I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss Susan Hill, given the strong feelings I have for the classical English supernatural tale as manifest from the Victorian era through to the first few decades of the Twentieth century. Perhaps it’s because I have a general dislike for pastiche in literature (if not in other genres) and, in the postmodern age in particular, I tend to find it an excuse for failing to make up an original plot and/or use an original style (while the often anachronistic attempt at adoption often merely puts the skill of the writer being pastiched into an even more flattering light). None of these faults, however, are to be found in Hill’s ghostly novella.
The Woman In Black – set in the early part of the twentieth century, where cars still vie with pony traps – is told with the classic framing device of the elderly reflection on a terrifying and traumatic event of youth; the occurrence in question is the visit of Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, to lonely Eel Marsh House. The house, with attendant crumbling cemetery, lies on a piece of land far out in the windswept salt marshes, accessible only by a causeway which is periodically covered by the rising tide. Kipps is in the process of going through the papers of Mrs Drablow, the late unlamented inhabitant of Eel Marsh House; but when he sees an emaciated woman in unfashionable black clothes at the funeral (getting only surly hostility from the locals on questioning), and starts to hear strange noises from across the marshes and from the locked room at the end of the passageway, things take a turn for the sanity-destroying.
As that précis indicates, all of the ingredients of the supernatural tale of terror are present here, as are James’ five key features of the English ghost story. Hill herself has indicated that her earlier novels are ‘serious,’ while her latter works, including TWIB and her Serailler detective series, do not fall into this category. Certainly it could not be said that TWIB is an original piece (though we might also say that of many of the ‘classical’ works of supernatural fiction), but it stands as a consummate example of an art which might have been considered lost in the age of torture porn and gritty realism. Indeed, we might ask whether originality is an important demand in genre work. Hill’s writing is fine (in the best sense of that word, and in contrast to the lonely setting), despite the frequent comma splices (but please ignore my soapboxing a pet peeve), rising to more poetic heights in some beautiful descriptions of landscape and atmosphere:
Away to the west, on my right hand, the sun was already beginning to slip down in a great, wintry, golden-red ball which shot arrows of fire and blood-red streaks across the water. To the east, sea and sky had darkened slightly to a uniform, leaden grey. The wind that came suddenly snaking off the estuary was cold.
Am I wrong in thinking that, mood-wise, the echoing spaces and sudden emotional stabs of The Cure circa Seventeen Seconds/Faith/Pornography (that is, in the same period as TWIB was written) would be an appropriate soundtrack? Rosemary Jackson, bringing a feminist analysis to Hill’s work (more on this anon), has suggested ‘coldness’ as its imaginative centre, and the tension between detachment from and desire for life as fundamental. The themes here are the ‘sensational’ passions – possessive love, revenge, fear, memory – refracted in sharp shards through the mirror of the past, a liminal demarcation (reminiscent of James’ own story 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad') which takes form literally in the flat sea surrounding the house, stressing the inaccessibility of the recollected, and the dangers both of the alluring yet treacherous waters of forgetfulness, and those of painful recollection – a double Charybdis which in either case leaves the overcurious subject isolated and, ultimately, suffocated.
In this sense, there is an aspect of the ‘psychological ghost story’ to TWIB, manifest in a not-so-pathetic fallacy, which is heir to works like de Maupassant’s The Horla or even Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (though without that work’s prescient questioning of perception itself) – and we might associate this existential alienation, resolved but never quite forgotten or overcome, with the dislocated temporal position of the narrator, trapped between old certainties and modernist innovations, with the house both as a space of security from the external world (the classic Victorian model), and as manifestation of anxiety - in being, on the one hand, the place par excellence for the determination of (cultural) capital, and, in this case, empty, that is, both void of any audience for such a display, and signifying the growing bourgeois realisation of the ultimate emptiness of the endeavour of wealth accumulation and conspicuous consumption.
On this note, class issues – fluidity and the lack thereof – are central to the landscape here. Class transformation is evident in the narrator’s own trajectory (given in the framing story), and a symbolic moment occurs when he transforms, in the eyes of a friendly but unsophisticated, new-moneyed landowner local, from suave young solicitor to dishevelled and fearful victim of the irrational. Beyond this, the fact that class mores were a determining factor in the events which led to the haunting is made explicit in the text – figuring, in other words, the (equally oceanic) arriviste on a lonesome road (one whose lonesomeness is only exaggerated by the many who tread it yet dare not recognise each other), desiring yet dreading to turn his head to see the ‘frightful fiend’ of class ignominy (a common theme in the sensation novel).
This anxiety – the prevailing mood of both the psychological ghost story, and of modernism itself and those who literarily anticipated its concerns – is also manifest in gender relationships. The narrator here moves in a masculine world of solidity (and reassuring, if undesirable, stolidity) while the appearance of the feminine in the text foreshadows catastrophe and unknowability – whether the unseen Mrs Drablow, the ‘woman in black' herself, or Kipps’ fiancé, Stella, who remains offstage and undescribed virtually throughout. One of M. R. James’ rules for the ghost story is the absence of gratuitous bloodshed and sex, and while this is certainly the case here (and while not wanting to emphasise overmuch the repressive hypothesis), nonetheless the events in question are put in motion by the sexual act (not to mention the absent father) - and the attraction-repulsion between the narrator and the ‘woman in black,’ who is a fallen woman both in the sexual and soteriological sense, who is both punished and who punishes, who is caught textually somewhere between the figure of the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural mother’ – certainly holds a strong sexual charge, the most obvious manifestation of which occurs in his discernment of the traces of beauty in her wasted features. One might ask, is there a scent here of the unnamed ‘wasting disease’ – the highly sexualised consumption, perhaps – as a punishment for sexual and maternal misconduct? It might be drawing too long a bow to recognise here the advent of HIV/AIDS, but it certainly resonates with the historical moment in which the novel was published.
Meanwhile, the counter-balancing feminine forces, equally without character – the remembrance of the maternal care of Kipps’ mother and his nurse, the warm asexual figure of his latter-day wife – certainly play into a narrative of the saviour Madonna in contrast to the unnatural whore or the barren hag. But I wouldn’t by any means say that this is a novel in which there lies concealed a misogynist narrative – rather, that these tropes of the supernatural genre, in the hands of a female writer (not that that necessarily counts for mitigation), are played upon and indeed complexified in their emotional import. Indeed, we might read the presence of these ‘silent women,’ and the reasons for their silence, as a statement in itself.
In order to appreciate TWIB, however, it’s not necessary (though it’s certainly enjoyable) to analyse the ways in which this work is a reflection on the sensibilities which shaped the classic ghost story, as filtered through the lens of the early 1980s (a period in which the gothic was once again beginning to take hold of popular culture). In short, what we have here is a worthy heir to James, Le Fanu, Mrs. Gaskell and the other luminaries of the luna-nary canon.
Showing posts with label illness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illness. Show all posts
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Wilkie Collins - Poor Miss Finch (1872)
While it's one of Collins’ lesser-known works, Poor Miss Finch does not fall into the category of his ‘thesis’ novels, and it remains a work with much to offer the reader. It does not measure up to the heights scaled by some of his other novels, but unlike those pieces, this is a novel which has, not characterisation and intricate plotting, but philosophical, and, specifically, phenomenological exploration as its central strut. Nonetheless, we are not without the sensational, gothic and grotesque aspects which characterise Collins’ work – the double (a recurrent theme), hideous disfigurement, the exurban gothic setting of an isolated house in a remote corner of the country (though accompanied by that staple of Victorian fiction, the picaresque village), and a plot driven by crime, multiplying and improbable coincidence, and a sense of fated doom.
The narrative concerns Lucilla Finch, a young blind woman, and her suitor, the good-natured but weak and quick-tempered Oscar Dubourg, as well as his more worldly twin, Nugent. The story is related by Madame Pratolungo, a companion to Lucilla and a former South American revolutionary – who represents here, along with the eye surgeon Herr Grosse, an example of Collins’ problematic depictions of ‘foreigners’ (we might think of Professor Pesca in The Woman In White), as well as the occasional vehicle of somewhat misogynistic views, but is nonetheless a sympathetic character. Perhaps the most famous aspect of this tale is the treatment Oscar takes for epilepsy – silver nitrate, which turns his skin a metallic blue-grey. The work is subtitled 'A Domestic Story,' and Collins (who, like Dickens, had a highly unorthodox domestic situation, but who, unlike Dickens, was open to the presentation of radical sociosexual moral critique) treats us to a hideous parody of the lower-upper Victorian bourgeois family in the Finch rectory, a former nunnery.
The plot is at times artificially melodramatic, and hence the characters somewhat frustrating, although from a feminist perspective Lucilla is a very atypical Victorian heroine – strong willed and with a definite personality (even if at times more stereotypically irrational and emotionally labile) – but the gothic and melodramatic aspects can also be relished, in the setting (an isolated downland house) and the dénouemont (a wild chase to avert a marriage schemed up under the auspices of deceptive identity, the latter being another characteristic Collins theme).
But unlike many of Collins’ other works, the concern here is not only with identity in terms of appearances which are deceptive because misrecognised (treating here another typical Collins project, the converse characteristics and complex emotional bonds of the double), but also with the way in which identity is created by perception – in particular, in Lucilla’s travail between blindness and sight, and the implications for her character and state of mind. Collins did a great deal of research into blindness for the work, and it was written in a period in which explorations of perception and ontology, with particular reference to blindness, had been budding in the work of philosophers such as Locke, Molyneux, Diderot and Bishop Berkeley (Collins did a great deal of research into the medical aspects of the work, both accounts of blindness and recovered sight, and the treatment of epilepsy with silver nitrate).
In a deeper sense, then, the novel is one which questions deeply-held assumptions about ‘affliction,’ happiness and the human condition, and further, mutual intelligibility – Catherine Peters’ introduction quotes Shaw: ‘do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.’ Peters also notes that Collins’ project, well achieved, was not to show blindness in the typical Victorian sentimental mold, but in the light of human reality – and the sometimes frustrating aspects of Lucilla’s character may be an inevitable outcome of this approach.
Even more so than his better-known novels, this is not a piece without flaws – and those which are characteristic of Collins are the most magnified. But it is also a thought-provoking text and one which is fascinatingly unusual both within Collin’s already outré oeuvre – due to its philosophical concerns – and within the Victorian canon itself.
The narrative concerns Lucilla Finch, a young blind woman, and her suitor, the good-natured but weak and quick-tempered Oscar Dubourg, as well as his more worldly twin, Nugent. The story is related by Madame Pratolungo, a companion to Lucilla and a former South American revolutionary – who represents here, along with the eye surgeon Herr Grosse, an example of Collins’ problematic depictions of ‘foreigners’ (we might think of Professor Pesca in The Woman In White), as well as the occasional vehicle of somewhat misogynistic views, but is nonetheless a sympathetic character. Perhaps the most famous aspect of this tale is the treatment Oscar takes for epilepsy – silver nitrate, which turns his skin a metallic blue-grey. The work is subtitled 'A Domestic Story,' and Collins (who, like Dickens, had a highly unorthodox domestic situation, but who, unlike Dickens, was open to the presentation of radical sociosexual moral critique) treats us to a hideous parody of the lower-upper Victorian bourgeois family in the Finch rectory, a former nunnery.
The plot is at times artificially melodramatic, and hence the characters somewhat frustrating, although from a feminist perspective Lucilla is a very atypical Victorian heroine – strong willed and with a definite personality (even if at times more stereotypically irrational and emotionally labile) – but the gothic and melodramatic aspects can also be relished, in the setting (an isolated downland house) and the dénouemont (a wild chase to avert a marriage schemed up under the auspices of deceptive identity, the latter being another characteristic Collins theme).
But unlike many of Collins’ other works, the concern here is not only with identity in terms of appearances which are deceptive because misrecognised (treating here another typical Collins project, the converse characteristics and complex emotional bonds of the double), but also with the way in which identity is created by perception – in particular, in Lucilla’s travail between blindness and sight, and the implications for her character and state of mind. Collins did a great deal of research into blindness for the work, and it was written in a period in which explorations of perception and ontology, with particular reference to blindness, had been budding in the work of philosophers such as Locke, Molyneux, Diderot and Bishop Berkeley (Collins did a great deal of research into the medical aspects of the work, both accounts of blindness and recovered sight, and the treatment of epilepsy with silver nitrate).
In a deeper sense, then, the novel is one which questions deeply-held assumptions about ‘affliction,’ happiness and the human condition, and further, mutual intelligibility – Catherine Peters’ introduction quotes Shaw: ‘do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.’ Peters also notes that Collins’ project, well achieved, was not to show blindness in the typical Victorian sentimental mold, but in the light of human reality – and the sometimes frustrating aspects of Lucilla’s character may be an inevitable outcome of this approach.
Even more so than his better-known novels, this is not a piece without flaws – and those which are characteristic of Collins are the most magnified. But it is also a thought-provoking text and one which is fascinatingly unusual both within Collin’s already outré oeuvre – due to its philosophical concerns – and within the Victorian canon itself.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Barbara Ehrenreich - Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & The World (2009)
Place your hand on your heart and say…
‘I admire rich people!’
‘I bless rich people!’
‘I love rich people!’
‘And I’m going to be one of those rich people too!’
If you find this a chilling statement, you’re not alone. In her new work, Barbara Ehrenreich’s target is ‘positive thinking’ in the United States (although the situations she describes will be familiar, though in some cases somewhat less extreme, to those in other societies). In eviscerating this ideology she traces its inception from a rejection of Calvinist roots in the New Thought of the nineteenth century (here we might think particularly of Transcendentalism and Christian Science) – the first flower of American ‘alternative culture’ – simultaneously arguing that the Calvinist 'predestination' model in which failure is a demonstration of blameworthy unworthiness, and the psyche must be continually examined for signs of ‘sin’ (now under the guise of ‘negativity’) remains the basic form of this discourse. In the present day, positive thinking has become manifest in ‘self-help,’ motivational literature and speaking (both personal and economic), psychology, life coaching, and in relation to physical and mental health and wellbeing. Each of these are evaluated in turn – and, while Susan Sontag’s writing is more high-brow and more spare, the way in which she evaluated a particular ideology across a number of different spheres, pursuing ideas from one intellectual stratum to the next, is a good point of comparison for Ehrenreich’s work here.
Ehrenreich’s starting point is the application of ‘positive thinking’ to illness, and, particularly, cancer – her own experience with breast cancer leads her to question both an ideology which, while seeming helpful or at the least innocuous, in fact leads to the placing of a huge burden on the subject as well as a blame-the-victim mentality (on the part both of fellow subjects – in this case cancer-patients – and non-subjects, each in denial about their ultimate lack of power and control). She also takes this as a starting point to debunk the science of ‘positive thinking’ and demonstrate the way in which dodgy evidence has been spun into the present-day equivalent of unquestionable folk wisdom: ‘research demonstrates.’
But Ehrenreich is not content to leave the issue here. Her next target is the economic sphere, to the individualism of this discourse on the terms of which the poor may be blamed for their poverty (conveniently dovetailing with the Horatio Alger myth), in which circumstance and context are discounted as factors influencing outcomes, in which recklessness is encouraged (optimism can be dangerous, if it leads to underestimation of risk) and which means that, in the post-industrial age of downsizing and the super-CEO, the way to manage a mistreated, unmotivated workforce is not to improve their conditions, but to insist on ‘positivity’ as a necessary aspect of work, no matter how unjust the treatment dished out from above. Meanwhile, the spiritually-framed anti-intellectualism of this discourse (and here again the crossover with New Ageism is apparent) means that celebrity CEOs are encouraged to act, not think, with disastrous consequences for others – and a groupthink mentality is created in which the rule is to shoot the messenger, leading to unforeseen crises from the response of Iraqis to the invasion of their country, to the credit crisis. The capitalist, and, now, neo-liberal ideology of perpetual growth ties in neatly with the ‘positive’ maxim that one should never be satisfied with one’s present circumstances.
According to this hegemonic ideology, criticism of massive and growing economic inequality can be suppressed not externally but internally, as the individual comes to believe that such a view is damaging to their own success – and their optimism leads them to politically reject brakes on conspicuous wealth accumulation as they envisage themselves as the rich-in-waiting. In other words, positive thinking creates a false consciousness (though Ehrenreich doesn’t use the term) which demands the cheerful acceptance of economic subjugation, justifies inequality both for those who enact it and those who are subjected to it, and stymies any recognition of, and hence resistance to, this process.
Christianity, too – at least in some forms – is deeply implicated in this mess. The present-day mega-churches, founded on market principles of determining what the customer wants (not to be lectured about morality or punishment) have jettisoned Biblical theology in favour of a prosperity gospel which sees individual material rewards – right down to praying for a table to be free at a restaurant – as the inevitable outcome of a positive attitude. The connection between religion and commerce is clear here inasmuch as, on the one hand, mega-rich televangelists preach material success as the reward of faith, rather than any otherworldly salvation, while their churches provide ever-growing tithes – while worshippers are encouraged to reject plans for negative outcomes (plans such as saving), and to see gains which might otherwise be recognised as unwarranted or risky (such as loans on little credit) as the God-given result of their positive faith. Furthermore – and here Ehrenreich reveals an interesting divide within US Christianity on the part of those who oppose this popular style of religiosity - ‘God’ becomes a cipher figure whose role is to reward positivity, whereas the primary power to alter reality is put in the hands of the human individual – and although Ehrenreich doesn’t extrapolate this far, here we see a discourse in which the individual in fact becomes their own God, the centre of a universe which they materially alter to suit their own needs (The Secret is a particularly egregious example of this kind of thought, one which Ehrenreich rips into). The question of whether one’s own material success may necessarily be incompatible with another’s is one which does not arise.
Ehrenreich recognises that this discourse cuts across the political spectrum, but it would have been nice to see more connections drawn between positive thinking and the hippie beliefs of the 1960s and ‘70s, ideals which shaped many of the present generation of those in charge, even when they have rejected their political content. The belief in mentality as shaping reality, and in purposeful positivity and optimism as ends in themselves, seem deeply indebted to that era. Another cavil is that for all her debunking of the ‘science’ of positive thinking – junk new-ageism which is pushed by people including Martin Seligman as head of the American Psychological Association (and indeed research into ‘happiness’ and ‘positivity’ is demonstrated as perhaps the major growth area for the lucrative interface between psychologists and corporations, leading Ehrenreich to question as to the difference between a ‘life coach’ or ‘motivational speaker’ and a qualified psychologist) – Ehrenreich fails to address the question of how we actually define ‘happiness’ (or is it ‘success’?) and the concomitant question, vital for scientific empiricism, of whether we can regard experiments in which participants self-report their own ‘happiness’ as reliable, or whether holding ‘positive thinking’ as an ideology in itself means that subjects are unable or unwilling to admit to a lack of happiness, either to themselves or to others.
Throughout, Ehrenreich’s dry writing is a pleasure to read, and this book is one to be devoured over a day or two rather than one to plough through – but she also exercises a cutting insight and a finely honed intellect – more so, I think, than in her earlier works for which she’s best-known, Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. Lack of positivity, she argues, need not mean pessimism and despair – rather, in the best Enlightenment tradition (and this is a work deeply premised on the exercise of reason in the ascertainment of empirical truth, a position with which I’m not always one hundred percent in sympathy, but which is absolutely appropriate as an heuristic here) she suggests that the best approach to life is a realism based on the gathering of knowledge and on critical thinking, one which recognises and plans for both best- and worst-case scenarios. Like her earlier works, Smile Or Die (released in the US as Bright-Sided) is both an expose in the finest American muckraking tradition, and a wake up call.
‘I admire rich people!’
‘I bless rich people!’
‘I love rich people!’
‘And I’m going to be one of those rich people too!’
If you find this a chilling statement, you’re not alone. In her new work, Barbara Ehrenreich’s target is ‘positive thinking’ in the United States (although the situations she describes will be familiar, though in some cases somewhat less extreme, to those in other societies). In eviscerating this ideology she traces its inception from a rejection of Calvinist roots in the New Thought of the nineteenth century (here we might think particularly of Transcendentalism and Christian Science) – the first flower of American ‘alternative culture’ – simultaneously arguing that the Calvinist 'predestination' model in which failure is a demonstration of blameworthy unworthiness, and the psyche must be continually examined for signs of ‘sin’ (now under the guise of ‘negativity’) remains the basic form of this discourse. In the present day, positive thinking has become manifest in ‘self-help,’ motivational literature and speaking (both personal and economic), psychology, life coaching, and in relation to physical and mental health and wellbeing. Each of these are evaluated in turn – and, while Susan Sontag’s writing is more high-brow and more spare, the way in which she evaluated a particular ideology across a number of different spheres, pursuing ideas from one intellectual stratum to the next, is a good point of comparison for Ehrenreich’s work here.
Ehrenreich’s starting point is the application of ‘positive thinking’ to illness, and, particularly, cancer – her own experience with breast cancer leads her to question both an ideology which, while seeming helpful or at the least innocuous, in fact leads to the placing of a huge burden on the subject as well as a blame-the-victim mentality (on the part both of fellow subjects – in this case cancer-patients – and non-subjects, each in denial about their ultimate lack of power and control). She also takes this as a starting point to debunk the science of ‘positive thinking’ and demonstrate the way in which dodgy evidence has been spun into the present-day equivalent of unquestionable folk wisdom: ‘research demonstrates.’
But Ehrenreich is not content to leave the issue here. Her next target is the economic sphere, to the individualism of this discourse on the terms of which the poor may be blamed for their poverty (conveniently dovetailing with the Horatio Alger myth), in which circumstance and context are discounted as factors influencing outcomes, in which recklessness is encouraged (optimism can be dangerous, if it leads to underestimation of risk) and which means that, in the post-industrial age of downsizing and the super-CEO, the way to manage a mistreated, unmotivated workforce is not to improve their conditions, but to insist on ‘positivity’ as a necessary aspect of work, no matter how unjust the treatment dished out from above. Meanwhile, the spiritually-framed anti-intellectualism of this discourse (and here again the crossover with New Ageism is apparent) means that celebrity CEOs are encouraged to act, not think, with disastrous consequences for others – and a groupthink mentality is created in which the rule is to shoot the messenger, leading to unforeseen crises from the response of Iraqis to the invasion of their country, to the credit crisis. The capitalist, and, now, neo-liberal ideology of perpetual growth ties in neatly with the ‘positive’ maxim that one should never be satisfied with one’s present circumstances.
According to this hegemonic ideology, criticism of massive and growing economic inequality can be suppressed not externally but internally, as the individual comes to believe that such a view is damaging to their own success – and their optimism leads them to politically reject brakes on conspicuous wealth accumulation as they envisage themselves as the rich-in-waiting. In other words, positive thinking creates a false consciousness (though Ehrenreich doesn’t use the term) which demands the cheerful acceptance of economic subjugation, justifies inequality both for those who enact it and those who are subjected to it, and stymies any recognition of, and hence resistance to, this process.
Christianity, too – at least in some forms – is deeply implicated in this mess. The present-day mega-churches, founded on market principles of determining what the customer wants (not to be lectured about morality or punishment) have jettisoned Biblical theology in favour of a prosperity gospel which sees individual material rewards – right down to praying for a table to be free at a restaurant – as the inevitable outcome of a positive attitude. The connection between religion and commerce is clear here inasmuch as, on the one hand, mega-rich televangelists preach material success as the reward of faith, rather than any otherworldly salvation, while their churches provide ever-growing tithes – while worshippers are encouraged to reject plans for negative outcomes (plans such as saving), and to see gains which might otherwise be recognised as unwarranted or risky (such as loans on little credit) as the God-given result of their positive faith. Furthermore – and here Ehrenreich reveals an interesting divide within US Christianity on the part of those who oppose this popular style of religiosity - ‘God’ becomes a cipher figure whose role is to reward positivity, whereas the primary power to alter reality is put in the hands of the human individual – and although Ehrenreich doesn’t extrapolate this far, here we see a discourse in which the individual in fact becomes their own God, the centre of a universe which they materially alter to suit their own needs (The Secret is a particularly egregious example of this kind of thought, one which Ehrenreich rips into). The question of whether one’s own material success may necessarily be incompatible with another’s is one which does not arise.
Ehrenreich recognises that this discourse cuts across the political spectrum, but it would have been nice to see more connections drawn between positive thinking and the hippie beliefs of the 1960s and ‘70s, ideals which shaped many of the present generation of those in charge, even when they have rejected their political content. The belief in mentality as shaping reality, and in purposeful positivity and optimism as ends in themselves, seem deeply indebted to that era. Another cavil is that for all her debunking of the ‘science’ of positive thinking – junk new-ageism which is pushed by people including Martin Seligman as head of the American Psychological Association (and indeed research into ‘happiness’ and ‘positivity’ is demonstrated as perhaps the major growth area for the lucrative interface between psychologists and corporations, leading Ehrenreich to question as to the difference between a ‘life coach’ or ‘motivational speaker’ and a qualified psychologist) – Ehrenreich fails to address the question of how we actually define ‘happiness’ (or is it ‘success’?) and the concomitant question, vital for scientific empiricism, of whether we can regard experiments in which participants self-report their own ‘happiness’ as reliable, or whether holding ‘positive thinking’ as an ideology in itself means that subjects are unable or unwilling to admit to a lack of happiness, either to themselves or to others.
Throughout, Ehrenreich’s dry writing is a pleasure to read, and this book is one to be devoured over a day or two rather than one to plough through – but she also exercises a cutting insight and a finely honed intellect – more so, I think, than in her earlier works for which she’s best-known, Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. Lack of positivity, she argues, need not mean pessimism and despair – rather, in the best Enlightenment tradition (and this is a work deeply premised on the exercise of reason in the ascertainment of empirical truth, a position with which I’m not always one hundred percent in sympathy, but which is absolutely appropriate as an heuristic here) she suggests that the best approach to life is a realism based on the gathering of knowledge and on critical thinking, one which recognises and plans for both best- and worst-case scenarios. Like her earlier works, Smile Or Die (released in the US as Bright-Sided) is both an expose in the finest American muckraking tradition, and a wake up call.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Mary Douglas - Purity and Danger (1966)
At times I condemn the modern self-helpish propensity to locate the self as both the source of all problems and the source of their solution. There's a narcissism here which I find problematic, and a political propensity to elide the defining impact of external conditions (particularly those outside the immediate family). But at the same time, the issues that we face as individuals are very much issues that are created by the post/modern condition, with its focus on identity, information flows, internal an external surveillance, and distance technologies; and as such, they need to be dealt with at this level. Also, approaching issues either as external (change yourself) or external (change the situation) is not a zero sum equation - rather, what's needed is a recognition that, in order to implement positive change, both these strategies need to be adopted in permeable concert and applied where they're possible - that is, to think outside the defining binary structures of Western (and perhaps human) thought, to exist in the permeable, liminal zones in which one doesn't strive for control in terms of mastery and lack of necessary connection, in which security is maintained by adaptability, not by inflexibility, in which one doesn't fear the contamination of the internal by the external and vice versa - in which one welcomes, in fact, the mingling and dissolving of these binaries.
Mary Douglas, the social anthropologist, has just died at the age of 86. I would highly recommend her book Purity and Danger (1966) to anyone who wants to understand the way in which modern society constructs the boundaries and oppositions which I mention above, and which demonstrates the construction of the dangers of contamination and pollution which maintain them. The work, and Douglas herself, is most famous for her fascinating analysis of the meaning of the prohibitions of Leviticus (which she later rethought, concluding that God cares equally for those creatures which 'man' must abominate); but the work goes far beyond this to demonstrate the way in which 'dirt', and hence pollution, contamination, defilement, is not an objective fact but rather a manifestation of a system in which matter is out of place - and that the fear of contamination is a fear of lack of control, of the inevitable permeability of boundaried and binaried systems into the construction of which huge social and individual labour is put.
For me, it's been a foundational text, both in terms of my academic work, and in terms of my understanding of my own self and my relationship to others and to the social, my understanding of desire and fear (each in the broadest sense) as manifestations of my person/ality. And, as I do with foundational texts, I've returned to seeing how central these ideas are to an understanding of those on my own individual level. This kind of work on the self, particularly in tumultuous externally-imposed (or, it might be better to say, unchosen) circumstances, is difficult: it helps to be clearheaded, which, for me at least, has been a struggle in itself, but one in which I've made a lot of progress (having not touched any substance of possible abuse stronger than caffeine and cocoa for, oh, about three months now); it involves taking risks and the fear and psychic discomfort that that entails - but they pay off amply; and (incidentally, since we love binaries so much, why do only trinities feel complete?) it involves the willpower to make change, while at the same time giving up the fantasy of total control. Most of all, it helps to have a hand to hold on that journey (the presence of which inevitably alters and defines its course), a beckoning finger to show where you can choose to be led, a companion in both fear and joy, a safe place when the difficulties seem overwhelming... possibilities are the bastard children of circumstance, but it's what we choose to do with them that relates to and creates both who we are - and who we become.
Mary Douglas, the social anthropologist, has just died at the age of 86. I would highly recommend her book Purity and Danger (1966) to anyone who wants to understand the way in which modern society constructs the boundaries and oppositions which I mention above, and which demonstrates the construction of the dangers of contamination and pollution which maintain them. The work, and Douglas herself, is most famous for her fascinating analysis of the meaning of the prohibitions of Leviticus (which she later rethought, concluding that God cares equally for those creatures which 'man' must abominate); but the work goes far beyond this to demonstrate the way in which 'dirt', and hence pollution, contamination, defilement, is not an objective fact but rather a manifestation of a system in which matter is out of place - and that the fear of contamination is a fear of lack of control, of the inevitable permeability of boundaried and binaried systems into the construction of which huge social and individual labour is put.
For me, it's been a foundational text, both in terms of my academic work, and in terms of my understanding of my own self and my relationship to others and to the social, my understanding of desire and fear (each in the broadest sense) as manifestations of my person/ality. And, as I do with foundational texts, I've returned to seeing how central these ideas are to an understanding of those on my own individual level. This kind of work on the self, particularly in tumultuous externally-imposed (or, it might be better to say, unchosen) circumstances, is difficult: it helps to be clearheaded, which, for me at least, has been a struggle in itself, but one in which I've made a lot of progress (having not touched any substance of possible abuse stronger than caffeine and cocoa for, oh, about three months now); it involves taking risks and the fear and psychic discomfort that that entails - but they pay off amply; and (incidentally, since we love binaries so much, why do only trinities feel complete?) it involves the willpower to make change, while at the same time giving up the fantasy of total control. Most of all, it helps to have a hand to hold on that journey (the presence of which inevitably alters and defines its course), a beckoning finger to show where you can choose to be led, a companion in both fear and joy, a safe place when the difficulties seem overwhelming... possibilities are the bastard children of circumstance, but it's what we choose to do with them that relates to and creates both who we are - and who we become.
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