Teaching: May 2009 Archives
Ralph Ellison
Bryan and I have often thought how nice it would be if Writing New York were a full-year course rather than a semester-long course. One book that we would add to the syllabus is Ralph Ellison's marvelous novel Invisible Man, which I think is one of the great literary achievement s of the twentieth-century. At 581 pages, however, it seems like too much to ask our students to read in a week -- although I seem to recall that we did precisely that at the school where I was a graduate student. And given the chronology of our course it would have to be mid-April, already a rough time of year. Still, it's tempting ...
When the novel opens, our narrator - the "invisible man" of the title - is speaking to us from a basement in Harlem, or rather, a "border area" somewhere near Harlem: "My hole is a warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer's dream night."
The narrator arrives in New York at about p. 157. "How do you get to Harlem," he asks a Red Cap at the train station. "That's easy ... You just keep heading north." A few page earlier a black veteran warns the narrator about the dangers of the city:
"New York!" he said "That's not a place, it's a dream. When I was your age it was Chicago. Now all the little black boys run away to New York. Out of the fire into the melting pot. I can see you after you've lived in Harlem for three months. Your speech will change, you'll talk a lot about 'college,' you'll attend lectures at the Men's House ... you might even meet a few white folks. And listen," he said, leaning close to whisper, "you might even dance with a white girl!"Invisible Man is the first novel that we're reading in my summer graduate course on U.S. Fiction after 1940, which began this evening. One of the questions I asked, in order to set up our discussion of the novel for the next class, is what difference the New York setting makes to the novel. What do you think?
The New York setting certainly made a difference to Ellison. In a 1981 introduction to a reprinted edition of the novel, Ellison wrote: "In retrospect it was as though writing about invisibility had rendered me either transparent or opaque and set me bouncing back and forth between the benighted provincialism of a small village an the benign disinterestedness of a great metropolis. Which given the difficulty of gaining authorial knowledge of this diverse society was not a bad discipline for an American writer."
How would the addition of Invisible Man affect the stories we tell in Writing New York, particularly the one about the city's cosmopolitan traditions? I'll have more to say on that score on later in the week.
As Bryan wrote earlier this week, we decided to end our Writing New York class on a dystopian note, with Frank Miller's graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns rather than on a more hopeful note as we've done in recent years -- with the blessing that concludes Tony Kushner's play Angels in America.There's a way, though, in which we did manage to give Kushner the final word -- or, perhaps more appropriately, the final question. Because the final question on the final examination for the course was framed by a quote from Kushner:
This city is an example of a fantastic and completely unworkable variety of cultures, and consciousnesses, and generational differences, and sexual preferential differences, all living together in one place and forming a peaceable kingdom, a workable government, a real democracy, and creating a city that is genuinely an exciting civic space.The quote comes from the supplementary materials included on the DVD version of Ric Burns's New York, and we invited the students to think about its implications in one of a number of different ways.
One topic arose from the idea of New York's "variety of cultures": we invited students to talk about ways in which different works on our syllabus had represented the interactions of enclaves, subcultures, or countercultures.
The second topic focused the idea of variety around the idea of cosmopolitanism, asking students to think about the promises and limitations of cosmopolitanism as dramatized in works we had read or seen during the term.
Students could also elect to talk about the implications of Kushner's idea of the "fantastic," by discussing the use of "realism" -- whatever they took that to mean -- and alternatives to it that we encountered over the course of the semester.
Finally, a fourth topic picked up on the slight tinge of uneasiness implicit in Kushner's statement. We suggested that, optimistic as it seems at first glance, Kushner's quote does suggest that there may be something dark or "unworkable" about New York City, and we invited students to thinking about works on our syllabus that dramatize New York's failure to make good on its utopian promises.
I guess we did end on a dystopian note after all.
Which of these questions did most of our students choose to answer? And what were some of the most interesting things that they wrote in response to the exam as a whole? We'll let you know later in the week.
Louis, Hannah, Prior, and Belize in front of Bethesda Fountain
One of the hallmarks of true cosmopolitan thinking, according to Kwame Anthony Appiah, is the idea of fallibilism -- "the idea that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence." Cosmopolitans value conversation because they know they're not perfect, that they don't have all the answers. It is by listening to others -- listening and being open to having our minds changed -- that we can discover where we may be wrong. And by talking to others that we can test our own beliefs and knowledge.
What stymies cosmopolitanism? Fundamentalism of any kind, because the fundamentalist believes that he or she has all the answers and isn't interested in conversation. The cosmopolitan believes in the necessity of talking and being willing to have your mind changed: what is the cosmopolitan to do then when faced with someone who won't talk and whose mind is completely made up?
There's another danger for the cosmopolitan, this one self-inflicted: provicinialism, or rather the cosmopolitan's scorn for the provincial. Bryan wrote here last summer about Rudy Giuliani's address to the Republican Convention: he was struck by Guiliani's pejorative use of the term "cosmopolitan." The people that Giuliani was addressing are the same people that Thomas Frank describes in his study of contemporary U.S. conservatism, What's the Matter with Kansas (2004): "People in suburban Kansas City vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of New York and Washington, D.C.; people in rural Kansas vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of Topeka and suburban Kansas City." Rural Kansas is provincial and proud of it. (I invoked Frank's statement last summer when writing about the anti-cosmopolitanism of one John Rocker.)
But cosmopolitans need to come clean: they tend to despise the provincials as much as the provincials despite them.
The test of the true cosmopolitan is the willingness to learn from everyone: even from the fundamentalist and even from the provincial.
For me that's the significance of Kushner's use of Mormonism in Angels in America: they're both fundamentalists and provincial. Kushner's Roy Cohn insults his erstwhile protege Joe Pitt by calling him "Dumb Utah Mormon Hick Shit," but as anti-liberal is Cohn is, I'm sure it's a sentioment that many good liberals share despite themselves.
Joe remains a provincial at the end of the play, but his mother,, Hannah, who enters the play as the archetypal out-of-towner, dragging two suitcases and lost in an outer borough -- she changes. She becomes a New Yorker, a process that the film version dramatizes effectively. (Check out Meryl Streep's fashionable hairdo above.)
But the longtime New Yorkers learn something from her as well: it's Hannah who tells Prior about the significance of the angel of Bethesday, and Prior invokes knowledge in the closing moments of the play -- in yet another affirmation of the play's commitment to cosmopolitanism.
What stymies cosmopolitanism? Fundamentalism of any kind, because the fundamentalist believes that he or she has all the answers and isn't interested in conversation. The cosmopolitan believes in the necessity of talking and being willing to have your mind changed: what is the cosmopolitan to do then when faced with someone who won't talk and whose mind is completely made up?
There's another danger for the cosmopolitan, this one self-inflicted: provicinialism, or rather the cosmopolitan's scorn for the provincial. Bryan wrote here last summer about Rudy Giuliani's address to the Republican Convention: he was struck by Guiliani's pejorative use of the term "cosmopolitan." The people that Giuliani was addressing are the same people that Thomas Frank describes in his study of contemporary U.S. conservatism, What's the Matter with Kansas (2004): "People in suburban Kansas City vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of New York and Washington, D.C.; people in rural Kansas vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of Topeka and suburban Kansas City." Rural Kansas is provincial and proud of it. (I invoked Frank's statement last summer when writing about the anti-cosmopolitanism of one John Rocker.)
But cosmopolitans need to come clean: they tend to despise the provincials as much as the provincials despite them.
The test of the true cosmopolitan is the willingness to learn from everyone: even from the fundamentalist and even from the provincial.
For me that's the significance of Kushner's use of Mormonism in Angels in America: they're both fundamentalists and provincial. Kushner's Roy Cohn insults his erstwhile protege Joe Pitt by calling him "Dumb Utah Mormon Hick Shit," but as anti-liberal is Cohn is, I'm sure it's a sentioment that many good liberals share despite themselves.
Joe remains a provincial at the end of the play, but his mother,, Hannah, who enters the play as the archetypal out-of-towner, dragging two suitcases and lost in an outer borough -- she changes. She becomes a New Yorker, a process that the film version dramatizes effectively. (Check out Meryl Streep's fashionable hairdo above.)
But the longtime New Yorkers learn something from her as well: it's Hannah who tells Prior about the significance of the angel of Bethesday, and Prior invokes knowledge in the closing moments of the play -- in yet another affirmation of the play's commitment to cosmopolitanism.
Emily the Nurse (Emma Thompson) and Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) in the film adaptation of Angels in America, directed by Mike Nichols.
I wanted to share one of my favorite scenes from Angels in America with you. Bryan mentioned it in lecture on Wednesday. It's the beginning of Part II: Perestroika, Act Four: John Brown's Body, Scene 6.
It features Prior Walter, one of the play's protagonists, who is dying of AIDS, his nurse-practitioner Emily, and Hannah, who is . . . well, you'll see.
Night. Prior, Emily (Prior's nurse-practitioner) and Hannah in an examination room in St. Vincent's emergency room. Emily is listening to his breathing, while Hannah sits in a nearby chair.The scene is an example of the play's humor, but it also reinforces an important idea that runs throughout the play: the idea of cosmopolitanism.
EMILY: You've lost eight pounds. Eight pounds! I know people who would kill to be in the shape you were in, you were recovering, and you threw it away.
PRIOR: This isn't about WEIGHT, it's about LUNGS, UM . . . PNEUMONIA.
EMILY: We don't know yet.
PRIOR: THE FUCK WE DON'T ASSHOLE YOU MAY NOT BUT I CAN'T BREATHE.
HANNAH: You'd breathe better if you didn't holler like that.
PRIOR (Looks at Hannah, then): This is my ex-lover's lover's Mormon mother.
(Little pause.)
EMILY: Even in New York in the eighties, that is strange.
New York emerges in Kushner's play as a cosmopolitan space of transformation. It's all about learning to embrace difference and change. Bryan cited one of my favorite concepts these days, what the philosopher Anthony Appiah calls "cosmopolitan contamination," in opposition to the idea of cultural purity. Bryan suggested that in a play about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the idea of contamination as an inevitable and perhaps even necessary part of cultural change has an even greater force than it might if considered in the abstract.
Here's what Appiah says about contamination in an article from the New York Times ("The Case for Contamination," New York Times Magazine, January 1, 2006), which was adapted from his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006):
Angels in America is all about learning to do things differently, and the play understands the transformative power of conversation. The play, after all, ends with a conversation -- or rather two. The first conversation the conversation among four friends who have come together against all odds: Prior, the AIDS survivor; Louis, his ex-lover; Hannah, his ex-lover's lover's Mormon mother; and Belize, a gay African American male nurse who serves as the moral compass of the play. The second conversation is between Prior and us, the audience: it's the one that ends with the blessing that Bryan cited in a previous post.
Living cultures do not, in any case, evolve from purity into contamination; change is more a gradual transformation from one mixture to a new mixture, a process that usually takes place at some distance from rules and rulers, in the conversations that occur across cultural boundaries. Such conversations are not so much about arguments and values as about the exchange of perspectives. I don't say that we can't change minds, but the reasons we offer in our conversation will seldom do much to persuade others who do not share our fundamental evaluative judgments already. When we make judgments, after all, it's rarely because we have applied well-thought-out principles to a set of facts and deduced an answer. Our efforts to justify what we have done - or what we plan to do - are typically made up after the event, rationalizations of what we have decided intuitively to do. And a good deal of what we intuitively take to be right, we take to be right just because it is what we are used to. That does not mean, however, that we cannot become accustomed to doing things differently.
And I think it's important the Prior uses the word "citizens" in the moments before he utters that blessing: "We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come."
What Prior is evoking is the idea of the world-citizen, a fundamental concept for cosmopolitan theory. It's the idea that each of us has a fundamental obligation to humanity as a whole. The time has come, Prior is telling us, to step up and be cosmopolitan, to be citizens of the world, to take responsibility for the way in which the world spins forward. That, in my reading, is what the play's final line -- "The Great Work Begins." -- ultimately signifies.
Meryl Streep as Prior's ex-lover's lover's Mormon mother, Hannah.
