over material I liked, material that let me parade my ghost (who was decidedly alive by this point) around for people to admire had at last arrived. The chapter was “Animating Failure: Ending, Fleeing, and Surviving.” It was the animated part that had me squirming in my seat, as eager to perform as a small child at his first recital.
And as I often did when engaging material I loved, I delved headfirst. I dug through Halberstam’s chapter, comparing it and situating it among the larger work, as is expected. As I delved, however, I began to uncover bits that I simply knew Halberstam would have wanted me to discuss. I almost felt like I had Halberstam over my shoulder, nodding along and pushing me to expanding the ideas. The presentation started becoming less about “Animating Failure” and more about my taking off from what Halberstam worked with. “If Halberstam had known about Paranorman and Wreck-It-Ralph, scle totally would have written about” I insisted to myself. It felt right at the time, as if I was some kind of anointed successor bringing forth the ideas into a more modern age. Now I cannot help but wonder if I wasn’t dangerously near to committing some form of academic hubris.
For the presentation came. I was last in the class, which was never a good place to be in. My brain generally shut off after about two hours of talking about the in depth subjects, never helped by my constant companion: a necessary laptop with internet access. My exhaustive research suddenly seemed like an overload, like I was bringing in too much for one group to talk about. Now I’m able to step back and wonder if I wasn’t attempting to get us to examine our happiness while flinging open a closet and shoving everyone inside. “Look at this thing! See how important it is that we look at animation!? What do we do with this!?” Insert wild gesticulations and more bad jokes to fully flesh out the idea. In the end, my presentation felt, to me at least, rushed. My dreams of an engaged group of my peers slipped through my fingers despite my best efforts. I would later be told that I did amazing, that it was another awesome presentation and that people were interested in the various films that I had mentioned that Halberstam had not. At the time though, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d stumbled over the finish line. It felt like a failure for some reason. I might have broken that ribbon and finished my race, but my last few steps just weren’t as graceful as I wanted them to be. The applause was missing.
Adding to this was the irony over my presentation’s focus. I was supposed to be talking about failure, after all. And I did, mostly. But it wasn’t just about failing, but what we did with those failures. I want to introduce my personal favorite quote from Halberstam, one that I’m likely going to end up printing out and framing at this rate, since in this, Halberstam speaks directly to failure, failure as seen often in animated film, and what that allows us to consider:

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 “But along the way to these ‘happy’ ending, bad things happen to good animals, monsters, and children, and failure nestles in every dusty corner, reminding the child viewer that this too is what it means to live in a world created by mean, petty, greedy, and violent adults. To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die; rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy… let us instead revel and cleave to all of our own inevitable failures” (187)

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Conclusion: Academic Brightside

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 “To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint… let us instead revel and cleave to our own inevitable failures” (Halberstam 187). So now I have flung the same quote from Halberstam at my reader twice, because I simply refuse to let go of it. This returns to the tricksy narrator. It’s not that Halberstam, it’s not that scholars, it’s not that animation scholars, it’s not that that I don’t know about “a world created by mean, petty greedy, and violent adults.” If anything, we as scholars are almost painfully aware. We’re the ones who have been to see the child that society locked away in the closet, or at least, most of us have, enough of us have. We’ve seen the suffering through the literature, encountered the ghosts and the empty cells and asked the subaltern if they have anything to say. But we’re also going back. Some of us, Halberstam and myself, are going to revel in our failures and take these brighter spots and utilize them to uncover these greater academic truths. Some of us are going to stand as tricksy narrators and point out that this happiness, that contentment that everyone suffers, it’s bought at the cost of someone else.
So here’s my question: isn’t narrating this resisting? It might not quite be taking up the causes of activism, freeing subaltern slaves from closets or what have you, but it is fighting back. It is not a cop out, even if it might seem like one. For we are the people who didn’t chose to walk away, but instead chose to stick around and slyly tell those that would listen about the place, about what it costs, about what’s laying underneath. For me, this is the brighter part, what I can finally do. I can point at animation, indicate that, yes, it is teaching us about failure, though perhaps it is doing so in a white-washed way. These are often the stories that we tell to the younger generation, the first tales that people see. If we have someone taking the time to explain to those that will listen what these texts mean, being a narrator of sorts, than that someone seems, to me at least, to be doing something.
Of course, that’s my specific one, but this is my piece, so I can make it all about me. I want to end, however, by broadening it out. The people who read this are going to be academics. In all likelihood, this piece isn’t going to go any further than the people who took this journey with me. You, my audience, you are the people who keep looking for that child, or looking at her/him. You are the ones who are becoming aware of the dark spots in the archive, of what it takes to get everyone to this blissful state. It is you, therefore, who should realize your position as a tricksy narrator in your own degree. Who should consider what you’re doing as important, though I’m willing to bet you already do. Because we aren’t the ones who walked away from Omelas, from the subaltern, from our ghosts, from the empty spaces, from our failures; we’re the ones who stuck around and started pointing out the ways to figure all this out.

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