Dracula as Feminist Icon

 

I am tutoring a high school student with his regular English literature course. They are studying Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They have been asked to interpret it using three lenses: a Marxist perspective, a feminist perspective, and a psychological perspective.

What is missing?

The obvious significance of Dracula is religious: it is all too heavy-handedly about the nature of evil and the nature of the human soul. This is not even touched on.

Stoker and his audience might have been familiar with Marx. Feminism or modern psychology would have been unknown to them.

I am told all texts in the course are subject to the same three analyses.

This is not knew. It was true when I was going through college and grad school in the 1970s. Religious or ethical concerns were never whispered at in English lit classes. Even though, as a historical fact, this would have been the primary concerns of any author up to at least the beginning of the 20th century.  I often wondered why the later work of so many authors was ignored. I assumed poets must burn out. Instead, it was because with age they all tended to get too obviously religions.

We had to fill our essays and theses with Marxist, or feminist, or Freudian, or Jungian, or structuralist, readings of each text, knowing that they could not possibly be correct, and that the underlying theories had usually been discredited. A complete waste of time, made bearable only by the excuse to read the texts themselves. Much sound and fury, signifying nothing. While all the time, the meaning we were searching for was perfectly clear by reference to Christian principles.

We are deliberately avoiding religion and ethics in our education system, as though it is the proverbial third rail. Our children and youth are being deliberately directed away from any spiritual or ethical concerns.

And this has spread throughout society.

I have for almost two years been trying to set up a group of “Poets of Faith,” “who believe their craft is in service to a Supreme Being.” Yet over these two years, whenever I get a group together, and start a meeting, someone begins by objecting to the mention of a Supreme Being. The meeting dissolves in chaos, and I must start all over. Sisyphus, move over. Despite the stated purpose of the group, the premise under which it was convened and under which people agreed to attend: “who believe their craft is in service to a Supreme Being.”

I think this is the same problem, the same cancer. Even allowing others to form a group acknowledging the existence of God and some responsibility to him is not to be tolerated. 

It is the same reason churches are being burned down across Canada, and priests assaulted at the altar. And black legends are spread about mass graves near residential schools.

This is no doubt why our arts are moribund and our civilization in decline. It is decadence.

On Writing Poems that Rhyme

 

At a recent poetry reading, I read a poem that rhymed. The moderator, a local cultural arbiter, reacted  when I finished by saying rhyming a poem was rather controversial. This certainly sounded like public disapproval.

She got immediate polite pushback, however, from one attendedd: “then which side are you on?”

“I like all styles of poetry,” she demurred, “but it’s hard to get a rhyming poem published.”

I had nothing to say. She was undoubtedly correct, after all.

Other listeners, however, seemed to make a point of congratulating me on the poem, insisting they liked rhyme. 

“It’s easier to recite rhymed poetry properly,” one noted.

“It’s easier to remember too,” I added.

Why did the coordinator want to call it out?

Coleridge defined poetry well back at the end of the 18th century: “the best words in the best order.” Each word must come across as the only possible word in that place. This can be for the rhyme, the rhythm, for assonance, for alliteration, for onomatopoeia, or for any other conceivable sound effect; or to evoke a vivid image, to extend a metaphoric conceit, to express an emotion with an apt objective correlative, to make a punch line by reversing expectations, or to make a profound philosophical or psychological (in the true sense) point. Ideally, you want every word to do at least two of these things. Three or more is better.

Rhyme, it is true, has never been a requirement for poetry. Some of the greatest poems do not rhyme. Consider Donne’s sermon, “No Man Is an Island”:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

To be fair, there is some rhyme, but irregular. There is rhythm, alliteration, an extended metaphor.

But one justification for a word is that it forms a rhyme. In principle, a rhymed poem is superior to an unrhymed poem, because it gives the words one more purpose, one more element of symmetry and beauty.

It is also true that readers and audiences prefer rhyme. Robert W. Service is the most successful poet of all time, in terms of sales generated; his best-remembered poems have not just end rhymes, but internal rhymes. 

In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man could play.

Of course, the cultural moderators scorn Service for this very reason: because he rhymed, and because he is popular.

Probably the most popular and successful living Canadian poet also rhymes: Dennis Lee. He gets away with it, presumably, because he writes for children:

Alligator pie! Alligator pie!
If I don’t get some, I think I’m gonna die!

According to Michael Posner’s detailed compilation of anecdotes, Leonard Cohen left poetry for songwriting because he was condemned by Louis Dudek for writing in rhyme. He saw there was no future for his passion for words in the poetry community. The joy of songwriting is that rhyme is permitted.

It may be no coincidence that songs, unlike poetry, are still popular.

Why then are the cultural arbiters openly hostile to rhyme?  

Because it takes great skill to write a good rhyme; and not just great skill. It takes a certain amount of inspiration. You rhyme badly, and it sounds inane: doggerel. This happens when the only reason for a word is to achieve a rhyme.

And so there is a natural pressure among professional or wannabe poets, to make their lives easier and their ambitions more attainable, to claim that rhyme is undesirable. Because inspiration can’t be taught, there is pressure on the Fine Arts departments to discount it, in favour of things they can teach the merely average student to do. 

Let these products of the academy or professional poets select for the publishers, as they do, and you get unpopular and mediocre art. Which is why poetry is now moribund.

Here’s a random current poem appearing in my Facebook Feed; selected as unusually good by the League of Canadian Poets:

 

It is more than decent prose; it has good images. But what makes it a poem, as distinct from a passage that might be found in a well-written novel?

There is no rhyme; there is no rhythm, no alliteration, no assonance. The images, while vivid, are not objective correlatives, serve no further purpose, and make no philosophical point. The topic seems trivial: these are not words that need to be said. “Catching the spins like commas” has some alliteration, but does not seem to mean anything. A spin does not really look like a comma. And the alliteration could have easily been better: “catching the curves like commas.” “These blasted rocks are laughing. Their jagged grins zipper shut as you drive by” is verbose. “Blasted” and “jagged” add nothing. “These rocks are laughing. Their grins zipper shut as you drive by” would be stronger.

While there are, I’d say unusually for most modern poetry, no cliches, except arguably for effect (“’A weekend escape,’ you tell yourselves.”) the entire format of interior monologue is itself an almost inescapable modern cliché.

Having nothing else to offer, there is among modern poets a temptation to grab attention by mere lurid detail. Here, the vulture eating the carcass of a raccoon. 

But this is an easy trick, a cheap thrill. Word porn. It gets boring fast.

We need somehow to get around the gatekeepers. My own idea is to create a poetry web page on which readers could vote for the poems they actually like best. With annual publication of the winners.

The Little Match Girl

 

Most literary criticism is awful. Don’t get me started on Hamlet’s supposed “indecision.” 

Most of it is based on the current fashionable academic theory, Marxism or Freudianism or Jungianism or intersectionality, and not at all on real world concerns like religion and family.

Interpretations of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” relentlessly seem to see her problem as poverty. Anderson is supposedly protesting social inequality.

No. It is about child abuse and loveless families. Although we talk about “child abuse” these days, the reality of true child abuse, the loveless family, seems to be the greatest of social taboos. We seem to consistently refuse to see it when it is right before our eyes.

Hamlet being another example…

The little match girl stays out all night and freezes to death not because she is poor. It is not because she cannot afford to go inside and warm herself. She has a home. Granted, “at home it was cold too, for above her she had only the roof, through which the wind whistled, even though the largest cracks were stopped up with straw and rags.” But that is better than the street, and there is no reason to suppose there would be no wood or straw there to make a fire. Certainly, had she gone home, she would not have died of hypothermia.

She cannot go home because “from her father she would certainly get blows” for not selling any matches.

Note too that, when she does not come home, her father or mother do not come out and look for her. And she can assume they will not. The point is not even the blows—it is rejection.

There is no indication that her grandmother had more money than her parents, and this is not mentioned as a consideration. Had she, wouldn’t her parents have inherited it? The significance of her grandmother is not that she will feed and warm the little girl, but that she was “the only person who had loved her.”

And the grandmother’s love matters to her more than the roast goose or the warm fire: “Oh, take me with you! You go away when the match burns out; you vanish like the warm stove, like the delicious roast goose, and like the magnificent Christmas tree!" She is asking for her grandmother’s company, not for the other three.

When they find her corpse, people suppose she had lit the matches to warm herself. “No one had the slightest suspicion …” In other words, physical warmth was not the issue. The cold itself was a metaphor for the emotional coldness she had experienced throughout her young life. Only a crass materialist could see otherwise.

The most telling element in the story is this: “One slipper was nowhere to be found; the other had been laid hold of by an urchin, and off he ran with it; he thought it would do capitally for a cradle when he some day or other should have children himself.”

This is a detail unnecessary to the narrative. Both slippers might as easily have been lost in the snow, as one was. It superficially makes no sense, as a slipper would be too small to use as a cradle. 

When we see an anomalous detail like this, we should take it as symbolic.

The street urchin contrasts with the match girl’s father. Although he himself has nothing, no parents, no parental love, his first thought is to provide not for himself but for an imaginary child. And we know children think like this; we are all born with the maternal or paternal instinct. 

Which speaks in condemnation of the match girl’s parents. Her father expects her to provide for him. She does not have shoes, while her mother has slippers.

The frustrating thing about creative writing is that, while it seems to be the only way one is allowed to tell the truth, it hardly matters. Whatever you write will be misinterpreted.

Let he who has ears to hear, hear. Let she who has eyes to see, see.

Putting Those White Males in Their Place

Blake, Africa and America supporting Europe.

Another example of the anti-white racism in our current culture came down the pike the other day: “White authors are still writing racist books because white critics won’t call them out.” I get these regularly on Facebook. I tend to respond here rather than on Facebook, because otherwise I lose my “liberal” friends. It is not easy in academics not to be left-leaning.

Most obviously: it discusses racism in literature as only a problem of white male authors. What could be more racist than such an assertion?

“Racism in literature,” it begins, “manifests itself in myriad ways: characters whose personalities are reduced to their accents, cultural dress or foods;...”

Further on, it says that much of the problem of racism is that books are too often judged solely on literary merit (God forbid), instead of political considerations. But a case of a character who is distinguished only by his accent or dress or food is not racism. It is simply bad writing.

Does the author know what good writing is? Isn’t she supposed here to be an authority on it? She is identified as “an award-winning essayist, journalist, and literary critic” Or have the humanities discarded all such considerations now?

She goes on: her second example of endemic racism is “brown or black characters ‘rescued’ by white saviors...”

No doubt this happens in some stories. It is not easy, offhand, to think of an example. Robinson Crusoe, I suppose, published in 1719. But the complaint drips with irony. Has the author never heard of the literary character called “the magic negro”? It’s been a big deal in literary thinking recently. The common plot device is not to have the black character rescued by a white one, but the white one rescued by a black or brown one. The Green Mile, Gunga Din, Pocahontas, The Last of the Mohicans, the story of the first Thanksgiving, The Shining, Peter Pan, the Krishna cycle, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and so on.

By this logic, these are all racist stories. But with the target being whites.

One wonders if the author has actually done much reading.

Another common example of racism: “... the ‘surprising’ friendship between a white character and a character of color...”

So showing a white character as not being racist is itself—racist.

“or, a white character’s journey to a ‘foreign’ or ‘third world’ country in search of ‘enlightenment.’”

Someone sure likes scare quotes.

Granted, this is a pretty common motif: the pilgrimage. Aside from Chaucer, it is pretty central to the image of Jerusalem in the Bible, or Mecca in the Quran. Or, in Taoism, the mythical islands to the East. Still, one would have thought this implied a positive, not a negative, attitude towards Jerusalem or Mecca, of said foreign country, as, say, possessing the real spiritual truth. It seems that, the instant a white mentions anything or anyone non-white, even with the highest praise, he is racist.

So are non-white authors equally racist if they mention anything white? Wouldn’t their writing in English, in the first place, count as cultural appropriation?

“The western or white gaze is unimaginative, misrepresentative [sic], and often harmful.”

Imagine substituting “the Chinese or Oriental gaze,” “the black or African gaze,” or “the female gaze” there. Sound good?

“As Pooja Makhijani writes in her review of Kevin Kwan’s China Rich Girlfriend: ‘We Americans erase layers of oppression by foisting our own frameworks, which reflect the specificity of our culture and history, on others.’ ‘The end result,’ says Lee, ‘is the reflexive default to ‘the western gaze.’”

Note the name of that author: Kwan. Our reviewer does not say it, but he is Singaporean Chinese. However, rather than concluding that racism is found in all races, both this article and the review to which it refers bizarrely blame Kwan’s supposed racism on Americans and the British. This is racism in both directions: in scapegoating white Europeans, and in infantilizing Asians. It supposes even a successful non-white author like Kwan is incapable of thinking for himself.

The poor dears. In the end, on this assumption, it was a darned good thing for their own sake that the British and Americans were there to take care of them for a few decades.

And they must have done very good job of it, if their influence is still so absolute generations after they left. Why, doesn’t that make a powerful argument for cultural superiority of some kind?

And why isn’t Kwan the guilty party, for “cultural appropriation,” for being so deeply influenced?

“Most book critics are white, and very often white and male,” Khakpour says. “Often those white males are not themselves very well-versed in issues of race, ethnicity, xenophobia, cultural appropriation etc. They are simply trained in reading books by white men, for white men, about white men.” … “Then there’s the reality that it’s much harder to recognize a problem you’ve never experienced. “

Odd, then, that most of the offending authors she cites, along with almost all of the critics, are either not white or not male. How did that happen—in a piece supposedly about white authors and white critics?

But never mind. There is a bigger logical problem here: if it is true that white males cannot have any insight into the lived experience of women or those with darker skins, it must be equally true that women and people of darker skins have no insight into the lived experience of whites or males. Who is the expert here? On what basis? Racial superiority?

Later, the author so much as says that white males “are simply not qualified to comment” on issues of race.

“Poverty enlightenment, a popular theme in narratives about white people traveling to brown or black countries, is similarly problematic when looked at through an anti-colonialist lens. ...”

The unfortunate reality is that, if a book portrays someone going to a “brown” or “black” country, said character is likely to see poverty. Is the author supposed to falsify this, or simply avoid setting any stories in “brown” or “black” countries? How would either of these options be less “racist”?

“Soniah Kamal, in a review of the [sic] Julie Feldon’s Karma Gone Bad (a memoir that proudly evinces its colonialist gaze in the title), notes that the author ‘sees beauty in the world after meeting a slum family, interacting with an orphan girl, and seeing a little barefoot errand boy. Does Feldon experience the same beauty when witnessing poverty in the US?’”

Ironically, the book the reviewer immediately goes on to criticise is a cheerfully comic novel about --- poverty in the US.

Then there’s Nell Zink’s 2015 novel Mislaid. Critics deemed it “infallibly irreverent,” “profoundly irreverent,” “a high comedy of racial identity,” or a “backwards route to examining oppression.”

So is the problem with seeing some kind of blessedness in poverty? If so, our author has just declared Jesus Christ racist. Has she never read the Beatitudes? It’s kind of hard to make much of Western civ as a whole without knowledge of the Bible.

“Mislaid harkens to blackface and slavery, when whites stripped Africans of their identities and forced them to assume their surnames.”

Okay, so maybe she was not a history major. But let’s set the record straight. Blackface might count these days as “cultural appropriation,” but it was obviously a sign of the general popularity of black culture. People would pay more money to watch if the performers pretended they were black. This popularity of black musical culture, after all, continues today. Is it racist to buy Mariah Carey records? The blackface minstrel shows were often banned in the South before the Civil War on the assumption that they were abolitionist.

Nor were Africans ever forced to take “white” surnames. Yes, they were required to take surnames. This was not about racism; it was a practical need in a complex society. Africans did not have surnames. When the slaves were freed, black Americans got to choose whatever surname they wanted. Nobody imposed a name on them: they were simply asked. Most of them chose “white” sounding names. Again, is the assumption that non-whites are incapable of thinking for themselves? And why is this not cultural appropriation?

Granted, Zink’s novel, although the central characters are in fact poor whites, could be interpreted as being really about black poverty in the US. When Zink complained there were no favourable portrayals of “US” poverty, perhaps she meant to exclude blacks as not being American. Nothing racist about that, right? But even so, if she is right, that there are few books or novels these days about poor whites, does that really suggest a preference for white people? Or does it rather suggest that the folks who write, edit, publish or read books don’t give a damn about poor whites? Or cannot see them sympathetically?

It is perhaps to easy to laugh, to see this as ridiculous. Nevertheless, the ugly fact remains that I received this article because I belong to a—more accurately, THE-- worldwide association or professional editors. This was sent out there as recommended.

Note then that, worldwide, nobody gets a book conventionally published without it going through a professional editor. One of these folks.

The same is true of entry to the professions, or to higher study. You don’t get to write books, either, without going through an academy where just this sort of thing is de rigeur.

Not just the overwhelmingly dominant viewpoint—a viewpoint that is largely enforced, and any dissent from which is likely to be punished.

Our system has become both stupid and systemically racist and sexist. Worldwide.

The Green World

It is possible to objectively prove the existence of God. Is it possible to objectively prove the existence of an afterlife as well?

I think it is, at least for some, by an appeal to their own experience.

Northrop Frye wrote a book, “The Green World,” in which he argued that most of Shakespeare's comedies feature a retreat to such a realm of nature, “typically a forest,” in which all the problems faced by the characters are somehow solved; and they live happily ever after.

He was close. Shakespeare's comedies, and romances, do usually feature such a world, but it is not really a realm of nature—it is not the real forest at all. For what do you make of an English forest that, in Shakepeare's conception, includes lions and palm trees? And sometimes the “green world” is instead some form of celebration, a holiday, or a performance.

“Nature” itself, in other words, is a metaphor for what these worlds really represent. What they really represent is the world of the imagination, aka “second sight,” which mimics the physical senses, and is also like nature in being endlessly fertile.

And as such, it is a keen analysis by Shakespeare. Every artist knows that it is in the imagination that problems are solved. According to Arthur Koestler's painstaking study, “The Act of Creation,” every important inventor or scientist knows this as well. You cannot be creative in any way without it. Einstein's “thought experiments,” for example, were and are green worlds in the same sense.

The imagination, I think, is also objective proof, for the strongly imaginative, of the existence of heaven and of an afterlife. One can become aware, powerfully, of a realm separate from the common physical world, but which has its own definite rules and exists apart from our own consciousness of it, out of our conscious control.

If one's imagination is powerful, one also becomes aware that this realm is a much better place than the everyday world—so much so that one develops a powerful yearning for it, and a corresponding disappointment with the visible world of the tiresome daylight hours.

I guess everyone has some experience of this second world—in dreams, at a minimum. But some clearly have far more awareness of it than others. When someone seems to think imagination is something under our control --- “stop daydreaming!” the teacher insists, or someone says “it's only your imagination” -- it seems to me they reveal that for them it is quite weak. But I think you can see clear references to it in the work of any really good artist—this is what makes artists, their awareness of the other world. Frye's “green world” could just as easily be located in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or Robet Louis Stevenson, or Stanley Kubrick, or anyone of that calibre; under various metaphors.

I think it is also the reason that artists of all kinds are also very likely to be depressives, or manic depressives. They become depressed, because they are painfully aware of this better place, and unable to go there, trapped mostly in this insufficient present world.

Conversely, I think most depressives I have known have been depressive because they are too aware of this other world.

“Schizophrenics”? I think schizophrenia may happen when one has no concept of the existence of this other world, and it suddenly manifests itself vividly. That's when one is liable to mistake the things of imagination for the things of the material world.

One corollary, I suppose, if this is right, is that people in general are wise to fear the mentally ill. For if this conception is true, it is also likely that mental illness is contagious. We may know that, instinctively.

The kingdom of heaven is among us.

For those of us who do not have a strong natural ability to perceive the imagination, the experience of art often does it for us. If and when we can become fully engrossed in a book or a movie, as most of us can, we are there.

That is our warrant. That is our proof that we can exist quite apart from the physical world around us, and apart from our physical bodies.

All human cultures have known this. It is more obvious than the nose on your face.