Critical Survey

This year American scholar Patricia J. Williams was invited to Britain to speak as Reith Lecturer, only the fourth woman and the third black speaker to contribute to the prestigious series of lectures which has a 49-year history. Her chosen subject was as topical as it proved controversial. Professor Williams’s subtle and measured discussion of the persistence of racism in daily life – and in even the most liberal of consciousnesses – struck a chord in British society. The furore that broke in the press was based as much in a certain ‘British’ intransigent refusal to allow that the persistence of prejudice could possibly be as ‘bad’ here as across the Atlantic as it was in a basic reluctance to address distinctive realities in contemporary society. Richard H. King and I interviewed Williams immediately following the transmission of the lecture series on Radio 4 and the transcripts, published by Virago as Seeing a Colour-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race, are reviewed in this issue by Larry Brown. Brown places Williams alongside fellow African-American scholar bell hooks in order to assess the different perspectives they take on issues of race and the politics of identity, and in order to decide on nature of the often very different roles of contemporary black intellectuals.

This year’s Reith Lecturer was Patricia J. Williams, a lawyer and Professor of Law at Columbia and author of the award-winning The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1993) and The Rooster’s Egg: The Persistence of Prejudice (1995) as well as numerous essays and articles in law journals and in The Village Voice, The Nation and Ms. Magazine. Professor Williams was invited to speak in this the European Year Against Racism but she found herself and the topic of her lectures the subject of heated media debate in Britain. Tabloids and broadsheets alike reviled her as ‘a militant black feminist who thinks all whites are racist and the family is wrong’ (Daily Mail) and her lectures were even described as ‘mumbo-jumbo’ in the Daily Telegraph. Britain’s newspapers and Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’ combined to demonise the first black woman speaker in the 49-year history of the Reith Lectures.

In A Rage For Order: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation, Joel Williamson explores the conjuncture of race, manhood, and violence peculiar to the American South. He argues that for southern white men the traditional Victorian masculine role of provider and protector was directly linked with violence because of plantation society’s ‘necessity of controlling a potentially explosive black population.’ As early as the seventeenth century, a patrol system, made up of masters and overseers enforced the laws of slavery. By the nineteenth century, the duty of patrolling was extended to all white men, who had authority over all blacks (even free blacks) and over whites who conspired with blacks. Thus a system for controlling slaves became a practice ‘of all whites controlling all blacks … a matter of race.’ The martial role white men created for themselves became entrenched, particularly in the last decades before the Civil War as slavery came under attack by northerners from without and by rebellious slaves from within. Whites created a complementary stereotype of black people as ‘simple, docile, and manageable’ who if properly handled were like children, but if improperly cared for became animals. Williamson argues that this ‘Sambo’ figure was a figment of white wishful thinking, which functioned ‘to build white egos’ while masking their fears of black rebellion.

Although not strictly speaking a ‘dirty realist’ novel, American Pastoral is clearly indebted to the genre. Concerned with a generation which, despite its money, is only one removed from the city’s Old Prince Street ghetto – Seymour Levov’s father left school at fourteen to work in a tannery to support a family of nine – the 1960s proves ‘dirtier’ than the past. Prosperous Newark becomes ‘the car-theft capital of the world’ and the Levov’s neighbourhood, reminiscent of ‘dirty realist’ writing, becomes a seedy district where, apart from a liquor store, a pizza stand and a church, everything is ruined and boarded up. Initially, as in ‘dirty realist’ writing, fantasies about family and community hide ‘the way things actually work’.1 But a significant element of American Pastoral is its implicit argument in favour of ‘dirty realism’. If we accept the novel’s gist, the need for Seymour to be released from myth into the complexity and messiness of history, then ‘dirty realism’, as beyond pastoral and outside a linear, progressive model of history, is relocated as a mode of writing which buys into postmodern critiques of monolithic narratives and fixed subject-positions.

When questioned by Larry McCaffery in an interview as to why his books were so firmly anchored in nature, Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien responded, ‘because life is anchored in these things’. The Things They Carried, O’Brien’s fifth book, is certainly no exception to this analysis. O’Brien’s book uncovers the multifarious dimensions to the sheer power and intensity of the bond between humankind and the natural world in the face of the brutal violence of the Vietnam war. It is this elemental relationship that I intend to examine with specific regard to the substantive influence of contemporary environmental theories and green ideas on O’Brien’s understanding of the value of the natural world. In order to examine the texts effectively, I will consider O’Brien’s work in chronological order. In doing so I hope to provide illustration of the continuation and development of the author’s environmental concerns within the framework of his most recent writings. I believe the author’s overarching concern with the intangibility of truth in these novels readily extends itself to his all-embracing manipulation of the symbolic landscape he presents to the reader.

The experimental mode and sensibility visioned in Lyn Hejinian’s poetic autobiography My Life (1987) is seditiously other than the Romantic aesthetics of William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1802). Although both poets textualise the complex process of selfreflection, contemplating the differentiated and undifferentiated boundaries between life and language, Hejinian calls into question what Wordsworth and his contemporaries took for granted. Poetry, for Wordsworth, has its source in what he called real life; and the emotions of real life, recollected and then rendered in the testimony of metrical composition, is what is affirmed in poetry. This a priori relation of life to letters is redefined in Hejinian’s writing.

Within the last decade in the contemporary American poetry scene, a battle line has been drawn between poetry identified as mainstream and as experimental poetry. Indeed, this division has been formed primarily by critics and poets who, advocating for an often ignored experimental poetry, have articulated a set of formal attributes highlighting the accomplishments of experimental poetry, or more specifically language poetry. While this commentary has been various and much debated, a repeated set of formal distinctions linked loosely with larger social agendas has arisen. Taking issue with a mainstream, sometimes called workshop poetry, for its confessional or expressivist emphasis, these critics and poets criticise this poetry’s centring on a unique self and utilisation of a highly referential and often normative language which purports to convey the poet’s experience. This poetry – intending to express true selves and authentic emotions – re-employs existing forms of illusions and contrives epiphanies, which only reconfirm prevailing social orders. In contradistinction to these practices, experimental poetry foregrounds language operations, showing how linguistic orders constitute social orders and how consequently these orders can be reconstituted. Refusing to make unified illusions out of conflicting, heterogeneous cultural languages, this poetry, engaging methods of defamiliarisation, claims to take on social reality far more directly.

Reel to Real: race, sex and class at the movies by bell hooks. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.

Seeing a Colour-Blind Future: The paradox of race. The 1997 Reith Lectures by Patricia J. Williams. London: Virago Press, 1997.

The Illusions of Postmodernism by Terry Eagleton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. X + 147, $44.95 hb.; $15.95 pb.

Mother Love by Rita Dove. New York: Norton, 1996. pp. 78, ISBN 0393314448 £7.95.

Distinguished Discord: Discontinuity and Pattern in the Critical Tradition of ‘The Turn of the Screw’ by Robin P. Hoople, Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997, £34.50). Pp. 328. ISBN 0-8387-5326-4.

European English Now, European Journal of English Studies, 1. 1. Swets and Zeitlinger, 132 pp., $69 / Dfl 115 to individuals, Dfl. 70 to ESSE members.

The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay et al., New York: Norton, 1997, pp. 2,665 Paper with CD 0393959082 £21.00.

Mark Twain in the Company of Women, by Laura E. Skandera- Trombley, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994; paper £15.50. Pp. xxiii, 219. ISBN 0 8122 1619 9.

Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film by Harry M. Benshoff. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Cloth £45.00 ISBN 0719044723, paper £14.99 ISBN 071904473.

Kate M. Cleary. A Literary Biography with Selected Works by Susanne K George. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. 250 pp. Cloth £28.50, ISBN: 0-8032-2164-9.

Consuming Subjects: British Women and Consumer Culture in the Eighteenth-Century by Elizabeth Kowalski-Wallace. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. cloth £32.00 ISBN 0231105789; paper £12.00 ISBN 0231105797.

Paul Oppenheimer, An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Modern Guilt, (London: Duckworth, 1997), pp. 127, cloth £12.95 ISBN 0-7156- 2759-7.

Passing Through Glass by Hugh Underhill. (National Poetry Foundation, 1997) ISBN 1 900726 10 6, £5.00

The Vigil by C K Williams. (Bloodaxe Books, 1997) ISBN 1 85224 402 X, £7.95

Yeah Yeah Yeah by Roddy Lumsden. (Bloodaxe Books, 1997) ISBN 1 85224 403 8, £7.95

Kiosk by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated by Michael Hamburger. Bloodaxe Books, 1997.

La Jeune Parque by Paul Valéry. French - English Bilingual Edition, translated by Alistair Elliot. Bloodaxe Books, 1997.

Nantucket and the Angel by Gillian Allnutt. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN I - 8 5224 - 382 1 £6.95

The Sky Behind the Forest – Selected Poems by Liliana Ursu. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN I - 85224 - 386 - 4 £7.95

Notes on contributors