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Use of Critical terms
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Use of terms
Kenneth Burke once argued that literary works are cultural practices that
relate in complex ways to other cultural practices, many of which can be
read effectively through the terms and practices that derive from literary
interpretation (qtd in Literary Terms ix). Frank Lentricchia suggests that
Burke's view posits that all interpretations of cultural practices rest
upon powerful assumptions and commitments, many of which are carried out
in terms of our critical language, and that the goal of raising our awareness
about everyday culture cannot be achieved unless these terms of interpretation
are themselves examined critically. In other words, if we use critical terms
as if they are self-evident truths or positions, what we do is reproduce
cultural and political assumptions rather than question them. Even the most
self-evident terms cannot escape the need to theorise the practices upon
which they are based.
For Thomas McLaughlin, the use of theory constitutes a shared commitment
to understanding how language and other system of signs provide frameworks
which determine how we read, and more generally, how we make sense of experience,
construct our own identity, produce meaning in the world. Theory, then,
gets at very basic questions that any serious reader must face. (1)
Certainly, theory is a contested site (which means that different critics
hold different views, and debate these views).
Contemporary theory recognises in a way that earlier theories did not, says
McLaughlin, that "ordinary language is an embodiment of an extremely
powerful and usually unquestioned system of values and beliefs; and that
using ordinary language catches you in that system" (2). What this
means is that the terms we use to discuss texts also catch us when we use
them unless we are careful about the "forgetfulness that comes with
habitual use" (3). In other words, all the terms we use "have
a history" which "shapes" what and how we read, and which
engages in larger social and political questions, whether we like it or
not.
For example, McLaughlin suggests that a term like "unity" meant,
for neo-classical critics, a "set of rules about the arrangement of
time, place, and action in a play"; for the Romantics, it meant infusing
a work with the personality of the author; for the New Critics, it meant
"a procedural principle which mandated that an interpretation of a
work account for all its detail as interrelated elements of a thematic or
formal whole" (4).
The term "unity," then, may mean any or all of these definitions,
and when we use the term we are participating in these. In other words,
the critical terms we use when discussing texts and the issues which arise
from them take part in social and cultural debates, and if we are not aware
of the commitments we make by using these terms, we will experience a sort
of blindness-that is, we will be committed to certain positions, whether
we like it or not, whether we know it or not.
Contemporary critical and theoretical debates, McLaughlin suggests, recognise
that literature is not a privileged domain or a realm of pure art but a
kind of writing which is "open to the same social entanglements and
limitations that condition all writing" (6). Consequently, literature
is "part of a process by which the values of society are communicated,"
a process in which readers produce meaning "by participating in a complex
of socially constructed and enforced practices." What this means is
that
Value and meaning do not transcend history and culture, just as literature
itself does not. Interpretation-the process of producing textual meaning-is
therefore rhetorical. It does not live in the realm of certain truths; it
lives in a world where only constructions of truth are possible, where competing
interpretations argue for supremacy. (7)
Literature, then, is produced within a complex cultural situation, which
means that both authors and readers, who are constituted by their social
placement, are defined "inside systems of gender, class and race."
Reading and writing, therefore, rely on "the values and habits of mind
that culture ratifies" (7). We cannot escape this no matter how much
we assert the primacy of the individual. As we shall see, however, the forces
of desire and the consequences of repression have ways of getting their
own back.
There are many terms which deserve close scrutiny but unfortunately we only
have the space to examine a few. For those of you who are interested in
pursuing this line of inquiry further, we strongly recommend Lentricchia
and McLaughlin's text Critical Terms for Literary Study. In what follows,
we will look at a number of terms: representation, narratives of community,
cultural orthodoxies, ideology, rationality/irrationality, race and gender.
We will then turn our attention to some of the critical orthodoxies which
relate to the texts which we will examine in the first few chapters of the
Study Guide.
Representation
The notion of representation might seem like an odd place to start, but
the questions which have beset this notion make it important to bring some
of the problems associated with representation out into the light, as it
were, very early. W.J.T. Mitchell argues that "Probably the most common
and naive intuition about literature is that it is a 'representation of
life'" (11). The reasons for this intuition are many and complex for,
as Mitchell suggests, the history of "representation," unlike
some other contemporary critical terms, goes back as far as Plato and Aristotle.
Mitchell notes that at its simplest level, representation has been a problem
for philosophers since they recognised that humans are "homo symbolicum,"
that is, creatures "whose distinctive character is the creation and
manipulation of signs-things that 'stand for' or 'take the place of' something
else'" (11). Language, of course, is the exemplary system of signs.
The problems for representation arise from the attempts to define it. Even
if we accept a simple definition of representation, as Mitchell does when
he says that "representation is always of something or someone, by
something or someone, to someone" (12), we cannot escape the inevitable
conclusion that representation always distorts that which it purports to
represent and that this distortion is inherent and inescapable.
Definitions have a habit of raising more questions than they answer: if
we use one thing to represent another, how can we be sure that nothing is
lost in the translation? how can we be confident that the system which gives
"life" to the representation, to use an old fashioned phrase,
such as language, mathematics, music and so on, does not distort the things
being represented? do the rules and characteristics of language (or the
sign system) themselves distort and/or construct the things being represented?
what should we know about these distortions? can they be measured? what
effect does being aware of these problems have on the claim that language,
discourse, literature, the novel and so on actually and accurately reflect
the things they represent? if we are prepared to be generous about the actuality
and accuracy of, say, language's ability to represent the physical things
about us even though we recognise that the word "cat" in no way
resembles "real" cats, what happens when we get to abstract things
like love, hate, power, politics, gender, race, ideology, and so on? what
clues and cues, if any, does the representation contain about the power
relations between the things being represented?
In short, the problems associated with representation are intrinsic to any
discussion of literature and/or theory/criticism. (For a more comprehensive
discussion of these problems, see W. J. T. Mitchell, "Representation,"
Critical Terms for Literary Study; and Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice,
Chapters 1-3).
Narratives of community
Sandra A. Zagarell argues that, in contrast to the allegedly "great
books" of the canon which take as their basic assumption that "great
literature is about the search for the self," there exists a non-exclusive
but nonetheless discernible genre which she terms "the narrative of
community" (250). Rather than seeing the self as a "transhistorical
entity," narratives of community
take as their subject the life of a community (life in 'its everyday aspects')
and portray the minute and quite ordinary processes through which the community
maintains itself as an entity. The self exists here as part of the interdependent
network of the community rather than as an individualistic unit. (250)
Zagarell suggests that the main practitioners of this genre are "white
women of the middle classes," and that they take individualism as a
point of departure rather than as a moment of arrival (251). Although it
is difficult to find novels which do not have elements of both (i.e. the
self and the community), Zagarell believes that it is possible to discern
a focus or emphasis on one or the other.
Zagarell believes that narratives of community seem committed to "rendering
the local life of a community to readers who lived in a world the authors
thought fragmented, rationalised, and individualistic" (254).
They do this by overlooking linear developments or chronological sequence
of plot, and by remaining "in one geographical place." Narratives
of community tend not to be focused as individualistic novels often are
on notions of conflict and progress, but rather they focus on process, tend
to be episodic, and deal with the "continuous small-scale negotiations
and daily procedures through which communities sustain themselves,"
which means that they exemplify "modes of interdependence among community
members." Consequently, local semiotic systems (from language to gardening)
are seen as "expressions of community history and values" which,
because these are contrasted with the so called "modern world,"
diminish the sense of difference between community life and the modern world
by giving voice to it.
Zagarell also believes that there are national differences at stake: poverty
in Britain is often seen as a consequence of the class system, whereas in
America where everyone is regarded as having an equal opportunity, poverty
is "understood as a consequence of personal capacity or luck"
(254). Zagarell notes that the novel is frequently regarded as a means of
articulating the interactions between the individual and society. Narratives
of community tend to give voice to the concerns of woman because novels
focused on the community show women's capacity to negotiate between the
so-called public and private spheres, to attend to voices other than their
own and to include these in their judgments and points of view, to deal
with the double-voicedness characteristic of all those who manoeuvre between
a subordinate culture and a surrounding, more dominant one (260).
The significance of Zagarell's view is that it highlights a particular focus
for a sub-genre of the novel, one that could be usefully applied to Stein's
"Melanctha," some of the stories of O'Connor, Morrison's The Bluest
Eye, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Esquival's Like Water for Chocolate.
However, Zagarell's view also highlights an inherent tendency within the
novel, which is to explore the tensions between the individual and the community.
At one level, this comes from the novel's propensity to focus on a character
or a number of characters, to place them in situations which take them out
of the norm (e.g. to show how they respond to some change in their circumstances
or fortune), and to situate them in social circumstances which influence
or are seen attempting to influence both their "character" (who
they are, their identity) and their actions (what they do and why). Even
those novels (such as John Irving's The World According to Garp) which work
against these conventions of the novel by attempting to subvert them in
a number of ways rely on either the characters and/or readers' understanding
of what constitute community norms and expectations.
Of course, someone's deviation is often another's norm. Nonetheless, the
role fiction plays in reinforcing and/or subverting the hegemonic notions
of American community relies on some understanding of the relation between
the community and the individual.
Cultural orthodoxies
How do the ideas which circulate around the hegemony of the "imagined
community" come to be embodied within texts? Raymond Williams suggests
that ideas which appear as conventions in novels are often difficult to
spot because they are or have become "orthodox" within a community
or group, which means that they tend to "take on more readily the appearance
of general truths or even of 'common sense,' 'maturity' or 'universal human
experience'."
This means that novelists who write with the grain of their society rely
heavily on ideas which are conventions, which then encourages readers and
critics to describe their novels as "non-ideological" (79). When
something is orthodox, in other words, we do not need to explain our assumptions
[why would we? We all know that (fill in with the target group-Blacks, women,
ethnic groups) are (fill in with current cliche and/or stereotype).]
Looked at in this way, we could argue that fiction always sets off in media
res, in the middle of things. Consequently, narrators assume certain things
about the world and about their readers. If they did not, it would be impossible
to say anything at all (i.e. they would need to explain absolutely everything,
explanations which would probably need further explanations, and so on).
Making assumptions, however, is not a trouble- or value-free practice.
What are some of these assumptions? Narrators assume that their readers
will not have to be told everything necessary to understand their narratives,
that readers will understand the language and narrative conventions used
in the text, and that readers will be able to distinguish between what passes
for orthodox cultural values and behaviour, and what doesn't. In this sense,
culture is embedded at every level of the text and is implicit in its every
reading.
What is a cultural orthodoxy? Orthodoxy refers to the act of holding "correct"
or normative views or positions at a particular moment in time. Orthodoxies
change as the "correct" views or positions change. Culture may
be used to describe a particular society's understanding of itself. Leaving
aside for the moment specific political and economic issues, cultural orthodoxy,
then, may describe a society's view of its religious, moral and ethical
standards as well as its normative understanding of acceptable patterns
of behaviour including use of language, dress, sexuality and so on.
Clearly, change can and does occur in any or all of these understandings
as well as in other issues associated with culture. It is also clear that
the use of a term like culture to cover a nation like America, with its
diverse peoples spread out over such a large tract of land, is problematic.
Is it possible to define or understand American culture as it is represented
in fiction? What would the debate about such definitions/understandings
look like? Is Benedict Anderson right in arguing that nations can only be
thought of as imagined communities?
If so, what does this mean for outsiders who "imagine" America?
for their understanding of how Americans "imagine" it? Does it
even make sense to speak about "American Culture" as if it were
unified and therefore knowable? Are there any points in common between Australian
and American culture which might be useful points of reference? What sorts
of subcultures exist in America? How do these challenge the cultural hegemony?
What happens when we add an historical perspective (i.e. examine nineteenth
century American culture)? What relations exist between reading practices
and cultural practices?
Despite the obvious complexity, some might say impossibility, of coming
to grips with the implications of some of these questions, fictional narratives
assert such orthodoxies in order to confirm, challenge, subvert and/or change
so-called orthodoxies. In other words, a narrative explicitly or implicitly
constructs a dialogue between its own point of view and those assumptions
which might be regarded as conventional or orthodox cultural wisdom.
If orthodoxy refers to the act of holding a "correct" view or
position of some aspect of culture, then fictional narratives undertake
to show these existing orthodoxies in a moment of crisis where they are
unable to explain, say, the real life experiences of certain characters
in certain situations. This could be said about all of the texts we will
be examining.
Cultural orthodoxies, then, are embodied in the very fabric of the text
itself, in narrative point of view, in characterisation, theme and plot,
in the dialogue of the characters, in the critics' reception of the text,
in the common sense or other reading approaches adopted by contemporary
or subsequent readers, and in the dialogue the text conducts with the cultural
orthodoxy represented within the text and with that represented by the intellectual
and cultural baggage of all its readers. Cultural orthodoxies imbue texts
with certain bundles of values or ideologies, and notions of "reality"
are themselves cultural orthodoxies.
Why would we want to note these points? Barbara Johnson provides a partial
answer when she argues that the orthodox reading practice of humanism "is
a strategy to stop reading when the text stops saying what it ought to have
said" ("Teaching Deconstructively" 140). She believes that
a more contemporary reading practice, which relies on the assumptions of
deconstruction, provides a stronger foundation for "a careful teasing
out of the conflicting forces of signification that are at work within the
text itself" because deconstruction shows that "a text signifies
in more than one way, that it can signify something more, something less,
or something other than it claims to, or that it signifies to different
degrees of explicitness, effectiveness, or coherence."
This means that "A deconstructive reading makes evident the ways in
which a text works out its complex disagreements with itself." Consequently,
as the text simultaneously asserts and denies its own rhetorical mode, a
deconstructive reading pays attention to what the text is doing "how
it means not just what it means" (140-141). In other words, "the
search for meaning" is illuminating and meaningful in itself: "One's
struggle with ambiguity and obscurity cease to be obstacles to reading:
they become the very experience of reading" (145). Meaning is not something
to be dug up: "it inhabits the very activity of the search." Indecision,
frustration and ambivalence are "the very richness and instructiveness
of the reading process" (145).
Ideology
In his text, Ideology: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton quotes a few lines
from Thomas Gunn about a German conscript who helped Jews escape from the
Nazis:
I know he had unusual eyes,
Whose power no orders could determine,
Not to mistake the men he saw,
As others did, for gods or vermin.
Eagleton comments: "What persuades men and women to mistake each other
from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology" (xiii).
This would appear to be an extreme definition of ideology, one which most
of us in a post-Holocaust society would easily recognise. John Stephens,
however, defines ideology much more broadly when he suggests that it is
that "bundle of ideas about the world, about how it is or should be
organised, and about the place and role of people in it," and he notes
that "We all have one, whether we are aware of it or not" (14).
Although not everyone would agree with Stephen's definition, it has the
advantage of being broad enough to account for our discussions so far. Eagleton's
and Stephens' definitions also alert us to another facet of the term: there
are many definitions of ideology, not all of them complementary. The term
ideology, then, more than most, is itself a site of contestation.
Eagleton, for instance, lists the following possible definitions "currently
in circulation":
(a) the process of production of meanings, signs and values
in social life;
(b) a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
(c) ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
(d) false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
(e) systematically distorted communication;
(f) that which offers a position for the subject;
(g) forms of thought motivated by social interest;
(h) identity thinking;
(i) socially necessary illusion;
(j) the conjuncture of discourse and power;
(k) the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
(l) action-oriented set of beliefs;
(m) the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
(n) semiotic closure;
(o) the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations
to a social structure;
(p) the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality. (1-2).
Clearly, an explication of these definitions would take some time (Eagleton's
text is devoted solely to this task), so we will have to restrict our comments.
As Catherine Belsey argues, ideology is not a "system" controlled
by faceless men, or a system of "ideas in people's heads." As
James Kavanagh suggests, certain mass media outlets and right-wing intellectuals
use the term ideology "pejoratively" in that they portray the
term as one which designates "some kind of especially coherent and
rigidly held system of political ideas" and which is used to identify
an individual or a group who wish "to impose an abstract, extremist,
intellectual-political obsession on a 'moderate,' mainstream political system."
In this sense, ideology is something everyone else has, but, of course,
we do not because we are "pragmatic" in our "common sense"
view of "reality" (306).
Belsey believes that ideology is a material practice which refuses to name
itself because it "exists in the behaviour of people acting according
to their beliefs" (56-57). This means that ideology is not simply a
set of illusions; rather, ideology is imaginary "in that it discourages
a full understanding of these conditions of existence and the ways in which
people are socially constituted within them" (57). In other words,
one of ideology's more insidious characteristics is that it naturalises
the ideas which go to make up the hegemonic "imagined community"
as "common sense," which means that we no longer see these views
as ideas open to debate and contestation but rather take them as more-or-less
immutable social facts. This, Belsey notes, is the "elementary ideological
effect."
John B. Thompson believes that ideology is "meaning in the service
of power," and that "the study of ideology requires us to investigate
the ways in which meaning is constructed and conveyed by symbolic forms
of various kinds, from everyday linguistic utterances to complex images
and texts" (7). For Thompson, any investigation of ideology should
focus not only on institutions as sites of power but also on the places
and spaces of everyday existence:
For most people, the relations of power and domination which
affect them most directly are those characteristic of the social contexts
within which they live out their everyday lives: the home, the workplace,
the classroom, the peer group. These are the contexts within which individuals
spend the bulk of their time, acting and interacting, speaking and listening,
pursuing their aims and following the aims of others. (8-9)
In other words, ideology concerns all of us in our everyday activities because
this is the place where our beliefs most affect our behaviour. Moreover,
in so far as literature attempts to reflect our "lives," it also
is ideological.
Eagleton concludes: "Ideology is less a matter of inherent linguistic
properties of a pronouncement than a question of who is saying what to whom
for what purposes" (9):
On the one hand, ideology is no mere set of abstract doctrines
but the stuff which makes us uniquely what we are, constitutive of our very
identities; on the other hand, it presents itself as an "everybody
knows that," a kind of anonymous universal truth. . . . Ideology is
a set of viewpoints I happen to hold; yet that "happen" is somehow
more than just fortuitous, as happening to prefer parting my hair down the
middle is probably not. It appears often enough as a ratbag of impersonal,
subjectless tags and adages; yet these shop-soiled platitudes are deeply
enough entwined with the roots of my personal identity to impel us from
time to time to murder or martyrdom. In the sphere of ideology, concrete
particular and universal truths glide ceaselessly in and out of each other,
by-passing the mediation of rational analysis. (20)
We do not have the space to explore this issue any further, but we believe
that it should be clear by now how the notion of ideology permeates both
the orthodox reception of the texts we will examine and the critical perspectives
which accompany these.
Ideology concerns the general material process of the production of ideas,
beliefs and values in social life, hence its interest for those who study
a primary embodiment of this process-literary texts. [For a more in-depth
discussion of ideology, see Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (Chapter
3); Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction; and. E.B. Thompson, Ideology
and Modern Culture.]
Rationality/irrationality
The battle between reason and everything which is considered to be non-reason
has a long history, and includes complications which need not concern us
here. However, we need to make some comment because many of the writers
we examine are, in some sense, working against the rationalist tradition-the
idea that the world is knowable and explainable using the so-called laws
of reason. Poe, Hawthorne and Melville, particularly, were working against
this tradition.
What is rationality? Philosophers such as Hume, Berkeley and Hegel all saw
the world as a series of signs (every object has a concealed meaning) and
symptoms (objects and events are signs of something that is neither here
nor now but will eventually happen and can be read in this way) which simply
needed to be explained for complete understanding to be attained. Berkeley,
for instance, believed that the world consisted of the infinite mind of
God, who had created both the finite minds of men and the ideas possessed
or experienced by these minds. The world, therefore, was a series of signs
which, when read completely, not only lead to absolute truth but also to
a closer knowledge of God and His purpose.
Poe, Melville and Hawthorne challenge this view by suggesting that the search
for hidden meanings is itself a cultural construction, a search which excludes,
covers-up and distorts anything which might be considered irrational or
violent. What the search for meaning produces is not explanation but ideas-those
things some form of hegemony believes "ought" to happen rather
than what "is" happening and how people relate and construct their
notions of "what is." Captain Delano in "Benito Cereno,"
for example, is a character whose reason functions within a "White"
paradigm such that he is incapable of thinking of the Negroes of the San
Dominick as possessing enough intelligence to stage a mutiny. Consequently,
he "rationalises" all the signs which point to such a conclusion
as evidence of the Spanish Captain's cultural and moral decay.
Umberto Eco suggests that the notion of rationality has taken a variety
of forms over time-everything from the ability to produce abstractions and
to speak through them, to a special faculty for knowing the absolute by
a direct view (Eco Hyper-Reality 125-130). Eco argues that a more contemporary
working definition of reason is the notion that "rationality is exercised
through the very fact that we are expressing propositions regarding the
world," an argument which accepts that language is a mediating factor,
for "even before making sure that these propositions are 'true,' we
have to make sure that others can understand them" (Eco 129).
We do this through "rules for common speech, logical rules which are
also linguistic rules." This does not mean that the discourse of reason
is univocal, however, for it is important to recognise that "there
exist also discourses (in dreams, in poetry, in the expression of desires
and passions) that mean several things at once, contradictory among themselves"
(130). What this suggests is that texts do not simply translate struggles
or systems of domination; they are themselves sites of these struggles.
To a certain extent, what Poe, Melville and Hawthorne tried to do was to
show that there is more to life than reason and the so-called "enlightenment"
(that period of the "flowering" of reason associated with the
mid-eighteenth century). What seems perfectly rational and reasonable to
one group may not only be anathema and irrational to another, but it may
also not bear too much scrutiny itself. Scratch below the surface of the
rational and reasonable and you often discover not enlightenment but class,
gender and race domination, a hegemony which denies difference, disavows
and stereotypes that which is not itself, that which is other.
Often violence is used as the means of maintaining the hegemony (for example,
Bartleby is "institutionalised"-violently restrained-because he
prefers not to participate in the hegemonic exploitation of his class).
Women and Blacks were not supposed to have the capacity to reason, so it
was only "reasonable" to exclude them from the public sphere and
from decision-making. So reason had not only a racial characteristic but
also a gender one. Rationality, then, is not so much the disinterested application
of reason as the exercise of power-a political weapon, a tool of violence.
Gender
Myra Jehlen notes that although gender is a term which designates sexual
identity and its associated characteristics, it is not necessarily correlated
with "sex." In other words, she says: "biological sex does
not directly or even at all generate the characteristics conventionally
associated with it. Culture, society, history define gender, not nature"
("Gender" 263). The assumption that whatever is masculine is "strong"
and "good," while all that is feminine is "weak" and
not so good has a long history. For example, in the eighteenth century Dr
Johnson wrote: "'a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his
hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at
all'" (qtd in Jehlen 264). Sexism does not have to be this overt to
be obnoxious.
Jehlen argues that all literature and criticism incorporate assumptions
about the nature of sexual identity, assumptions that, like the man who
discovered one day that all the time he had been talking he was in fact
speaking prose, "organise and even suggest critical perception"
(263). Questions of gender (and of race) have been so "naturalised"
within certain discourses that it takes such a recognition to bring them
out into the open. As Jehlen suggests: "Denaturalising the character
of women is part of a larger denaturalisation of all categories of human
character, which emerges as both a social and linguistic construction"
(264).
What this means is that if "gender is a matter of nurture not nature,
the character conventionally assigned men and women in novels reflects history
and culture rather than nature, and novels, poems and plays are neither
timeless nor transcendent" (264). In other words, "From the perspective
of gender, identity is a role, character traits are not autonomous qualities
but functions and ways of relating. Actions define actors rather than vice
versa. Connoting history and not nature, gender is not a category of human
nature" (265).
The problem Jehlen identifies here is that in literature, as in other fields,
whatever is masculine is seen to be "universal" in that "Man's"
experience defines the human condition. This means that women's experience
is relegated to a stereotyped sub-category, one that is not given the same
value or credibility as that associated with men.
In fact, so naturalised has the category of "universal" experience
become that it takes an effort to see that what is universal is inevitably
what is male. Jehlen calls this the "fantasy of transcendence"-the
view that "men embody the transcendent human norm"-and she argues
that to subvert this fantasy requires treading a fine line: those who argue
that the lived experiences of men and women are different run the risk of
reinforcing the stereotypical subcategories that the fantasy of transcendence
evokes; and those who argue that men and women have the same lived experiences
run the risk of enforcing the very category they wish to challenge by submerging
"the complexities of human difference" in a quest for a unity
of identity (264-265).
Consequently, Jehlen believes that "gender has emerged as a problem
that is always implicit in any work," which means that thinking about
the issues associated with gender functions as an "additional lens,
or a way of lifting the curtain to an unseen recess of the self and of society"
(265).
We do not have the space here to explore the implications of Jehlen's comments.
However, you might like to explore them yourself in your reading. In any
event, it is important to be cognisant of the issues she raises not only
when reading those texts, like The Handmaid's Tale and Like Water for Chocolate,
which specifically draw attention to similar issues, but also when reading
other texts where the issue is harder to define (as we do, for example,
in the chapter on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).
Race
Appiah argues that racism is the idea that certain groups called "races"
are discriminated against on the grounds that members of these groups share
certain "fundamental, biologically inheritable, moral and intellectual
characteristics with each other," characteristics, that is, which they
do not share with members of any other race ("Race" 276). These
characteristics are taken to be that race's "essence"; that is,
using the word "Negro," for instance, implies, at one level, black
skin and/or curly hair, but it also implies other characteristics which
may be a threat to the "non-Negro" race which uses the "racial"
category.
These characteristics, then, not only represent the fears and anxieties
about that race (racism invariably includes denigrations about allegedly
ungovernable lusts such as sexual lusts for Blacks, money for Jews, propensities
for violence and intractability, and so on), they also justify these stereotypes
by framing them in terms of loose morality and intellectual and cultural
inferiority.
Appiah provides an example of this racism from Shakespeare's play The Tempest.
Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, have taken over an island whose inhabitant,
Caliban, is forced to work as a slave and is kept in check by Prospero's
magic (literally-Prospero is a magician). At one point, Miranda says to
Caliban:
Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or another. When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race-
Though thou didst learn-had that in't which good natures
Cannot abide to be with;
Caliban here cops the lot. Not only is he shown to be an ungrateful, babbling
wretch, but he is also imputed to have an evil nature which cannot be changed.
He is slow to learn, and what he learns he puts to vile purposes.
Caliban's behaviour, which may indeed be obnoxious (albeit understandable
- he has, after all, been turned into a slave against his will), is not
personalised but racialised-that is, he is as he is because he comes from
a particular race (i.e. he is not of Miranda's race). Although this is not
shown in this passage, Caliban is interested in Miranda sexually (she is
the only woman on the island), and she shows her disgust at this possibility
here and elsewhere. (It might be interesting to compare Miranda's racism
with Captain Delano's in "Benito Cereno.")
The problem with racism, then, is that it emphasises difference as a means
of denigration and exclusion. As Appiah notes, none of this has any grounding
in empirical reality-not only have scientists not been able to establish
that "race" has any biological foundation, on the odd occasion
where a slight difference has been noticed, it does not reflect favourably
on the Whites.
(The Australian ophthalmologist Fred Hollows, for example, showed empirically
that, generally speaking, Aborigines have a higher visual acuity than Anglo-Saxon-Europeans-that
is, they could "see further" and with more accuracy-which means,
he believed, that because visual acuity is a function of the visual cortex,
and therefore a cerebral characteristic, Aborigines could be said to be
more developed cerebrally than Whites. Hollows used this not as a way of
asserting Aboriginal superiority but as a way of countering the racist view
that Aborigines are somehow mentally inferior to Australian Whites.)
Racism, then, is a question of belief; but beliefs can have serious consequences
however much they are themselves falsehoods. As Appiah notes "races
are like witches: however unreal witches are, belief in witches, like belief
in races, has had-and in many communities continues to have-profound consequences
for human social life" (277). (The issue of racism will be taken up
in our discussion of Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"; Gertrude
Stein's "Melanctha"; and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.)
Last updated August 1996
Comments to Dr John Fitzsimmons:
Phone: (079) 309240; Email: j.fitzsimmons@cqu.edu.au
Humanities Department
Faculty of Arts
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton MC Queensland 4702
Australia