Who is a Writer?

When asked the question “what do you do?” who is entitled to reply “I’m a writer”?  That’s the question animating an essay by Tom Coyne in the most recent issue of Notre Dame Magazine.  There are many fine things in Coyne’s essay, but the most interesting part of the issue goes largely unexamined: it’s that strange misfit between the verb of the question—what do you do—and the verb in the answer—I am a writer.  We gloss over the slippage from doing to being, because we live in a society that largely equates work activity with identity, but that equation is not obvious everywhere.

One of my great touchtones, when it comes to how identity is defined, is a moment from a conference I attended years ago, in which the Tanzanian scholar Joseph Mbele rose up and asked the assembled scholars, who had been talking about identity, when we would consider the criteria for identity—family, clan, tribe—that applied in the world he came from.  One did not, in the village of his youth, define oneself through an occupational identity so much as through a kinship network.  Even in Western societies, the notion that one’s identity is primarily a matter of work activities is of fairly recent vintage.  The scholars Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, in their excellent study Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, note that even in what was then the nation most advanced into modernity, England, it is only in the early to mid nineteenth century that work activity began to displace other forms of identity (such as “gentleman”) as primary terms of identity definition.  To a degree, this was because the economic conditions that drive us toward specialization had yet to become dominant.  As they put it,

 …tasks which are now specialized and seen only properly performed by experts, were then still vaguely defined.  The task or function was the focus, not a full professional identity.  People moved between activities and used a variety of ways to support their livelihood…. Both men and women had to balance their time and energy between a wide range of duties.

What is more, family identity was still, as far as official documents were concerned, more important than individual identity.  The census itself did not account for individuals, but for families, and from 1801 to 1821 “roughly categorized families as agricultural or in ‘trade manufacture.’”  But by 1831, “families were abandoned and adult males were divided into nine major occupational groups.”  If you were a man, you were starting to be defined by your work, and by 1851 it had become standard to equate “masculine identity with an occupation” (if you were a woman, there was some question as to just what you were—a question that animated a great deal of conversation and fuelled a great deal of activism).

So to answer the question “what do you do” with “I am a writer” (or dishwasher, or bond broker) is to already declare “I live in a gesellschaft rather than a gemeinschaft world,” a world of abstract economic relations rather than a world of concrete kinship bonds.  You live in a world where you are defined by your profession.

But is writing a profession?  For Coyne, the first answer seems to be “no,” if being a professional means living off the money earned by writing.  “[C]alling oneself a writer,” he declares, “has nothing to do with whether or not you have been paid as one” (one hears the poets of the world cheering in the background, their voices faint like those of the slain warriors Odysseus visits in the land of the dead).  But being a professional has always meant more than being paid.  As Burton J. Bledstein puts it in The Culture of Professionalism, a profession involves a certain kind of background and a certain ethos.  Traditionally, becoming a professional meant something like this:

During a fairly difficult and time-consuming process, a person mastered an esoteric but useful body of systematic knowledge, completed theoretical training before entering a practice or apprenticeship, and received a degree or license from a recognized institution.  A professional person in the role of practitioner insisted upon technical competence, superior skill, and a high quality of performance.  Moreover, a professional embraced an ethic of service which taught that dedication to a client’s interest took precedence over personal profit, when the two happened to come into conflict.

It’s an interesting mix of regulation and autonomy, isn’t it?  A self-policing entity, a profession maintains standards through institutions and certificates, and in so doing places itself above the standards of a marketplace—good medicine trumps good commerce, for the true professional (although this principle is sometimes, scandalously, in abeyance).  The thing about writing, though, is that for the vast majority of its history it has been extra-professional.  Indeed, one reason for the great growth in the numbers of writers in the nineteenth century is that, unlike many other paths through life, writing did not require any particular qualification or license, so it became a refuge for educated youth shut out of other fields (César Graña’s Bohemian vs. Bourgeois offers an excellent discussion of these issues).  Even now, when universities have made the MFA a credential for writing, and when many writers, including Coyne, work at universities that issue degrees in writing, the idea of the writer as a professional in the sense outlined by Bledstein has not become fully dominant.  The very title of a recent book on what it means to be a writer—MFA vs NYC—indicates that there are two prominent cultures of writing in contemporary America, only one of them close to the traditional idea of professionalism.

Coyne eschews the idea that one is a professional by virtue of being paid, and does not discuss the culture of professionalism as it is seen by social historians like Bledstein.  He does, however, distinguish the professional writer from the amateur by virtue of the professional’s attitude toward his or her writing.  “If you write when you don’t want to,” he says, “if you go back when it’s hard, if you pry open the laptop when you would rather be watching BBC America”—if you do these things, “you don’t just write.  You’re a writer.”  This is a bit of a grim picture: it’s almost as if to count as a writer, you have to be alienated from your labor, experiencing it not as fulfillment but as drudgery.  There’s certainly a work ethic here, but it seems to be imported from the more exploited forms of labor.  And it is through this ethic of drudgery that one earns the identity of the writer.

One wonders, though: if adopting this alienated attitude is the cost of claiming a writer’s identity, is the prize worth it?  Or might we borrow a page from Michel Foucault, who argued in History of Sexuality, Volume One, that it is possible to conceive of sexuality not as an identity, but as a set of activities?  Could we, when asked what we do, reply in terms of activity (the terms of the question, after all), rather than identity?  When asked “what do you do?” could we reply not “I am a writer” but “mostly, I write”?

It's Not What's in the Picture, It's Where the Picture Puts You: Cubism in Focus

Cubist painting puts a lot of people off, and, in a way, that's the point—but not in some sophomoric "let's shock our parents" way.  One of the main accomplishments of cubism is the way it dislocates the viewer, but to understand just how this works it's probably best to take a look at the highly developed mode of painting that cubism rejects—the kind of representational painting that relies on single point perspective.

It's not really a coincidence that this sort of painting comes into being in the Renaissance, reaches a zenith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and only really begins to be challenged in the nineteenth century.  Consider how the dates co-ordinate so well with what  Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, calls "the classical episteme."  This episteme, or way of organizing knowledge —incipient in the Renaissance, dominant around the mid-seventeenth century, and continuing on through late eighteenth century—reflects the ideology of absolutist monarchies.  The stress is on order, centralization, and sovereignty in all things: in politics, in theology, in economics.

Aesthetics is no exception: the Palace of Versailles and its gardens give architectural and spatial expression to the notion of a grand and centralized scheme, and order based on the location and prestige of the sovereign.  The king's inner chamber, and, in the final analysis, the king's body are the center of a world that points toward, and radiates out from, his presence.  The single point perspective that dominates representational painting during the classical era also reflects the values of centralization and sovereignty.  We see this not only in grand portraits that assert the power of absolute monarchs, such as Hyacinthe Rigaud's famous portraits of Louis XIV, but in the formal underpinnings common to so many paintings of the classical episteme.

As Christopher Kul-Want puts it, "In painting during this period (especially in southern Europe), the subject stands literally and metaphorically before the pictured world like an omnipotent God.  In Raphael's School of Athens, for example, a central space is reserved for the subject, who is both viewer and addressee of the painting." As a viewer, you know where you stand in relation to the image, and it's a place of command and access: everything opens up, available to you and directed at you.  In a sense, you complete the scene, and stand at the point that gives it order.  In the case ofThe School of Athens, you stand directly before the greatest and most central of philosophers, as if to command their conversation and interrogate them about whatever subject you wish.

In The Order of Things Foucault discusses Velázquez's Las Meninas as a culmination of the classical episteme in painting.  Here, we take the position of the sovereign: the mirror in the back reflects the images of King Philip IV and Queen Maria Anna — and we, as viewers, soon realize that we stand, quite literally, in the place of the sovereign.  We command the creation of pictorial space, since Velázquez paints himself here as someone who is in the process of painting a commissioned portrait of us (the little girl is visiting us while we sit for this portrait).  We are also, by virtue of the mirror with our reflections in it, at the center of pictorial space.  And, most importantly, we are in the privileged place of the spectator for whom all of the visual elements are ordered and displayed.  There's a lot going on in Velázquez's painting but, among other things, Las Meninas is a comment on the nature of pictorial space, and on the privilege granted to the viewer of single-point perspective representational paintings.  In this kind of painting, we, the viewers, are kings, and gaze with mastery over all we survey.

There's a long, slow breakdown of the classical episteme, and many of our cultural landmarks are both symptoms and causes, of that breakdown.  Consider Isaac Newton's Principia: Newtonian space is a far more potent challenge to the classical episteme than Galileo's decentering of the earth in favor of the sun ever was.  If space is the neutral, ever-extending field Newton theorized, it lacks a center, and therefore is impossible to hierarchize: every point is as significant as every other point.  Or consider Voltaire's "Micromégas," a story in which a centuries-old, 20,000 foot tall creature from an enormous planet orbiting Sirius visits the earth, along with his 6,000 foot companion from Saturn.  Their contempt for the tiny inhabitants of our planet, and the philosophical reflections that stem from differences of scale in space and time serve to displace our sense of our own centrality and sovereignty.  A more familiar example of the relativizing of our perspectives and values comes in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which helps spell the death knell for the theology and political thought of the classical episteme—even though Swift himself was none too happy about the decline of the old values.

But I digress.  This is about Cubism.  And one thing that Cubism does is to displace the viewer from the privileged space he occupied during the classical episteme.  Whether it's a matter of presenting a profile view with both eyes visible as if in a frontal view, or a matter of representing the many different planes that might form the entry point into a painting, Cubist paintings find ways of not letting you assume a steady place from which the represented objects can be seen clearly.  In the Cubist world, we're no longer able to see from a position of sovereignty and command: we're no longer that important.  What is more, we're forced to confront the fact that it is not possible to survey the world from a vantage point that makes everything available to us.  Every imaginable perspective is partial, every perspective leaves something out.  Things in themselves are visible to us only in bits and pieces, in stolen glances.  Cubism denies Matthew Arnold's old ideal "to see life steadily and see it whole," and asserts something more like what E.M. Forster asserts when, in Howards End, he tells us "it is impossible to see modern life steadily and see it whole."  We can, like Forster's Mr. Wilcox, see it steadily but in a very limited fashion, or we can, like Forster's Margaret, see it whole.  Cubism is a kind of Margaret, offering the whole only by shaking it up into bits, and placing us in an unsteady position.

To understand painting of the classical episteme, we could stand in a position of sovereignty and command a view of the objects before us.  To understand Cubism, we have to stop asking what's been put into the picture, and start asking where the picture puts us.  ​

Otherness and Empathy: Harvey Kurtzman’s War Comics

I don’t remember much about the war comics I read as a kid, in part because I didn’t read them the way I read Tintin or Asterix (obsessively, slowly, repeatedly).  I couldn’t read them that way, because they weren’t mine: they belonged to the kids whose family had a little cabin next to my family’s weekend place on a lake a couple of hours into the enormous conifer and rock-outcrop forest of the Canadian Shield.  The Reichert kids were older than I was, and had lived in England for a while, and kept a stash of English and American war and horror comics in a back room of the cabin, and sometimes, when our family was visiting theirs, I’d sneak into that back room and hurriedly read through a comic or two with a flashlight.

The horror comics were a mistake: I’d always rush home and try to forget about the terrifying images by reading Asterix, but it never did any good, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night convinced that the sound of the wind in the branches could only be the wailing of corpses risen from the grave.  But the war comics were fascinating: full of guys punching out heavily armed enemies with nothing but the oversized knuckles on their spectacularly rendered fists, or jackbooted Nazis and commies marching in lockstep against our side’s ragtag bands of can-do misfits.  I do remember one exception: a grim tale of a Vietnam veteran returned home after a bad injury in the jungle, only to face social rejection, unemployment, a girlfriend who’d left him while he was away at war, and finally a crippling drug addiction.  In the end, he tries to commit suicide, but when he pulls the trigger of his old service revolver, nothing happens, and a mysterious man appears to explain that he can’t take such an easy way out: he died in the jungle, and this America to which he’d returned is hell.  But by and large the pages of Nick Fury and His Howling Commandos, Smash! and Sgt. Rock took a more gung-ho tack.

This early experience of 1970s war comics conditioned my expectations when Michael Robbins pulled a nicely produced hardcover of Corpse on the Imjin! And Other Stories by Harvey Kurtzman from his courier bag and passed it to me in the departmental lounge one evening (he’d written a review of the book for The Chicago Tribune).  Kurtzman wrote—and, frequently, illustrated—many issues of the EC comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat during the 1950s, and I expected to find simple jingoism like I’d seen in the comics I’d read growing up.  I mean, these were comics about war during a time when America was at war in Korea, when Cold War propaganda was picturing a red under every bed, and before we’d had the hard national disillusion of Vietnam.  But instead, I found something rather different.  Perhaps because Kurtzman had been a soldier himself during the Second World War (though not a combat infantryman), his stories tend to be defined by two characteristics: an acute sense of the suffering of all soldiers; and a sense of the essential irony of war.  That is: the soldiers in his stories aren’t the sort who’d shout “go get ‘em, boys!” and charge down an enemy machine gun nest.  Rather, they’re people whose boots aren’t good enough for the journey, who hunger, who are plagued by fear and lack of sleep and more fear and by naïve courage that lasts exactly up to the point of first contact with the enemy.  Which is also exactly as long as the best-laid plans of officers lasts: armies plan, in Kurtzman’s stories, and the gods of war laugh.  More often than not, soldiers are caught in their own traps, or by their own illusions.  And it’s not just minor characters who perish: protagonists die, sometimes quickly, sometimes alone and in pain.  At least one critic, Ng Suat Tong, writing for Comics Journal, has complained that Kurtzman presented war as “gentle, dignified, and bloodlessly pleasant”—to be perfectly honest, I do not know how he could experience Kurtzman’s stories, in which we watch corpses float down rivers, see the laboriously built homes of innocent farmers destroyed by mere chance, and witness the slaughter of P.O.W.s by their captors, in this light.  If this is dignity and pleasantness, I shudder to think of indignity and pain.

There are, to be fair, occasional moments where we hear the false note of jingoism —“America is a way of life... and as long as we believe in good we can’t go wrong!” But generally Kurtzman is better than that, even in a format that openly panders to the audience’s prejudices (the last panel of many stories consists of a little message like “That’s it readers!  Did you enjoy this magazine?  Your letters give us an idea of what you like to read so won’t you please write us and tell us what you liked and why!”).

What’s most interesting is the sympathetic treatment Kurtzman gives to the Chinese and North Korean experience of the war, in comics for an American market published during the war itself.  Although Kurtzman doesn’t get into the political issues behind the war, he does treat the ethics of individual combatants, and in doing so he refuses to elevate the Americans above their Chinese and Korean opponents: both are shown as capable of dehumanizing their enemies, both are capable of great loyalty to their fellow soldiers, and of self-sacrifice, not for some abstract cause, but for the other guys in the unit, in the hopes of getting everyone back home safely.

One story, “Air Burst!” is told from the point of view of Chinese soldiers in a dangerous retreat after a failed offensive, and they are treated with exactly the same level of sympathy one sees in Kurtzman’s stories about American G.I.s.  Unlike the faceless German soldiers of Sgt. Rock, these guys have nicknames, they carry each other when wounded, they’re individuated, with some being kinder or more skilled than others, they suffer from terror during shelling by Americans, and, like the Kurtzman’s G.I.s, their fates can be ironic—in the end, one is killed by the trap his squad set to slow the American pursuit of their retreat.  Here, we've moved beyond the sympathetic to the empathetic, in that we don't just feel for the Chinese soldiers, we feel through them, are asked to see through their eyes and feel what they feel.  We become them, to the degree that we become Jane Eyre or Huck Finn or any other protagonist with whose plight a story asks us to identify.

Or almost.  There's one major stumbling block to our identification with Kurtzman's Chinese soldiers: the way he represents their speech.  Kurtzman's American G.I.s speak as realistically as he could make them, given the anti-profanity restrictions placed on publications by the Comics Code Authority.  But his Chinese soldiers, for all their humanity, speak a stilted, formalized version of English.  "Let us pause a moment" one will say, "Why do you stop, Lee?" another will ask. Then an airstrike that would have caused one of Kurtzman's Americans to shout "hit the deck!" makes a Chinese soldier call out "fall to the ground!" and then "we shall give the Americans a taste of shrapnel."  Seeing an American observation plane, another soldier calls out "he circles us!" and "let us run!"— you get the idea: no slang, no contractions, the kind of thing the writers of Star Trek did when writing for Spock or Data.  The idea seems to be to present the Chinese characters as exotic, and this interferes with the attempt to give us their experience and their point of view, since they are exotic only to us, not to themselves.  If they come across as exotic, we are taken out of their lived experience, and reminded of their otherness.  We are no longer fully experiencing their point of view.

The easiest thing to do would be to dismiss this as a kind of failure of imagination on Kurtzman's part, but the more I think about Kurtzman's representation of Chinese speech, the more I can see a point to it.  In fact, it has some of the characteristics most admired in postmodern translation theory.

Consider this passage from Michel Foucault's essay on Pierre Klossowski's translation of the Aeneid:

It is quite necessary to admit that two kinds of translations exist; they do not have the same function or the same nature. In one, something (meaning, aesthetic value) must remain identical, and it is given passage into another language.... And then there are translations that hurl one language against another... taking the original text for a projectile and treating the translating language like a target. Their task is... to use the translated language to derail the translating language.

That is, some translations seek to appear as if they were written in the new language: to make a version of Goethe, say, that seems like a work originally written in English.  This is the most commonly held sense of what a good translation looks like, and I confess that I've often thought of good translation in these terms.  When, for example, I read a translation from the French that stays too close to the Latinate side of English, using "submarine rock formations" rather than "underwater rock formations" for the French "formations rocheuses sous-marines," I tend to sneer at this as a bit prissy.  But there's another kind of translation, one that aims to retain the sense that the translated work was written in another language—this is Foucault's "projectile" translation.

The late Antoine Berman, one of the most influential and controversial translation theorists of the last thirty years, elaborated on this second kind of translation in an essay called "Translation and the Trials of the Foreign" (the title comes from Heidegger's discussion of Hölderlin's strange translations from the Greek).  Here, Berman describes a type of translation that maintains a strong sense of the original language's difference from our own tongue, and aims "to open up the foreign work to us in its utter foreignness" by "accentuating its strangeness," which is, paradoxically, the only real way of "giving us access" to the foreign text as such, that is, as a foreign text.  The idea is to maintain a sense of strangeness in the translation, thereby preventing the reader from erasing the real, existing otherness of the original text itself.

Kurtzman, of course, isn't translating anything—he, not a Chinese author, wrote 'Air Strike!" and he wrote it in English.  But the representation of Chinese speech as a marked English, as something other than idiomatic, native-speaker stuff, may be taken as an attempt to maintain for us a sense that the people he is depicting are not simply Westerners with slightly different bodies: they come from another culture, and speak another language, and his representation of their speech keeps this always in front of us.

There's a case to be made against this kind of speech representation.  When I see pop-culture depictions of Native Americans, and they speak a kind of hyper-formal, dignified, contraction-free, unslangy English, I always rankle a bit, because it seems like this involves a flattening out of the emotional and expressive range of the characters.  They're not talking like the Cree and Blackfoot kids I knew growing up in western Canada, kids who were capable of wackiness, low diction, fast-talk, and as full a range of human affect as you or I.  But if Berman is to be believed, there's also a case for a kind of speech representation that marks difference as difference, that refuses to allow us to forget the foreignness of the foreign.  If we proceed on Berman's assumptions, then we can see "Air Strike!" as a combination of a Chinese point of view—inviting empathy—with speech effects that remind us that the empathy we're feeling is an empathy that stretches across cultural divisions.  And that's a subtle move—far subtler than many of us have been willing to attribute to something in the often maligned form of the old-school comic book.