Silicon Valley and the Meaning of Work

Last year a viral Tweet collecting screenshots of Gen Z Tik-Tok denizens mocking Millennials went viral. Millennials like myself may have been taken aback because, even though many of us are now in our mid to late thirties, we’ve had to read at least fifteen years worth of articles about the various businesses we’re destroying by not making enough money to be comfortably middle class. Gen Z made fun of us for liking Harry Potter and using the word “adulting” (both accusations accurate and fair). But tucked into the list of things to make fun of Millennials for was talking about “tech start-ups.” 

I couldn’t help but think about Gen Z mocking the Millennial obsession with tech start-ups while reading Anna Wiener’s memoir, Uncanny Valley. What was once our generation’s gold rush, a respectable way to get rich and “change the world” for the better has now become passe, almost embarrassing. As a recent graduate, Wiener wanted to work in publishing, but found herself stuck in the role of personal assistant scraping enough to barely survive in New York City. While those firmly established in the industry see this sort of precarity as simply paying your dues, any millennial would recognize it for what it is: exploitation. Wiener decided to ditch her moribound industry for a New York e-reading startup, which eventually led to a move to San Francisco.

Throughout the memoir, Wiener uses a technique where she references companies but does not name them. Proper nouns are translated into phrases. For instance, Facebook becomes “the social network everybody hates.” It’s a clever way to lightly anonymize the companies she worked for, and perhaps generalize her experiences. (Of course, it’s likely also a way to avoid any NDAs she may have had to sign). But it doesn’t take much work to discover that the two companies Wiener worked for were Mixpanel and Github. 

Wiener’s memoir is largely outward facing. We don’t learn too much about her outside of her work life, which I think works to the story’s advantage by allowing the narrative to tightly focus on Silicon Valley. I found her to present a rather even-handed analysis of startup culture, perhaps even giving too many tech bros the benefit of the doubt. There’s a fine line between open-minded and naive. 

She’s careful not to present individuals as caricatures. A rising CEO might have a libertarian streak, but he’s also interested in prison abolition. The aloof, but brilliant programmer at the data analytics company enjoys making artistic, non-commercial games in his free time. With any system, it’s not the individuals who are the problem. If everyone in Silicon Valley all of a sudden became well intentioned do-gooders, then it wouldn’t solve the problems of misinformation, privacy violations, and gentrification these companies have caused.

But Wiener also confirms a number of stereotypes about Silicon Valley culture. It’s true that startups are mostly run and staffed by male twenty-somethings. There’s a cult-like nature to these workplaces where instead of suits, employees sport t-shirts and other garb blazoned with the name of the company. There’s an ideological obsession with efficiency that extends to viewing the body as just another system to be “hacked.” The Silicon Valley boom has led to the gentrification of San Francisco, exacerbating its housing crises and contributing to the excess of pretentious restaurants and bars, like one where you tell the “mixologist” three adjectives instead of just ordering a drink. Also, people listen to, ugh, EDM. (Whatever happened to EDM?)

As a woman in a male dominated industry, Wiener had to endure a general miasma of sexism, including resistance by some colleagues to diversifying the tech industry as well as overt harassment. While sharing a cab, a coworker put his hand under her blouse and then down her skirt. Another employee casually mentions to her how much he loves dating Jewish women because they’re so sensual. She mentions the latter incident to her boss, but he does nothing. And while these incidents seem bad enough, Wiener notes that what happened to her pales compared to what many other women in tech went through.

The larger problem with Silicon Valley, however, is structural and ideological. VC firms pump billions of dollars into companies that, despite the rosy image they project, too often make the world worse. Google may have adopted the slogan “Don’t be evil,” but Facebook’s mantra, “Move fast and break things” is likely a more accurate description of how tech companies operate. 

There’s a strong undercurrent of techno-utopia libertarianism that pervades Silicon Valley culture. People in tech laud the idea of special economic zones while ignoring the brutal working conditions and child labor they produce. They promote patriarchal and racist hierarchies under the guise of “just asking questions.” And they seem perpetually unaware of historical and cultural context. As Wiener notes, all the new and exciting political ideas Silicon Valley comes up with are just old ideas that we’ve moved past, and for a good reason. They’re recycling late 19th-century Gilded Age ideology, but are too ignorant of history to even recognize it. 

The one question that Wiener struggles with and doesn’t satisfactorily answer is whether people of Silicon Valley actually believe their techno-optimist line or whether these are just empty slogans. It’s something I’ve wondered about myself. Facebook presents itself as a company that brings people together, but it actually spreads misinformation and gives safe harbor to white supremacists. Uber has billed itself as a company that will revolutionize transportation, lead to less car ownership and help the environment. Instead it has ruined the lives of many immigrant taxi drivers and spread more CO2 into the atmosphere. Do the CEOs of these companies really think they’re making the world a better place?

This is an especially pertinent question when it comes to SIlicon Valley because these companies received so much free uncritical press coverage for so long. Hell, the media was ready to credit Twitter with the 2011 Egyptian Revolution as if protests never happened before the existence of the micro-blogging site. Silicon Valley branded itself with the old adage that you can “Do well while doing good.” Plenty of people were snookered, but I’ve always wondered whether that included the startups themselves. Were they naive enough to believe their own utopian hype machine? Ultimately, I see Uncanny Valley as a memoir about meaning and work. Wiener was unhappy in publishing because there was no way forward, but she still found meaning in writing and literature. Working in tech, however, gives her a sense of accomplishment and a paycheck that allows her to live in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S., but eventually she begins to doubt whether the good of these companies outweigh the harm they’re doing. As a motivational tool, a paycheck only takes you so far. You’re not going to get people to give over their lives to a company if it’s a simple exchange of labor for coin. And I have a sneaking suspicion that this is true of the rank and file as much as it’s true of the ownership class. You can accumulate as much as possible in life, but when all is said and done, what have you actually accomplished with your time here on Earth? And even worse, when you’re on the cutting edge, you’re still no more than a decade away from becoming passe.  What happens when the youngins no longer think you’re cool?

On Joaquin Murieta, Race, and Cult Movies

The Sonoran outlaw, Joaquin Murieta is one of those historical figures who was a real person but whose factual existence has been so clouded by myth that now he’s more literary than historical. Of course, this isn’t much of a problem for us in the world of literature. After all, even historical figures have a literary equivalent, a version of themselves that signify some greater, larger abstract ideas. Sure, there might be a historical Lincoln, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also have our own badass, vampire-killin’ version of Honest Abe as well. Interesting enough, it was the Native American author, John Rollin Ridge, who wrote the ur-text of the Murieta mythos, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, which also happens to be the first novel written by a Native American.

Ridge (whose Cherokee name was Yellow Bird) lived an interesting life, almost interesting enough to compete with his most famous literary work. Ridge was the son of John Ridge and grandson of Major Ridge, leaders of a group of Cherokee who, prior to the forced removal from Cherokee lands, struck a deal with the U.S. government, known as the Treaty of New Echota, that would cede Cherokee lands in exchange for compensation. Understandably, this was an unpopular position among the Cherokee, but you can see the logic behind the Treaty Party’s position. They felt that removal was inevitable, so they wanted to strike the best deal possible.

Many other Cherokee saw these actions as a betrayal, and after enduring the Trail of Tears and removal to Indian Territory in the West, many of the leaders of the Treaty Party were assassinated, including Ridge’s father and grandfather, John Ridge and Major Ridge.

Ridge eventually made his way to California during the gold rush, but unsatisfied with mining turned towards writing as his trade, eventually writing a highly fictionalized version of the exploits of Joaquin Murieta. Joaquin Murieta: The Novel is a fascinating, contradictory, and often shockingly violent story. Throughout, however, it’s infused with real feelings of love, anger, and betrayal. Arguably, the object of love and hate is the United States herself.

Early on, Ridge establishes that the story of Murieta is not singular; it’s the story of circumstances: 

The character of this truly wonderful man was nothing more than a natural production of the social and moral condition in which he lived, acting upon certain peculiar circumstances favorable to such a result, and, consequently, his individual history is part of the most valuable history of the State. (7)

Here and elsewhere you can feel Ridge working out his complex feelings about the nation on the page. Murieta is a dashing outlaw, a good man turned to do bad things, a victim of circumstances. 

In their heyday, the Ridge family were wealthy Cherokee elites who held positions of power and esteem. The Cherokee themselves were a part of the five civilized tribes, which meant they adopted a number of white customs, in part strategically assimilating as a means to protect their rights from white settlers. In fact, the Ridges even owned slaves. If things had gone differently, if his family hadn’t signed the Treaty of New Echota, then he too may have become an important leader among the Cherokee people. In part, the Ridges achieved their positions of prominence because they were able to deftly navigate both white and native worlds, acculturating when it was advantageous. 

It’s not hard to see a bit of Ridge in Murieta as he immigrated to California “fired with enthusiastic admiration of the American character” (8). But this enthusiasm is soon dashed. After much initial success in mining, Americans jealous of his success violently beat him, tie him up, and then rape his wife in front of him. Murieta continues to mine for gold, chasing his initial success, only to be attacked by Americans once again. (Usually, these sorts of tales only require one violent inciting incident, but Ridge has Murieta victimized a second time). This time whites accuse him of being a horse thief, tie him up and whip him, and then go to his half-brother’s house and hang him. 

Naturally, after enduring this sort of violence, Murieta forms a band of robbers. California during the gold rush was a multicultural place, and whites established laws that prevented non-whites from competing in the gold mining craze, including the 1850 Foreign Miners’ Tax Law, which had the intent of making it nearly impossible for people of color to compete with whites in the gold rush by establishing a cumbersome bureaucracy and taxes that applied only to “foreigners.” 

Despite the violence he endured, Murieta is the consummate gentleman thief. He occasionally prefers to let people go rather than murder them, and when his enemies get the best of him, he often laughs it off. When Murieta and his men are betrayed by seemingly friendly Tejon Indians, he eventually “burst out into a loud laugh at his ridiculous position, and ever afterwards endured his captivity with a quiet smile” (38). 

Interesting enough, during Murieta’s time as the captive of the Tejon Indians, Ridge paints a largely unflattering portrait the Tejon people. Although, they are some of the few people who can win one over on Murieta, they’re also described as “poor,” “miserable,” and “cowardly.” Presumably, as a partially acculturated member of one of the “civilized” tribes, Ridge sees himself and the Cherokee in general as superior to the Tejon. His somewhat unkind portrayal of California Indians may also be a way for him to distance himself from “those Indians.”

Ridge seems unable to fully identify with California Native Americans, but this isn’t the only strange, tangled relationship the novel has with race. While Murieta can take a joke and lose a few battles without losing his sense of humor, his chief lieutenant, Three Finger Jack can’t. In fact, he’s shockingly bloodthirsty, especially when it comes to killing Chinese: “ ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I can’t help it; but, somehow or other, I love to smell the blood of a Chinaman. Besides, it’s such easy work to kill them. It’s a kind of luxury to cut their throats’” (64). And here is the crux of Joaquin Murieta’s weird relationship with race: Murieta is both a victim of racialized violence while his gang is simultaneously a perpetrator of racialized violence.

If we were to map Ridge’s psyche onto his text, then surely Three Finger Jack would be the id to Murieta’s ego. The astute gentleman thief of Murieta surely represents how Ridge, an educated man descended from a once powerful family, sees himself. But within Three Finger Jack, Ridge can arguably release his unfettered rage, lashing out at white racists and Chinese settlers alike. 

Even though Ridge is the first Native American to write a novel, like many nineteenth-century authors, he doesn’t fit nicely into our modern conception of how a minority author is supposed to tackle issues of race and colonialism. We don’t expect denunciations of white colonial racism to sit side by side with leering depictions of violence against immigrants, which is one of the reasons why the text is so valuable as an object of study and analysis. Not all minority authors could be as incredibly ahead of their time as Frederick Douglass.  

Of course, as a son of slave owners, we of course shouldn’t expect racial solidarity from Ridge. But Joaquin Murieta’s anger at injustice and simultaneous rage against innocents reminds me a lot of the cult films of the 70s and 80s, like Repo Man, They Live, A Boy and His Dog, Death Race 2000, and Escape from New York. These are explicitly political films that pummel their targets of with anger and a good bit of irony. Arguably, the politics in these films are mostly liberal, but there’s a not-so-hidden mean streak that runs through all of them. The raw anger of these cult classics is also what drew me to them in my youth, and if I’m being honest, one of the reasons why I return to many of them now that I’m older. 

But like Joaquin Murieta, the target of these movie’s anger often slips, often landing not on Reaganomics or inequality but on women. LIke Ridge’s casual violence towards the Chinese and semi-dismissive portrayal of California Native Americans, misogyny is an unfortunate byproduct of so many cult classics of the late twentieth century. If I would draw a hasty framework connecting a novel from the 1840s and movies from the 1970s and 80s, then I might claim that anger at injustice done to us by society can so easily curdle into anger at other, easier targets. It’s not so difficult to both punch up and down at the same time. Looking at the world around us, where anger is hardly in short supply, this seems like a useful reminder.

On The Siren Song of Socialism and Herman Melville’s Typee

Is there anything cornier than a political cartoon? Unlikely. Political cartoons are the sort of things that uncle you never speak to “fwds” you over e-mail or plasters on his facebook page. At most, they repackage already cliched talking points with some unnecessary visual aids, usually of the explicitly racist variety. They’re the even less ambitious younger brother of the op-ed.

But they can also be helpful. No, they don’t further political debate or shine a light on woefully underdiscussed issues, but they do provide keen insight into the political mind’s id. A political cartoon can give us a better glimpse of the conservative mind than an ocean’s worth of David Brooks and Ross Douthat’s hot takes. There’s something about the visual nature of the form that brings out the deepest recesses of the conservative subconscious.

And that’s what we got with Ben Garrison’s cartoon, “The Siren Song of Socialism,” which was passed around the internet by both conservatives as a stern warning against the evils of socialism and by liberals as an example of how far off the deep end the right has fallen. If you haven’t seen it, the cartoon consists of a man dressed in a flannel and blue jeans tied, like Odysseus, to the mast under which Garrison has helpfully included the label “millennials.” The man is excitedly leering at three women on an island representing Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, each scantily-clad in “island” garb. At the head of the ship, a stern Trump informs the man, “We’re not going there!”

Naturally, plenty of people focused on the underlying sexism and racism of the cartoon. It’s a little weird that Garrison is lumping Harris in with Ocasio-Cortez. The former’s been criticized as an overzealous prosecutor while the latter is an actual member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The fact that these women are people of color seems to be at the forefront of Garrison’s mind than whether or not both have any devotion to socialism.

But while most were trying to parse which was worse, the cartoon’s racism of sexism, I was kind of amazed how much the illustration reminded me of the work of Herman Melville.

The comparison might sound strange for a number of reasons. Today, when you hear the name “Melville,” most are reminded of his masterpiece, Moby Dick, but that wasn’t the case during Melville’s lifetime. Before scholars rediscovered Melville’s genius, he was mostly known for his first novel, a little adventure tale called Typee after the name of a native tribe living on the Polynesian island of Nuku Hiva.

Typee became a hit in Melville’s day because it was reportedly based on his real experiences living among a cannibal tribe in Polynesia. While based on his own experiences, Typee is also fictionalized to an extent. While it’s true that Melville, like his protagonist in the novel, jumped ship while at Nuku Hiva and lived for a time among the Typee people, he didn’t stick around three months like he claimed in the novel. It was closer to three weeks. Still, the sensational story of Melville living among a Polynesian tribe helped garner him become known as the “man who lived among the cannibals” and catapulted the novel to a level of success that Melville could never repeat in this lifetime.

In the novel, Melville eventually cuts his way through the jungle and stumbles upon the Typee village, which turns out to be something of a socialist paradise on Earth, not dissimilar to Garrison’s fevered dream of socialism. But before we get to Melville’s depiction of Typee culture, it might be useful to take a look at whaling in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of Typee, Melville states that the crew had been at sea for six months “cruising after the sperm-whale beneath the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific” (11). During that time Melville would have alternated his time among the enclosed bowels of the ship and the infinite horizon of the Pacific.

And even on the open ocean, Melville would have been crammed into a small whaleboat with several others chasing sperm whale by using a harpoon fastened by rope onto the small boat to latch onto the gargantuan creature. Once securely latched to the whale, the boat would be pulled along for an hour or more while the whalers tried to kill the giant creature, hoping he doesn’t crush them or dive too far below the surface and take them with the leviathan. When the whale begins spraying blood from his blowhole instead of air, the sailors know that death is near. Melville writes in Moby Dick: “At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frightened air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea” (329).

Once they had finally killed the whale, the whalers must drag the massive carcass to the ship where they must peel away and process the blubber. The dead whale was fastened to the starboard side of the ship where planks were erected for the whalers to cut off strips of blubber, like they were peeling an apple. The blubber was then boiled and eventually stored in barrels. The crew and ship would become stained by oil and blood, and the massive carcass could become a beacon for nearby sharks, which was just another danger whalers faced if they happened to slide off the now slippery deck. The stench of the processing whale blubber into oil would have been overwhelming, Melville describing it as smelling “like the left wing of the day of judgment” (475).

It was dangerous work, but it was the only way that whalers could get paid on their journey. These men weren’t given salaries. Instead, they received a “lay,” or a percentage of the profits, which could be meager for those with no seniority. If they encountered few whales, then they earned nothing, or even ended up in debt to the ship because sailors had to purchase supplies like clothes, boots, or tobacco from the shipowners.

A whaling ship was rigidly hierarchical. Captain Ahab, obsessive, brutal, and demanding, has become an archetypical tyrant. In Omoo, Melville’s sequel to Typee (yes, Typee was so popular that it even received the obligatory sequel treatment), the crew becomes so upset with their treatment at the hands of the captain that they mutiny. This was the life of a sailor in the first half of the nineteenth century. You work your body to a nub hoping to make enough money so that you aren’t in debt at the end of the voyage all the while under the absolute sway of a tyrant.

Comparatively, life among the Typee must have seemed like paradise to Melville, and he often presents the Typee people as living in an Edenic paradise. Their principle food, the breadfruit, is plentiful and can be transformed into a wide variety of dishes. Before visiting the Typee, Melville assumed that their lives were nothing “but a world of care and anxiety,” but found that they lived “infinitely happier” lives than “the self-complacent European.” (149). Melville continues to compare Western society unfavorably to the natives of Polynesia. The Typee aren’t ignorant of violence and occasionally go to war against their neighbors, but the violence of their society pales next to trail of unfettered war, torture, and executions throughout European history. In a passage that is sadly as true today as it was over a hundred and fifty years ago, Melville condemns the seemingly more “humane” prisons we’ve built: “yet how feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemned to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population” (150).

And Melville isn’t shy about laying down blame for how Western society has gone wrong:

[In the Typee village] [t]here were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bill payable, no debts of honor in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers, perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description;…no destitute widows with their children starving on the cold charities of the world; no beggars; no debtors’ prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum up all in one word–no Money!

Life in a whaling ship is living in capitalism’s burning furnace. By living among the Typee, Melville sees that there are other worlds, other ways of arranging society. The world of the Typee looks a lot like a Marxist utopia. But what’s so striking about Melville’s representation of Typee society is that it’s so much freer than Western capitalist societies when freedom is supposed to be at the very heart of capitalist’s appeals. We are free to choose our employers, what we buy, where we live, and what we do with our lives. Of course, that’s not the lived experience of most people living in capitalist economies, certainly not during Melville’s time but not even in our era of late capitalism where massive inequality and precariousness are increasingly normalized.

What I find fascinating about the parallels between Garrison’s hacky political cartoon and Melville’s first novel is that, although they take complete opposite views on “socialism,” they actually break down the dichotomy of freedom and servitude along the same lines. The hapless millennial in Garrison’s cartoon is tied up and a self-serious Trump is the one steering the ship away from the island of socialism. For many conservatives, that lack of freedom has actually become a part of capitalism’s appeal. A society where the rich and powerful can exert their power over others is not just an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism’s excesses, it’s one of the main points.

Of course, as a man of the nineteenth century, Melville also brought plenty of baggage with him. His account of the Typee isn’t without some of the racist assumptions of the day, even if it was more progressive than many peers. And both Garrison and Melville view everything through the male gaze. Freedom for Melville also means free access to women’s bodies, and parts of Typee were censored because they featured between the sailors and the Polynesian women.

We might be inching towards a time where we finally acknowledge the central lie about capitalism: that it’s about freedom. For most, there is nothing freeing about being at the mercy of an employer and the shifting economic winds. There are some entrepreneurs, like Peter Thiel, who are at least honest about the fact that their view of capitalism is incompatible with democratic values. Melville knew this over a hundred and fifty years ago, and we might be learning all over again that democracy and capitalism don’t mix.

On Bringing “The Real World” into the Classroom

Over the last week, it’ been difficult to get the Christchurch shootings out of my head. The sheer scale of that violence and the Islamophobic and xenophobic motivations of the killer make it seem as if could have happened here in the United States. And of course, it speaks to the global reach of alt-right terrorism, which we’ve experienced in droves recently. Just last year there was the Parkland shooting, the Tree of Life shooting, and the Tallahassee yoga studio shooting, each of which was carried out by a violent white male under the influence of right wing demagoguery. (There are so many mass shootings in the U.S. that I had actually forgotten about the one in Tallahassee, perhaps because “only” six people were shot).

After the shooting, I felt compelled to discuss the incident with my students. I’ve long tried to draw connections between what we do in the class with events in the news and on campus, something I was more disciplined about as a graduate student than as an overburdened adjunct. But earlier in the semester I had my students read an essay by Doreen Massey on rethinking space and place, in which she argues, in part, that we must think of places and their meanings as fluid and changing rather than ossified. This of course has implications for how we view the nation and our borders.

Using this essay, I had my students use Massey’s essay to dissect the Vice documentary on the Charlottesville alt-right protests, looking at how space and its meanings are contested and to what purpose. When I heard about the Christchurch shootings, I immediately thought of the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally and the murder of Heather Heyer. However, when I brought up the the Christchurch shooting and asked my students to draw connections, they struggled at first.

There might be a number of reasons for why my student had difficulty connecting the dots between the Unite the Right Rally, Massey, and the Christchurch shooting. First and foremost, we read Massey and watched the Vice documentary all the way at the beginning of the semester, so it was hardly fresh in their minds.

But I wonder how often students are asked to draw conclusions between what’s happening inside the classroom and what’s happening outside the classroom. Testing culture and a fear of inviting controversy can easily hermetically seal the classroom space.

Our discussion ended up moving beyond Massey and veering towards internet platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube and their responsibility or lack of responsibility for the current resurgence of right-wing violence. Immediately, students fell back on dualistic notions of freedom of expression versus censorship. When I mentioned that social media platforms have censored information since their inception–banning nudity for instance–they weren’t exactly sure what to do with this information. We didn’t come close to solving the problem of right-wing hate and online culpability, but they did start to complicate how we might approach these problems, and at least see that there might be a problem in the first place.

In order to teach well, I have to come to the class ultra-prepared. Other teachers might be able to play the classroom in the same way a jazz player might play his instrument, with a heavy element of improvisation. But I’m just not that teacher. Still, I think this recent class really stressed the importance of drawing connections to classroom discussions and current events.

Students are trained to see the classroom as a series of obstacles they must simply pass to get to the next level. It’s our job to remind them that the issues we discuss in the classroom have very real life or death implications to others. Not only does this bring home the fact that seemingly abstract discussions about space, place, nation, speech, and censorship manifest in the world, but it helps foster the ability to synthesize information and make the kinds of connections we want to see from our students. I know that what we discuss in the classroom is of importance, and I want to make sure my students see that as well.

On Tom Sawyer Abroad and the Accidental Imperialists

Everyone knows about that time Tom Sawyer tricked the neighborhood kids into painting his aunt’s fence for him. Everyone knows about his time hiding out on Jackson Island with his friend Huck Finn and when he made his way out of McDougal’s Cave with his sweetheart Becky. Heck, those who have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn could even tell you that Tom Sawyer was there when Huck Finn freed the slave Jim after he is recaptured. Tom Sawyer’s story has been a part of not only the literary canon, but a part of the American tale we tell ourselves. But few know about that one time Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim hopped on a flying machine with a deranged inventor and made their way over to Northern Africa.

It turns out that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not the end of the Tom and Huck saga. Mark Twain completed two other novels focused on his two most famous characters, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective. Twain even attempted to write other adventure tales featuring Tom and Huck, including Huck and Tom Among the Indians, Schoolhouse Hill, and Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy, but none of these were published or even completed in Twain’s lifetime.

There’s a reason why Tom Sawyer Abroad failed to lodge in America’s consciousness: it’s not great. I suppose you could see it as the Solo: A Star Wars Story of the Tom Sawyer series, or Twain’s Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, if you’re being unkind. While the previous Tom and Huck stories weren’t exactly concerned with narrative realism, it does seem odd to see Twain inject some Jules Verne steampunk into the bucolic world of St. Petersburg, Missouri.

Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Abroad is narrated by Huck, and though published about a decade after Huck Finn, it begins almost immediately after the events of the previous novel. The first chapter, “Tom Seeks New Adventures,” which begins with Tom Sawyer deciding that the events of Huck Finn wouldn’t be enough to satiate his curiosity and wanderlust, seems to perfectly describe what was likely Twain’s brainstorming process. As M. Thomas Inge notes in my edition’s afterward, Twain, who got himself into financial trouble towards the end of the nineteenth century, wrote Abroad for “crass commercial purposes.” In other words Twain writing a third novel featuring these characters is kind of like when a movie studio decides that they have some IP that they can squeeze a few bucks from. So I guess this makes Tom Sawyer Abroad the Live Free or Die Hard or the Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps or Godfather III of Twain’s oeuvre.

And just like many movie studios of late, Twain had been bitten by the franchise bug. He apparently had plans to ship Huck, Tom, and Jim to other parts of the world in a series of sequels, which never came to be. Judging by the quality of Abroad, this is probably for the better. The main problem is that although Abroad promises lots of hijinks by Tom, Huck, and Jim in Northern Africa, the trio doesn’t really spend much time actually on the ground. Instead, they spend much of the early chapters terrorized by the manic mad inventor of the airship who both seems to have absolute faith in his invention and a streak of misanthropy, and when he plunges to his grizzly death, the three of them are left to figure out what to do now that they’ve somehow wandered across the Atlantic Ocean. But once they reach Africa, they mostly just hang out in the stupid air balloon. There’s no awkward mix up with local customs or getting caught up in the tension between the Berbers and colonizing European powers. No, it’s mostly just Tom, Huck, and Jim observing things from a far and shooting the shit.

On the bright side, the conversation and arguments that the three get into are without a doubt the highlights of the novel. As the most learned of the three, Tom repeatedly tries to represent himself and worldly and authoritative, but he’s almost always rhetorically outmaneuvered by Jim. At one point they consider the implication that fleas are proportionally much stronger than humans, leading them to the horrifying conclusion that if a flea were human-size, then that “flea would be President of the United States, and you couldn’t any more prevent it than you can prevent lightning.”  In these moments, you can feel Twain’s warmth towards his creations, and the book starts to take the shape of an anti-adventure novel, where the characters go halfway around the world just to get into philosophical arguments with one another. Maybe Richard Linklater can do the film adaptation.

It’s worth highlighting the boisterous illustrations, which are admittedly a lot of fun, and interestingly enough they were created by Dan Beard, an early founder of the Boy Scouts of America. 

Tom Sawyer Abroad is uneven at best, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not some interesting work going on here. The novel showcases Twain’s burgeoning anti-imperialist attitudes. Early on, Tom tries to convince his companions to embark on a crusade, but Jim is unsure about the ethics behind this new idea, arguing that if he had a farm and someone wanted it, it wouldn’t be right for them to just take it like the so called crusaders. Apoplectic, Tom rejects Jim’s metaphor outright:

“It ain’t a farm, it’s entirely different. You see, it’s like this. They own the land, just the mere land, and that’s all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be there defiling it.”

Tom’s response surely strikes the reader as an inefficient defense of crusades, but it also inaugurates themes of epistemological uncertainty and imperialism. He rejects Jim’s metaphor as a means of knowing how Middle Easterners must have felt about invading Europeans. Throughout the novel the notion of metaphors as a means of knowing comes into play, which in turn affects how the trio see themselves as an invasive force.

Later, after the three have been riding the balloon across America, Huck uses his knowledge of of maps to try and pinpoint exactly where they are. Although they have been riding the balloon for quite some time, Huck’s surprised that they haven’t passed into Indiana yet. When asked why he thinks they haven’t passed Indiana yet, Huck logically observes that while the state of Illinois is green, Indiana is clearly pink. After all, that’s how it’s portrayed on maps he’s seen. Like the metaphor of the farm, Huck is relying on the map as a form of metaphor. It synecdochically stands in for the nation as a whole, but where Jim’s farm metaphor attempts the bridge the distance between Christians and Muslims, the map demonstrates ways in which metaphor can distance us from the reality of the object itself. Color coded states are a helpful shorthand, but they are clearly a fiction.

There’s a running theme of how distance, both figurative and literal, between us and the other becomes difficult to bridge through traditional modes of knowledge production. While reading Tom Sawyer Abroad, I eventually became frustrated by the fact that Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the damn balloon. One of the joys of these globetrotting nineteenth century adventure stories is how our western heroes get to visit new places and cultures. Of course, these cultures are always interpreted through the understanding of the white authors, often in wildly inaccurate and racist ways. But if we’re to look at Abroad as an anti-adventure novel, perhaps this is the point. There’s no uncovering of ancient artifacts from lost civilizations or opportunities to use superior wit to escape capture by the natives. Instead, the three of them much prefer to sit around and jaw with one another just as if the front porches of St. Petersburg, Missouri were transported to the Sahara Desert.

Because Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the balloon, they have a skewed perspective understanding of Africa and its people. It’s telling that Twain borrows the word “aeronaut” from Jules Verne, who he is clearly satirizing, but here he spells it “errornaut” (italics mine).

 To me, this seems to suggest ways in which this new technology allows individuals to more quickly and easily cast about the world while also maintaining a distance from the actual people who live in these “far flung” regions, keeping us just as ignorant as before we left our provincial town. I can’t help but compare the balloon in Abroad with drones sent by the military to places like Northern Africa and the Middle East.

We see both of these issues, the use of metaphor as knowledge-creation and the errornautical view of the world, collide in the chapter, “The Sand-Storm,” where the trio witnesses the destruction of a caravan of nomads violently tossed by a sandstorm. Tom and company were devastated by these deaths and felt like they had lost friends although they never actually met any members of the caravan.

For some time, the trio had followed the caravan with their air balloon, and as Tom says, “The longer we traveled with them, and the more we got used to their ways, the better and better we liked them.” Of course, they didn’t actually know any of the Africans below, so they granted them names, like “Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline Robinson” or “Miss Harryet McDougal.” Over time, the group became so familiar with these nomads that they decided it was okay to drop the misters and misses and other titles. Once again, Abroad is trapped between the remote and the nearby. Tom and the rest are capable of extending empathy towards outsiders from a culture and place foreign to them, but in order to do so, they must Anglicize these people. The Africans become Robinsons and McDougals.

Over the course of the novel, Tom, Huck, and Jim become accidental imperialists. At one point, Tom looks at all the sand that’s been gathering in their balloon and decides that it must be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Quickly, he sets upon a money-making scheme:

“[W]e can keep on coming back and fetching sand, and coming back and fetching more sand, and just keep it a-going till we’ve carted this whole desert over there and sold it out; and there ain’t ever going to be any opposition, either because we’ll take out a patent.”

The only thing that preventing Tom from embarking on literally stealing the desert sands of North Africa are tariffs, which he reasons would completely eat away at their profits.

But just as it’s easy to not only forgive Tom’s fence-painting scheme, but actually laud him for his ingenuity, Tom, Huck, and Jim are so genial, it’s easy to forgive or miss altogether the fact that they seem to be inadvertently colonizing countries they likely didn’t even know existed at the beginning of the novel. Needless to say, Tom Sawyer Abroad is a strange novel. I don’t think anyone expected Mark Twain to pump out a steampunk sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and after reading the novel, I’m not surprised that it’s fallen into obscurity. Despite the fact that the novel spans oceans and deserts, it seems strangely stagnant and claustrophobic. The novel is filled with contradictions like this, but in many ways Tom Sawyer Abroad is the kind of novel you enjoy the more you think and write about it. 

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I do think that there’s a lot of potential to adapt Tom Sawyer Abroad as a film. Hear me out. There’s no definitive film version of either Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, perhaps the closest being the 1938 technicolor adaptation. For whatever reason, both novels seem to resist adaptation, perhaps because of their episodic structure. But what’s the use in letting these instantly recognizable IPs lying around? People have heard of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and they’re in the public domain. Do I have to draw you a map?

But in all seriousness, I would be down for a steampunk, globe-trotting Tom Sawyer movie. And since the novel isn’t as precious as the first two, a screenwriter doesn’t really have any obligation to follow the book to the letter. It’s an invitation to let your imagination go wild. If Hollywood wanted to play it safe, they could just let Guy Ritchie do to Tom Sawyer what he already did to Sherlock Holmes. But I also think both Kings of Summer and Kong make Jordan Vogt-Roberts uniquely qualified for steampunk Tom Sawyer. This one’s for free, Hollywood.

On Pap Finn and White Trash

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn might be the most laid-back of any “Great American Novel.” It goes down as easy as iced tea on a summer day or a dry stout after a long day of work. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate the cover of Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (the copy I own) by Lilli Carre. Just look at how delightful that image is. Doesn’t it just invite you to take an adventure on the mighty Mississippi? And doesn’t it promise that the adventure will be fun, even exciting, but that in the end, no one will get hurt?

That’s not exactly true of the story itself. A few people die, including Huck’s drunken and abusive dad (who we’ll get to in a bit), but the story is so wrapped up in irony that when Huck once again teams up with Tom Sawyer in the final act in order to rescue the escaped slave Jim, Tom purposefully creates obstacles for the rescue so that it better resembles the adventure novels he’s read.

I mean, take a look at the inscription that opens the novel:

NOTICE.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

Per G. G. Chief of Ordinance

 

It almost makes it possible to not read anything into the novel, to refuse to peak under the veil, to plumb the subtext, and to just come along for the adventure.

But we can’t. No, it’s just not in our constitution. So when rereading Huck Finn after about a decade, I couldn’t help but draw connections between the world Twain crafted and our own. (By the by, G. G. in the above inscription likely refers to General Grant who Twain befriended. Twain even published Grant’s memoir.) Huck Finn draws a picture of a fragmented, inchoate nation. Its very geography speaks to differing, contested, and overlapping peoples, governments, customs, borders, and languages. The narrative spans the length of the Mississippi, a commercial byway that seems to be the only link to disparate, isolated communities. In other words, the world of Huck Finn is startling familiar to the United States of today.

Before we even get started on Huck’s trip down the Mississippi, Twain highlights the divided nature of America as embodied in speech:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” Dialect; and the modified varieties of this last…I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Through multiple dialects, Twain illustrates ways in which we barely speak the same language, and in fact language serves as much a means of division as a means of communication. Language attaches itself to geography, race, and class.

It’s the last of these that I want to focus on, specifically on Huck’s drunken, abusive father. It’s easy to see Twain as a champion of the lower class. He not only uses dialect, but he allows Huck to the be narrator of his own story, elevating him and his unique speaking style to that of the novel’s typically bourgeois subject who for so long nearly monopolized literary attention. It’s this populism that has lead to his canonization as a particularly American author.

But when we look at Huck’s father, Pap Finn, it’s clear that he’s burdened with many of the same stereotypes associated with the poor in America. He’s lazy, he’s a drunk, and he’s an unrepentant racist. In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg traces common stereotypes of poor whites from early colonization to the 21st century. She finds not only that America has always had some form of class system, but also it was commonly believed that that a permanent underclass was natural and right. Pap seems to reflect America’s belief that poverty is the result of individual failings.

There’s one striking passage where Pap expresses class and racial resentment against a well-educated black man who had the audacity to live in Missouri as a free man. What’s worse, the useless government didn’t even bother to enslave him:

“There was a free nigger there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane–the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think they said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home…I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?…Why they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months…They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months.” (36-7)

So many of the negative perceptions of poor whites that we associate with Trump voters are found in Pap. He’s resentful and embittered, and these feelings are directed towards blacks who he sees as his natural inferiors. This passage reminded me of a remark made by J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy claiming that many poor whites look at Barack Obama, see a successful black man with an established family, and feel angry and ashamed.

As mentioned in White Trash, there’s a long history of elevating African-Americans by comparing them favorably to poor whites. Isenberg point to the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine girls who were selected to attend the newly desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957. In the photograph, we can see Eckford calmly walking to school while a white classmate, Hazel Bryan, shouts at her from behind. The image is powerful. As Isenberg puts it, attempting to maintain her tenuous social and economic position above blacks Bryan became the face of white trash for most of America. There’s certainly truth in this reading, and it’s long underpinned our understanding of why poor whites would fight so aggressively for slavery during the Civil War when they could never hope to own slaves themselves. (Of course, there were exceptions, even back then).

Of course, focusing too intently on animosity between poor whites and blacks serves to distance middle and upper class whites from their own more genteel bigotry. We see racism as something that only the ill bred engage in.

At the same time, poor white racial animosity has long been used by the left as an explanation for why we lack the kind of class consciousness that’s found in Great Britain. Look at What’s the Matter with Kansas or the debate over whether Trump’s ability to flip the Midwest was a result of economics or racism. (Recent research has suggested that white voters were concerned about losing their status as whites, but I don’t think you can discount ways in which economic anxiety can reinforce racism).

In some ways, Pap demonstrates the tricky relationship progressives have with poor whites in the Trump era. We believe we should be sticking up for the economically marginalized while also acknowledging that racism drove many of these people (although certainly not all) to vote for an obvious huckster who represents the exact opposite of what we believe to be the best qualities of the nation.

So what do we do with Pap? It helps that he’s not the sole or even the most prominent representation of poor whites in the novel. That position, of course, belongs to Huck himself who purposefully flees bourgeois respectability. Perhaps it’s easier to handle the stereotypes embodied by Pap because he does not fully stand for poor whites, and Twain valorizes the dusty street urchin that headlines the novel.

There’s also an opening to read Pap as more than a simple stereotype. In one exchange with Huck, he tries to steer his son away from education. First, he asks his son to read in order to see if his son even knows how, and when he sees that Huck can read, he accuses him of putting on airs:

“It’s so. You can do it. I had my doubts when you told me. Now looky here’ you stop that putting on frills. I won’t have it. I’ll lay for you, my smarty; and if I catch you about that school I’ll tan you good. First you know you’ll get religion, too. I never see such a son.” (29)

There are different ways to interpret his fear of education. Certainly, he’s afraid of his social standing in relation to his son. For his son to be educated would mean an inversion of father/son norms as he understands them. There’s also a suggestion that Pap sees education as unmanly and unsuitable for a son of his. (At one point he calls Huck a “dandy.”). But I wonder if we can’t also read some genuine attachment.

Pap could be afraid of how education might transform Huck’s speech, driving a wedge between him and his son. Twain foregrounds language’s ability to divide, so it makes sense that this form of logophobia is on the mind of Finn the elder. As Huck’s language changes, he becomes a part of the bourgeois, and it’s interesting to note that Pap links education with religion here. In English departments we so often find common allies with characters who reject bourgeois norms, but Pap seems to test these limits. Still, we might see his tirade not simply born out of personal grievances or fear of losing what little socio-economic privileges he has, but rather developed out of a fear of losing his only son. We might consider whether such a monstrous character might also have room for affection within.

In 2007, Jon Clinch published a book, Finn, that follows Pap Finn prior to the events of Huckleberry Finn. Instead of humanizing and rounding out the character, though, he makes him even more gruesome and beyond our sympathy. I haven’t read Clinch’s book, but it is interesting to note that when so many retellings try to humanize the villain (see: Wicked and Maleficent), Pap is denied a similarly new perspective.

Pap Finn reminds us that liberals and the left have always struggled when it comes to poor whites. Often they are seen as enemies while also being the kind of marginalized group we should be working to help. But people can be complicated. A racist can also be economically disenfranchised; a poor white can also benefit from white privilege. As Huckleberry Finn still teaches us, race and class wrestle with each other in troubling ways.

On Why Netflix Should Play Ball with Movie Theaters

Netflix is in trouble. This might seem like a strange thing to say. After all, the company is nearly synonymous with the idea of streaming content (“Hulu and chill” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it) and is often trotted out as an ideal example of a “disruptor” in the media landscape. This means that entertainment journalists are fond of writing articles declaring the company’s genius and claiming that they are playing four dimensional chess against those rusty and outdated producers and distributors of “content.”

But it’s become more and more apparent that Netflix’s strategy is to deluge its users with content until they surrender. It’s waterboarding as a business plan, except in this case the water costs about a kajillion dollars. Or more precisely about $8 billion. That’s how much Netflix plans to spend on original content this year. But if you’ve ever spent time lingering on Netflix’s site, searching through its Netflix Originals, then you’ve recognized the poor junk to quality ratio.

Without a doubt, Netflix has had real success in television. Their greatest coup may have been realizing how many people love to binge watch and allowing viewers to gorge on as many episode as they want in a single sitting. But I’m a movie lover, and the area where they’ve really struggled has been with movies.

There have been triumphs, of course (Okja, Mudbound, and The Meyerwitz Stories to name a few). But be honest with yourself, how many Netflix original movies have you sat down and watched all the way through? How many were any good? I’ve been burned more than a few times myself. This has been disappointing because the Netflix model at first seemed to offer creative freedom to unique artistic voices, only to turn around and serve us something like Bright. (And if Bright signals a new direction for the company, then they’re well on their way to reproducing the same tired movies we’ve been given by every traditional studio.)

Recently, Netflix has transformed into a dumping ground for orphan films. We’ve seen a couple of big budget films quietly shuffled to Netflix because studios weren’t convinced that they could hack it in the movie theater market. First it was Cloverfield Paradox (which wasted a great cast) and more recently it’s Andy Serkis’s other Jungle Book adaptation, Mowgli. Just a couple of decades ago, two similar films from rival studios could duke it out on the big screen in the same year (see Armageddon v. Deep Impact and Dante’s Peak v. Volcano), but it looks like that’s no longer the case, in part because of Netflix. Audiences just have too many options, and watching a film with the same premise but from a different studio just isn’t as appealing as it once was.

This all speaks to the tense relationship Netflix has with movie theaters. Earlier this year, the company decided to take a few swings at Cannes after the film festival declared that films without a theatrical releases would be barred from competition. (Netflix could still theoretically show films at Cannes; they just wouldn’t be eligible for any awards). This lead Netflix to pull out of the festival completely.

For those reporting on the dustup, the narrative had already been written for them: the stuffy French were upended by Silicon Valley disruptors. It’s true that the French can be traditionalists. These are the people who have a government agency devoted to policing the French language, after all. They even have laws propping up their book stores against the incursion of e-books.

But there might be a different narrative at work: tech innovator chooses disruption over success. Cannes isn’t simply about honoring art. Like all film festivals, it’s also concerned with promoting the movie industry, including the cinemas where these films play on the big screen. Unlike Amazon Studios, who have a better track record when it comes to the kinds of films they produce, Netflix won’t play ball with cinemas outside of screening their movies briefly so that they qualify for the Oscars. Movie theaters, understandably, want a certain window of time between when films play in theaters and when they stream online, otherwise they’re simply helping undercut their own business. For its part, Netflix has argued that this window of time restricts their customers’ access to their content, and, after all, it’s their subscribers who are footing the bill for all these movies.

At the same time, a distinction within the culture has developed between a “real film” and a “Netflix film.” Whether Netflix likes it or not, theatrical distribution adds an aura of legitimacy. Although I wouldn’t go as far as Steven Spielberg who has claimed that Netflix films are nothing more than TV movies, they still don’t feel like events in the same way that big theatrical released often do.

Arguably, I suppose this distinction might evaporate over time. It used to be that a celebrity had to go to Japan in order to film commercials lest American audiences see them shilling for American Express and think that their career was on the skids, but today Sam Jackson can hawk credit cards while also headlining movies. American audiences don’t automatically assume that his career is over. In some sense, Netflix is betting that something similar will happen with films. They will no longer be elevated in the same way that celebrities once were. Movies will become just more content that can be distributed through a variety of channels, which ultimately matter little to the consumer.

For film lovers, this might sound like a nightmare scenario, but I think it might even be harmful for Netflix in the long run. Let’s say that the distinction between a theatrical film and a Netflix film does disappear. If you decide you want to watch a movie, then you still have to figure out which movie is worth your time. Traditional media outlets and film festivals are still important avenues for drumming up advertising for movies. If a film gets good buzz and Sundance and by entertainment journalists, then it’s going to become more familiar to audiences. This ecosystem still matters, even if it’s distilled through places like Twitter and Rottentomatoes.

Netflix likely hopes that the old guard doesn’t matter much anymore. After all, why trust some critic trying to make use of a journalism degree (or worse, a film degree) when you can generate recommendations with an algorithm. I mean, algorithms are much better than people. That’s just math.

Unfortunately, Netflix’s algorithm sucks. I might like Westerns, but I’m not interested in Adam Sandler’s Ridiculous Six, Netflix. And I can’t be the only one who finds last year’s revamped thumb-based recommendation system less accurate than the old five-star-based recommendation system. I know that not everyone has their two or three favorite film critics. Plenty of viewers just coast on general word of mouth. But as it stands now, most Netflix movies don’t even have a presence on Rottentomatoes. That has to hurt visibility.

On some level, Netflix knows this is a problem. Recently, they made a failed bid to buy a movie theater company. This move at least acknowledges that Netflix would like a presence in cinemas, even if it’s on their own terms. And while Netflix’s entry into streaming was groundbreaking at the time, other companies are catching up. Right now Netflix has a deal to stream recent Disney films, but that’s going to come to an end, most notably because Disney also plans on launching a streaming service. At that point, Netflix’s original content will have to face off against a company that has several lifetimes worth of films released and marketed for cinema. How will Bright fare against the latest Marvel film?

We may already be seeing the seams tearing. Netflix’s stocks recently took a hit on Wall Street because they missed projected revenues. Of course, these blips happen all the time, but until recently, Netflix was the premiere streaming site. Now they’re getting squeezed on all sides. When you’re the up and coming new kid, it might be fun to call yourself a disruptor and throw around the word “algorithm” a lot. But Netflix is now an established company who would likely benefit from playing the game like an established company does now and again. That doesn’t mean that the company can’t find its own way of reaching and maintaining customers, but it does mean that in the near future, Netflix might have to choose between disruption and survival.

On Charles Chestnutt, The Conjure Woman, and Tricksters

In the classroom, I’m certain that photographs of Charles Chestnutt have been taught at least as often as his writing. Although he identified as black, Chestnutt could have passed as white, and at different points in his lifetime in different states he would have been legally deemed white or black. Chestnutt becomes a readily available example of the legal and cultural construction of race.

In fact, I myself am guilty of using Chestnutt’s photo in my own classroom but not his writing. I’ve shied away from assigning Chestnutt’s work to my non-English major freshman mostly because of his use of heavy dialect, which can be impenetrable for those with little patience and sometimes steers a bit too close to stereotype for modern readers.

But maybe I should reconsider because after recently reading The Conjure Woman, Chestnutt’s first novella, I was struck by its wit and subtleties. The Conjure Woman is actually a series of short stories, plantation folk tales where supernatural men and women are able to cast spells and transmogrify people into plants and animals. These tales are told by an old former slave, Uncle Julius, who relates them to his employees, a married carpetbagger couple from the North who moved to North Carolina because of the wife’s medical condition.

The plantation tale has an uneasy history. Perhaps the most famous plantation tale is the story of Br’er Rabbit, which was written down by folklorist Joel Chandler Harris as a part of his Uncle Remus stories and later adapted into a cartoon by the infamous (and out of print in the U.S.) Disney film Song of the South.

 

(I’ve always found it strange that the Br’er Rabbit story from Song of the South was used as the theme for Disney World’s Splash Mountain roller coaster. Granted, it’s a great coaster, especially since Disney World has so few roller coasters for slightly older children, and it was definitely a highlight of the park when I visited as a child. But considering the fact that the story contains a subtextual connection to slavery, it’s certainly not the most obvious Disney property to be given its own ride at the happiest place on Earth. You would think that someone would have thought about changing the ride’s theme sometime between now and the coaster’s initial opening in 1989. I mean, I hear they’re changing the theme of The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney’s California Adventure. Yep, they’re removing all the fun Twilight Zone paraphernalia, including the creepy but totally appropriate back-from-the-dead Rod Serling, and replacing it with a Guardians of the Galaxy theme. It’s corporate synergy at its finest. Well, I guess that’s progress.)

But Chestnutt’s plantation tales balk at this idyllic view of the past conjured up by plantation stories and antebellum nostalgia littered throughout the cultural landscape in films like Gone with the Wind and in the literal landscape in the more than 700 Confederate monuments and statues. At first glance, the storyteller, Uncle Julius, looks like those harmless, buffoonish elderly black men. But the stories he tells reveal the real economic violence inflicted on enslaved people.

In one story, for instance, a slave is cursed to age and deage with the seasons. So as the weather grows colder, he grows older, losing his hair and become more and more feeble. But when the weather turns nicer, he becomes deages, regaining his youthful vigor. Observing this strange phenomena, the plantation owner doesn’t hesitate to profit from his slave’s condition, selling his “property” during the summer, and then buying him back at a lower price when he ages in the winter, essentially selling short on his own slave. In another story, a slave is transformed into a tree, which is then used to build a schoolhouse.

These stories have elements of body horror, as the schoolhouse is literally built from the body of a slave. They remind us that people and things become interchangeable under a slave-economy.

The dark undercurrent of these tales goes unnoticed by the white carpetbagger husband, although his wife may have an inkling that these fantastic stories carry with them a kind of truth. And while the overarching narrative of The Conjure Woman is written in the first person from the point of view of the white northerner, Uncle Julius is at the center of the book, occupying plenty of real estate as he relays his folk tales.

And these folk tales rebuff the simple moral function that storytelling was supposed to provide during the late Victorian period. At times, even the wife balks at Uncle Julius’s tales because she can’t see the “moral of the story.” This speaks to a gap between how blacks and whites view the purpose of storytelling in the first place. Chestnutt is also interrogating the role of the trickster in black folk tales and this archetype’s function in a postbellum world.

Africa has a long corpus of trickster folktales. Henry Louis Gates Jr. used the trickster Eshu as an example of how African and African-American literature has a literary critical tradition in parallel with the Western canon. African folktales commented on and played around with narratives passed around between storytellers. Some Cherokee rabbit trickster stories hew so closely to Br’er Rabbit stories that it’s been suggested that his origin is Native American rather than African-American. Regardless, there’s something about the non-binary nature of the trickster that marks him as outside of the Manichean Dualism of Anglo-European storytelling tradition. The trickster may do bad or good, and he may even do good while trying to do bad. (Tellingly, Westerner audiences have a poor habit of associating these tricksters with the devil.)

In his book, Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde observes that tricksters are adept at crossing borders. And that’s certainly true of Uncle Julius. He’s a black man living in the postbellum white supremacist South and working for two carpetbaggers. His very survival is predicated on his ability to navigate the dangerous borders between white and black in America, which he does by relying on his powers of storytelling.

There’s a running gag in The Conjure Woman in which each story Julius tells results in him achieving some ulterior goal. After spinning a tale where a slave is transformed into a tree and subsequently chopped down as material for a schoolhouse on the grounds, the white couple decides not to use the schoolhouse lumber for a new kitchen. This frees up the structure to be used as a meeting place for his church congregation. When Julius’s grandson is let go by the husband because he’s found to be a careless worker, Julius tells a tale of a harsh master who gets his comeuppance, illustrating what happens when white folks “doan make no ‘lowance” for poor black folks. The wife decides to rehire Julius’s grandson (100).

Behind these narratives is a different understanding of the function of storytelling. The wife hears these stories and looks for a simple message and is open to Julius’s storytelling when she can find a moral. But after a particularly galling story, she rebukes Julius:

“That story does not appeal to me, Uncle Julius, and is not up to your usual mark. It is n’t pathetic, it has no moral that I can discover, and I can’t see why you should tell it. In fact, it seems to me like nonsense.” (127)

But coming from an African-American trickster tradition, Julius’s stories don’t work the way that the wife expects. The goal may be to simply entertain the listener, a common criticism of novels in the Victorian era. But as we see, these narratives also speak to how narrative and art function for blacks in a postbellum United States.

Julius must use the tools of the trickster, using storytelling not to reinforce culturally appropriate norms but to give him the ability to cross racial borders and move among whites. These stories are about and function as a form of survival. Without the power of storytelling and black art, Julius and his kin may not have made it this far while surrounded by white supremacists on all sides.

It’s further interesting that the carpetbagger wife would complain that Julius’s story wasn’t “pathetic” enough. For her, black art must focus on “the struggle.” The craftsmanship of the narrative itself and the sheer imagination involved in the creation of these stories are not enough. This is a limitation we still have, even when (or maybe especially when) it comes to academics. Our focus on identity has opened up whole new landscapes of criticism, but it can also limit our understanding and appreciation for art made by people of color.

 
And once you get used to the heavy dialect, the stories in The Conjure Woman pull you along. The imagery is phantasmagoric, and the plotting has a real rhythm to it. You never quite know how each narrative will end. It’s worth taking a moment to pluck these narratives out of their time and place and just admire their construction, the sheer craftsmanship of Chestnutt’s storytelling, before reflecting on the link between storytelling and survival.

On Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown

Early in Wendy Brown’s treatise on neoliberalism’s impact on Western democracy, Undoing the Demos, she turns towards Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. After a first term blindly attempting to find middle ground with the increasingly radical right, Obama’s second term marked a shift back towards the lofty liberal ideals that launched him into the White House in the first place.

As Brown notes, Obama appeared, finally, to be concerned with LGBTQ equality, after initially opposing gay marriage, our military quagmires in the Iraq and Afghanistan, clean energy, education, and the minimum wage, among other Democratic concerns. But when you look closely at how these issues were framed, it becomes clear that these now perennial liberal concerns were framed according to “economic growth or American competitiveness” (25). As a guide Obama laid out three questions: “How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills needed to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?” (qtd in Brown 25).

Here we see progressive values being defined through an economic lens. Gone are questions of equality, ecology, values, democracy, and fairness. We must promote clean energy not because our ideals call us to be stewards of the land; no, we must promote clean energy because if we don’t, then China will, and we can’t let them have an economic advantage.

In examining Obama’s second inaugural address, Brown demonstrates ways in which neoliberal thought has fully colonized all modern understandings, political or personal. It’s telling that the focus of Brown’s analysis here isn’t some conservative thinker, a Peter Thiel, a Milton Friedman, or a Koch Brother. In fact, Brown rarely engages with the stalwart defenders of capitalism in her book, preferring to focus her analysis on mainstream American liberals who better showcase ways in which neoliberal thought has seeped into all facets of how we understand ourselves, each other, and the world.

Brown’s correct in understanding that an engagement with the neoliberalism of Larry Summers rather than that of Ludwig von Mises would be far more fecund and relevant to our present situation. But what is our present situation? The term “neoliberalism” gets thrown around a lot these days, but what does it mean and in what way is it different from classical liberalism? Why isn’t Adam Smith’s good old invisible hand not enough these days? And what has this hand transformed into?

Brown smartly lays the groundwork for her terminology and differentiates neoliberalism from its less rapacious forebear. Examining early political economists, even those most closely aligned (rightly or wrongly) with naked self-interest and laissez-faire ideology, Brown uncovers nuance in their thinking that’s often missing from the caricatures they’ve been made out to be. Even someone like Adam Smith understood the limits of homo oeconomicus as the sum total of the human experience. As John Stuart Mill wrote, and Brown quotes, “no political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind are really [driven] solely [by] the desire for wealth” (qtd in Brown 97-8).

Moving from classical liberal thought to the kind of neoliberalism we’ve seen in the last thirty or more years, Foucault becomes our guide. Brown largely relies on the later writing of Michel Foucault, specifically his 1978-79 College de France lectures. Central to Brown’s argument is Foucault’s notion of “political rationality” or “governing rationality” as guiding, normative forms of logic that shape how we interpret society and ourselves.

The notion of “responsibilization” serves as a salient example of how these “common sense” beliefs affect our thinking. Brown defines responsibilization as “forcing the subject to become a responsible self-investor and self-provider” (84). I would imagine that after hearing that definition, most Americans would have a positive reaction to the idea of responsibilization without recognizing the implication this might have for, say, social security or medicare. Even arguably the most far-ranging liberal law past in America in the 21st century, “Obamacare,” is premised on the notion that most individuals must be responsible for purchasing health insurance. (This was one of the overriding conservative arguments for the similar law passed in Massachusetts by the Republican governor Mitt Romney.)

Neoliberal thought has completely consumed our ability to conceptualize outside of its terms. This is perhaps most evident when it comes to education in the U.S. After WWII, the U.S. embarked on a massive plan to expand educational opportunities to broad swathes of the country. The goal of this project wasn’t simply economic expansion. College students were to gain individual insight, become thoughtful citizens, and, yes, they were also supposed to go into various industries and grow the economy. Colleges and universities were also supposed to seek out knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Of the many contributions that higher education might play in the life of students, communities, and the nation, every single one of them today is subordinated to neoliberal logic. Higher education is now in the business of building homo oeconomicus widgets that can be easily inserted into industry.

Neoliberalism’s erosion of higher education’s ideals is clearly a topic close to Brown’s heart, since the neoliberal university is where she makes her home, but it’s not the only issue she tackles. In Brown’s analysis, neoliberal thinking has lead government to lose its ability to collectively tackle national and global crises. To define this process, she uses the term devolution, meaning that “large-scale problems, such as recessions, finance-capital crises, unemployment, or environmental problems, as well as fiscal crises of the state, are sent down the pipeline to small and weak units unable to cope with them” (131-2). She even spends most of a chapter interrogating the notorious 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision that opened up the floodgates that had previously put modest restraints on money in politics.

The one aspect of Undoing the Demos that didn’t quite sit well with me is how much oxygen is taken up by Michel Foucault. On one level, Foucault’s understanding of power and discourse as fluid notions that construct the subject’s understanding of herself seem important to Brown’s analysis; on the other hand, it’s not clear to me that Foucault entirely understood the immensity of neoliberalism. He wasn’t quite prophetic enough to see this new world coming. Brown herself acknowledges as much, noting that Foucault located the centrality of homo oeconomicus, but he didn’t foresee ways in which it would eclipse homo juridicus or homo legalis (85). But the all encompassing nature of homo oecnomicus appears to be a major thread of Brown’s argument, and I’m not convinced that Foucault needs so much space in her analysis. Foucault has cast a long shadow, and I like his work as much as the next overeducated humanities graduate, but we might be coming to a time where Foucault’s work has less relevance in the 21st century than it did in the 20th. A rethought and reinvigorated Marxist philosophy might be what we need today. That doesn’t mean that we need to dismiss Foucault completely, but it might be time to force him to surrender center stage.

Regardless, Brown’s writing is important as ever in understanding the world we now occupy. At bare minimum, she does as good a job as anyone in actually defining the pesky term “neoliberalism.” By reckoning with our neoliberal era Brown gives us the tools to actually see this new society as it is and recognize ways in which we have fallen away from the promises of democracy. In her lucid prose, Brown offers us a choice: it’s neoliberalism or democracy. The two can’t stand together.

On Tom Sawyer, Cats, and Water Nymphs

When I was ten, Tom Sawyer tricked me. Not only did he convince me to paint his aunt’s fence, a chore he was supposed to complete on his own, but he somehow got me to give him a big glass stopper and a tin soldier for the honor. I never forgave him.

Or at least that’s the only explanation I can think of for why I never actually sat down to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer until now. In fifth grade I was in a school production of the novel where I got to be one of the dummies who paint the fence, and I suppose I never got the love for a character who’s kind of a jerk. But just like Bart Simpson, America’s other irascible schoolboy, Sawyer has a heart of gold, never as bad as his parents or teachers might think in their moments of anger.

By now most people are nominally familiar with the basic outline of Tom Sawyer’s plot: his innocent courtship of new girl Becky Thatcher, his friendship with Huck Finn (and Joe Harper), his running away to an island in the Mississippi River with Huck (and Joe), his witnessing of Injun Joe committing murder, and his time lost in McDougal’s cave with Becky. But reading the actual book, it’s clear that Mark Twain isn’t interested in a tight plot so much as in creating a series of vignettes you might find in one of his public speeches.

In his “Preface” to the novel, Twain makes his goals plain. He plans is “to try pleasantly try to remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in” (vii). Tom Sawyer’s ability to capture boyhood even for men living over a hundred and fifty years after the events are supposed to take place, makes it the ur-text of male nostalgia. Without Tom Sawyer would we have the works of Stephen King, Our Gang, The Goonies, The Sandlot, Peanuts, and any other text where (mostly) boys construct an entire society outside the purview of adults.

But what I found most striking about first about Tom Sawyer in my first read through are the “queer enterprises.” Plenty are familiar with Leslie Fiedler’s essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,” where he posits an interracial sexual relation between Huck and Jim (arguably a bit of a stretch) as well as Ishmael and Queequeg (much less of a stretch). Fiedler’s essay was first published in 1948(!) and then later repackaged in the early sixties in his book Love and Death in the American Novel. But I had never previously read a queer take on Tom Sawyer, even though it’s ripe for such a reading.

It’s when Tom, Joe, and Huck flee to a small island in the Mississippi that most clearly presents a sexualized relationship between boys. Twain writes:

After breakfast they went whooping and prancing out on the bar, and chased each other round and round, shedding clothes as they went, until they were naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the shoal water of the bar, against the stiff current, which latter tripped their legs from under them from time to time, and greatly increased the fun. And now and then they stood in a group and splashed water in each other’s faces with their palms, gradually approaching each other with averted faces, to avoid the straggling sprays, and finally gripping and struggling till the best man ducked his neighbour, and then they all went under in a tangle of white legs and arms, and came up blowing, sputtering, laughing and grasping for breath at one and the same time. (150-1)

I can imagine that queer theorists took a look at that passage and said to themselves, “Naw, this is too easy.” The scene seems strangely reminiscent of the water nymphs John William Waterhouse would paint a couple of decades later.

The ages of Sawyer and his friends are never revealed, but it’s clear that they are at the age to notice girls. Sawyer, of course, pursues Becky Thatcher, even persuading her to get “engaged” by kissing him. Thatcher’s a bit incensed when she learns that Sawyer was previously engaged to another girl. This budding romance puts Sawyer and his friends at a crossroads where they must choose between each other and compulsory heterosexuality.

Perhaps the most common metaphor for the boys of St. Petersburg is that of a cat. A quick search shows that the word “cat(s)” appears in the slim volume of Tom Sawyer eighteen times. It’s a wonderfully layered metaphor. On the one hand, Sawyer, Finn, and Harper are like strays, resourceful and versed in the ways of getting what they want. But cats are also androgynous. Feline are often associated with women where dogs are associated with men. In this sense, Sawyer and his friends’ close association with cats speak to the fact that they are not yet, by the dictates of the 19th century, “men” in multiple senses of the word.

Much of Tom Sawyer’s plot revolves around McDougal’s Cave, which serves as a convenient psychoanalytical metaphor for the subconscious. The characters enter and exit the cave at several point, and within the context of Tom and his buddy’s island adventure, these journeys into the dark stand for exploration of unearthed desires. Tellingly, the climax of the novel occurs when Tom and Becky get lost within the cave and must navigate their way to the surface. This joint male/female journey becomes Tom’s means of establishing a heteronormative relationship, leaving behind his time on the island in the Mississippi and the queer relationships he developed there.

But Tom Sawyer refuses to fall into place as a tidy heteronormative journey. By the end of the narrative, after Becky and Tom are rescued, Injun Joe is dead, and Huck Finn is adopted by The Widow Douglas, Tom and Huck have one last encounter. Stifled by his structured life in his new home, Huck flees. Tom chases him down and promises Huck that all of this civilizing (read: interpellating into the heteronormative adult world) won’t be so bad, and that they will never give up their time together. In fact, when the time is right, they will form their gang in secret once again.

What’s so fascinating about Tom Sawyer when reading it for the first time as an adult is how obvious these queer themes are. In order to complete a queer reading, you barely have to break a sweat. How much of this, though, is a result of a modern reader who had to read queer theory in graduate school and how much of it would have been recognized by the Twain’s 19th century audience? Returning to Twain’s preface now, Twain’s words take on a new meaning: “part of my plan has been to try pleasantly to remind adults of what they once were” (vii). How many adults were reminded of queer lives lived outside the gaze of the heteronormative world? Perhaps this sort of scholarly work is nearly impossible. Even looking at the reception of Tom Sawyer at the time would yield little since book reviews would have been subject to the rules of discourse that at the time would have made such discussion verboten. So we’re left with a mystery. But even without a definitive answer, we can assume that the queer themes would have likely moved certain audience members with a sense of recognition and an understanding that their experiences are not singular, that they are not alone.

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This is the first of several reviews of Mark Twain’s series of books that feature Tom Sawyer and his friends. In total, he wrote four books that include Tom Sawyer and his best friend Huck Finn. I’ll tackle each one, examining whatever themes happen to catch my eye at the time.