Blockchain Papers

Melissa Alexander

Before they met in 1917, Virginia Woolf envisioned a peculiar setting for her first encounter with Katherine Mansfield, the promising young writer who had ‘dogged [her] steps for three years’. Intriguingly, Woolf imagined she might glimpse Mansfield, not in the drawing-room of a mutual friend or at a literary soirée, but ‘on a rock or in the sea’ – there, ‘I shall accost her’.1 Woolf pictures Mansfield in an attitude reminiscent of Frederic Leighton’s Solitude (1890), an allegorical painting of a ‘woman draped in white, sitting on a rock’ overlooking the sea, mentioned in Mansfield’s 1915 short story, ‘Autumns: II’.2 This allusion reveals acute attention to Mansfield’s early work, as well as a tendency to imagine the New Zealand outsider in a liminal position, tricked out in classical trappings but on a promontory of her own. It seems that, for Woolf, Mansfield’s allure was mixed up with her air of solitude. Indeed, solitude would draw these writers together as a magnet, a fertile ground for ‘accost’. Woolf’s image proved strangely prescient as if, already attuned to the sound of ‘waves breaking’, she had somehow anticipated Mansfield’s declaration in her diary, ‘All that I write – all that I am – is on the border of the sea’.3 If Woolf assumed she could identify Mansfield as a ‘sign’ of solitude (not merely the signature of her own work, but a citation of longstanding pictorial traditions), it is worth recognising that we, their readers, also approach these figures through the iconography of solitude developed by their contemporaries and cultural legatees. For instance, when Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry edited her journal for posthumous publication, he presented Mansfield as the female isolate par excellence, adding subheadings like ‘Femme Seule’, ‘Being Alone’, and ‘Living Alone’.4 Similarly, in 1930, Cecil Beaton described Woolf as a fragile ‘sea-anemone’ that ‘curls up at contact with the outer world’, a marine image that influenced her popular representation for decades (despite her indignation), perhaps because it anticipated her suicide by drowning in 1941.5 Such early depictions of the modernist isolate – embracing the deluge alone with tragic but heroic determination – seem like caricatures, especially in light of recent scholarship on modernists’ efforts to develop meaningful forms of intimacy and public engagement.6 Nevertheless, in addition to complicating these stock images, we might consider how their crude outlines invite questions about the legibility and evasiveness of that ubiquitous affect we call ‘solitude’. The assumptions that colour Woolf’s imagined Mansfield – simultaneously, a distinctive body that can be recognised by virtue of her solitary position, and a generic genius loci – should alert us to how solitude is implicated in ‘the tension between personal expression and general convention’. Solitude is at once a passionate feeling of (or claim to) singularity, an uncompromised only-ness, and a culturally encoded ‘repertoire of actions and statements […] postures and signs’ that can evoke the heat of genuine frisson or seem like tepid clichés.7 In singling out the one, solitude gestures towards the universal, connoting island and ‘continent’, one Mansfield standing out to sea and ‘mortal millions that live alone’ in ‘the shoreless watery wild’.8 Solitude seems like a landscape where we travel alone but it is characterised by discursive landmarks and pocked with others’ steps. Thus, this paper not only traces the connections between Mansfield and Woolf’s thoughts on solitude, but also tracks their course through a wider cultural and literary horizon. Solitude emerges as a fluid network of feeling, characterised by expressive norms and emotional protocols that are ‘repeatedly undone by the very wildness’ of its ebbs and flows.9 Solitude and literature have been deeply wedded in the Western cultural imaginary, as solitude is often considered an essential precondition for creativity, marking a writer’s commitment to their craft. We might, for instance, think of Henry James sententiously advising the aspiring writer to inscribe ‘one word’ ‘upon your banner … that word is Loneliness’.10 James’s self-advertising tone aside, Woolf often subscribes to this idea, remarking that ‘solitude will be good for a new book’ for ‘it is likely that the best [phrases] are made in solitude’.11 Moreover, her seminal essay, A Room of One’s Own, contends that, throughout history, too few women have had the privilege of uninterrupted solitude or an income of £500 with which to purchase an escape from the voice of that ‘eternal’ patriarchal ‘pedagogue’ ‘which cannot let women alone’.12 Although Mansfield did not explicitly frame the need for solitude in gendered terms (and, as a perpetual boarder, knew a room of one’s own could be rented for less), she also valued spatial privacy. ‘[T]o be alone’, she notes, was one of ‘2 essentials to my writing – endless time no fires to attend to, no-one to wait for … I’d better find a room in London quickly – and £5 with which to furnish it’.13 Woolf and Mansfield’s efforts to reclaim solitude as a space of independence, individuation, and personal growth have been a perennial touchstone for literary, sociological, and philosophical studies that highlight solitude’s positive functions as revitalising social critique and creative resource.14 I find the rapture at being alone hard to understand. Certainly when I am sitting out of sight under a tree I feel I would be content to never return … ‘oh Loneliness of my sad heart is Queen’. It isn’t in the least that. This entry vacillates between rapture and refusal as Katherine riffs on the French expression, ‘la solitude est la reine de mon cœur’, opting for the less exact translation, ‘loneliness’.16 In both authors’ writings about solitude, we find them slipping between cognates and casting about amongst clichés to express the turbulent valences of their own feelings. Indeed, some passages leave the reader with a profound sense of isolation without naming any feeling at all, relying instead on the simultaneously empty but pregnant cry – ‘oh, oh, oh’.17 This tendency to ‘move among’ and even relinquish ‘names’ in search of ‘some more appropriate predicate’ shows that expressions of feeling are, in Charles Altieri’s words, characterised by ‘a continual struggle between a sense of inchoateness and the forms of intelligibility provided by our social grammars’.18 We might venture to say that solitude reveals a unique dimension of this struggle. The difficulty of expressing solitude is not only to do with an inadequate or messy vernacular, but with the fact that a vernacular necessarily originates in a community and solitude seems like an intimation of distance or difference from others that craves its own idiolect. Isolates may find themselves in the same situation as theorists like Brian Massumi, who has sought to develop a language that directs attention to an experiential ‘excess or remainder’ that does not fit into ‘socially recognised lines of actions and reactions’ or confining emotional categories. Hence, Massumi famously distinguishes between ‘the socio-linguistic fixing of [a] quality of an experience’, a naming process whereby feelings become ‘owned and recognized’ as emotions, and ‘asignifying’ intensities he calls ‘affects’.19 Massumi’s distinction may be a little too tidy; as Sianne Ngai observes, ‘the difference between affect and emotion’ may well be ‘a modal difference of intensity or degree, rather than a formal difference of quality and kind’.20 However, it betokens a desire to distinguish between the unruliness of feeling and normative models of the emotions, which have emerged out of long historical struggles over diagnostic criteria that allow us to not only identify but invest ourselves in states of feeling that can be recognised and assessed by others. I wonder whether the speaking isolate is not uniquely situated to observe the gap between affect and emotion (in my opinion, more thought-provoking than secure) as well as how they bleed into each other. Isolates may feel that they are living in the ‘remainder’ that the concept of affect gestures towards, ‘the unexpected, the singular, or […] quirky’ aspects of experience rather than ‘the generally applicable’.21 Yet if they are to express and take ownership of solitude, they must engage with the emotional frameworks that qualify particular sorts of selves, solitary or otherwise. If they tend to squirm a little, no wonder, since discourses on solitude are often condensed into aphorisms and clichés that have lost much of their pith and energy in the course of public circulation. Faced with an overdetermined vernacular, the isolate is forced to navigate the ineffable only-ness of their feelings and the thorny places where these singular intensities brush up against the social. Thus, like affect, the isolate sits on the precarious boundary between the public and the private, the individual and the social (albeit with some vested interest in preserving it). If the isolate tends to test their feelings against social grammars and feel about for the parameters of the self, it is because solitude is deeply connected to ideas of authenticity. I do not mean to say that solitude is exempt from artifice, or to privilege it as more real and pure than other feelings, but it often feels like an exceptionally authentic part of the self, the self’s most sincere testament. Woolf broaches this issue in The Waves, where Bernard contrasts his shifting identity, dependent on ‘the illumination of other people’s eyes’, with ‘the authentics’ who ‘exist most completely in solitude’.22 Likewise, Mansfield relied on solitude ‘to puzzle out’ her ‘own particular self’ – ‘[w]hat I aim at is that state of mind when I feel my soul and my mind are one. … Only solitude will do it for me’.23 Solitude seems to bring the self to a peak of concentration so that we exist in emphatic totality, absorbed in ‘that sense of being which is so extreme in solitude’ and temporarily lost to all the distinctions whereby we gauge authenticity and parcel out the self into zones that are deemed more or less personal and inviolable (like the body, mind, or soul).24 Yet while solitude seems to consolidate the self, it is often experienced as self-displacement or surprise, seizing us unawares. Although my solitude seems specific to me, I do not seem to be its origin. Similarly, though some critics suggest that solitude ‘produces individuals’, an ‘I’ is not necessarily its result.25 In Woolf’s experience of ‘solitude’, identity seems to ebb away ‘into deep waters’ and ‘it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with’.26 Thus, solitude places pressure on the authentic self it evokes, prompting us to ask whether solitude stakes out some indigenous territory we can legitimately define as personal or whether, like affect, it reveals our susceptibility to migratory intensities stemming from ‘impersonal, or […] “pre-personal” forces’?27 Just as solitude is linked to the authentic individual, modernism has been defined by an interest in individual experience. As Woolf writes in ‘Modern Fiction’, many modernists tried to discard ‘the conventions which are commonly observed’ and ‘record […] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’.28 They sought to distinguish unique feelings from emotional norms through experimental works that reflect the vibrant flow of one’s inner life. Thus, modernism seems rather partial to the idea that ‘art […] is the rediscovery of solitude, and the road back into the individual self’.29 However, Woolf and Mansfield were sceptical of any art that ‘remains centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond’.30 This famous caveat from ‘Modern Fiction’, which immediately qualifies Woolf’s call to record personal impressions, may have been inspired by one of Mansfield’s reviews. A year earlier, Mansfield had contended that writers must not be content to ‘register’ the individual’s ‘faint inward shock[s]’, those ‘experiences which are, as it were, peculiarly theirs’. Such an art would leave us enclosed within a ‘tiny circle’, like that envisioned in ‘Modern Fiction’.31 Both authors sought a style that would capture ‘the effect of things upon one’s mind’ and yet portray these effects as affects (in our contemporary parlance), resonances between the self and the outside world. Else, Woolf observes, the writer ‘“lives alone, / Housed in a dream, at distance from the / Kind”’.32 … no sound Which the heart does not make, or else so fit[s] To its own temper that in external things No longer seems internal difference … things that are without Live in our minds as in their native home.37 Glossing over whether this exquisite ‘fit’ between self and things is altogether seamless or a matter of nipping and tucking, these isolates suggest that nature is not simply a surrogate for society and its difficult compacts and compromises. The isolate’s experience in the natural world models a better, organic community that operates by the principle of complete integration, not only resolving any splits in the self but also the more fundamental split between self and world. The permeability of hands and peaches and souls and boughs admits no barrier of difference, raising the question of whether the isolate’s pleasures are finally autoerotic, a matter of voluptuous self-gratification rather than a real engagement with otherness. Although Marvell exclaims, ‘Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound, / No name shall but your own be found’, is he actually grafting the name and legend of the human on the non-human world?38 Mansfield and Woolf were heirs to this tradition, demonstrating a deep familiarity with both Marvell and Wordsworth throughout their careers. For Mansfield, ‘W.W’ was one of those ‘people with whom I want to live’ and, in many ways, she did ‘live with’ Wordsworth, incorporating his ode to solitude into her letters and diaries.39 Mansfield’s repeated use of Wordsworthian motifs might explain the Woolfs’ conspicuous mistakes when typesetting Mansfield’s Prelude at the Hogarth Press; they were frequently in error over the title, using the definite article ‘the’, as in Wordsworth’s The Prelude.40 Wordsworth was also a significant figure in Woolf’s intellectual development and her frequent allusions to his work show that she was ‘involved in “one continuous unexhausted reading” of the Romantics, particularly of Wordsworth, from childhood to the end of her life’.41 Similarly, as Marvell was restyled in the twentieth century as the poet laureate of rural solitude, echoes of his poetry can be heard throughout both authors’ work.42 They invoke his images of blissful union with nature as well as his desolate ‘deserts of vast eternity’ to contemplate the double-edged nature of solitude.43 Indeed, Mansfield claimed Marvell’s ‘deserts’ as her personal ‘secret’, translating them into an existential threat hovering over the most quotidian experiences.44 In Mansfield and Woolf’s conversations with the past (shaped, perhaps, through conversations with each other), we see that to ‘live with’ these eminent poets of solitude was also to revise, rewrite, and disagree with them. Woolf and Mansfield tease out the complications and tensions in earlier paeans to solitude for, like other twentieth-century writers, they often felt immune to solitude’s If they could to Wordsworth’s pleasures in a they could also with when he of and the as by The of solitude are often (not by the natural as it seems to the by Marvell and Thus, Mansfield and Woolf’s writing much to who see as of our in […] the and its as much as its Solitude a sense of the and as we shall this is a precondition for a more of than that by of The cultural landscape of solitude is characterised by questions about and the nature of feeling, and our to others and to the non-human world. questions are also at in work on and and and A between solitude and affect can how solitude of and may even Indeed, solitude a in Woolf and Mansfield’s we find them the same ground in and their in and letters they were to have The and between their writings on solitude suggest the they claim to have or conversations that have been lost in the of I have letters in which she of the of a upon my writing with I have letters for adding of … the is it is The question also If it were not that I her of to these […] I should be more As it is Woolf frequently Mansfield’s and the quality of her own Indeed, authenticity something of a in their Mansfield knew she had a for and tried to Woolf that she ‘to be … without any at even to Woolf her Nevertheless, Mansfield ‘a to [her] and whether the most between women were could be and but also about her she with In Mansfield a of Woolf’s and she considered the ‘a in the to the effects of to to to the most … I am to by it might also for the of Mansfield’s repeated was in that and her situation with wonder she can is in her writing a of expression as though she were at – her over her – her own her – and her within Mansfield ‘I to feel like Virginia but she had I had This into her of and and Woolf spite in A she up to The was by Mansfield’s to to her – no no It that she is of the solitary we about solitude, I her expressing my feelings, as I never heard them we into as as as though were – … once more as as I feel a between us – a sense of being – not only about literature did they say when they about We can only because this it has no in Mansfield’s Yet it some about how these women solitude. Woolf solitude as the for an experience where we into feeling both and we think about solitude as a of This solitude, not as an but as a or that its – and meaningful – but is not by both authors tend to write of solitude in this tone seems to from the intensity of the feeling rather than from a that solitude is For instance, in To the and his an feeling that in the back of both of their minds … […] was for both of them the about The that is a profound between the but does not out In an To the echoes a from an in where Mansfield writes of ‘that which to her to be her only the only Woolf was to have this – is this what Mansfield when she my feelings, as I never heard them the of To the back to Woolf’s of in as solitude of Woolf that solitude is a even itself to a The idea that solitude is the of an may have its as when a young Woolf Wordsworth – like many is well to be in good I find solitude strangely Yet as the speaking isolate a in this does she some of her and authenticity – in a her Although Mansfield that solitude was the to a self, she also how even the most inward feelings and In solitude is up with an of […] and In her opinion, solitary we are ‘to a than would be in to to to even to ourselves or others only to find are no longer we think about Woolf and Mansfield’s it is to wonder whether Mansfield about how solitude the lines between the and its longer she the need to our feelings on show for others and have them recognised as sincere – a that might be as a in the air […] for of the with a of over of the sea […] – and more – of a where my were like and … and this other self in the the of her some of Mansfield’s find a of but one self is while and the of a towards the end of her Mansfield was with the idea of what she her and of feeling when we are most ourselves and least If Mansfield this experience their it is likely that Woolf would have her more for she that we are of many than but with the desire ‘to be but one ‘a self, a real Mansfield and Woolf might have that of alert us to the and of selves, our to flow towards things and back into is – what and – how one the other to have the other – … it is how and we each of us are – at the and from their find their into like a short in in which Mansfield ‘the quality of […] between an and to Woolf, consider how it is to find some one […] who to be with is in the desire to ‘the most of this ‘to be the Mansfield a of each up into that invite the other to complete each is with that the and of a that no For a minds to each Mansfield’s that she could ‘the quality of Yet For no their into and they themselves as little away into This is a as if the were to human they were – over their but from the a of and a The the with the the seems to a – is intimacy and a short from Woolf’s this between and on the and of a between and the of this is simply on the and the lines of and in the landscape the feelings this and that, like the of a sea felt that […] the who sits in while his does all the and and the show his the In the of social a of authentic encounter with ‘the upon which the was and they each other so were in so that they had only to by this as as in feels ‘the of human … that of Both the same the of human the quality of and the of and intimacy and isolation seem to from outside the sense of so that they and in time to an that them and echoes between Mansfield’s and Woolf’s at a about solitude that the ebbs and of their an intimacy they but could not finally Mansfield and Woolf’s over solitude was only by Woolf was already a by Katherine to my on Nevertheless, their seems to have Woolf to her to a she considered and so and so that I had to to the for something to As observes, this may be to the of Woolf as of with her a little on one and as if were Mansfield’s of Woolf with your a little on one as though knew some we shall see In Mansfield Woolf’s about her on their – it is not but who is of the her as Woolf’s that she between and she qualifies her on Mansfield’s it to all this of her into a Yet has an personal even as it out into a on of solitude Woolf

James K. Anderson, Kiran Bharthapudi, Hao Cao

In this essay, Foucault's concept “of other spaces” – or, heterotopia – is used to examine the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in the context of systemic crisis. Neoliberalism is marked by innovations that amplify and accelerate contradictions, unfolding the false utopia of finance capitalism. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) helped hyper-financialize the economy, enrich banksters and extend inequalities. Conversely, high-tech developments allow for decentralized decision-making and more direct democracy, paralleling the ethics of OWS. New ICTs compress TimeSpace, opening doors for empathic connections, generating conditions for elevation of collective superstructural consciousness. This paper explores how these conditions create – and are recreated by – heterotopic spaces. Drawing on Foucault's method of heterotopology we throw light on the potential of OWS to prefigure another world, analyzing endeavors to promote cooperative autonomy, and raise consciousness in and through mediated environments, always contested, ever in flux, and inevitably over-(but never pre-)determined.

Dan C. Shoemaker

In 1957, in his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes recommended mapping the multiple terrains in which various myths and ideologies were spoken (149). This paper follows in those footsteps by examining a pattern of discourse in American films after the events of September 11, 2001. An analysis of three recent films (and a comparison to a film from an earlier era) will reveal that the timbre of our discourse has modulated toward reliance upon (and valorization of) patriarchal authority, and away from reason. The author's fundamental theoretical assumption is that the relationship between American society and its cultural production is interactive, reciprocal, and mutually informing; films not only reflect society, but help to shape it. Since films are the result of conscious acts of representation and not some automatic process of reflection, films should be taken seriously as ideologically driven acts of speech. Million Dollar Baby won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2004, as well as Oscars for director Clint Eastwood and lead actress Hilary Swank. The religious right criticized the film for its apparent endorsement of euthanasia, but may have missed the point. Million Dollar Baby is actually a film about then-Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration's doctrine of preemptive war. The film stars Hilary Swank as Maggie, a bootstrapping, working poor waitress determined to make it as a professional boxer. Clint Eastwood stars as gym owner and boxing coach Frankie Dunn, who reluctantly takes Maggie under his wing. The narration by Morgan Freeman's character, Scrap, obscures the dynamics of the story. Maggie is the million dollar baby of the title, but whose baby is she? She is Frankie's. Indeed, the relationship between Frankie and Maggie becomes familial. Frankie has a grown daughter who returns his letters to her unopened and unread. The origin of the rift between Frankie and his daughter is unexplained by the film; the audience is not told what happened, and all we see are after-effects. Getting only one side of the story encourages us to sympathize with Frankie (at least he is trying to get it right, we reason). Before long, Maggie slips into the role of surrogate daughter. Maggie calls Frankie “Boss,” but “Daddy” would be more appropriate. Her relations with her own family are frustrating and are an early clue about the film's conservative ideology. When Maggie wins enough money as a boxer, she buys her mother a house. Instead of being grateful, her mother (Margo Martindale) complains that the acquisition of a home is going to upset her welfare scam. Maggie's family also includes her sister Mardell (Riki Lindhome), an unwed mother, and her brother JD (Marcus Chait), soon to be released from jail. Now, whose stereotypes are these? Maggie's mother and siblings are cartoons of welfare-state parasites, the kind of sly poor folk whom conservatives theorize are sapping our nation of its vigor. Maggie's family is portrayed without a shred of sympathy. We do not feel for their poverty, ignorance, or lack of options; instead, the one-dimensional scripting encourages us to see them as selfish, ungrateful, and criminal. Following the debacle with Maggie's mom is a scene which plays a key part in foreshadowing coming events. Maggie tells Frankie about the time her father euthanized her beloved dog as an act of mercy, and then the pair stop at a diner and have some lemon pie. They bond. Subsequently, Maggie demonstrates her loyalty to Frankie by refusing to abandon him in favor of a more successful manager with better connections. Frankie's key piece of advice to Maggie, which he repeats several times throughout the movie, is this: Always protect yourself. That is the same advice Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration invoked to justify going to war in Iraq: we had to protect ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. Despite the constant reiteration of this advice, Maggie fails to keep her guard up and is clocked by a nasty boxer identified as a former East German prostitute (Trifecta: a figure not only representing two major military enemies of the U.S.A. in the 20th century, but also moral turpitude). After getting sucker-punched by her opponent, Maggie falls, sustaining spinal cord injuries that leave her permanently paralyzed and bedridden. She then requests that Frankie treat her as her father had treated her dog. It is at this point that it becomes clear that the film is about Frankie, and not about Maggie. The balance of the movie is about the difficulty of Frankie's choice. As a Catholic, Frankie thinks mercy killing is a sin. As Maggie's surrogate father, he cannot bear to see her suffer. What, then, to do? Well, thank God our patriarchs are old and wise, and are capable of making the tough decisions. The entire narrative logic of the film endorses the assumption that our elders know what they are doing, and the young do not. Frankie's priest is a younger man, whom Frankie treats mostly with disdain. In a sub-plot of the film, Scrap is called upon to defend Danger, a hapless wannabe boxer who is pummeled by a gym bully. The skilled, older boxer (even when reduced to the status of a janitor) is more than a match for the guileless youth of the bully; in fact, Scrap puts him away with one hand. For her part, Maggie demonstrates that she has finally learned Frankie's lesson about defending herself when she refuses to sign her financial assets over to her parasitic family. In every instance throughout the film, the logic of the narrative supports the idea that the combination of age and male gender confers wisdom. Frankie ultimately decides to end Maggie's suffering. In their last conversation, Frankie tells Maggie that the Gaelic nickname he gave her, Mo Cuishle, means “my darling, my blood.” Family feeling triumphs over religion and law; Frankie knows that euthanasia is illegal, but he does it because he feels it is right. Insert your own joke about Bush administration policies and scandals here. Scrap's narration turns out to be a letter to Frankie's estranged daughter, explaining that Frankie never came back to the gym after ending Maggie's misery. “No matter where he is, I thought you should know what kind of man your father really was,” Scrap concludes. The final image of the film is Frankie back at the diner, presumably having some of that lemon pie. The tone is nostalgic and sentimental. It is an odd chord to strike in a film about senseless tragedy and loss, and it only makes sense if we are supposed to identify with Frankie. This is a textbook example of how hegemony is supposed to work under patriarchy; we are presumed to mistake the patriarch's interests and point of view for our own. While democracy and maturity both involve necessary measures of self-determination in order to be free and responsible, patriarchy requires submission to the dictates of the father-figure. In his book Moral Politics, the cognitive linguist George Lakoff delineates paradigmatic differences in the politics of conservatives and progressives. Lakoff asserts that that the two groups both employ the metaphor of the family to conceptualize and articulate their political positions, but differ in the kind of family they theorize. According to Lakoff, conservatives embrace a Strict Parent model of family. In this model, a Strict Parent is deemed necessary because the world is thought to be a dangerous place, and children therefore need to be disciplined in order to survive the Darwinian ordeal of existence. Any leniency toward or indulgence of children is considered a moral lapse, because it fosters weakness that will ultimately endanger the child. In the Strict Parent paradigm, being strong is the same thing as being moral. Since morality and strength are thought to be the same thing, and since success is proof of strength and fitness for survival, success is also considered a sign of morality. Therefore, failure is a sign of weakness and immorality. The people who succeed or fail do so not because of structural inequalities (such as institutional discrimination against race, class, or gender), but because of their personal characters. Strength of character is formed through children learning self-discipline and self-reliance, qualities which are deemed necessary to succeed in life's harsh contest. These qualities are presumably learned through obedience to the authority of the Strict Parent, usually the father. Since the success or failure of children and (by extension) society is dependent on the discipline of the father, the exercise of parental authority is itself considered moral, justified, and paramount; conversely, threats to that authority are seen as immoral, unjustified, and misguided (Lakoff, 67-84). When the Strict Parent is a father, and when the family metaphor is extended to the whole of society and its institutions, Lakoff's Strict Parent model is a good description of the logic of patriarchy. If Lakoff is correct in his assessment of the Strict Parent model, it goes a long way toward explaining the conservative obsession with fathers and fatherhood. It also helps explain the logic behind the 2005 version of War of the Worlds, in which the solution to the problem of invasion is the restoration of patriarchal authority. The narrator of the classic novel The War of the Worlds is an unnamed character much like the author H.G. Wells himself, a writer with some scientific knowledge. Few of the characters in the novel are given names, and most are referred to by their occupation or station, for example, the curate, the artilleryman, etc. A few chapters detail the exploits of the narrator's brother, a medical student, after the arrival of the Martians (Mac Adam, xxvi-xxvii). The hero of the 1953 film version is atomic scientist Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) who wants to get a good look at the Martians as much as he wants to escort his love-object Sylvia to safety. Sylvia (Ann Robinson) is a pretty weak movie heroine, even by 1950s standards: she is weepy and hysterical much of the time, and her skill-set seems mostly comprised of serving coffee, square-dancing, cooking breakfast, and driving a school-bus. Obviously, an update of the story would have to entail some changes; the characters would have to be drawn in such a way that contemporary audiences could recognize them as being realistic. The choices made in changing the story to update it for Steven Spielberg's 2005 version are therefore legitimate topics of criticism. Significantly, instead of replacing Sylvia with a modern woman, the character is simply written out of the 2005 remake. There are no adult women characters for the balance of the movie, or women whose actions matter to the resolution of the problem. Any trace of feminism's impact on our culture is erased. What we are offered instead is the story of a father and his children. In the 2005 version of War of the Worlds, the protagonist is Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), not a scientist but an Everyman. At the start of the film, we see Ray finish his shift as a longshoreman and race home in his vintage Mustang. Ray is late to pick up his kids from his pregnant ex-wife, Mary Ann (Miranda Otto), and her new husband, Tim (David Alan They have in a new which Ray to as a As the it becomes apparent that Ray is not the is a and he is an on his has no in his and no when he tells his kids to order out for Ray does not know how to with his and does not know how to his daughter even her is The narrative of the film mostly on as a father as he to escort his children to the Martians our The key in the film is or not Ray is good under When the Martians it It may as well While the of the film is an invasion which the audience knows is the of the film is to with the of This is through the of of and destruction. The of is the that when the from their of the of the film is on we see it in his the of the is in and the are the of When the and turns its on the feeling the scene much the of on of people from the of and by the of the The is the by the that Tim and Mary house. This no narrative and does to the but is of the that in on September The of is the of you seen this that Ray and his children with the to the These of were all over in the as the to who may or may not have in the If we of this recent version of War of the Worlds as a that is about that then are a of about the film that are is the of the in to their to the invasion is a to up with the to the to do so is by his who you leave who will protect a that both lack of in does to and a military that is the What is so is that his need not in of having to do but in of having to see the to it. This is in to the (and of who is from what is going on her on two when she is from at the and when Ray her he their children two about War on all those young who the military after to in and those of us on the home who have from or about what has going on because of the as when the a under the of to of war to The thing is the film's of in whose Ray and The character is an of two characters from the the and the discourse that of the artilleryman, but his is to that of the in the the protagonist the when the is on the of their in a to Martians (Mac Adam, In the 1953 film, the is to the character of of the and the What is so about the character and his in the 2005 version is the in which the and characters are and the logic to justify his What are the qualities that make a to Ray and is a and his him as events This is an but one which Ray never no is made to to stop a of with the of his is At with the but he is when the the in which the characters are After and after the Martians upon the of about in the under the and a This is the from the but to it is the that the a nation never an over not only from our own but also from the Significantly, this is one that to in and What is his own to a Ray not only because he is and but because fails to the of their and because the the of the Martians and a These for are to right of the to the war does not the of the world may in be dangerous to our own and is the of old who are on The of Tim as in of that with this conservative logic on a In a with and its logic of family for killing is to protect and his child. Always protect it for the In the film's only a and Tim is presumably to with a look at the look at the war look at or or The film's narrative has Ray to in Mary Ann him for is having the to the military he into is the film's last of This is in that it is the time Ray as and his patriarchal authority. had referred to his father as him to him from a after him had to do so in the narrative as in the film, Ray had to his him by his but his to be called if you your kids to for your authority, them to war. The film's is taken from the of the and also in the 1953 version is the For those with the the invasion of is when the are by the to which have of the has to the between and for example The and A is the with the novel and film version of War of the H.G. Wells some to God for on to defend our from While to God is religion is also the of in the in the figure of the The 1950s film a but the of the Spielberg's version of the film is of God or religion the when God is mostly as the of triumphs over the Martians because has has that is to upon the but not the from this as is from the discourse of is the of The of and by are the from right and The version of by does not involve the or the of our better obedience to the will of God the father and to the as the of as by on God in a film to this author's by written after The film in at a film in and released in the on only a of with its on in of The film released on in of and has since of a in some and about the film's on The story two from and who get into a with some the in calls and to the of the but the are not the an and that God wants them to all that which is so that which is good may and They out to do with the of their a in the The of that the leave behind them is by at the and the to piece the events which the audience as a When he finally that the are out the he decides to help them than from the of the the of the a out of who is only as We are told is a and but one with he would not women or children. for the The when the in and it is a himself, he is their long the with their by an of the and their father. They in a in which their is by who patriarchal authority. The act as George Bush with that God is on their and with that their is There are no or characters in the The we is the who is for and in a scene about the of her The film with on the about the and of as if of morality. the of Bush administration policies the who process if you are you are the right While this author through written after it is that the film Obviously, the Bush administration not and patriarchal were in American culture the events of September What, then, are the of this If patriarchal have through American culture for what right has the author to the of films to the of the administration in and right politics in that we the back to of the film of that to the of the which a of the same In the like The and The work is not considered to be The film version of to the of the follows the of the a and by is as a but but usually right. of the of the film or not is in his right a in (and surrogate to him of In the the is to be a and is as not only but The of to the of the is the has and A scientist thinks the will itself but that the be from the by a The of the film the to the right at the right time to the the to the world are by the of religious will is written the are you that man even in his to not for us to but we If God that man should without a then does he us the will to to the of the but it a in American thought and cultural production that we could Following War in order to American from right and and American culture the of What this from into or an that it be seen in an and personal had to be to and of and that were to the not only the of but also the of the We see this in a of culture from the the of and on and in and some of the of Ray and the culture and both the and While upon his to have his way for much of to the of the his is on scientific and his to him in the In his own actions not through but by the authority of and have two for to authority. is to and is not. In a or the of God is and is for In the scientific are to and The differences between two have for both and American political asserts a logic to that of the people in know what they are they know what they are because they are the people in knows simply because he is the father. In the Strict Parent model by Lakoff, the in authority is presumed to have that through strength of as the authority is justified, and on or even of are presumed to be such logic is at with which free and September 11, the American people were from an The world to which they and The events of that our that the world us because we are the good In such a strong who a and may and the of is in a of requires us to for and to make our on not authority. The of as by and American who to should be as to that were in culture that The films under are not but As and we should be A culture that obedience to authority is not a culture that endorses free or kind of If we do not this lesson of the century, we may well be to some

Michael Rothberg

3 Song of Solomon picks up where Mumbo Jumbo leaves off. That is, in repeating with a difference certain details and motifs of Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel, Toni Morrison signifies upon what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has called one of grand works of critical Signification (238). (1) While the writing of Mumbo Jumbo concludes, we read, at P.M. on Jan. 31st, 1971, Morrison's famous North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent sets off from the roof of Mercy Hospital for other side of Lake Superior ... [a]t 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February 1931 (Reed 218; Morrison, Song 3). If Morrison sets her watch by Reed's earlier novel, she also rewinds the time back to the early years of the Depression. Yet even in that return to the past, Song of Solomon continues Mumbo Jumbo, a novel that, except for its epilogue, is set in a fantastic pastiche of the 1920s. With this opening example, I would like to suggest how an exploration of Song of Solomon and its many intertexts evoke questions of narrative logic, historical time, and cultural memory. Because it is so densely allusive on so many different levels and in so many different modes, Morrison's novel deserves to be read not only through its numerous intertexts, but also as a commentary on the significance of intertextuality as a literary, historical, and social process. As her careful but parodic dating suggests, Morrison, like Reed, uses intertextuality to provide an alternative to dominant accounts of history, and, like Reed again, she does so by engaging both with texts of the black Atlantic and with Euro-American currents in Western literary culture. In particular, for my interests, both Song of Solomon and Mumbo Jumbo rewrite Thomas Pynchon's paranoid postmodern quest classic The Crying of Lot 49. (2) On the surface, Morrison's novel seems far from Pynchon's and Reed's work, but in fact they constitute a complex constellation that can lead to a rethinking both of intertextual relations and of intersections among literature, history, and memory. Each novel involves a protagonist's quest for a hidden truth that destabilizes his or her everyday world and turns out to involve coming to terms with some significant, but previously obscure, aspect of the past and its still operative influence on the present. Pynchon's Oedipa sets out to execute a will and finds herself searching for proof of an elaborate postal conspiracy that recedes hundreds of years into the past. Reed's PaPa LaBas attempts to understand the wax and wane of the Jew Grew infection and ends up seeking the sacred Text of black culture and uncovering an epic battle that stretches back to ancient Egypt. Finally, Morrison's Milkman initially sets out after his Aunt Pilate's inheritance, only to discover that it is not gold that is at stake, but an oral cultural document of familial and communal history. Despite broad narrative and thematic similarities--and a host of smaller-scale convergences--Morrison's work diverges significantly from the two other texts I have identified. While Reed in Mumbo Jumbo pushes Pynchon's paranoid and conspiratorial logic to the extreme, at once universalizing and shattering it, Morrison takes a different tack. She backgrounds conspiracy in order to explore a related, but significantly different, narrative logic, that of traumatic memory. While critics have in particular read Morrison's Beloved as a literary enactment of trauma, Song of Solomon also offers an opportunity to engage with contemporary legacies of traumatic memory. (3) Exploring the intersections among these texts takes on particular significance because narratives of conspiracy and trauma have emerged in recent decades as two of the most powerful logics through which the subjects of postmodern U.S. culture register and reflect on history. The two narrative logics are often linked, both in real life and in popular culture. In two well-known examples, the trauma of Kennedy's assassination has given birth to rampant paranoid speculation, and Mulder's conspiratorial thinking on The X Files has supposedly been spurred by the traumatic abduction of his sister. …