Self-Esteem

Danah Boyd, the social researcher famous for her work on MySpace, has a new post up at apophenia about the book Generation Me, written by Jean Twenge. It’s along the lines of a follow-up to an earlier essay on narcissism and MySpace. Boyd seems to be going through some kind of crisis of conscience about her objects of study, including MySpace; that is, she is eager to separate the healthy, two-way interactions that take place through these sites, from the ravenous egotism (or “narcissism”) they sometimes reflect.

Her writing suggests that the media themselves are neutral. At the same time, she has taken a moral stance against pedagogical and parenting practices that try to improve self-esteem, on the grounds that these practices make adolescents (and young adults) pathologically incapable of dealing with frustration, accepting criticism, and coming to terms with the basic obligations — unfreedoms — of everyday life. Boyd also implies that young people who internalize “self-esteem” become numb to the needs of other people. She writes in her first post:

I am most certainly worried about the level of narcissism that exists today. I am worried by how we feed our children meritocratic myths and dreams of being anyone just so that current powers can maintain their supremacy at a direct cost to those who are supplying the dreams. I am worried that our “solutions” to the burst bubble are physically, psychologically, and culturally devastating, filled with hate and toxic waste. I am worried that Paris Hilton is a more meaningful role model to most American girls than Mother Theresa ever was. But I am not inherently worried about social network technology or video cameras or magazines. I’m worried by how society leverages different media to perpetuate disturbing ideals and pray on people’s desire for freedom and attention. Eliminating MySpace will not stop the narcissistic crisis that we’re facing; it will simply allow us to play ostrich as we continue to damage our children with unrealistic views of the world.

Then, in her second post, she turns to the (perhaps inevitable) subject of the shootings at Virginia Tech. She quotes Twenge:

Several studies have found that narcissists lash out aggressively when they are insulted or rejected. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the teenage gunmen at Columbine High School, made statements remarkably similar to items on the most popular narcissism questionnaire. On a videotape made before the shootings, Harris picked up a gun, made a shooting noise, and said “Isn’t it fun to get the respect we’re going to deserve?” (Chillingly similar to the narcissism item “I insist upon getting the respect that is due me.”) (Twenge 2006, 70-71)

To be honest, something inside of me goes cold at the thought of analyzing narcissism, particularly the narcissism of children, in this fashion. In order to understand how people, including young people, think of themselves, it is essential to separate self-approbation from power.

Self-approbation is a source of alienation, and eventually of misery. Esteem-based education teaches children to regard themselves from an outside perspective, and to do so with a frozen smile of approval. In fact, on top of this initial moment of self-justifying alienation, we have overlaid another imperative: if you don’t approve of who you are and what you choose, you will never succeed, because you won’t project confidence. So you have an obligation to yourself to approve of yourself, and thus to make others believe.

Power, by which I mean capacity, agency, and influence, is a different story. It is essential. The absence of it is suffocating. If I am teaching a student to write, I do so under the guiding assumptions that they have the capacity to improve their writing, and that their writing will matter at some point in the future. It may not matter in the same way for each student, and I don’t expect that any student will become famous. But I expect that what they have to say will eventually matter to someone.

When we think of the difference between Paris Hilton and Mother Teresa, compared in the first quote above, it is easy to turn them into symbols of selfish and selfless behavior, respectively. For me, the difference between them is a matter of principle, because both are powerful. Mother Teresa believed in something, and devoted herself to it; whatever Paris may believe, she (obviously) has yet to do the same. But it is important to remember that even if a teenager, living in some dreary suburb, wanted to become the next Mother Teresa, he or she might not be able to pull it off. It would certainly require tearing oneself away from family and community on the grounds of an unshakable conviction. Otherwise, one’s hero is Mother Teresa, but one’s job is working at the Tastee Freeze.

The traditional models of selflessness in America, which are derived from the Christian tradition, locate power in God; access to power comes through doing God’s will. In other words, they are anything but models of powerlessness. The inability to accept criticism, and the inability to come to terms with one’s obligations, are actually two different things. The ability to freely assume obligations to people and principles is tremendous. It gives us a reason to value criticism, because it becomes worthwhile to improve.

On the other hand, we may find ourselves wanting to help young people adjust to the obligations imposed upon them. Certainly, it worries me to think of self-advertisement or, what is worse, of violence usurping sustained action as the American model of agency. I’ll take adjustment over pathology every time. But, especially for disenfranchised Americans, self-esteem doesn’t spoil them for reality. It spoils them for an absence of choices, an absence of power. We risk telling them to come to terms with jail.

Then Mary, she got pregnant
And man, that was all she wrote
And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat…
Now those memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie, that don’t come true
Or is it something worse
-Bruce Springsteen, “The River”

Debunking Andrew Scull: Michel Foucault’s History of Madness

(x-posted to The Valve)

It is time, at last, for me to confront Andrew Scull’s recent review (now a little less so) of Michel Foucault’s book Madness and Civilization. The book has come out in an expanded and newly translated edition.

I will be brief. Scull’s review is a disaster, and the worst of it is that some of his criticisms are undoubtedly just. Furthermore, some of what has been written against Scull is useless.

This post follows up on Scott Eric Kaufman’s two excellent posts on the subject, here (1) and here (2). I’m indebted to Scott for the links below. Though I disagree with him about the value of Foucault’s book, I think his comparison of “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” with Madness and Civilization is very helpful.

I am not merely aiming to pick apart Scull’s response to Foucault; my real target is Scull’s blithe cynicism about the 1960s. That decade, which already signifies an irresponsible utopianism in most public discourse, is now slowly being rejected by academia as an embarrassment. We literally run the risk of losing works like Madness and Civilization, Eros and Civilization, and Life Against Death to this smug and unreasoning process of expulsion.

***

To begin with, Scull’s project is fundamentally dishonest because of the difference between media. Foucault is writing an immense work of historical research, now properly annotated. Scull is writing a book review. As a result, Scull has to ask us to take a great deal on faith, without ever providing footnotes or citations of his own, and he does so in the service of a critique of a blindly credulous audience.

Let’s grant Scull as much of his argument as we can. Let’s assume that Foucault drastically over-stated the number of mental patients being held as prisoners in Western Europe; in defense of this assertion, Scull cites a book entitled Madness and Democracy, published in 1999. Let’s assume that Foucault was working from erroneous sources, when he described the public paying to observe inmates at Bedlam. Scull claims that public visitation ended much earlier, and that no fixed price was set for admissions. Finally, let’s accept the idea that most of the new asylums were not constructed on the sites of convents or monasteries.

These are frustrating mistakes to uncover. For somebody writing a history of the physical treatment and confinement of the insane, they may be fatal. Still, they are subject to qualification.

First of all, whether or not madmen continued to roam in the streets in the Classical Age, it is still possible to trace a trend favoring the establishment of asylums and hospitals. Scull himself admits that by the 19th Century, “vast museums of madness” had sprung up with the help of public funding. People with mental illnesses still walk the streets today: they show up in our lives as sources of disruption, and in our artworks as saints, apocalyptic prophets, and harbingers of magic. That hardly makes the history of institutionalization irrelevant to contemporary life. In fact, given the number of people who are now treated for various mental disorders on an outpatient basis, one could say that the asylum is now a much more real, and less visible, presence in our lives.

As for exhibiting patients at Bedlam, Scull tries his best to disguise the fact that they were exhibited, and there was a price, even if Foucault got the dates wrong, and the price was never fixed. As Richard Prouty notes at the blog One Way Street, bringing this phenomenon to our attention “is far more illuminating and provocative than knowing that the public visitation of patients at Bedlam ceased in 1770, and did not continue into the nineteenth century, as Foucault asserted. What’s important is that the patients went on display in the first place.”

*

Scull claims that “such massive incarceration” as Foucault describes, “simply never occurred in England.” He also claims that the “ships of fools” — the plural of Foucault’s historicizing metaphor for the mad individuals who, during the Middle Ages, occupied the interstices between settlements — didn’t exist, either. Since he gives absolutely no supporting evidence for these claims, he inspires me with nothing beyond a slight doubt. I am likewise unimpressed by his careful tallies of which of Foucault’s sources were written when. Scull gives us no clue as to which texts specifically are out of date, and which are not.

*

Scull continues, “Foucault’s isolation from the world of facts and scholarship is evident throughout History of Madness.” What he really means, in this single reference to an incredible omission, is that for large stretches of Madness and Civilization Foucault is concerned with interpreting works of art and philosophy that deal with madness.

This is where Foucault is on his most unassailable ground. As Gracchi remarks, at Westminster Wisdom, “the philosophical points that Foucault makes, so far as they are unrelated to the empirical evidence, are left untouched.” Foucault’s references to the “Ship of Fools” are metaphorical, even though Scull tries to make it seem as though Foucault is describing whole crews of madmen. Foucault is describing the philosophico-aesthetic (really epistemic) lenses through which even one madman on a ship would have been viewed.

The only thing that can disprove Foucault’s dozens of literary readings, stretching all the way from Erasmus, to Albrecht Dürer, to Friedrich Nietzsche and Antonin Artaud, is a recourse to those works themselves. So why, then, should we want to abandon Foucault’s appeals to conscience on the grounds of a mistake about admission fees at Bedlam? We can interpret the following statement of the strength of 19th and 20th Century art alone:

There is no madness except as the final instant of the work of art—the work endlessly drives madness to its limits; where there is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates the time of its truth…the world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness. (trans. Howard, 289)

*

Craig, writing at Long Sunday (here [1] and here [2]) in response to Scott, as well as Jeremy at FoucaultBlog writing in response to Scull, claim that Scull is trying to discredit all of Foucault’s work. There is no evidence for this. Scott’s deft use of Foucault’s essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” against the errors of Madness and Civilization proves that the critique can be immanently contained.

In fact, the entry at FoucaultBlog shows a curious unwillingness to defend Madness and Civilization. Similarly, Craig’s two posts seek to wall it off from the rest of Foucault’s work, by arguing that this Foucault was unpolished, and lacked the genealogical rigor he would bring to The Birth of the Clinic.

So why give up on Madness and Civilization, while valiantly defending Foucault against an imaginary slippery slope? We’ve known the answer for several years now: Foucault writes as though, through madness, “the world is made aware of its guilt” (288). He writes as though art that struggles at the border of madness could reveal hitherto unsuspected potentials for social transformation. And all this is embarrassing. It is not even Foucauldian enough, we hear nowadays.

Scull hopes to use the chinks in Foucault’s armor to discredit the whole history of 1960s anti-psychiatric sociology. We are told that Erving Goffman was “brilliant if idiosyncratic,” and that his “loosely linked essays lent academic lustre to the previously polemical equation of the mental hospital and the concentration camp.” Leaving aside Scull’s painful alliteration, the point is clear: he’s fond of those 60s liberals, with their academic lustre and idiosyncratic brilliance, but they were — let’s face it — a bit off the mark. He dismisses Ronnie Laing as “yesterday’s man,” and he may be right, but calling “schizophrenia” a form of “supersanity” (as Laing did) is passingly close to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who are still read and debated widely. Scull overloads his language with rhetorical devices. He calls Laing a “guru,” to remind us again of that decade’s crazy excesses, and describes a generation of historians as “midwives.” Even his description of the translated title, Madness and Civilization, is meant as a warning about the seductive power of intellectual provocation.

Scull may be right that the real historical conditions in mental institutions did not always match the rhetoric of the age. He calls Foucault out as a fortunate deceiver, “cynical” and “shameless,” and hints darkly at Foucault’s effect on “people’s lives.” But if we have learned anything from Foucault, and from his predecessor Nietzsche, it is that certain kinds of ideological errors react with material histories, and alter them. To treat the lot of Foucault’s textual criticism of madness as nothing – that is pure, indefensible ideology. It endeavors to silence Foucault, and restores to us a good conscience we have done nothing to deserve.

Derision Does Not Equal Theory

At the enjoyable, smartly written theory blog Antigram, Daniel has posted a new commentary by Jacques-Alain Miller (one of the executors of Jacques Lacan’s estate) on Google. Here’s an excerpt:

Google serves a meta-function: that of knowing what there is to know.

Our query is without syntax, minimal to the extreme; one click… and bingo! It is a cascade – the stark white of the query page is suddenly covered in words. The void flips into plenitude, concision to verbosity. Every hit a winner.

Organising the Great Enormity, Google follows a totalitarian maxim: voracious and all-consuming.

For several days now, I’ve been thinking about the fact that contemporary social and political philosophy risks becoming vapid and ineffectual, if it is written from within that erudite dream that makes things effortlessly conform to its own post-Marxist despair. Much contemporary critique has done nothing to affect political rhetoric, organizing tactics, or party politics. It should be that effective: political philosophy is not art, and does not have the same claim to a useful indirection.

Consider these statements, for example. While people do look to Google for information, it doesn’t always serve the function of “knowing what there is to know.” We’ve all had the experience of searching fruitlessly for something via Google, perhaps something we knew was out there: every hit is not a winner. Furthermore, the burden of knowledge (even on a symbolic level) is shared by sites like Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database.

“Our query is without syntax.” No, it’s not. It depends on the query. I write queries that have syntax (e.g. phrases) all the time.

“The stark white of the query page is suddenly covered in words.” That depends on where you’re searching from. Lots of times I will use the Google box in the top right of my browser, which means that the screen’s already covered in words.

“All-consuming.” Google mirrors; it caches. It does not consume in any useful sense.

One may, instinctively, still feel that somehow Miller is right, in general if not in the particulars. Somehow his tone of derision, his disillusionment, his sense of aggrieved assault, all refer back to something real, and Google is part of that something.

Doubtless. But we can’t achieve change by summoning miasmas.

On Decadence

In a remarkable new post at Is There No Sin In It?, A White Bear gives us her “half-assed” (not really) theory of decadence. She writes,

I hold that decadence is taking pleasure in something that either would or does create suffering either in the pleasured self (masochistic decadence) or in others (sadistic decadence).

She then describes examples of both in her own family’s history, both sadistic decadence in the form of practical jokes, and masochistic decadence in the form of addictions, and what seems implicitly to be something like drug- or alcohol-fueled sprees. Reading her descriptions of masochism, I was reminded first of Charles Bukowski and Barfly, next of the music Elvis made at Sun Records, which Greil Marcus linked to the self-destructive festival of the Southerner on a spree. It means spending all your money, losing whole days to blackouts, wandering and sleeping away from home. It is a consuming incandescence, and at the same time as ordinary as country songs (noted over at AWB’s site by one commenter already).

I’m interested in A White Bear’s conclusion:

This doesn’t mean that I’m not still occasionally a deeply depraved individual. I absolutely am. I am, in certain seasons, unkind and venal, driven by libido and ego, competitive, selfish, and cruel. In those seasons, I crave a return in kind from the objects of my worse nature. There is excruciating pleasure in it, and then it passes, and I am once again a lamb.

Max used to talk about the Zen principle of treating each obsessive thought and feeling as an angry bull. You can’t shoo the bull away without making it angry, so all you can do is put a fence around it, feed it every now and then, and leave it to its space. I often feel like I can’t cure myself of my decadent nature, but I can give it its space, feed it every so often, and preserve the rest of my mind from being trampled by it, the way it trampled both my grandfathers’.

This epitomizes the mild, but incurable, disagreement that I have with the Zen way of tending to the psyche; or at least, with the way Zen is practiced in the West. (It’s an appropriation of Eastern culture, to be sure, but often a relatively informed and wise one.) There is a symmetry between the gorgeous lucidity of AWB’s initial binary (sadistic and masochistic decadence), and the specificity of the image of the penned bull. The psychic event becomes reified, contained not only by its pen, but by its image.

For me, the Wildean maxim still holds. The only way to resist a temptation is to yield to it. The technology of thought at work here, designed to contain the sadistic and masochistic impulses towards suffering, also leaves one in total uncertainty about how to designate such containment. Where do decadence and suffering end? If rock ‘n roll is a product of masochistic decadence, as Marcus seems to think, is it a means of containment and catharsis, or an incitement? If practical jokes are an overly extreme form of sadistic humor, what about other kinds of jokes?

For me, recognizing self-destruction, and schadenfreude, and egotism, is like holding on to Proteus. At every point one has to say, this is decadence, and this is decadence. Hedonism is decadence. The obsessive ethic is decadence. Each metamorphosis is subtler, less dangerous, more secret, and more coherent. I am trying to cross the distance between my habits, and the part of me that slips into this or that little death, in protest. The act of naming dispels the break, without banishing what is most vivid. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

Plato and Derrida on Democracy: States of Desire

(x-posted to The Valve)

In a recent post at the Lacanian blog Larval Subjects, the eponymous author (we’ll call him LS) writes:

Is it truly possible, I wonder, to ever desire the difference of the Other, or is this simply impressive sounding talk?

I was reminded of a marvelous paraphrase of The Republic, from Jacques Derrida’s book on democratic states, Rogues:

[In a democracy one finds] all sorts of people, a greater variety than anywhere else. Whence the multicolored beauty of democracy. Plato insists as much on the beauty as on the medley of colors. Democracy seems—and this is its appearing, if not its appearance and its simulacrum—the most beautiful, the most seductive of constitutions. Its beauty resembles that of a multi- and brightly colored garment. The seduction matters here; it provokes; it is provocative in this “milieu” of sexual difference, where roués and voyous roam about. (26)

In his own roundabout fashion, Derrida follows Plato’s example, but inverts him: Derrida will desire the presence of rogues and vagabonds, will insist roguishly on seduction and shiftlessness, and will hint at debaucheries and even at insurrections. All of which confirms, for us, that democracy is, in LS’s apt phrase, a process of desiring the difference of the Other.

I wonder whether it is reasonable to establish a democracy on these grounds; or whether, in fact, democracy is a best understood as a matter of indifference.

***

In order to understand this question of desire, it is crucial to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary states. If a poor person goes hungry, we assume, and rightly so, that they are involuntarily hungry, and that something should be done to either feed them or teach them to fish. If, on the other hand, a person is fasting, we assume that they are acting of their own free will, and do not try to compel them to eat.

The question of what is voluntary, and what is not, is a question about free will, and the limits of free will. (For example, we routinely treat the mentally disabled, and the very young, as though they did not possess free will, and this seems to be justified.) I cannot hope to answer that question here, and in fact do not need to do so.

Instead, let’s focus on that enormous field of thoughts, actions, and subjectivities which are assumed to be free. It is ridiculous to expect us to desire what Derrida calls the milieu of difference. The phrase calls up, as Derrida himself notes, a “bazaar” (26) in which other human beings serve as consumer goods, as spectacles for our entertainment.

However, in order for another person to become visible to us, thus catalyzing our desire, they must be comprehensible in some way. We become an audience for them, and audiences get very upset when difference is threatened by self-difference; that is, when a celebrity, ethnic group, friend, or lover acts in a fashion inconsistent with our expectations. Even when we expect someone to be different from ourselves, as most celebrities are different, we don’t like it when they change. Hence the outpouring of basically aggressive “concern” for Britney Spears when she had her highly publicized breakdowns, and the imperialisms of representation that characterize what Edward Said called “Orientalism.”

Furthermore, it is foolish and intellectually dishonest to enter into conversations hampered by some arbitrary marker of irreducible difference. People with strong beliefs, be they religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political, have an interest in promoting their beliefs, and this is as it should be. There’s no good reason to expect a devout Christian to want somebody else to remain a Buddhist in the same way that he or she wants to be saved, and wants to save others. Even environments that seem most pluralistic, such as classroom discussions about the meaning of a text, are underwritten by an extensive and mutual set of rules — usually, in this case, about what kind of supporting evidence is required to justify a reading. Difference seems to constantly transcend itself towards identity: group identity, family bonds, even personal identity. Every promise and every acceptance of duty determinately negates difference.

Thus one discovers, at the heart of the democratic principle, not the spectacle of seductive differences, but rather the matter of indifference, as the phrase is used in everyday conversation. It does not mean insensibility, or a lack of interest in what other people volunteer. It is simply a limit placed on what concerns me. I cease expecting others to be fully transparent to me, and I cease to expect them to create environments in which my beliefs predominate. This is the essence of the right to privacy, of toleration, and of the fair exercise of authority.

We’re back on the air, or, re-integration

Dear readers,

I’m still learning about blogs, which is why I’ve gone through the drama of shutting this down, starting up a new blog, having lots of fun with it, and then porting it back over here. You might’ve had to spend time adjusting your blogrolls, playing along with the new nickname, creating archives; I apologize for making you chase a phantom, albeit briefly. I’m ashamed to have cried wolf. I’ll be honest and say that the kindnesses that were left in the comments section here, as well as in a few posts written by friends, did a lot to convince me to keep blogging under any name, after the vitriolic nature of a few exchanges shocked me into wanting to abandon my authorship.

I’ll try to be brief in explaining what’s going on.

First of all, there was no way to detach the old posts here from my name, and I was loathe to delete them. Lots of other people have linked here from time to time, and I didn’t want to break all those links.

Second, I realized that it wasn’t so much writing under my own name that was flattening out my style, as it was the expectations that I brought to writing for the academic blogosphere. As soon as I started writing at Coffee & Critique, I realized that I was doing exactly the same sorts of entries I’d been posting here. I’ll keep trying to figure out ways of taking intellectual risks at this site. Furthermore, I think the kind of frank responses that I wanted to write pseudonymously can and should be posted under my own name.

As for the odd antagonism that seems to have developed between Long Sunday, The Valve, and The Weblog/An und für sich, it is, from my point of view, ridiculous. Several posters at each site don’t want it, and the supposed divides (e.g. theory/anti-theory) don’t hold up across the roster, anymore. Well, actually, I don’t know what Adam Kotsko or Anthony Paul Smith want, but then again I’m not religious.

It continues to be true that named bloggers can be mercilessly attacked by people with pseudonyms. Such attacks are inevitable nowadays, and inevitable for me since I’m going to keep posting over at The Valve. I suppose such things can be safely ignored.

***

So let’s think of this as a posthumous experiment. I love this new layout; that’s one of several things I learned from starting the new blog.

Enjoy your Friday night; there’s more to come.

-Kugelmass

Absolutely Fun and True Fact #2

I am currently reading The Life of Samuel Johnson for my exam lists, and enjoying it fairly, even though it only has a claim on my Interest and Approbation rather than upon my Heart’s feelings. I received the Book in a nice hardcover edition from Amazon, and have just come upon two pages in the middle that are literally uncut. I cannot read them without fetching a knife. I have never had to cut open pages in my life, and I cannot tell you how much it delights me to do so with a book written in the 18th Century.

Poor, Unfortunate Societies: Getting to the Bottom of The Little Mermaid

Of all the works of art that haunt modern life — James Joyce’s Ulysses, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring — perhaps none has caused as much critical puzzlement and dispute as The Little Mermaid. Terry Eagleton, in his book Ariel’s Tempest, described the film as a “delightful romp for the whole family,” unsettling a whole tradition of Wittgensteinian criticism that began with Stanley Cavell. Cavell, writing in The Strange Object: Combs and Cutlery, was famous for such statements as “the dinglehopper is the real protagonist of Disney’s unsettling sea-shanty, which raises the crucial question of what we mean when we speak of a dinglehopper” (TSO 13).

For my part, I want to examine the way the film ends, because, while watching it with my friend uncomplicatedly, the events leading up to the climax were so wretched that she exclaimed: “Oh wait, how do they get out of this one? It looks like they’re totally fucked.”

The way they “get out of it” is, the prince steers the carcass of a sunken boat right into the heart of the monstrous Ursula, who by this time has assumed gigantic proportions. When the boat pierces her, she dies, and all the spells she has cast over merfolk and oceans fade. This is a resolution on the level of the symbolic, as well as the solution to the riddle of the plot. It restores a traditional way of life, structured by myth, to a society corrupted by rationalism and contractual economies.

The Little Mermaid is a romance, and the love between the mermaid and the prince symbolizes a pre-lapsarian social whole, where men and merfolk live in harmony. The film takes place in a world cut off from tradition. The prince can’t remember the name of the human princess he was supposed to marry, and apparently has no parents. Triton, the mermaid’s father, is superficially a traditional figure, but he can’t think of any of Ariel’s suitors names either, and has actually usurped Ursula, though you need to watch the bonus features to have this confirmed.

Ariel and Prince Eric, in their respective worlds, have nostalgic myths imposed upon them in the form of art. Triton is outraged when Ariel fails to play her part in the enormous pageant held in his honor. A clam shell opens, symbolizing Ariel’s birth, but Ariel isn’t inside — which only makes sense, since according to the Venus myth Ariel should actually emerge from the sea onto land. Later, Ariel will be missing at the end of Sebastian’s “Under the Sea” musical number.

In the same vein, the rationalist tutor Grimsby (I call him “Voltaire,” and he doesn’t believe in merfolk) makes the odd gesture of commissioning a statue of Prince Eric in an antiquated pose, with a sword. Eric rejects the statue, and it later becomes part of Ariel’s collection of human objects. In other words, both Ariel and Eric refuse to be turned to stone by assigned roles in nostalgic artworks that compensate for the evident state of lack: missing parents, disgruntled sea-witch, undistinguished suitors, and war between the two kingdoms. Art only takes you so far, as Ariel admits when (in “Part of Your World”) she sings about her boredom with merely collecting human objects. Sebastian’s songs neither convince Ariel to stay undersea, nor get her the kiss she needs. (However, it is significant that when he leaves the king’s service, and enters her’s, he stops trying to write symphonies, and returns to his roots by singing lite reggae.) Art can even be perverse, if it substitutes for the real thing. Ursula steals Ariel’s voice, and her song convinces Eric to abandon Ariel, via an aesthetic illusion of presence.

Art is a compensation in a society run by contracts: Triton’s rules, Grimsby’s insistence that Eric wed, and above all Ursula’s contracts with customers in need of magic. Ursula is a Usurer. If you don’t pay your debt to her in time, she is legally able to turn you into a small, boneless chicken of the sea. Her victims live in a garden of the oppressed that is meant to resonate with the Medusa myth and the theme of petrifaction. The force of the contract first protects her against Triton’s old-fashioned magic, then allows her to re-claim it.

Like Grimsby, Eric is nostalgic, but he’s nostalgic for a real person. He’s nostalgic for the maternal figure of Ariel, who is singing to him at the moment he is brought back to life on the shore, and reborn. So he follows her out to sea, having been primed to believe in mermaids by the old salts among his crew. Ursula, returning to the position of ruler of the seas, stirs up the shipwrecked boat from the bottom of the ocean. Yet she is still vulnerable, because she can’t return to the Ariel-like being she was formerly. So the prince drives the masthead into her: disturbing. We know from countless establishing shots that the masthead is a mermaid, and in effect, Ursula is killed by the cold statuary in her own heart, of herself as she was. She becomes a monster by confusing herself with that effigy in a way Eric and Ariel will not.

The resurrected ship, like the parallel scenes of Ariel and Eric’s rebirths on the mediating strip of shore, is a symbol of the present reunited with the past through living practice, rather than lifeless art. The very holes along its sides are indices of the prince’s ability to look beyond the thing, to see the thing as a mere sign, just as he was close to doing by kissing mute Ariel out of love for her voice. The separation between the aesthetic world of fantasy, and the hierarchies of contract, are swept away and replaced by a holistic order. Art withers away and becomes the free festival, rather than the imposed pageant.

Yet, in its way, this too is a Cold Pastoral, a trick to tease us out of thought. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? First of all, most of all, not Ariel’s mother, Eric’s parents, or Ursula herself (though she was more usurped than usurious)…but Flounder, the fat kid.

Absolutely Fun and True Fact #1

If you whistle with a soft drink fast food straw held up to your lips, at the right angle, you will sound like you are playing pan pipes. I just figured this out ten minutes ago, and it’s like Zamfir’s Greatest Hits over here. My versions of “El Condor Pasa” and “Memories (from the musical Cats)” were particularly incredible.

This has been the first ever absolutely fun and true fact, brought to you by The Kugelmass Episodes.

Enjoy your afternoon!

The Rejection Letter

Becks, over at the stream-of-consciousness blog Unfogged, asked us what to do about some poor guy’s manuscript, which apparently was as Freudian as a mispelled hero fantasy can get. She was asking us for suggestions about possible rejection letters.

She writes:

So this guy comes up to my table and starts talking about the novel he’s been working on, but it could also be a comic book script or a screenplay, etc., etc., and he hands me a two-page excerpt and a cover letter and takes off.

I read it on the way home from work tonight. It’s… not good.

I feel obligated to send the guy a polite rejection notice. My questions:

1) Should I also advise him to use the spelling and grammar checkers in his word processor?

2) Should I also advise him to read Norman Spinrad’s essay, “The Emperor Of Everything” and attempt to understand why the SF/Fantasy/Occult/Horror genres don’t really need more masturbatory, misogynistic adolescent power fantasy stories?

3) Should I also advise him to see a therapist?

I started to respond over there, and I think I’ll finish up here:

You could break it to him gently. You could say: Hey, right now this is a novel. It could be a comic book; it could be a screenplay, too. It could be a novella. It could take a turn towards realism. Kids picking blackberries, they have a dog, the dog dies. But then the turn away from realism. Maybe the dog was an alien or is dreaming it all. It could be a short story. It could be some notes, with accompanying sketches. The sketches might not be related. I’m talking about doodles. Little drawings of trees and Captain America’s shield. It could be something you scribbled on a napkin. It could be a napkin that you quickly tucked in your pocket. Coffee stains on the most important phrases. The ink bleeds away and the napkin goes pulpy in the wash. It could be an idea you had once that you were going to write but didn’t have a pen. It could be a silly idea. Something you should never tell a soul. There, there. Don’t be sad. Grindhouse is still in the theaters. Treat yourself to a matinee.