One of the many questions surrounding Arthur Miller’s creative ‘treatment’ of the historical events behind the Salem Witch Trails of 1692 so as to ‘enlighten’ the corrosive and anti-democratic practices of the HUAC’s (House Committee on Un-American Activities) in the early 1950s is connected with the different ways in which critics and audiences (since the first staging of the play in 1953 up until present times) have come to understand the ‘historical terms’ of his playwriting endeavors.

Is the parallel between 1692 and 1952 a valid one?

If we are to conceive of Miller’s play as of a history play, such as I propose in my reading of the piece, then are we to agree that it does embody, to a certain extent, a view of (social) history, i.e., as the critic Michael J. O’Neal amicably points out in his essay, titled “History, Myth, and Name Magic in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible,” “[does] it [The Crucible] imagine forth through plot and character, a way of making coherent the manifold events of [one] culture’s past”? (84, brackets added)

What is the essence of Miller’s ‘projected history’? How does Miller re-conceive socio-historical phenomena while creating the historically-grounded parallels of the play’s ‘aesthetic opposition’?

O’Neal puts forward a rather visionary way of dealing with Miller’s concept of time present and past. In his essay on the historiographics of Miller’s play, he proposes that the audience (and the critic as an active member of the audience) understand Miller’s projection of historical evidence in the play as a projection of a ‘vertical view’ of history. He then proceeds to explicate the terminology he has proposed by examining the differences existing between a ‘horizontal’ and a ‘vertical’ view of historical events/practices. O’Neal regards the former of the two as the more ordinary approach to history (an approach that Adorno may relate to the edificating practices of ‘politically committed art’), one that we employ in our every-day understanding of life. Therefore, in O’Neal’s view, by addressing history as a “duration”, a “progress from point to point toward a destination” (thus, employing the ‘vertical view’, which, in turn, does not strike me as being too far off from Adorno’s conceptualization of the monad as a dynamic set of internally charged meanings) we seek “in history the antecedent conditions giving rise to any state of affairs under examination.” (84) With that in mind, O’Neal positions Miller’s use of history as one that “is less interested in exploring a diachronic sequence of historical facts,” but rather a methodology which attempts to depict historical events/influences synchronically, i.e., “vertically,” pointing towards “a recurrent pattern of human behavior independent of pre-existent conditions.” (84-85)

If we follow O’Neal’s delineation of Miller’s methodology, we must concede that the inhibiting practices of American political democracy in the early 1950s do not single-handedly define The Crucible’s historical framework, that is to say, “[both] the Salem delusion and post-World War II anti-Communist hysteria” act out as “coordinate elements in the same discontinuous historical subset, a subset that would include other historical “facts” as well.” (85) In an essay initially written for The New York Times (March 9th, 1958 edition), and subsequently reprinted in the collection The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, Miller discusses at length his reaction to the critics’ reception of the original Broadway production of the play. He voices his more than obvious disappointment at their inability to see the play in a larger human context of sociopolitical magnitude, suggesting a very similar premise for understanding its appeal to history to that induced by the critic Michael J. O’Neal. He writes, for example:

I was disappointed in the reaction to The Crucible not only for the obvious reasons but because no critic seemed to sense what I was after. In 1953 McCarthyism probably helped to make it appear that the play was bounded on all sides by its arraignment of the witch hunt. The political trajectory was so clear – a fact of which I am a little proud – that what to me were equally if not more important elements were totally ignored. […]

I was drawn to write The Crucible not merely as a response to McCarthyism. It is not any more an attempt to cure witch hunts than [Death of a] Salesman is a plea for the improvement of conditions for traveling men, All My Sons a plea for better inspection of airplane parts, or A View from the Bridge an attack upon the Immigration Bureau. […]

The form, the shape, the meaning of The Crucible were all compounded out of the faith of those who were hanged. They were asked to be lonely and they refused. They were asked to deny their belief in a God of all men, not merely a god each individual could manipulate to his interests. They were asked to call a phantom real and to deny their touch with reality. […]

The “heat” infusing this play is therefore of a different order from that which draws tears and the common identifications. And it was designed to be of a different order. In a sense, I felt, our situation has thrown us willy-nilly into a new classical period. Classical in a sense that the social scheme, as of old, had reached the point of rigidity where it had become implacable as a consciously known force working in us and upon us. […]

For me The Crucible was a new beginning, the beginning of an attempt to embrace a wider field of vision, a field wide enough to contain the whole of our current awareness. It was not so much to move ahead of the audience but to catch up with what it commonly knows about the way things are and how they get that way. […]

When we can put together what we do know with what we feel, we shall find a new kind of theater in our hands. The Crucible was written as it was in order to bring me, and the audience, closer to that theater and what I imagine can be an art more ample than any of us has dared to strive for, the art of Man among men, Man amid his works. (172-174, brackets added)

Nonetheless, these seemingly revealing words about craftsmanship and intent do not seem to appease even the contemporary critics’ backlash of Miller’s ‘infamous’ 1953 play. Some, like the scholar David Levin, have continued to regard Miller’s work in The Crucible as aesthetically fallible, since the playwright has proven himself unsuccessful in bringing into play the reality of the world that he pretended to unfold (namely, that of 1692 Salem, Massachusetts). Though Mr. Levin and his contemporaries may be right when pointing out the historical inaccuracies/discrepancies of Miller’s Salem (for example, the adulterous relationship between John Proctor and Abigail Williams is an artistic fabrication, then there is the rather sizable change in Abigail Williams’ age, from eleven to seventeen, and the like), they consequently fail to grasp the playwright’s illuminating use of historical events, past and present, which, in turn, constitutes a powerfully challenging aesthetics for confronting the audiences’ perceptions/definitions of reality, and their imprint on history. By pointing to a synchronous view of social and historical forces, Miller’s play ‘subverts’ the dissembling character of false consciousness, provoking us to question, constantly, the ‘essentially logical’ given of socio-historical linearity.

As a man positioned within an intricate web of partnerships and ‘warring camps’ within twentieth-century philosophical discourse, Theodor W. Adorno left behind him an impressively versatile body of work. His sharp criticism on political and social circumstances in the first half of the twentieth-century was largely influenced by the incongruous historical events of the period, namely the rise and fall of fascism, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the tumultuous times preceding and following the Second World War, the rise of totalitarian regimes in Old Europe, the Holocaust, and the seeming inevitability of the Cold War. On the other hand, there is the Theodor Adorno of the Aesthetic Theory, a work that marks an important departure for the philosopher’s seeming ‘ontological negativism’.

Written in the last few years of his life, after Adorno had said his final good-byes to the United States, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory sets out (bravely) to examine an area of relevant bearing for the philosopher, one that he had until then approached in a rather diffused manner. The work is centered on the idea that art is autonomous, i.e., art seen as a product of the immanent division existing between intellectual and physical labor. Adorno examines this characteristic of ‘high art’ by looking at artworks from the bourgeois era that wield a visible ‘freedom’ from social rule/influence. For example, he considers the art of the German Romantic Period (one that he was particularly taken by) as a pertinent example of art that had not been ‘composed’ so as to perform a ‘public function’, hence it managed to preserve its aesthetic essence by opposing the heteronomy of political ‘influenza’.

Even though Adorno himself was profoundly affected by revolutionary Marxism (a shared trait with other intellectuals reared in the decades of the Great Depression and Hitler’s totalitarian rule over Germany), in the sections of the Aesthetic Theory focusing on the relationship between art and society, he sets out to reject the idea of ‘politically committed art’ as postulated by two other leading western European intellectuals at the time (Bertold Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre), since he dismissed their acquiescence of art’s political platform. It is Adorno’s belief that

art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity. Its contribution to society is not communication with it but rather something extremely mediated: It is resistance in which, by virtue of inner-aesthetic development, social development is reproduced without being imitated. At the risk of its self-alienation, radical modernity preserves art’s immanence by admitting society only in an obscured form, as in the dreams with which artworks have always been compared. Nothing social in art is immediately social, not even when this is its aim. […]

what is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions. Its historical gesture repels empirical reality, of which artworks are nevertheless in that they are things. (226-227)

In that respect, true art allows room for the exploration of social conflicts, since it does not claim to have removed itself entirely from the purview of society. Nonetheless, according to Adorno, true art, i.e., ‘autonomous art’, disavows the occasion(s) to be profusely ‘edited’ so that it satisfies a social norm/standard, such as the depiction of social life as a well-balanced and evocative entirety.

Adorno then proceeds to employ the metaphor of Leibniz’s monad (i.e., monads are essentially perceived as entities, individual and internally dynamic unities, windowless in their capacity not to affect one another and simultaneously acting as individual reflective surfaces to the universe’s wholeness), translating it to the realm of art, so as to establish each work of art as one such monad. Concurrently, Adorno positions each work of ‘autonomous art’ as a monadic symbol awaiting its interpretation, drawing attention to socially volatile spaces without conforming itself to the singularity of a ‘resounding message’ (as he views the case with ‘politically committed art’).

In other words, ‘true art’ can question social dynamics by inviting/initiating practices that are found in opposition to socially approved practices (Adorno points to the work of Arnold Schoenberg), or by ‘exposing’ the out-of-the-ordinary elements/segments within everyday affairs (Adorno zooms on the work of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, respectively). Adorno sees this Kafkaesque and Beckettian approach as a highly effective form of literary ‘subversion’ (meaning, a stylistic ruse of content via form), one that very much like Leibniz’s monads demonstrates the aporious nature of contemporary social life. This aporious quality of contemporary lifestyle, in turn, is hidden away from our false consciousness, since it (our false consciousness) allows the make-up of the social situation to permeate our existence by equating it with something that has been ‘naturally given’ as a fundamentally realistic element to/of social structure. That is to say, both Kafka and Beckett (and here I would like to add on to the list Arthur Miller and his artistic ‘subversions’) confront this (false) consciousness by situating in a literary work of art the knowledge of social ambiguities/inconsistencies/negations/oppositions that serve to challenge, perhaps indirectly, our linear understanding of social practices. In Adorno’s view, this constitutes the only feasible way for ‘autonomous art’ to engage itself in the ‘battles’ of aesthetic opposition.

Adorno also makes a clear distinction between his notion of what ‘autonomous art’ is and the ‘l’art pour l’art’ aesthetics, in that, the latter (while asserting a self-imposed stance from a vile reality) are unable to question the reality they propose to dismiss and stand aside from, thus resorting to mere periods of ineffectual let-up. This assumption brings Adorno’s exploration of art’s autonomy and its relationship to social forces full circle, as he once again asserts the relevance of treating art as the end-product of the existing divide between intellectual and physical labor. While arguing in favor of ‘autonomous art’s’ superiority, one that is closely tied to ‘autonomous art’s’ critical endeavors, he does not fail to ascertain that it is precisely due to art’s coming-about-as-the-resulting-effect-of-labor-division that it effectuates society’s potential for political, cultural, artistic change.

Along those lines, I propose a reading of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible as an ‘autonomous art-work’, a history play, which offers the audience (present and past) an alternative way to be constructively critical of social normativity and its tightening grip on otherwise ‘liberated’ politics of art’s cultural legitimacy. Although Adorno’s somewhat lassiez-faire view of art (that is strong enough to transcend the pettiness of map lines and time slots) tends to blur the historical specificity of the time we live in, thus striking out as a rather insufficient methodological tool to relate the reality of multiple political, social and historical forces engaged in the process called ‘contemporary American theatre’, when addressing Miller’s The Crucible as one poignant example of a dramatic ‘monad’, Adorno’s aesthetics prove quite invaluable.

As a linguist (in a previous academic life), I often wondered about (and still do, to an extent) the limitations of language to deliver, to disclose, everything, all about human suffering, due to one’s exclusion from the dominant culture’s discourse, or the benevolent socio-political and historic context of their time(s). Most theoretical work I have encountered on my linguistic exploits (Jacobson, Chomsky, Ilić) has not helped me come closer to a finite understanding of this problem of limited representation. No matter how beneficial these theories of language as “langue” and “parole” have been for my linguistic training, their philosophical conceptualizations are not expansive enough to offer a sustained account of what it would mean to rework the constricting impulses they contain so as to ameliorate the pain of exclusion/ otherness/ subordination they exact. Judith Butler’s “immanent” critique of a set of politically engaging theories/practices, titled Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, employs multiple theoretical/ disciplinary/ political “languages” as it struggles to open up the discussion surrounding gender’s ‘metaphysics of presence’. Ms. Butler’s reversal of the gender/sex binary, contesting the prevailing idea of gender as a surface expression of a deeper “sex”, constitutes a noteworthy introductory step in a long-awaited scholarly attempt to consider the ways through which language constructs all the objects it contends merely to describe.

Bearing this in mind, my question regarding Butler’s re-conceptualization of gender as a “performative act” goes along the lines of questioning whether gender’s “performativity” presumes a subject with too much agency.

If this be true, what, then, constitutes “too much agency”? If one such subject is discursively constituted (as a mere effect of language), is it solely determined by language? Could gender be just a matter of choice? If so, to what extent?

Ms. Butler’s theoretical work on gender as a “doing” rather than a “done” is clearly invested in the works of several French thinkers (Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Wittig). However, the theoretical move that I found quite innovative in Ms. Butler’s work on gender identity is connected with her reading of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic description of mourning and melancholia as a useful way to theorize the acquisition of gender. In “Trauer und Melancholie” (1917, translated in English as “Mourning and Melancholia”, 1925), Freud looks at melancholia as a reaction to an emotional loss, in which the pertinent loss is not dealt with properly, whereas in the case of mourning the loss has been properly grieved. As a result of this dichotomy, in grieving, a melancholic person does not aver properly; they hold on to the loss, retaining it as one of their own characteristics. In other words, the melancholic person encorporates “the other” who has been lost so as to prevent the otherwise irretrievable loss of that person.

Ms. Butler shows by means of Freudian theory how gender identity could be elucidated (similarly) as a preservation of a loss attachment, while, at the same time, stressing the notion that we cannot continue to work with an ‘untroubled’ gender concept without (implicitly) adjourning to a heterosexual structure. This recasting of Freudian theory (exposing the unfortunate mutual exclusivity existing between identification and desire) could function as a future modus operandi to cultural theorists looking for ways to be constructively critical of social normativity and its grip on (otherwise) ‘liberated’ theories/politics behind cultural legitimacy. Thus, “the culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.” (119)

Initially it was Spalding Gray who approached the director Jonathan Demme with the possibility of turning his 1985 monologue, Swimming to Cambodia, into a feature film. Even though he has been quoted on several occasions saying that ‘it was never my [his] idea to put them [the monologues] on film,’ Gray seems to have seen past his former reservations, thus allowing himself (and his performative persona) to ‘cross over’ into a new medium. In an interview with Cineasté magazine, he espouses the reasons for this ‘sudden’ change of heart:

It’s less expensive to see, so you get an audience that cannot afford a theater ticket. Second, you get an audience that would never go to the theater at all, but which does go to the movies. The surprising thing that happened in retrospect is that because the film is so minimal, because there are no cutaways, the audience is required to make their own film. That’s not to say that doesn’t happen in the theater, but it happens differently in the movie theater. I think you come to film with certain expectations and conditioning. You have seen so many movies before that offer a kind of literal representation of reality. When it’s not there, there is the motivation for the audience to make self-cinema.

This sense of contesting, multiple audiences (the movie-goers giving documentary cinema a try, the cineastes making a leap of faith and considering the filmed monologue as a veritable cinematic form, the penniless theatre aficionados experiencing a re-packaged ‘live act’ performative gesture) endows rather than pilfers away Gray’s performative style, perhaps all done unwittingly, with the unspoken awareness of both subject matter (the experiences leading to and fro his casting in Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields) and its ‘execution’ (how to ‘speak about’ someone else’s traumatic past without exploiting it for obvious personal gain). A veteran stage performer, schooled in the performative exploits of the New York avant-garde scene during the nineteen-sixties and seventies , Gray proceeds to situate his dramatic practices (in this case, the monologue delivered in a film format) within a cultural environment (American) that is inextricably tied to his own dramatic self-enactments (the 1987 Jonathan Demme film was shot during three separate live performances in Gray’s ‘performative habitat’, the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in Lower Manhattan, where he has been ‘present’ on stage for nearly three decades).

On a virtually empty stage, save for a few props (four to be exact – a glass of water, an open notebook, a map of Southeast Asia, and a pointing device), sitting behind a desk, wearing the quotidian plaid shirt and blue jeans, Gray unravels his ‘speaking memory’. Working with a handful of props that do not appear to be even there, on stage, next to his demure figure, Gray approaches the unseemly complexity of his experiences heads (vocal cords) on: the audiences’ attention is focused on the only relevant signifier of meaning, Gray’s multifarious voice; everything else (shirt, jeans, notebook, map) plays second fiddle to the performer’s reverberated life experiences. Consequently, Gray the performer ‘speaks’ so that the audiences present may ‘partake’ on what anthropologist Marianne A. Paget calls ‘Erlebnis’ (life as lived through).

The technique of speaking directly to an audience dates back to the times of Ancient Greek play-practices. The term for such a scene in a drama is parabasis. Traditionally rendered in form of an ode which members of the chorus in a classical Attic comedy put forward, directly, to present audiences, a ‘parabasis’ semi-sequence was seen to exist independently of the play’s action, and usually marked the anticipated ending of Ancient Greek (Hellenic) comedic performances. However, this technique has been used by the likes of Sophocles, in his tragedies, and Shakespeare, in his characters’ soliloquies as well as at the beginning and ending of certain plays. In more recent times, ‘parabasis’ story-sharing has also been put to use by some of America’s most resounding theatrical voices (including the likes of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner, August Wilson, to name but a few - consider Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, where the playwright has his alter ego, Tom Wingfield’s character, reach the audience by standing in front of a veil so as to distance himself from the play’s action when commenting on the story of his family’s life. In Kushner’s ‘Theatre of the Fabulous act’, the two-part Angels in America extravaganza, all of the characters (of this or the other world), at one time or another in the play, address the audience directly, in parabasis fashion, delivering some of the play’s most somber comments on the political and social reality in contemporary human relationships. Likewise, both Miller and Wilson, respectfully, endow their (this time around) supporting characters with the ability to project their private thoughts directly to the audiences: with Miller, it is usually a female character, such as Joe Keller’s wife, Kate, in All My Sons, whereas with Wilson, the emphasis is placed on the racial rather than gender distinction of the marginalized character, as for example the case of the victimized musician Toledo in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. (See C. W. E. Bigsby’s A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982-1985), and Modern American Drama, 1945-1990 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992)).

Moreover, this story-telling ritualistic practice descends from a narrative as well as a dramatic tradition; it is particularly present among oral storytellers who employed the technique to regain the audience’s attention during lapses in action, to underline certain parts of the plot, or to pass on moral and philosophical statements about their characters’ life-choices. Without referring to this old story-teller’s ‘stratagem’ by its westernized name, Native American writer, scholar and activist, Gerald Vizenor, talks about the sheer ‘trickery’ of the parabasis story-telling routine, and its place in the novels, oral histories, tricky liberation stories by what he calls ‘postindian writers’. According to Vizenor, the ability to shift personalities and skins when creating a narrative voice or voices, to go in and out of temporality herein perceived against the tradition of the realist novel or story, allows Native American story-tellers to create a narrative ‘native presence’ that acts both as a revision and a futurity, which then in turn, helps ground the exigency for ‘survivance’, in both text and discourse.

In that respect, when Gray voices the final thoughts of his performance in Demme’s 1987 filmed version, telling the audiences that he finally understands what killed Marilyn Monroe, as an auto-performer he re-members the potentially ‘futile power’ voiced memory takes on in a public space, like a theatre house or a cineplex. At the same time, he and director Jonathan Demme make sure that the audiences remain seated for an additional writing on the screen, which reads:

TO THE CAMBODIANS AND CAMBODIA, A COUNTRY BEYOND MY IMAGINATION AND MUCH TOO FAR TO SWIM TO.

The dedication segment, together with the Marilyn Monroe remark, both conveniently sparse, carry the weight of the monologue’s leit motif; they open up, rather than enclose, the auto/ethnographic journey that Gray the performer ‘tracks’ for his audiences. The dedication, for one, is a cleverly disguised warning about the journey itself: if what the audiences are looking for is an ‘historically truthful’ ethnographic account of what life has been like for the Cambodian population during the sixties and seventies of the past century, what it truly ‘felt’ like to live through the era of great social and political unrest, what it ‘took’ to survive the toll of the Khmer Rouge’s punishments, they (the audiences) have signed up for the wrong journey. Instead, what they are about to pay witness to, in Demme’s 1987 filmed version of Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia, is a narrative about the craft of narrating life’s minutiae, an auto/performative piece about the art of dramatic recollection, an auto/ethnographic attempt which scrutinizes and elaborates on the notion of art-full (re)presentation of historic events.

Listening to Gray’s personalized expose of art imitating life imitating art, I, myself, felt a disquieting sense of hearing someone talk about my own life, not that I have personally experienced the same mixture of candor, humor and imaginative non-fictionality as Spalding Gray has. Even though, throughout the film, the audience is aware of Gray’s presence on and off the screen, body and head attached, every time the performer opens his mouth, the audiences’ attention drifts towards the voice rather than the body it belongs to. The film critic Roger Ebert identifies this omnipresent story-telling trait as part of another, earlier twentieth-century medium, the radio. Ebert links the ‘radio phenomenon’ of the monologue’s filmed version to the spell-binding effect Gray’s storytelling practice exhumes: although what the audiences look at is a single face on a small screen, what is said (and how it is said) supplants the physicality of Gray’s body. Essentially, the filmed monologue unfolds like a ‘radio play’, allowing the present audiences to picture-add, in the solitude of their imaginative minds, the visual memories to Gray’s spoken recollection.

Consequently, I, too, managed to ‘locate’ myself within the volatile ‘spaces’ of his ‘spoken memory’. In that respect, when he tells us that he finally ‘gets’ what killed Marilyn Monroe, we are offered an investment into our fascination, and at the same time, our disregard for auto/biographically linked art. Henceforth, if we choose to deny the private self its sacred abode in the immediacy of our secluded lives, we then run the risk of breaking off the umbilical cord that ties us to a historic past, while, at the same time, we allow for that past to ‘take over’ our memories and ‘shape’ their (re)presentations on a larger cultural canvas, oftentimes changing them beyond recognition. In a sense, we remain tempted to look for ‘alternative’ ways that might satisfy our ‘disrupted’ private lives and their undaunting ‘affairs with the past’. We then ‘go after’ men and women who seem to have lived their entire lives in the public’s eye, born and raised, and killed in its vicinity. We crucify them over and over again, as they help appease our immanent sense of guilt, betrayal, inadequacy, disconnectedness, boredom. We seem to need them today more than ever, since the present-day rules of ‘detached self-immersion’ are blighting. We create iconoclastic cultural narratives that no longer require the icon; only the thought of it will suffice.

The following is the work of Gavril Rosoklija, class of 2009.

In many works of literature, characters (not necessarily the main ones) can be characterized as round or complete ones because of a change they experience throughout the narrative. This change often comes as a result of a journey and even more commonly as a result of a physical quest which the character undertakes. What makes these journeys study-worthy for me is their significance towards revealing the inner characteristics of a character and with that make the work more meaningful.

Analyzing these quests gives me the opportunity to look behind the obvious story line and connect the work to a broader perspective. Whenever a character decides to go on a quest, he or she leaves the “comfort zone” of his or her home and enters a new world filled with challenges, surprises, successes but also setbacks. This allows me as a reader to trace the characters development and discover the idea which that characters stands for. Quite commonly these journeys or quests of the characters in a text can be influenced by the author’s belonging, his or her race, gender and ethnicity. Without looking into these journeys I as a reader would not be able to locate the presence of the author in one or more of the characters. Examples of such transformed characters influenced by the authors belonging are Sethe Suggs, the doomed mother from Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the curious colonialist Marlow from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Toni Morrison is a contemporary African American author who as a part of her works has written a historical novel Beloved that belongs to the neo-slave narrative paradigm. The fact that Morrison is of the same race, gender and ethnicity as Sethe Suggs is significant for the development of the narrative as a whole. Sethe is a creation of Morrison’s; however Sethe’s character is based on a real historical woman which Morrison uses for her neo-slave narrative. Morrison, prompted by her racial belonging, feels the need to present the world with a credible account of the African American history. She uses the real life case of Margaret Garner in support of the trope of the powerless African American mother that commits infanticide and creates the character of Sethe Suggs. For me as a reader, the fact that Sethe Suggs is an adaptation of an existing woman makes this completely incredulous occurrence seem plausible. Morrison sets Sethe Suggs’ on a journey which consists of getting away from what Sethe believes is the heart of evil, the plantation of the school teacher and entering the free land. Sethe wants to provide her children with the best future possible, a future that is not dominated by humiliating milking and constant beating. By making the character of Sethe Suggs go on such a journey, Morrison is again employing an example from African American history, namely the Fugitive Slave Act. Instead of finding the desired freedom, Sethe is forced to commit one of the most gruesome acts a mother can commit, the act of infanticide. It is a debatable topic whether the fact that Sethe murders her little baby referred to as Beloved in order to save her from being taken into slavery is something that the society can forgive, however it is certain that it is a huge step back in Sethe’s journey. Instead of escaping from the heart of evil, Sethe is taken back and trapped by the ghost of Beloved and the setting of “124”, the haunted house she and her remaining daughter Denver live in.

Once again, the fact the Morrison is an African American woman increases the importance of this novel because of the relationship she forms as a woman with Sethe Suggs. What makes Sethe go on this journey is Morrison’s awareness of the difficulties mothers had to face when leaving the plantations where they worked and her willingness to let the world know about the years of slavery. Moreover, what makes Morrison set Sethe on this journey is her sense of belonging, her feeling of repaying the men and women that survived these gruesome events and brought up Morrison.

On the other hand, Joseph Conrad relates to us the character of Marlow. Belonging to the age of Colonialism himself, Conrad makes Marlow go on a colonialist mission to what Marlow though is the heart of all evil. Unlike Sethe who hopes to go from the worst to the better, Marlow thinks he knows that he is going to the worst place of all. Instead, he is pleasantly surprised by what he finds in the heart of the Congo River. There he meets Kurtz and the Russian harlequin who seem to be leading quite a normal life, nothing as Marlow expects. What can be seen here is Conrad’s reflection in the perspective of Marlow. However, Marlow is by no means a direct representation of Conrad as many readers today believe. What makes Conrad and his character Marlow controversial today is the fact that civilization is strongly against Colonialism. Conrad influenced by the surrounding society creates the character of Marlow and sends him on a journey. Since Conrad is British, his writing was influenced by the colonizers and the character of Marlow reveals the one sided reality of Colonialism without giving us any information about the perspective of the colonized. All of Marlow’s decisions are determined by Conrad’s choice to write a colonialist novella. After going to the Congo, Marlow becomes what he always feared he would become, a typical colonialist. Eventhough we witness African people been given wires as food, tortured and forced to work, Marlow still does not seem to think that the Congo is the evil place he was hoping to find. This is supported by the dual setting Conrad uses, contrasting the present chat with Marlow’s friends on the Thames and the past occurrences in the Congo.

Finally, both of these authors have decided to mark their works with the influences that come from their race, gender and ethnicity. Both Beloved and Heart of Darkness are works where the characters created by the authors are not accidental creations of the imagination, but have a deeper history and belonging which is determined by the author. The actions of these characters are a key part of these types of narratives, since reading into their journeys is of essence to understanding to broader appeal these works have. It is wrong to believe that the characters are a self-portrait of the authors, but instead they are only told what to do by the authors, the rest is up to the reader to decide.

The following text is the work of Kiril Tuntevski, class of 2009.

Trying to attribute the term of the Lost Generation to a generation of living young authors is a travesty. The term, in its literary form in the British idiomatic spectrum, applies to the generation of soldiers killed in World War One, regardless of their martial affiliation. To claim that somebody else belongs to a lost generation, he or she needs to belong to another, usually older generation. So, the former should be deemed the greatest hypocrite – no traditionalist would likely doom a generation to their early proverbial grave. On the contrary, that Hemingway’s Lost Generation is the primary harbinger of modernity.

Actually, the preface to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is Gertrude Stein’s utterance “You are all a lost generation” originally refers to a pre-World War One generation of Northern American expatriates from the last two decades of the 19th century. However, its glorification through Hemingway’s 1924 novel refocused its meaning on Hemingway’s post-war generation. In a sense, Hemingway has recycled Stein’s phrase for his own purposes, in creating the telegraphic, traditionally disenchanted world of post-World-War-One Europe. In these terms, Hemingway makes a proverbial usurpation of identity and purpose. While Stein doesn’t necessarily refer to Hemingway’s generation, her quote is expanded and embodied in the character of Bill Gorton, who benefits all the spoils of expatriate life while being utterly cynical about it. Thus, the alleged traditionalists (Gorton) are portrayed living the lives of Hemingway’s Lost Generation.

This penetration of context enables Hemingway to write The Sun Also Rises as a negation, rather than as an affirmation of Stein’s alleged claim; the expatriates’ life is the best one there is. Further, Hemingway himself has a claim that befits best his generation’s philosophy, namely that there is no distinction amongst men except for the way they live and the way they die. As the life of the characters in The Sun Also Rises stems, in most part, from the life of Hemingway’s contemporaries, as well as Hemingway’s own life, the characters don’t seem to be lost at all. Their travelling, eating, drinking along with every other carnal activity they engage seems to be the thing they know best, even though to a traditionalist they may seem lost.

When reading these expatriates against the standards of an American (USA) text, I realize that they do quite the opposite of the American Foundation. Namely, they depart from the Myth of the Garden, and head back to the old world to re-establish their carnal lives. They, Jacob Barnes, Robert Cohn, Frances Clyne – predominately the WASP-like characters – are the prodigal sons of the New World; now they return to Europe, as a result of military struggles and psychological exile to reclaim the Old World as their playground (with every right to do so!). Personally, I choose to view this Hemingway’s Lost Generation as the first stance of Globalization; the first generation that chose to look beyond a nationalist veil at foreign things for their appeal, with a dose of expressionist internationalism. Mechanization is this generation’s primary trait – something that continues to be the essential factor of Globalism – and its necessity stems from pragmatism and exclusion of aesthetical ornamentations in speech and correspondence. Many times, speech in The Sun Also Rises seems to be shaped by the influence of correspondence. Bill Gorton’s telegraphic utterances when he recounts his trip to Austria is one of the text’s ubiquitous moments of modernity, while his speech is in fact only a natural occurrence in today’s (beginning of the 21st century).

My major point is, that “lost generation” written about in works such as The Sun Also Rises is the prototype of modernity and thus of contemporary life, which despite the fourscore years hasn’t really changed in style. The absurdity of the claim that the expatriate generation is a lost one is only topped by the fact that the quotation comes from somebody who spent most of her life in France (even though American). Gertrude Stein, the “author” of this ubiquitous quote, thus seems to have an air of pompousness around her – judging from this one single instance of hypocrisy, though I am not usually likely to make such a judgement prior to an in-depth study of an author’s works. Still, even the quote in question in this paper seems to be a result of rushed-in judgement, as expatriate (though not necessarily carnal) life today is greatly attributed to intellectuals worldwide. There is nothing lost about Hemingway’s Lost Generation. It is the initial step of internationalization and unbiased global interaction.

The following blog posts will be dedicated to the work of my students, who have attempted (successfully), the art of the position paper. I open their text to the world, not just the Nova community, so learing and sharing can take place.

The first text in the series belongs to Giacomo Bagarella, class of 2009.

It is readily apparent that most civilized societies are based on exclusion, regardless of the degree of democracy or totalitarianism present in the system. From the onset of settled livelihood in Mesopotamia, to the Classical civilizations in China, India, and the Mediterranean basin, up to today’s globalized world, the so-called monolith of these societies has always found recurrent buttresses in a group of people downcast for that purpose. What barbarians were to Greece and Rome were the outcastes of India, just as the “pagans” of the Christian Middle Ages were what homosexuals or “Arab fundamentalists” are today.

As we will see, the trope of the “Other” I will trace in several literary works takes place in properly defined civilizations , a factor crucial to the understanding of this concept (also o outside of literature). Toni Morrison’s Beloved unravels itself in the midst of a growingly imperialist nation, the US. David Henry Hwang’s M.Butterfly, on the other hand, takes place in a postcolonial “dominion ”, where Western foreigners form a clique in assumed superiority of the Chinese natives. Finally, Tony Kushner’s complete play Angels in America concludes the tercet of texts, providing insight on recent tendencies towards exclusion as they unfold in a modern society. Now, the presence of the “Other” may appear as a persistent trait in human history in which a group of people(s) is subjugated to another following the “logic” of Social Darwinism. However, upon careful scrutiny, it comes down to much more than that. The entity of the “Other” serves a much more profound and unsettling dualism with the Monolith (for example, WASPs in US society). As it is present to stand in (often quiet) contrast of the Monolith, the “Other” not only serves the purpose of highlighting several central “values” or “mores” of the monolith itself by negative comparison, but it also perpetually defines the monolith as ever superior and establishes its unquestionable authority.

Both before and after the US Civil War, the condition of African-Americans, especially psychologically, remained majorly unchanged. Regardless of the abolition of slavery, racism was still a pervasive belief, and besides a few isolated nuclei where both Blacks and Whites coexisted normally the situation was dire. Sethe, one of the central characters of Toni Morrison’s Neo-Slave-Narrative Beloved, epitomizes the scars which, penetrating much more than just torn, expropriated skin, afflict a whole society. Sethe’s grief at her murder of her first daughter Beloved, together with abuses she had suffered while a slave, remain within her psyche even after she is officially “emancipated”. This perpetual demeaning of the African-American body and soul serves the drastic purpose of consolidating the Whites in their position of padreternae of the postcolonial American society. Even without official legal support (which would soon be created), Whites continued in their campaign of making the bonds of the African-Americans nothing but their society’s veil straps; tight in controlling a propelling “object”, yet malleable upon any wish by the boatswain.

Clearly, skin color was the principal basis for the discrimination of African-Americans before and after the Emancipation Proclamation. Grounded on centuries of belief of superiority, engraved in tomes upon tomes of degenerative Western rationalism, American racism divided the New World society as clearly as the night and day. Whites did not only gain cheap labor, but also the moral “comfort” that they had a spot, assured by God, ahead both of the Christianized ex-Africans and the savage American Indians. With this conviction, it wasn’t hard to create a system in which race subsumed duty, and in which it was easy for Whites to stay aloft at the expense of the African-American “Others”. Scholarship was a crucial determinant in this establishment, as African-Americans were kept at a low-education level (with few exceptions), which comfortably provided scarce insurgent ideology, a self-humiliating rationale (in face of the White “learned gentlemen”), and a possibility to subsist only on the most meager of jobs. Emerging from this grim background of forced obsequiousness, Denver (Sethe’s daughter) manages both to defeat the ghosts of the slave inheritance and to shape her path to a higher education institution like Oberlin College. The “Others”, dissatisfied with a destiny of bondage, rise up and refute their position as serfs and enhancers of White supremacist ideology.

Moving a century closer to our times, David Henry Hwang’s M.Butterfly encapsulates the trope of the “Other” in the 1960s and 1970s Maoist China. Western diplomats, such as protagonist René Gallimard, are imbued with centuries of filo-Occidental thought, and create comfortable niches for themselves amidst the “uncivilized” Chinese population. These men and women, overlooking China’s status as a rising world power, consider the relations to that country and to its people nothing more but a continuation of the Western domination of the 19th Century. In social interaction, Chinese people are scarcely treated as human beings (especially women), and this results in the sexist and Orientalist behavior of the aforementioned diplomats. In addition to this, the scenes which comment on the political events of the era reflect this tendency on a broader scale. Asian nationalists striving for independence are viewed as childish subjects who, once subjugated, will fall in line again and be more than content in being ruled by the self-assumed “superior” foreigners. This is particularly true in the René’s analysis of the Vietnam War; to him, the Vietnamese will soon realize the benefits of occupation in front of the more advanced Americans, and will joyfully adopt the power’s customs and bend to their demands.

Thus, alongside the heritage of slavery and imposed European supremacy on African deportees, Asia too suffers the fate of seeing its inhabitants being turned into “Others”. White men, certainly more virile, intelligent, and able than their Chinese counterparts, should consequently not only expect the latter to kowtow to them, but also to draw freely from the Asian nation’s women, mines, and treasures. Again, white becomes the pure and desirable skin color, with the tinted yellow scorned and refuted (in history and tradition) in a last-ditch attempt to preserve European political and psychological supremacy as well as a limiting condition of “Otherness” for Asian peoples.

As globalization and civil rights movements eradicated many of the cultural and religious inequalities of the late 20th Century, race lost its position as keystone of the Monoliths’ resistance. Without any more rebellious natives to face and use as pretext for empowerment, governments and high-strata social factions had to find a new “Other”. These were comfortably engendered in the expanding groups of homosexuals and of other peoples with non-mainstream ideology, such as communists. Angels in America, a play by Tony Kushner, renders perfectly the struggles of homosexuals in the alienating society of Reaganite America. Accused not only of deviating from “normal” principles of heterosexual relationships but also of propagating the threat of the AIDS/HIV epidemic, homosexual men (including Mormons, Jews, etc.) have to combat their status as “Others” even against people who are indistinguishable from them in all but one aspect. Emarginated and decimated by the disease, homosexuals become involuntary pawns in political power-play, where easy votes can be had by renouncing rights to people with a different sexuality.

“Indicting” homosexual men and women with two diseases, mental (for their sexuality) and physical (for AIDS/HIV), the heterosexual majority is able to confirm their own “normality” and their higher roles in what supposedly is a “free society”. Angels in America displays the multiple struggles homosexuals have to take on; against society at large, against themselves, against their emotions, and against a festering, silent killer. Finally, even in a modern, industrialized nation, like the United States, the need for “Others” remains apparently high. It is saddening to witness this not only in the States but all over the world too; the push for democracy and common human rights, rather than promoting debate and cooperation, strengthens partisanship and factionalism instead – of course, always at the expense of some minority.

The scope of homosexual “Otherness” demonstrates that this trope is not racist; it is not biased, much less regional. Ironically, it envelops in its embrace all people and cultures by making each and every one of us a potential “Other”, whether it be for our nationality, ideology, or any other trait which may serve the occasional Monolith’s purpose. Literary works, such as Angels in America, Beloved, and M. Butterfly, open gates of reflection upon these issues, stimulating each of our minds to confront current and past discriminations from a fair, tolerant, and amending perspective. Having followed exclusion and its goals so far, in about 3000 years of human history, I can only hope that the future will be different, and that groups will base their status upon real strength and not a prejudiced demeaning of any “Other”, whoever it may be.

The Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms defines ‘auto/ethnography’ as an emerging subgenre of autobiography, a life-writing practice through which writers produce hybrid narratives, that in turn combine both autobiographical and ethnographic writing techniques. An auto/ethnographer is seen to be situated ‘in, and through, a social milieu, or ethnos, that is irreducibly tied to the subject [he/she] constructs.’ In other words, auto/ethnographers recognize (self/cultural) identity’s transindividual or collective make-up, understand its ever-shifting positionality within networks of contesting ‘contact zones’ so that when the story of a self is being told it is never just a story of an alienated self. Consequently, self-presentation in auto/ethnographic narratives could resonate ‘through the representation of the subject’s historically mis- or unremembered group,’ therefore locating ‘the individual [or individuals] through a “synecdochic model”,’ where he or she accepts being a part of a collective body, ‘often one whose membership has been transmitted orally over generations.’

(The notion of a ‘synecdochic self’ (a self which is a product of a communal narrative rather than an individual, singular life-journey) has been largely tied to the study of Native American auto/biographical practices. Theorist Arnold Krupat is among the first in the field to recognize this unique feature of self-telling amidst native auto/biographers, who according to Krupat’s ‘synecdochic model’ of self-representation, not only commence their life stories with references to particular communal/tribal practices and customs, but throughout the narrativized text keep the ‘communal self-hood’ on the frontlines: the larger view, the community’s life in an through history, makes the smaller (personal) journey possible. (See Arnold Krupat, ‘Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self,’ in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. by Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 171-194, and Arnold Krupat, Ethnocentrism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)).

Cultural historian Mary Louise Pratt coined the phrase ‘contact zone’ (which seems to have become over the years inextricably tied to the proliferation and understanding of auto/ethnographic narratives), herself searching for a descriptively dynamic way to approach the study of social and personal relations amidst the intersecting frontiers of spaces marked by colonial encounters. In her work on the relationship between travel writing and colonized historical discourse, titled Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Pratt defines the ‘contact zone’ as ‘the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.’ By choosing a term (‘contact’) that is closer to linguistics than traditional historical analysis, Pratt hopes to bring into perspective the relational side to subject formation within the terrain of the colonized frontiers, therefore allowing for the production and distribution of auto/ethnographic ‘expressions’ that are ‘heterogeneous’ in structure, idiom and reception. The term ‘auto/ethnography’ , which has been in use for the past two decades by both camps on the humanities divide, anthropologists and literary historians alike, implies more than a textual representation of auto-ethno-biographical modes of contact for and in multi-vocal settings.

According to ethnographer Deborah E. Reed Danahay, the editor of the first (and to this day, only) anthological work that examines this hybrid form of life-writing ethnography, titled Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social, ‘autoethnography’ is a boundary-crossing practice and product, simultaneously acting out the method behind the concept; as a method and a text, the act of auto/ethnographic representing fuses ‘both a postmodern ethnography, in which the realist conventions and objective observer position of standard ethnography have been called into question, and a postmodern autobiography, in which the notion of the coherent, individual self has been similarly called into question.’ Hence, Reed-Danahay endorses this ‘intersecting’ dual nature of ‘autobiographical ethnography’, which in her view could offer itself to be the perfect battle ground for questions relating to the act and practice of present-day representation (for instance, who speaks on whose behalf, how ‘authentic’ is their rendering of the represented life, and so on). As a result, whether or not the astute literary critic or social historian decide, respectfully, to stake their claim either with the autobiographic or the ethnographic side of the hybrid-form, ‘auto/ethnography’ thwarts conventional story-telling practices (of the ‘realist school’) by trespassing cultural and social boundaries, thus exerting its presence in ‘form of a self-narrative that places the self in a social context.’

The question beckons then, where in these definitions about the contours of auto/ethnographic self-telling could one find evidence to support a reading of Spalding Gray’s work, present in and behind the Swimming to Cambodia monologue, as an act of auto/ethnographic self-recovery?

For one, Gray does not belong to a historically ‘mis- or unremembered group’; moreover, he is a New England Brahmin with a ‘healthy’ bank account, a Southampton estate on the Island and a Tribeca loft in the city (in the now-trendy Lower East Village part of Manhattan). The only ‘mis-represented’ instance about his life narrative are his ‘WASP-ish features’, which in turn, contribute to the reality of him being typecast as either a professional WASP or a WASP doctor. Conversely, if we allow ourselves to part with the obviously apparent for the moment, we could begin to see Gray’s method of approaching the art of auto/performative self-recovery in contemporary media (theatre, film, TV) for what it truly is: an unassuming correlative to the narrative practices of other American auto/ethnographers, such as for example Sherman Alexie or Gerald Vizenor, two ‘postindian’ writer-activists, whose ‘trickster figures’ transpire transindividual contenders who are able to dance in-between tribal/communal practices as well as urban ‘civilities’ that are said to undermine and counter these backward traditions.

Secondly, the fact that Gray continues to work on his narratives while performing them ‘on the road’, facing different audiences each night, seeking out their guidance to help him ‘deliver his lines’, attests to his shrewd awareness of the complex nature of the ‘contact zones’ he lives out through the topography of his monologue-covered space. In that sense, the ‘recovered’ performative persona of Gray’s monologues, especially that of the Swimming to Cambodia monologue (1985, 1987), is never an autonomous self, never just another ‘perfectly ensconced’ identity. His various audiences are always present to remind him of this: there is the international cast and crew of The Killing Fields, then there are the world-wide audiences who saw and see this motion picture, sometimes accompanied by the film audiences for Jonathan Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia; next, there are those who were present during the filming of the monologue and those who have experienced the completed work afterwards, not to leave out the dedicated theatre audiences who had the chance to queue in for a live performance.

Finally, there is the vast readership associated with the published ‘text’ of the monologue’s narrative, and yet somehow the list seems to go on further. The palpability, though often times situated at varied spatial and temporal distances, of this multi-layered body of spectators, a collage of silent but not silenced voices, demands that Gray testify to his own hegemonic ‘isms’ (racism, passive colonialism, adherent economic imperialism, implicit misogyny), employing ‘an outsider looking inwards’ (and vice versa) perspective while simultaneously undermining his own ‘imbedded positionality’ in the web of postindustiralist social relations. Whether and how (for that matter) successful Gray and his performative persona are in the demanding structure that auto/ethnographic recovery imposes on the writing self is a question we can ask after having turned over all the ‘perfect moments’ of his artistic quest, in and outside the monologue’s humorously woven picaresque structure.

On to the pebbles then.

Sarah Banet-Weiser’s study of the intricate performative nature of beauty pageants, aptly titled The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, in particular the complex and complicated essence of the Miss America pageant, broadens the definition of research-significant cultural practices by examining the cultural validity of what may seem to the naked eye as the ‘lowest’ possible context of contemporary cultural production and reception. Banet's reads the Miss America beauty pageant as a “civic ritual”, i.e., a political space where concerns about national identity and cultural aspirations are confronted with all-too-palpable anxieties regarding gender and race, which in turn allows her to challenge our paradigmatic way of thinking about foundational/relevant cultural values and beliefs; what we are left with, after closing in the reading, is a push towards 'a re-think' of the multi-faceted links existing between “the nation” and “the citizen as a subject” amidst the overtly visible policing of sexuality/desire in the consumer-driven reality of post-industrialist American society.

However, playing the devil’s advocate, I wonder about the extent to which a feasible study of popular culture practices, such as Ms. Banet-Weiser’s ethnographically-fed study of beauty pageants, enables ordinary people (outside of the academy), to generate/create/devise meaning(s) for themselves under conditions that they may not necessarily control or influence.

Can such a theoretically-laden text influence “engaging activism” outside the academy? What can be done in the realm of everyday commonality after reading Ms. Banet-Weiser’s text? If the text fosters an awareness to the complex nature of the Miss America pageant, what is then the next logical step for the ordinary citizen as a subject?

The theoretical move that I found particularly motivating in Ms. Banet-Weiser’s work is tied to her use of Benedict Anderson’s now-classic formulation of the nation as an “imagined community”, namely examining the beauty pageants’ re-creation of “a national field of shared symbols and practices that define both ethnicity and femininity in terms of national identity.” (6-7) Building onto Anderson’s foundational theoretical topography, Ms. Banet-Weiser then proceeds to view “nationalism as a specifically cultural artifact…a discourse that meditates constructions of femininity and ethnicity in order to produce a particularly gendered notion of citizenship.” (7)

Thus, she is able to recast the ritualistic nature of the contemporary beauty pageant against the background of other ritualistic practices in/of U.S nationalism, opening up the possibility of seeing this “low entertainment” event as a site of political strife and national containment/reaffirmation. Bearing this in mind, Ms. Banet-Weiser’s interesting spin on Anderson’s template can be reapplied in the examination of other “low-brow” popular culture ritualistic practices, such as Nascar/Indicar/Formula One competitions, hence negotiating the emergence of a needed merge of empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of concrete cultural questions.

People come in into our lives: uninvited, unwelcomed, unknowingly. When they are taken away, due to nature’s steady course or life’s cruel unpredictability, we speak of their wanted presence in our own transience. We lament their absence, their voice, their laughter. We grieve. It is all normal, we are told. More so, it is all expected. We have been socially ushered into understanding the necessity behind this division of labor. No matter how many times we go through the motions, we are surprised by each new departure: a new sting, unpremeditated, unforeseen, populates our senses. We lean on what we have been taught: we think of life, we think of the time we shared with the dearly departed.

Most Western societies are accustomed to ‘life-affirming practices’ since, indeed, they have long accepted and practiced the art of ‘the obituary’. Obits, for short, are by definition life-affirming: as most Obits writers will tell you, the first rule is – life, how it was lived, not cause of death. Namely, they attempt to recast a person’s biography in not more than 500 words (again, the word count does depend on the social relevance of the deceased). Social significance aside, most civil servants, even those lowly positioned on the social ladder, receive an Obits’ notification in the newspapers.

In Macedonia, Obits are a rare practice. If indeed we chance upon one in the local papers, it is in fact an oddity: what is celebrated, the life that is remembered, does not belong to ‘a person’, it most definitely focuses on ‘the person’: an exceptional journalist, or philanthropist. Or fallen hero, of a time forlorn. Instead, we are more comfortable with another form of ‘remembrance’: the necrologue. Though most dictionaries, online or otherwise, would position these two practices as synonymous, there is an exact distinction: while the obituary celebrates the life of the life that has been lost, the necrologue announces the way in which other lives will, from now on, position themselves towards this loss. In a sense, the necrologue is less about the departed and more about the living: how family, friends, acquaintances, from now on, are to measure time, in reference to their loss. Knowing all this, I was not prepared for yet another intervention by society on our already increasingly conditioned lifestyles.

In August 2007, we heard news that a beloved uncle had been taken from us too prematurely. Just as we were about to celebrate his new diplomatic position, the hard-hitting facts came biting in. As the family was gathering from all corners of the known world, and preparing for yet another fissure in our already broken perspective on things – cremation – I was to place the necrologue in the local papers. My grandfather should not bear the heat, my parents and I decided. So, it was up to me to place our own strand of the family’s commemorative token. I must say that, even though, I had passed by the ‘announcements’ building that carries the ‘necrologue’ space for the three major Macedonian daily publications, this was my first time, entering on my own, with a specific task at hand. (Since then, I had had the unfortunate luck to enter this building twice more, each time less prepared than before).

After finding the floor, pressing the elevator button, getting to the offices, writing out the exact wording, it came time to settle the bill. Yes, payment is a reality, perhaps greater than the certainty of life and death altogether. I forked out the sum, and as I was about to leave, the lady behind the counter presented me with the receipt (yes, the fiscally correct bill). Just as I was about to stash this paper, with the rest of its kind, in my otherwise empty wallet, I noticed something that will perhaps haunt me until my dying days. My uncle’s name was printed on the receipt: he was ‘the purchased item’.

I barely found my legs to take me to the elevator. The rest few minutes are still a haze. As I left the building, and found shelter under a near-by tree, I looked at the receipt again. No class or reading I had taken at undergraduate, graduate or post-graduate level had prepared me for this. No Adorno, or Horkheimer, or Arendt, or Marcuse, or for that matter, hooks, Omi, Winant, Said, Gilroy, Gramsci, Spivak. By placing a commemorative token, I had unwittingly participated in the creation of a grotesque ritualization: I had purchased my uncle. I now, in my wallet, have a crazy ‘bill of sale’, and yet they keep telling me it is 2009, we live in an enlightened age.

I am certain that people who keep our monetary practices at bay would not have such a violent reaction: theirs is a world of numbers and stats, which always round off, and give meaning to each other. But the world of flesh is not one that can be so easily forgiving: by placing a ‘necrologue’, today, in the Republic of Macedonia, we become, quite knowingly, perpetuators of something so drastically removed from the act of remembrance. We become consumers, of the same flesh we tend to lament and hope to remember. Thus, until something can be done, and I’d like to think it can (call me the proverbial social romantic, I still believe in the old adage – ‘where there is a will, there is a way’), I suggest that we do embrace the Obits practice: that we concentrate on the texture and significance of the life lost, and not on the moment we can finally say farewell. And for this we do not need papers, we do not need mediators. We just need to remember: how we meet, what we did, why we laughed.