As a college student, you often hear fellow students dismissing certain elements of daily life as “social constructs.” While people tend to focus on and mock the idea of a social construct, it’s important to remember that social constructs can’t be simply dismissed. Social norms, however frivolous or repugnant they may be, have real world consequences and effect change in people’s lives. Reputation is one of the social constructs we often encounter that greatly impact many of our interactions with other people. It can be informed by attributes such as race, occupation, education, wealth etc. Regardless of where a person’s reputation is derived from, it can affect how others contextualize them within society, and by consequence how others interact with them.

This concept can apply to literature as well, particularly in the relationship between authors and their readerships. French philosopher Michel Foucault saw the author’s name as a functional item, a means of classification, used to categorize texts and generate relationships between texts. He also saw the author as a function of discourse for the readership, stating “Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; … Rather, its status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates” (123). Foucault later clarifies that the “author function” he’s discussing is a construction that is “assigned a ‘realistic’ dimension as we speak of an individual’s … ‘creative’ power, his intentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing” (127). These aspects of the author we find frequently discussed are “projections … of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice” (127). Essentially, Foucault is making the claim that a reader’s understanding of an author is limited and based on a series of projections, things the reader may think they know about the author in question.

Stephen King possesses the image of a titan within the horror genre, with this idea being fed by his many horror works, and the popularity they’ve gained for the genre. In a 2014 interview between King and Rolling Stone writer Andy Greene, Greene comments that by becoming a writer of primarily horror novels, King was entering “one of the least respected genres of fiction.” King replies by stating that he never had much interest in the styles of the conventional literary greats such as Hemingway and Steinbeck, taking time to add, “I have to say this: To a degree, I have elevated the horror genre.” With this statement, King raises the idea that his work, being truly exceptional, has earned the horror genre some of the prestige it initially lacked. Greene remarks that few would argue with King’s claim, giving it some measure of credence. I find this interview to be especially significant because it was conducted by Rolling Stone, which tends to focus on popular culture. In a way, publications like Rolling Stone help in setting the tone of American culture, and by promoting King, they increase his cultural significance. King’s name functions to characterize the discussions around his work, with the interview serving to put his name on a pedestal. As a result, discussions about King usually set him up to be a luminary within the horror genre, which will have ramifications when discussing non horror work.

While the Rolling Stone interview helped to heighten and reinforce King’s reputation, not all literary critics have been so kind to him. King received the National Book Foundation’s award for distinguished contribution in 2003, attracting the ire of Yale English Professor Harold Bloom. In a column for The Boston Globe, Bloom decried the foundation’s decision, believing commercial success to be their only criterion in selecting King. He then introduces J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter series into the argument, referring to the first novel, The Sorcerer’s Stone, specifically. While Bloom says he “suffered a great deal” while reading what he perceived to be a terrible novel, he draws attention to a positive review written by King. In his review, King comments on the possibility that children reading Harry Potter may grow up to read some of his novels. Bloom takes this idea further, stating, “When you read Harry Potter you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.” He believes a sort of vicious cycle has formed, where unskilled authors are building off of one another in order to achieve prominence, seemingly lowering literature in the process. Indeed, Bloom seems to dislike most new literature, as he ends his column by naming only four American novelists, “who are still at work and who deserve our praise.” Throughout his column, I viewed Bloom functioning as a literary elitist using his elevated position in academia to espouse his views, which seem to be counter to anything he sees as popular culture. He doesn’t believe King and Rowling deserve their success and allows his repugnance to overpower his discourse, going as far to dismiss their work as irrelevant were it not successful.

Using literary elitism to limit a writer’s validity as an author doesn’t need to have the vitriol employed by Bloom, and can be more effective without it. King has been faced with genre shaming, meaning that critics don’t take his work seriously as literature because it falls within the horror genre, which they see as facile. While discussing his novel Bag of Bones with Time, he mentioned how his new publisher at the time helped him to break his horror centric image, “Scribner [was] … interested in the book rather than in [my] reputation … which was a penny-dreadful reputation at that point. … To some degree, they rehabilitated my reputation” (Cruz). King admits that his critics had relegated him to a producer of “penny dreadfuls,” meaning that in their eyes, he only produced cheap, sensational stories. It’s important to note that King made his transition to Scribner publishing in 1998, after he had already released several successful non horror works, such as The Green Mile and the Dark Tower series. By getting a new publisher that advertised his work in a different way, he was able to move past the farcical reputation established by his detractors. King’s reputation was also aided by The Shawshank Redemption, specifically the film adaptation. Aja Romano of Vox details the adaptation’s importance for King’s career, saying the film “drew popular attention to the fact that King could do more than ‘just’ write horror, and helped kick-start critical reassessment of him and his work.” Notice how Romano specifies by saying the film drew “popular attention.” The Shawshank Redemption was originally published in 1982, but it received little attention until an adaptation was made, a task undertaken by readers. As the film version of the story grew in popularity, eventually becoming the highest ranked movie on IMDB, it piqued people’s interest in the source material, which served to bolster the idea that King could still write well when outside the horror genre. King switching publishers was action taken by the author, while the creation of a film adaptation to The Shawshank Redemption was an action originating from the readers. These two actions, though originating from two different parties, both serve to appeal to the readers, showing again how the culture of the day sets the tone of discussion for authors and their works.

So let’s see an example of the “author function” influencing how one of King’s work is handled in discussion. From 2014 to 2016, King published a trilogy of thriller detective novels starting with Mr. Mercedes, marking his first project in the detective genre. In a review of Mr. Mercedes, The Guardian writer Michael Smith begins by admitting that he judges King works differently: “Stephen King is one of the few writers so well known that even people who don’t read have heard of him. As a result, he is judged by different rules.” Smith says that he examines new King novels on two levels when reviewing them. First, he reviews the novel on the premise of its quality as a standalone work. The second level of analysis, centers around “the question of whether it’s a good Stephen King book, because he puts each novel in front of bazillions of readers who return for his distinctively unstoppable storytelling engine, his particular and hugely dependable voice.” Smith then outlines a third level of analysis, a method seemingly designated only for non horror works, “King isn’t as trapped in the horror ghetto as he once was. Therefore, there is a third level of potential scrutiny – that of assessing the book within whichever genre it inhabits.” Smith is reviewing King’s writing in Mr. Mercedes based on his ability to adapt his writing style to the detective genre, since the discussions surrounding his works tend to take place within the horror genre. Unlike past critics, he doesn’t relegate King to being ‘just a horror writer,’ but decides to view his writing within the detective genre. King’s name, carrying a myriad of connotations from his lengthy career, requires Smith to analyze Mr. Mercedes within multiple contexts, in order to form a solid opinion on the novel as a whole.

The New York Times review of Mr. Mercedes, by writer Megan Abbott, spends more time reflecting on some of King’s possible influences. Abbott points out that King has admitted to his horror works being inspired by the anxiety of the era he wrote them in. She then posits the idea that this concept still holds for Mr. Mercedes, “King cannily focuses on a particularly urgent and timely one: the spree of rampage killers dominating current headlines.” The novel centers around a cold case involving a man driving a Mercedes into a crowd during a job fair, drawing parallels to violent rampages from that time, such as the shooting in Aurora, Colorado and the bombings at the Boston Marathon. When discussing the protagonist of the novel, former detective Bill Hodges, Abbott references the work of Raymond Chandler, a renowned author within the detective genre. She specifically highlights from an essay called “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which Chandler laid out some of the hallmarks of writing within the detective genre, such as the character elements that construct a good detective protagonist. Abbott notes how King initially draws from Chandler in constructing Hodges, only to later depart from his methods later in the novel. While I enjoyed this review and its ideas as to where King drew inspiration, I was careful to remember that many of Abbott’s ideas were not based in fact. Her review was informed by things she assumed to be true, pieces of the projection of King.
In observing King’s career, I believe it’s easy to see how the name ‘Stephen King’ has escaped the man in some regards. What began as a man trying to earn living as a writer has been transformed into debates regarding the validity of his works as literature, and the validity of the horror genre and genre fiction as a whole. King has remained relevant and active as an author by finding ways to restructure how readers view him in literary discussions, and engaging them with more frequent departures from the horror genre. I’m interested to see how the King name will continue to evolve over time, and whether his work or their adaptations will hold more sway with public opinion. I see King’s image and discussions regarding him shifting more towards horror again, given that the 2017 film It, based off King’s novel of the same name, has become the highest grossing horror movie of all time. But King could always steer the discussion in a different direction by releasing a novel set within a genre he hasn’t worked in before, as he did with Mr. Mercedes. Whatever project he decides to put out next, his readership, both the admirers and the detractors, will be waiting to discuss it in ways only befitting of a Stephen King work.

Works Cited
Abbott, Megan. “Stephen King’s ‘Mr. Mercedes’.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 June 2014.

Bloom, Harold. “Dumbing down American Readers.” Boston.com, The Boston Globe, 24 Sept. 2003.

Cruz, Gilbert. “Stephen King on His 10 Longest Novels.” Time, Time, 6 Nov. 2009.

Foucault, Michel, et al. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Cornell Univ. Press.

Greene, Andy. “Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 31 Oct. 2014.

Romano, Aja. “Stephen King Has Spent Half a Century Scaring Us, but His Legacy Is so Much More than Horror.” Vox, Vox, 4 Aug. 2017.

Smith, Michael Marshall. “Mr Mercedes by Stephen King Review – a Crime Thriller from the  Horror Master.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 4 June 2014.

W.G. Sebald’s ambulatory, postmodern fiction The Rings of Saturn is obsessed with historical representation and the hermeneutics of memory. The novel follows a nameless, foreign narrator (who is a thinly veiled representation of the author himself) as he wanders through Suffolk county in England: observing the landscape, interacting with locals, and remembering historical phenomenon. Quotation marks are noticeably absent from The Rings of Saturn: readers oftentimes forget from whose perspective a story is from—the narrator or another character. Monochromatic photographs also riddle the text, moments of historical clairvoyance breaking through the ubiquitous ambiguity of the narrative. The Rings of Saturn insubordinately refuses genre, all the while remaining deeply invested in historical accuracy. Despite Sebald’s interest and obsession with history, the novel is a work of fiction. The postmodern narrative structures prevent the text from realizing itself as historically indisputable. The epistemological legitimacy of the photograph in The Rings of Saturn will be challenged through the photograph that accompanies the narrator’s interaction with Thomas Abrams, a man reconstructing the Temple of Jerusalem.

At the crux of The Rings of Saturn is a queasy temporality: “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk” (Sebald 3). The temporal stability offered at the beginning of the text is immediately compromised: “Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into the hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. It was then that I began in my thoughts to write these pages” (Sebald 4). The Rings of Saturn is a retrospective, written about a journey that happened a year earlier. The narrator’s voice is “archaic, that of a specter” (McCulloh 2). The distance from the journey is reflected the narrator’s emotional detachment that resonates in the novel’s prose. The novel is riddled with allusions to other images, authors, artists and works of art. Within the story, the narrator examines Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, deconstructs the legitimacy of maritime battle paintings, reflects upon Sir Thomas Brown’s Urn Burial, thoroughly investigates the author Joseph Conrad’s biography, and considers the ethics of mass death from herring fishing and Dutch Elm disease, as well as from colonization. The Rings of Saturn is clearly an act of fanatical remembrance, a desperate attempt to describe the almost labyrinthine consciousness of a man walking through the countryside. Sebald has written, as it were, a travel narrative—i.e. a modern travel novel. And what do modern people do when they travel? Yes, they take photographs.

Photography “[developed] in tandem with one of the most characteristic activities of modern activities: tourism” (Sontag 9). The “reproduction of photographic images” is the “most conspicuous surface feature” of the text (Long 46). They are emblematic of the historical tourism and voyeurism within Sebald’s novel. These photographs are mnemonic souvenirs from the narrator’s journey. The images are monuments to the narrator’s travel. There is an “authenticating function of images” that epistemologically validates the narrative (Long 47). Furthermore, photography “assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel” (Sontag 9-10). The reproductions of photographs are diametrically opposed to the profound instability of the novel’s ambulatory consciousness. The photograph becomes the apex of historical representation in The Rings of Saturn; they “suggest a totality—the totality of life’s experiences—that would otherwise have been lost” (McCulloh 7). The image provides the epistemological validity and narrative stability intrinsically absent in the modern activity of travel and the narrator’s spectral non-presence. Whereas the narrator’s account of his travel disobeys traditional forms of dramatic realism, the photograph’s are unequivocally realistic, insofar as they are actual photographs.

Sebald’s prose is incredibly reverential towards history and the mystical aspects of life. The Rings of Saturn could be therefore considered a pilgrimage. Any good pilgrimage typically concludes in a visit to a shrine (or similar location of spiritual significance). The Sebaldian narrator visits Thomas Abrams, a retired farmer who has spent the better part of three decades meticulously reconstructing a model of the Temple of Jerusalem. What was once considered a manic obsession by his peers—he was “[immersing] himself deeper and deeper into a fantasy world”—has gradually evolved into an act of intense scholarship and academic research (Sebald 244). Thomas Abrams is a pseudonym for Alec Garrard, who is obsessed with the idealization of historical representation. He is actively engaged in a religiously utopian project. If The Rings of Saturn concluded with Abrams’ model of The Temple of Jerusalem, as it nearly does, the novel would agree with his utopian vision, substantiating The Rings of Saturn as a historical pilgrimage. However, Sebald is careful in his subordination, seemingly rejecting the supremacy of any form of historical representation.

The pilgrimage is therefore darkly comic. Instead of visiting an actual shrine, which the narrator wishes to do (“I wished that the short drive would… go on and on, all the way to Jerusalem”), the narrator visits a simulacrum (Sebald 249). It is merely an incomplete representation of the Temple of Jerusalem. Nevertheless, there is a spiritual palpability in Abrams’ reverence towards his activity: “After all, if the Temple is to create the impression of being true to life, I have to make every one of the tiny coffers on the ceiling, every one of the hundreds of columns” (Sebald 245). Abrams’ devotion towards historical representation can only create an “impression”. Abrams is not completely sure of his project’s utopian design: “Now as the edges of my field of vision are beginning to darken, I sometimes wonder if I will ever finish the Temple and whether all I have done so far has not been a wretched waste of time” (Sebald 245). However, Abrams’ emotional shift with regards to his utopian project shifts at the exact moment the photograph of his model of the Temple appears in the text.

At the moment when Abrams’ doubt paradigmatically shifts towards conviction, a photograph of his model appears, covering the entirety of a two-page spread. In the faded photograph, the columns of Abrams’ model are receding into the distance, towards a vanishing point. The image captures Abrams’ sentiment of his project: “as if everything were already completed and as if I were gazing into eternity” (248). The columns are stretching towards eternity, echoing the endlessness of the Abrams’ artistic process. Just as the narrator is assuaged by his mnemonic souvenirs, the photograph of the model reaffirms Abrams faith. His faith is simultaneously challenged and restored by the ongoing-ness, the eternity, of his utopian ideal of historical representation. Although Abrams’ model will always exist as a simulacrum of the actual Temple, in a perpetual state of becoming, the photograph legitimizes Abrams’ utopian vision of representing history.

If The Rings of Saturn was an ideal pilgrimage the novel would’ve ended with this interaction, possibly with the photo of the temple. Yet the novel leaves Abrams behind with his obsession and goes on for another chapter. The departure from Abrams’ utopian exercise forces readers to return to the interaction. The entire interaction with Abrams’ is mediated through the narrator’s consciousness. The narrator is literally putting words into Abrams’ mouth. The narrator’s eloquence would be unexpected, if not incongruous, with the language of a retired farmer. Furthermore, Thomas Abrams is a pseudonym for Alec Garrard. The absence of quotation marks guarantees that Alec Garrard is not given any narratological space in the novel. If nothing is in quotation marks, then everything is mediated through the consciousness of the narrator—including the photographs.

Aesthetically, this makes sense. The photographs are all monochromatic and faded, as if they were retrieved from a shoebox labeled “Memories”. The images do not possess the aesthetic quality, which we associate with epistemological legitimacy, that would be expected of photographs in a history textbook. They are photographs that belong in a family photo album. While the content of the photograph buttresses Abrams’ utopian form of historical representation, the aesthetics of the photograph problematize his design. The camera is awkwardly close to the model. The edges of the photograph are blurred like Abrams’ vision, questioning the meaningfulness of his venture. The endless columns do not beget eternity. It is tunnel vision. The columns are awe-inspiring and crippling. The reproduction of the photographs, the narrator’s form of documentation, is “used, paradoxically, to evoke that which cannot be documented” (McCulloh 9). The photograph is an irreconcilable form of representation within the postmodern fiction.

The photograph also provides a dark comedy in The Rings of Saturn. At no point does the novel confirm that this is in fact a photograph of Alec Garrard’s Temple of Jerusalem. Maybe this is a photo of the actual Temple of Jerusalem? Or, maybe—just maybe—this is a photo of a random temple with columns that readers in, say, Williamstown, MA would neither be able to confirm or deny. The Rings of Saturn investment in historical accuracy beguiles a trust from the reader which is completely unfounded. The postmodern literary techniques should be enough to warrant skepticism from the readers, yet the interpretive diligence the book demands exhausts them. It is quite easy to forget that this narrative is a work of fiction—especially when many people have attempted to recreate Sebald’s walking tour of Suffolk. Readers blindly assume that this is a photograph of a simulacrum, when the photograph itself is only “a semblance of knowledge” (Sontag 24). Is this image merely a representation of a representation? Additionally, there is a small, blurred silhouette of a person within the hall. It is impossible to determine whether this spectral presence is a figurine or an actual individual. Any possible epistemological validity left in the photograph is ultimately annihilated by the tactility of the novel itself.

The photograph of the columns is spread across two pages. The image is bifurcated by the crease of the novel. The crease functions as an imperfect mirror; the photograph is almost perfectly reflected across the book’s meridian. The vanishing point within the photograph is lost within the crease. The eternity towards which Abrams is looking becomes invisible. The reader knows that the vanishing point must be there, but the undulation of the page destroys the perspective. The book consumes the photograph. The photograph’s epistemological legitimacy in The Rings of Saturn is destabilized by the aesthetics of the image and the postmodern narrator’s mediation, yet it is ultimately devoured by the book itself.

But does any of this matter? Why should readers be concerned with historical representation in a book that need not have any bearing in reality? After all, The Rings of Saturn is fiction. Thomas Abrams is not a real person. All of the photographs in the text are aestheticized abstractions. But Alec Garrard is an actual individual who has devoted a significant portion of his life to the reproduction of the Temple of Jerusalem. Even though he is rendered invisible through the violence of artistic representation, The Rings of Saturn goes to great lengths to evocatively describe his faith in representation. Sebald might be neurotically skeptical of fiction as a valid form of historical representation, but he is still fanatically obsessed with humanity’s need to organize knowledge and understand history.

Works Cited:

Long, J.J. W.G. Sebald: Image Archive, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Print.

McCulloh, Mark R. Understanding W.G. Sebald. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Print.

Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. London: The Harvill Press, 1998. Print.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. Print.

I’d like to thank Rob for reading my essay and to apologize for the same reason.

Lethal injection is the humane form of capital punishment. As a culture, as Americans, we’ve moved past the nightmare methods of the past. Gone are the brutal neck-snappings of hangings, the grotesque sizzling of bodies in electric chairs, the barbaric heart-ripping bullets from firing squads. The lethal injection turns the high theatrics of an execution into a routine medical procedure, an elimination antiseptic and efficient, humanity scrubbed of a scourge with clean consciences all around. It’s a painless process. Clayton Lockett spent the promised easy process of his death writhing on a gurney in agony, groaning, screaming, pleading for help, trying to escape, burning alive from the inside, for forty-five minutes before his heart mercifully seized. Doyle Lee Hamm, suffering from cancer, was strapped down while doctors jabbed needles into his legs and groin in an attempt to find a vein healthy enough to fit an IV line through which prison officials could send the drugs needed to numb his pain receptors, freeze his body, and stop his heart. He bled profusely and plead for death, was saved only by the midnight deadline for the completion of his execution and his own body’s illness and decay. He still experiences – feels vividly – the dread he felt at the prospect of his own imminent execution, and the pain that made him wish it would come sooner, every time he lies on his back. “Cruel and unusual punishment” is forbidden by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the document that supposedly provides the basis for every law and legal decision in the country. The tortures of Lockett and Hamm raise the question of how can a society that has among its founding documents a prohibition against cruel punishment reconcile itself to such gruesome scenes in its death chambers. More urgently: why would it ever want to?

The answer to both questions relies on the uncertainty in the words “cruel and unusual”. There is no objective standard for cruelty, no level of agony that is for everyone too far when administering punishment. This leaves the meaning of the clause open to interpretation both constitutionally – what is allowed as law by the courts – and morally – what individuals think of as appropriate means of punishment. Defenders of the death penalty often locate its legal justification in its original meaning in the Bill of Rights. Executions were commonplace in late 18th-century America, in law if not in practice, often for lesser crimes than murder. They did not cease after the enactment of the 8th Amendment-containing Constitution, indicating the drafters and signers of the law did not intend for it to forbid capital punishment – for the death penalty to be considered “cruel and unusual”. This argument is bolstered by the presence of language in the Bill of Rights that seems to allude to the constitutional legality of the death penalty. Namely, in the Fifth Amendment, which reads in part “no person will be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law”; the “without” seems to imply that, if the due process of law is afforded, the state can deprive a person of her life. The case that the collective intent of the founders in drafting the constitution was pro-capital punishment – intended the constitution not forbid state laws that included it as a sentence – seems unimpeachable. To further their point, death penalty supporters note that the methods of execution in 18th century America were often quite brutal – poorly prepared hangings and so on – and the executions carried out in the modern day are less painful, less cruel, than what is theoretically permissible by the constitution.

But courts are not bound the original meaning of the 8th Amendment when deciding how it will be understood today, and indeed there are good reasons to apply different, updated interpretive principles to its text. The country has made moral advancements since the late 18th century, notably doing away with chattel slavery as its primary mode of agriculture and allowing women and people of color the vote. Both of these changes deviated from the original intent of the drafters of the constitution at its signing; slavery was explicitly included as permissible in the document. A principled originalist might here make an objection of type: the examples just cited were new laws rather than updated interpretations of previously written ones. But the understood meanings of amendments have shifted as well. At the time the constitution was ratified, no one understood the First Amendment to categorically protect free speech rights, as exemplified by the Alien and Sedition Acts, a suite of laws passed in 1798 – with yea votes by many of the Founding Fathers – that made it a crime to protest the government, among other things. Yet the legal understanding of the Amendment changed, and no serious legal scholar would defend the constitutionality of a law punishing political protest today. The meaning of the 8th Amendment itself has updated similarly throughout the centuries. George Washington had a man hanged for introducing fake money to the economy, and even the most bloodthirsty modern judge would not sign off on an execution order for a counterfeiter. Punishments not in use at the time of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, such as extended stretches of solitary confinement for juveniles, have been in recent history examined and deemed unconstitutional. So it is clear laws, the 8th Amendment among them, can be read using updated interpretive principles, ones that bring to bear on them modern socio-political and moral understandings.

If we examine the death penalty with a twenty-first century view of what constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment”, the case for its unconstitutionality becomes stark. Start with the clear brutality of the state murdering an innocent person. While there are no confirmed cases of a post-execution exonerations – case files tend to close after the convicted perpetrator dies – 154 people have been proven innocent by DNA evidence since the reintroduction of the death penalty in the 1970s. Over 1400 people have been executed in that time. This means out of every eleven people put on death row, one has been exonerated. The probability that the 154 people shown conclusively to have not committed the crime for which they spent years awaiting their execution were the only innocent ones – that no truthfully innocent convicts were killed by the state – is astronomically small (Stevenson). It’s almost certain the state has murdered an innocent person. By the very logic the state uses to condemn humans to death – the heinousness of their actions, almost always resulting in the malicious death of innocent people – the death penalty, incorrectly applied, is unspeakably cruel. Incorrect verdicts are not purely the function of a malconceived capital punishment scheme, or of the practice’s overapplication. They are inherent to the administration of justice in a society. No system will ever produce perfect results – guilty people will be exonerated at trial, innocent people will be convicted – as a result of the fallibility of human reasoning. Capital punishment exacerbates this flaw with its severity and its irreversibility. No reparations can be made to the dead.

But even if our system of determining guilt and innocence was perfect, the death penalty would remain cruel in the extreme. Lethal injection is considered the least painful, cleanest, most humane way to execute – a medical procedure. It has created grisly, horrific scenes – the torture of Clayton Lockett, of Doyle Lee Hamm, numerous other deaths of unspeakable torment. These are “botched executions”. But to call them that neglects a key point: they often succeed. They do what they’re intended to do, which is kill a person. The barbarity of the enterprise simply rises to the surface when the sodium thiopental or the paralytic fails and we’re forced to confront how potassium chloride eats the body from the inside, burns it up and stops the heart. What is “botched” is the theater. The dramatics of the last meal, the long march, the last words, the justified rage of the warden, the desperate protests of the bleeding-hearts, the clinical precision of the doctor, the slow painless-seeming snuffing of a human life, so much better than the convict deserved for what he did; all an elaborate stage show with one grotesquely warped message: justice is served. The writhing, tortured dying man had the gall to ruin the play by exposing the act of cruelty at its heart. This black core does not change when an execution goes off without a hitch. It is simply better concealed – better acted. Brutality is inherent to the enterprise, no matter if the death is presented in the guise of medicine, serving the cause of justice.

At least that’s one way of looking at it. There are people who believe the death penalty is just, the correct punishment for heinous crimes. Others are strict abolitionists who think it is always evil, forever wrong. Whether you think it should be legal nationally circles back towards your reading of the 8th Amendment – what you consider “cruel and unusual punishment”. The meaning taken by any individual depends on the interpretive principles they apply: whether they prefer original meanings instead of modern understandings, their individual philosophy, and so on. It is so obvious to not need stating that people can reach meanings both favorable to and opposed to the legality of the death penalty considered on 8th Amendment grounds. What is interesting is the remarkable consistency of one entity when faced with this analysis. The Supreme Court has, save for a very brief period, used the interpretation that has held the death penalty is not cruel and unusual, that it is permissible. Figuring out why this has held true reveals something fundamental about the law and how it is interpreted – to what end and to whose benefit.

Every case that goes before the Supreme Court has winners and losers. When the death penalty is preserved, who is hurt? The answer is obvious: the people set to be executed. And these consistently defeated are of a type. Death row inmates are not a randomly selected sample of the population. They’re disproportionately likely to be black and poor compared to not only the general population, but also to the population of convicted murderers. The most likely convicted murderer to be sentenced to die is a black man who murders a white person – there are more than fourteen times as many black people on death row for murdering white people than white people on death row for murdering black people. This is not a new phenomenon. The Supreme Court’s decision that temporarily suspended the legality of capital punishment in the United States, Furman vs. Georgia, cited the racial disparity in death sentences as part of the reason the death penalty as a whole was a cruel and unusual punishment. This, when combined with the capriciousness of the sentence – one justice compared being sentenced to death to being struck by lightning – put capital punishment laws in violation of the 8th amendment. Neither the racial difference in the sentence nor the randomness of its occurrence were coincidental.

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow analyzes the system of mass incarceration in the United States and comes to the conclusion that it is essentially a recreation of the racial caste system that existed under slavery and then again under Jim Crow. The work persuasively lays out the case for how the systematic incarceration of young black men essentially marks them as a permanent underclass in American society. Her emphasis is on the war on drugs, but Alexander’s Jim Crow metaphor can be extended to capital punishment. In the new Jim Crow, the death penalty takes the place of lynching. Once, the legal system functioned as a method of guilt-avoidance for white people who committed hate crimes – think Emmett Till’s killers, so obviously culpable, walking free and then jubilantly confessing their guilt and their pride to whomever would listen. But this was uncouth, dated, a hick-style murder committed by backwards lost-causers a century after it fell out of style. The savvier racists – most of the country – understood that the threat of lynching could be moved to the legal system and justified within it. Thus the spike of executions in the 1900s as Jim Crow asserted itself, to rates that remained high into the 1960s. After the lull in the 1970s following Furman, which was reversed after states presented plans to address the issues raised by the decisions in the case, Reagan’s war-on-drugs tough-on-crime rhetoric prompted another increase. In 1989, five young men, four black and one of Latino descent, were convicted of raping a jogger in Central Park. Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for their execution. The five were exonerated in 2003. During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly insisted upon their guilt and refused to retract his call for the death penalty. The associations are clarion: men of color are falsely accused of a crime, and an angry community decides to administer their grotesque pantomime of justice via a lynching. Donald Trump, a man whose main talent is reflecting perfectly the petty rages and desires of the embittered and embattled white middle-aged majority, had an inchoate understanding that the death penalty was the means by which a lynching would be achieved in the late 1980s. Its function could not be clearer. So why was the death penalty allowed to persist? The answer reflects a fundamental trait of the law: its inherent ambiguity – the multiple meanings that can be read into any statute – means any legal decision is a fight between two sides supporting opposing interpretations. And these fights are not conducted between foes of even strength; often, one position comes in with all the advantages afforded by privilege and societal power. That side sees its interpretation prevail the overwhelming majority of the time. Thus, the law is a wholly ineffective means of changing the status quo: if the dominant group in society nearly always gets its way, and the status quo is how they like things, then nothing will change. If this country’s white majority wants “cruel and unusual” to be read to exclude the torture that is the death penalty in order to preserve a tool of the violent enforcement of their hegemony, then that is how the 8th amendment will be understood.

But there seems to be a flaw in this conclusion. Sometimes, the legal system rules against the powerful. The Furman case is an example: if the system was really biased in favor of the interests – cops, district attorneys’ offices, a majority of the voting public, white people – with more clout in American society, the Supreme Court would have ruled in favor of the death penalty. This seeming redemptive correction misses critical nuance, though, that can be found in the ambiguity in the heart of the law. There’s no limit to the number of challenges you can raise to a decision. Even if one interpretation falters, there is another that can be swiftly elevated to take its place. Then, the position of the minority needs to defend itself, perhaps this time with different attorneys, or different judges, with slightly different arguments. Furman was reversed after states presented a plan to use “aggravating factors”, things that made a crime theoretically more heinous, as the basis for death sentences. This system changed nothing about the racial dynamics or the capriciousness of the death penalty. It remains legal. Once a policy favored by the powerful wins in court, it has a way of sticking around. Any loss is merely a temporary setback, forcing the interests behind it to stall while a new legal strategy is cooked up. Any victory is immediately reinforced by implementation in society, giving the judicial decision the force of real life. Life without the death penalty was never given a real chance in American society. Life with unlimited political spending came into being promptly after Citizens United and it’s difficult to envision the world we would return to after a repeal.

The only way to break this cycle is to gain power. Political power in American life comes in varied forms, but some are more achievable than others for the currently dispossessed. It is unlikely that movements seeking change are going to accumulate the near-unfathomable wealth possessed by their foes, and changing the status quo means fighting against privileges. The attainable form of power is popular support. Take the Supreme Court decision in Hodges. It came soon after nationwide support for marriage equality eclipsed fifty percent. A similar shift in public opinion might be necessary to end the death penalty nationally. The multiple understandings possible for any law reinforce the existing order and reward powerful groups, who are better equipped to fight on the terrain of interpretation. Making any changes to the long-existing understanding of “cruel and unusual punishment” that excludes execution is going to be an uphill climb. But if a majority of Americans come to realize the barbarism of capital punishment, then change, however improbable, might be possible. And a chance of any size to end state murder by torture is worth taking.

I have been guilty of skipping the preface. And the foreword to the preface. And the prologue to the foreword to the preface. It only recently occurred to me that a school of literary theorists, headed by Wimsatt and Beardsley, are ready to formally clear me of blame: The New Critics are not interested in authors’ intentions or their biographical details. They believe that the intentions of authors are elusive, and moreover, irrelevant. Anything a text says is there in the text, already. Wimsatt and Beardsley are prodding at the how-to of reading—should we poke around authors’ private correspondence and life history as we read, or would doing so distract from, or worse yet, obscure the meaning of the text itself? On this matter, let me chide my idleness: I hope to reenact how a text—David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech delivered at Kenyon College, This Is Water, in this case—can have a ghostly, mitigated author buried within it, and why knowing more about authors and their intentions would help us get at readings that would otherwise escape us. [1]

A bandanna-free David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College, 2005

It will prove helpful to begin with the intuition that inspired the Wimsatt Law forbidding readers from considering authorial intents—namely, that intentions are tricky to nail down. Careful observers will find that we never had access to authors’ intentions, merely their statements of intentions, at best. Mediated by language, these statements inherit the problematic nature of all writing: they are “regulated less by the content [they signify] than by the very nature of the signifier” (Foucault 116). Free of their object referent, the statements could well have very little say on author’s true intensions; what we can be sure of is that intentions are only ever available to us in a state corrupted by projections of biases from the language’s user. The consequence of this observation is ubiquitous yet often glossed over. This Is Water deems it significant enough to meditate, on a literal level, how differing interpretations, colored by self-centeredness, can stem from one formulation. At one point in the text is a “didactic little story” of an atheist and a religious man, the former of which is saved in a blizzard by a couple Eskimos. Where the religious sees proof of God’s existence, the atheist knows only “all that happened was that a couple Eskimos just happened to come wandering by” (Wallace 16-23). The text spells out the obvious take-away: “It’s easy to run this story through a kind of standard liberal arts analysis: The exact same experience can mean two completely different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience” (Wallace 24). At the same time, it is hesitant to announce even such a relativist reading definitive, accusing the analysis of assuming that “how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice, of conscious decision” (Wallace 28). The point here is simply that, like how religious orientation and education background can prefigure individual interpretation to some degree, statements of intents is a fair playground for prejudice—authors unintentionally spin their intentions. Therefore, “intensions” have no business being taken at face value, as the final word for how a text is to be understood.

A related but different thesis involves projections from readers’ end of the communication. If it holds that representations are chained by biases, it must also hold that “aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author… are projections… of our way of handling texts” (Foucault 127). Who, or what we commonly deem as “the author” is no more than “the configuration of the author” (Foucault 127). Here it is not hard to imagine a sense in which authors die in writing—their communicative abilities lamed, their messages truncated. More interestingly, writing is not only “the sacrifice of life itself; it is a voluntary [emphasis added] obliteration of the self” (Foucault 117). The speaker of This Is Water is blatantly aware that his or her persuasion is limited. The text is interjected three times by utterances along the lines of “but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish” (Wallace 6-7). Rather, it is dutifully acknowledged that “you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what hasn’t” (Wallace 95)—that readers must figure into the interpretation of the text.

But I cannot honestly toll the death knell on authors, not seriously. They are not totally wiped out on so many levels. One might argue that an image of Wallace is too readily available: he leaves “a legacy composed not only of his novels and essays, and of pieces written about him—official obituaries, elegies, and scholarly papers—but also of a vast and growing system of Web sites, e-mails, message boards, and blogs—and comments on those blogs, and comments on those comments, ad infinitum” (Krajeski). I would argue it is not coincidence that for an author whose work is strewn with footnotes, Wallace had a similarly annotated life. He worked with mediums whose author is hard to kill. Pause on the particularity of the commencement address as a literary form, and the difference in potency of the author’s presence is apparent. Unlike fiction, where authors orchestrate characters, the speaker of This Is Water aligns with Wallace the public writer persona I construct. It is a longish interview session of “Say, what do you have to tell the bright, young minds?” The Wimsattian readers will have to confront the “problematic nature of the word ‘work’”—or, “how a work can be extracted from the millions of traces left by an individual after his death” (Foucault 119). This Is Water abounds with instances where the speaker names his or her designs: “Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon” (Wallace 126-127). Even when concession is made to readers’ interpretive freedom, communicative power is not annihilated. The Wimsatt-minded would maintain that even in non-fictional writing, claims made by the “I” of the text is to be attributed to an anonymous addresser, but I would be kidding with myself to give that in the speech’s inception form, delivered on a “dry and lovely morning” (Wallace 10), its addresser is not be the writer Wallace persona I keep painting. In our case, at least, I am comfortable pronouncing the author not quite dead.

In fact, it is seriously questionable whether the hardly feasible Wimsattian project is desirable, at all: Underpinning true authorial intents is impossible, but the study of authorial images is not harmful nor unfruitful. While it is true that learning about what authors say they meant cannot place meaning in the text that isn’t there in the first place, that such information has no independent authority, the image we have can serve as clues pointing to features within the text previously unnoticed, or even unnoticeable. So long as an analysis is supported with textual evidence, there is no good reason to exile statements of intents. Indeed, there is good reason not to be a Wimsattian. Investigation of authors’ images adds “discursive properties… irreducible to the rules of grammar and logic” (Foucault 137). The close reading Wimsatt and Beardsley propose is a closed reading, terrified of proliferation of text. But multiplicity is hardly daunting; it often makes the text an awful lot more interesting. Allow me to bring in a sample of Wallace’s remarks and biography outside of This Is Water in piecewise fashion, and stage how they inform the search for textual evidence revealing new readings:

Exhibit A: Like all authors, Wallace is frequently asked in interviews to touch on the design of his work. The gist of his replies is something two-fold: “Really good fiction… [would] find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it” (McCaffery 26). With this in mind, we discover the fundamental matters of writing for Wallace in the background of This Is Water. There is in the text a detailed account of a tediously mundane supermarket trip that exemplifies the “rat race” (Wallace 123) of adult American life. The text follows up with, “[t]he point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in” (Wallace 76): “[Y]ou get to decide how you’re going to try to see it” (Wallace 94). Taking note of how the text reconstructs “what’s dreadful” in an attempt to “move people” (McCaffery 32), This Is Water is no longer dealing only with solipsism and compassion; it is also grappling with the question of how to write.

Still from a short created by The Glossary, inspired by This Is Water

Exhibit B: On how to achieve his two-fold ambition, Wallace commented, “[r]eally good work probably comes out of a willingness to… sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. … Maybe it’s as simple as trying to make the writing more generous and less ego-driven” (McCaffery 50-51). Suddenly it is not so difficult to hear a similar ring in This Is Water: when the text appeals to the ability “to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over” (Wallace 120), we begin to wonder if the text can be extended to deliberate on the egos of authors and their “sort of” dead status. More on his method, Wallace revealed a deviation from his earlier style: “The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever almost made me die” (Lipsky 174). This sentiment is, again, echoed in the commencement speech: “Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking” (Wallace 48). It is unsurprising that a Wallace scholar refers to biography in a footnote when he accredits “Wallace’s more negative orientation” for inspiring a shift for “a relatively optimistic ethos” in Wallace’s successors (Konstantinou 106). The little piece of interview functions as the tipster for finding textual traces, which eventually informs a study of thematic modification.

Exhibit C (and this one is hard to ignore): What happens to This Is Water when we let in the fact that Wallace suffered depression and committed suicide three years after the speech? What of report that linked his dwindling final state with his suspension of an antidepressant, out of suspicion that it was “interfering with his creative evolution” (Max)? The water churns; the image is now one of a martyr for literature, a patron-saint of the tortured genius, a celebrity writer dude. Let us revisit the supermarket scene: “and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle, and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open” (Wallace 70-71). The unflaggingly funny and warm address now takes on edges of chilling-in-hindsight darkness as we peer through the “obsessive, recursive, exhausting, and pathologically self-aware prose style” (Scott). When the text insists that the “capital-T Truth” of life “is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head” (Wallace 130), we now hear Wallace addressing a ghostly self. The suicide throws open the debate of whether his death defeats his cause—does what might be considered his personal “failure” at his project undermine all its value? Or, is there a sense in which he succeeded, executing his principle of sacrificing for readers all too well? These questions we would lose, were we Wimsattian readers. Some critics, despite their “fear… that Wallace’s work will forever be read through the way that he died”, deem it impossible to fully understand Wallace’s last and unfinished novel “without reckoning in what Wallace was feeling and thinking about writing and about himself as a writer at the time he wrote it” (Cohen 59). I would not say that this reading is the “full” reading, or even the “fuller” reading, but I am ready to consider the additional insights into the book Wallace’s life sheds light on.

“Think of the old cliché about the mind being ‘an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ … It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in… the head” (Wallace 56, 58). The publisher of this booklet I quote from, when stretching This Is Water to fill 138 pages, found the liberty to remove the line that follows in the original speech: “They shoot the terrible master”. The edit’s defendants claim that “any mention of self-annihilation in Wallace’s work… now has a blast radius that obscures everything around it” (Bissell), and that the removal preserves the original message. What I see, here, is a baseless executive decision: I am skeptical that the editors could distinguish the speech’s “original meaning” in light of Wallace’s new image any better than the next reader. Their crazed obsession with the “original meaning” is such that they even chopped at the text. This fear of diverging readings is quite contradictory, when we think about it, to their starting claim that language is independent of its object of reference as well as its speaker. In the wake of a case where the death of the author is made all too literal, we find tethered to the text a ghost-shaped author, who surrenders the authoritative say on what a work “is supposed to mean”, but haunts it, nonetheless, bound and inseparable to the artifice. As long as I treat authors as sites of inquiry, critics or editors will not succeed to pre-select for me what I may or may not know, in the hopes of funneling my understanding to fit theirs. Does it matter that Wallace’s email handle was “ocapmycap@…”? After all, who can lay claim to ever pinning down anyone’s drives: “My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still” (Whitman). The point here is not that you must consider the author; effective criticism is not about dogmas. To use Wallace’s words, I’m only asking that you be “aware enough to give yourself a choice” (Wallace 89).[2]

Notes

[1] My approach is indebted to Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”

[2] This essay was read by Jessica Zong.

Works Cited

Cohen, Sameul. “To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jest’s History.” The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou, University of Iowa Press, 2012.

Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Cornell University Press, 1980.

Konstantinou, Lee. “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief.” The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou, University of Iowa Press, 2012.

Krajeski, Jenna. “This Is Water.” New Yorker, September 19, 2008, newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-is-water. Accessed April 23, 2018.

Max, D. T. “The Unfinished.” New Yorker, March 9, 2009, newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/09/the-unfinished. Accessed April 23, 2018.

Scott, A. O. “The Best Mind of His Generation.” New York Times, September 20, 2008, nytimes.com/2008/09/21/weekinreview/21scott.html. Accessed April 23, 2018.

Wallace, David Foster. “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace.” Interview by Larry McCaffery, 1993. Conversations with David Foster Wallace, edited by Stephen J. Burn, University Press of Mississippi, 2012.

Wallace, David Foster. “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace.” Interview by David Lipsky, 2008. Conversations with David Foster Wallace, edited by Stephen J. Burn, University Press of Mississippi, 2012.

Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

Whitman, Walt. “O Captain! My Captain!” Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia, David McKay, 1891.

In modern American politics, one of the most important roles for the President is that of communicator, transmitting his or her version for the country’s future to the American people, so that they will get behind this vision. In the last four decades, Ronald Reagan has been praised as an excellent speaker and communicator for his ability to connect to the American public in a manner that far outweighed that of his contemporaries. Far more than the other men who held the office of President during the past 40 years, Reagan was noted for his ability to capture the American attention. Reagan acquired the title “The Great Communicator” during his political career. But the focus of this piece is not to praise these three Presidents for their ability as speakers; rather, it is to take a closer look at the language and specifically the rhetorical aspects of the language they and their administrations used in discourse about particular issues that arose during their presidencies. There is a great deal that can be gleaned from analyzing their presidential rhetoric, far more than exists simply in the words themselves.

One of the earliest lessons (and one of the most important ones) that the Reagan administration learned about counter-terrorism strategy came from Reagan’s predecessor, President Jimmy Carter. The lesson, coming from Carter’s inability to deal with the Iran Hostage Crisis, was that failure to deal effectively with terrorism was a fatal mistake for a President to make. In fact, the disastrous attempt under Carter to use military force to free the American hostages was considered the final nail in the coffin for his re-election hopes. But this is not meant to be a history lesson. What is most interesting about the Reagan administration’s counter-terrorism strategy is, given the focus of this piece, the rhetorical posturing that was used to create the strategy. George Schultz, Secretary of State from 1982 until 1989, pushed hard for pre-emptive action to combat terrorism, cautioning that, “We cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond.” Now, this metaphor is incredibly fascinating, not only due to the specifics of the Reagan administration, but also due to the intricacies of the relationship of the character and play Hamlet to judgment and decision-making. The point is that there is a wealth of insight that can be gained from delving into the literary aspects of Shultz’s metaphor, Hamlet, that is not available by merely looking at this language as a piece of logical argumentation.

Firstly, it is important to establish the importance of rhetoric in the position President of the United States. In politics generally, the rhetoric used to communicate a message can tell us a great deal about the thought underlying the message (Kitchin 111). In fact, certain words appear to trigger activity in different hemispheres (right or left) of the brain, depending on how much they involve emotion, imagery, or abstraction. But what is rather unique to presidential use of rhetoric is its ability to reflect and change the political reality. The language that they use to formulate their positions proliferates, spreading throughout their administrations and making its way into specific policy changes. The goal of this piece is to analyze the rhetorical metaphors of the Reagan administration as determinants and illustrations of political climate and Reagan’s agenda surrounding the transformation of American counter-terrorism strategy.

Prevalent in Hamlet is the question of judgment and the much related question of decision-making. While, given the context, it seems that Schultz’s allusion to Hamlet was meant to be a pejorative one, viewing Hamlet as a pussy-footing weakling, there are levels of complexity to Hamlet’s indecision that bear a close resemblance to the position in which the Reagan administration found itself and that give an uncanny aptness to Schultz’s reference. Borrowing from Vivasvan Soni’s Shakespeare and Judgment and Christopher J. Fuller’s See It/Shoot It, this piece hopes to demonstrate the insights that can be gained from close analysis of the rhetorical elements of political statements in the context of the Reagan administration and more generally.

But, to return to and really dive into Hamlet, the question of judgment is central to the play. Soni provides an extremely helpful definition of judgment as “the process by which a subject, always unhinged from world (madness), strives to bind itself back to the world again (religare), without collapsing itself back into the world (death)” (Soni 46-47). In other words, judgment is how humans connect ourselves to a world which we cannot fully comprehend (and in which we do not have all of the information necessary for comprehension) without becoming objects of said world — i.e. corpses. Judgment is ubiquitous in Hamlet. Hamlet judges the appropriateness of his mother’s marrying Claudius; Polonius judges Hamlet’s behavior with Ophelia; Hamlet observes and judges Claudius’s reaction to the play-within-a-play (Soni 48). Similarly, the Reagan administration was faced with the task of judging the threat of terror attacks against American citizens and judging how best to combat.

But the connection between Hamlet and the Reagan administration goes deeper than this superficial “they both make judgments” comparison. The very literary structure that brings about the actions of the play is strikingly similar to those that guided action taken by the Reagan administration (and subsequent administrations). What is that structure, without which almost none of the action of Hamlet could have taken place? As Soni discusses, it is the ghost of Hamlet’s father and Hamlet’s conversation with the apparition that turns Hamlet from a mourner into an avenger (Soni 50). Soni argues further that the ghost of Hamlet’s father serves as a story within the play. This story takes the events that have occurred up to that point and arranges them narratively to increase their significance; where once those events could have been ignored, they become like burning pokers against the flesh, driving one to action, impossible to disregard (Soni 50).

This notion of story or narrative is key to understanding the internal debate within the Reagan administration over counter-terrorism policy. The fact that American citizens faced foreign terror threats abroad was undeniable. Where the debate existed was in the narrative underlying these attacks and threats. Were these, as Secretary of State Alexander Haig argued, part of a larger strategy by the USSR to strike against Cold War targets in the West (Fuller 27)? Were they “‘weapon[s] of unconventional war against the democracies of the West, taking advantage of their openness and building on political hostility toward them,’” as Secretary of State George Shultz argued (Fuller 28)? Was terrorism a criminal act, one that American citizens were used to seeing handled through arrests of suspects and trials in federal courts (Fuller 30)? Within the Reagan administration, the choice of narrative was often the de facto choice of policy. Most internal accounts agree that Reagan was very hands off, allowing specific members of his cabinet to handle the policy details: “It was…left to [Reagan’s] advisors to make policies that would be generally consistent with [Reagan’s] speech[es]; Reagan’s job, as he saw it, was then the sell the policies to the public.” (Fuller 51) The narrative that was used to discuss a problem determined the policies that would be used to solve the problem. In the realm of counter-terrorism, it was Shultz’s narrative and his proposed solution of a U.S. military increasingly willing to strike pre-emptively in order to prevent strikes that won out.

To Shultz’s credit, his use of Hamlet as a caution against the perils of dawdling is sensible in that Hamlet wishes that he did not have to bear the responsibility of judgment (Soni 58). Thus, he waits. He forestalls the moment of decision-making. In this way, it is likely that Shultz and those who promote pre-emptive military action to defend against terrorism are right. Endless delaying of the moment of decision-making is not sensible. It is an attempt to hold the burden of judgment at bay. But there is another element of Hamlet’s thinking that Shultz’s metaphor does not recognize. What eventually destroys Hamlet is not his indecision; it is his haste. He enters the final scene without an end in mind and acts rashly (Soni 62). It is Shultz’s lack of recognition for this that betrays a major flaw in the strategy of pre-emptive military action. It wishes to avoid Hamlet’s indecision and runs directly into his haste. Shultz’s preference for pre-emptive strikes has become mainstream, especially as evidenced by the CIA’s drone campaign to target suspected terrorists abroad, which flourished under President Obama (Fuller 60). It is also hard to forget America’s most recent and ongoing engagements, in Iraq and Afghanistan for example. While justification for pre-emptive military action may be largely along the lines of avoiding indecision, perhaps Hamlet can serve as a reminder of the dangers of haste.

References:

Fuller, Christopher J. “See It/Shoot It: The Secret History of the CIA’s Lethal Drone Program” “THE HAMLET OF NATIONS”: THE RHETORIC AND REALITY OF THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION’S COUNTERTERRORISM POLICY, 1980–1985, Yale University Press, 2017, pp. 22-62 (Accessed via JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1n2tvmf.8)

Kitchin, William. “Imagery, Emotion, and Cause and Effect in Presidential Language”. International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique, Vol. 8, No. 2, Main Currents in Biopolitics (Apr., 1987), pp. 111-119. Sage Publications, Ltd. (Accessed via JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1600685 )

Soni, Vivasvan. “Shakespeare and Judgment” Believing in Ghosts, in Part: Judgment and Indecision in Hamlet, edited by Kevin Curran, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 45-70 (Accessed via JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g04zss.7 )

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Emily Bannigan profusely for reading and helping me with this paper.

To say that rhetoric is subjective is almost redundant. It is one of the few fields of study that wear subjectivity without issue; there is no intelligible way to think of language as functionally impersonal. With language, there must be a speaker and there must be a listener. Rhetorical language has yet another quirk: it is unconcerned with “Truth” in its ordinary sense. By this I mean those who study rhetoric are not so much concerned with what you say as they are with how you say it.

We, as language speakers, have an intuitive sense of this dichotomy in language. Namely, we understand that the way in which something is said matters, an obvious example being our capacity for sarcasm. The way that we speak about language, especially literature, further demonstrates this innate duality. Literary discourse is typically concerned with both content and form; the former,“we assume, is a body of ideas contained in the writer’s mind and in the reader’s”, and “which is supposedly ‘transmitted’ by the language” in distinct forms equally worthy of analysis (Whipp 16).

Unfortunately, outside of the literary tradition, we perhaps don’t pay as much attention to linguistic approach as is warranted. Aside from issuing the occasional warning to “choose carefully”, it is not the average person’s business to preach the significance of language. Still, decisions of form, as in stylistic form, are considerably consequential. For example, if your wife were to ask you, “how does this dress look on me?” you might answer, “it makes you look awful,” or tell her, “I think you’d look even prettier in a different dress”. Both statements are products of the same idea — the dress is unappealing — but you can imagine how greatly the consequences of linguistic style would vary in this situation. The rhetorician, however, suggests that the consequences of form are even greater than their immediate provocations. “The choice of a way of saying,” says the rhetorician, “is sometimes also a way of seeing” (Whipp 15).

Whipp suggests that the way we channel content through certain avenues of speech (as opposed to others) reveals something important about ourselves. To stay with the former example, telling your lovely lady that another dress better compliments her dazzling features signals that you, as a speaker, have an appreciable interest in maintaining her feelings (and some common sense). In this case, as in others, the way you choose to speak indicates something about your intentions and your contextual understanding, or, in short, something about you.  The literature of fiction has a uniquely special relationship with this principle by virtue of its containing entire persons and worlds made up of nothing but utterances. Presumably then, the style an author takes to creating his world has indescribably important implications for that world. It follows that, as readers who seek to understand these worlds, we must pay special attention to literary form, or risk overlooking important information.

For the unconvinced, I offer an elucidating example of the crucial function of style by way of that American novel which famously rebels against the ordinary dimensions of literary language: J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. This novel, sometimes unflatteringly called “a story about nothing,” ironically puts non-literary language, that is, language that is apparently craft-less, at its forefront. The entire procession of the story is narrated by the self-proclaimed “illiterate, but well-read” sixteen-year old Holden Caulfield. A frequent-flyer among high school English curriculums, Catcher is often flippantly reduced to a chronicle of teenage angst and lament for the loss of childhood innocence. However, the reputed colloquialism of the story’s narrator, far from being a simple idiosyncratic novelty, adds immense philosophical depth that too often goes unnoticed.

Holden’s speech functions in two modes which can adequately be described in Holden’s terminology of  “illiterate” versus “well-read”. The sloppy, illiterate Holden is the more conspicuous one, and perhaps the more enduring. This is the idiosyncratic Holden who talks incessantly of “phonies” and loosely strings thoughts together with the indiscrete “and all” and “or something”. There is much to be said of how this type of language renders Holden more authentic. Evidently few would disagree with this sentiment: “most critics who looked at The Catcher in the Rye at the time of its publication thought that its language was a true and authentic rendering of teenage colloquial speech. Reviewers in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, the London Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic…all specifically mentioned the authenticity of the book’s language” (Costello, 172). However, less appreciated is how Holden uses the banality of ordinary teenage speech to his own purposes, that is, no purpose, or at the very least no consistent one. Take, for example, Holden’s aforementioned colloquialism of “and all”. Holden often uses the phrase to indicate that the issue at hand has additional dimensions, but he won’t go into them, as in, “my parents were occupied and all before they had me” / “they’re nice and all”, but just as often breaks this pattern arbitrarily with statements— “he’s my brother and all” / It was December and all” — that warrant no further commentary (Costello 174).  

The careless reader will applaud Salinger for accurately depicting the teenage dialect of his time and then take his leave, but there is much more to be said about these particular peculiarities. We can make sense of Holden’s language as a protective mechanism — one that, on the surface, asserts his belonging amongst his boarding school peers, but in actuality is devoid of any substance. This is the difference between Holden as representative of the mid 20th century teen and Holden as representative of a teenager of the time trying to fit in.  Holden was a relatable character for so many, flaws and all, because he “encapsulated the sheer frustration of a society that had been irrevocably altered in the wake of war. Holden’s longing for something beyond superficial social inclusion, for an authentic and intimate communication with another, mirrored the predicaments of contemporary youth—a generation of silenced and oppressed individuals with whom contemporary ideals and ideologies had failed to connect” (Kinane 118). Unfortunately for Holden, the culture of his time, right down to its popular language, was not designed with genuine connection in mind. Superficiality was the flavor of his day, and in light of this understanding Holden’s critique of the adult world as “phony” takes on new weight. The “phoniness” Holden denounces becomes less directed on a culture of materialism and more at odds with “a trait exhibited by characters in the novel who communicate blithely — without sincerity, intention, or without even being thoroughly engaging (such as Stradlater, the school principal, and the prep-school jerks, for instance)” (Kinane 119).

Another peculiarity of Holden’s is his habitual tendency to assert his earnesty: “in a phony world Holden feels compelled to re-enforce his sincerity and truthfulness constantly with, “it really is” or “it really did.’” (Costello 174). Immediately, the expression seems to further cement Holden against a phoniness that is so pervasive it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to identify real earnestness. However, in tandem with Holden’s other formulations and his unfolding trauma the verbiage becomes something more significant. His verbal patterns around truth, “if you want to know the truth” or “if you really want to know,” begin to suggest that society as a whole generally doesn’t actually care about Holden’s truth. Aside from Phoebe, and arguably Mr. Antolini, the other characters in the novel are immensely indifferent to Holden and to each other.  “Recognition of the truth,” Strauch argues, “would embrace the love and compassion that it [society] has no time for but that Holden himself not only lavishes on his secret world but extends to the public world” (9).

The literate Holden, on the other hand, can be best understood in contrast to his illiterate self: “as we have seen, Holden shares, in general, the trite repetitive vocabulary which is the typical lot of his age group. But as there are exceptions in his figures of speech, so are there exceptions in his vocabulary itself, in his word stock. An intelligent, well-read, and educated boy, Holden possesses, and can use when he wants to, many words which are many a cut above Basic English, including ‘ostracized,’ ‘exhibitionist,’ ‘unscrupulous,’ ‘conversationalist,’ ‘psychic,’ ‘bourgeois.’ (Costello 179). This suggests, as Costello points out, that Holden is self-conscious in his use of language. He is actively making choices about when to default to his standardized common discourse and when to use more discretion. The literate Holden is then, in a sense, the real Holden, insofar that he means what he says, and he means how he says it. This Holden is the one who needs us to understand him clearly, and thus sacrifices his social standing  — to a degree — for clarity and self-expression. Take for example, his following commentary:

People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. I’ll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I’d see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence–there was this fence that went all around the course–and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That’s the kind of red hair he had.

In contrast to Holden’s typical kind of speech, this writing is overflowing with literary precision and specificity. Yet at the same time, there is a profound ineptitude in Holden’s description. Twice he voices an intention to describe “the kind of red hair Allie had”, but in actuality produces an unrelated bittersweet anecdote from the boys’ childhood. Holden’s love for Allie is unambiguous, and so untranslatable to the language of the illiterate. Thus Holden invents an alternative mode of speech for talking about his precious brother, one that simultaneously demonstrates Holden’s linguistic dilemma and tender heart.

Holden Caulfield’s language is not simply the language of a 1940s teen; it is, for lack of a better term, the language of Holden Caulfield. That is, Holden’s language is that of an educated, socially isolated, neurotic teenage wanderer who deeply misses his brother. It is at times conformist and ambiguous, and at others precise and heartfelt in an implicative way. To miss this is to miss Salinger’s final commentary, which is that there is no communicable cure for disillusionment. It is the individual, rather, who is responsible for his own salvation. With this understanding, the novel’s blunted final chapter is less of a dampener (a therapy couch was never going to be Holden’s solution) and more of an auxiliary to its tale of self-discovery.

Works Cited

Costell, Donald P. The Language of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. American Speech, Vol. 34, No. 3, Oct. 1959, pp. 172-181.

Kinane, Ian. “Phonies” and Phone Calls: Social Isolation, the Problem of Language, and J.D.  Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 73, Number 4, Winter 2017, pp. 117-132

Strauch, Carl F. Kings in the Back Row: Meaning through Structure. A Reading of Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1961, pp. 5-30.

Whipp, Leslie T. The Language of Rhetoric. College Composition and Communication, Vol. 19, No. 1, Feb. 1968, pp. 15-21.

Thank you to Peter Fousek ’21 for your contributions.

Though Martin Heidegger is focused on approaching the abstractions of being through the lens of poetic language, I would like to argue that the Heideggerian approach of the idea of poetry conflicts with poetry as a form of art—in fact, it could be said that Heidegger trades the deeper appreciation of the work of art for the appreciation of being (wherein the Heideggerian approach is opposed to interpretation through the resemblance of ideas (Basic Writings, 162))—in this sense, I believe that poetry is not the perfect Heideggerian channel in his methodology to undo his “forgetting-of-being”. In this sense, Heidegger’s goal is merely to contemplate the prima facie effects of poetry (wherein poetry induces a particular sensation in the self when it is first read), and not to completely find the essence of poetry in itself. This is because poetry, like all literature, is meant to be subject to a form of interpretation, and consequently it must be assimilated into a structure of themes in order for it to be construed. Thus, I would like to use Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Der Ister” in order to demonstrate the problems of the Heideggerian approach of poetry. The reason that I have chosen this poem is the fact it is created by Heidegger’s own favorite poet (who he mentions in The Origin of the Work of Art; the poem itself has also been mentioned in Heidegger’s lecture course “Hölderlin’s Hymn “Der Ister””). In addition, the poem is renowned for its contribution to Romanticism, which seems to be the genre that resonates with Heidegger the most due to the the genre’s appeal to the mystery of being in a natural state.

I would first like to begin by further describing the contemporary metaphysical view of poetry. As Nietzsche states in “Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense”, it is impossible for language to approach the thing-in-itself (Philosophy and Truth, 83); in Heideggerian terms, “the thing vanishes” because interpretations are an “inordinate attempt to bring it into the greatest possible proximity to us” (Basic Writings, 152). In this sense, language, as a connective tool, is focused mainly on the processes of things through connective ideas, so it cannot be fully utilized in the paradigm of a thing-ontology. However, language is the ultimate device in its ability to create resemblances of the thing-in-itself: in the empiricist view, we use language to formulate ideas through sense-impressions (which is essentially the definition of empiricism in itself). As a result, poetry, like all literature, is limited to resemblances without being able to touch the forms of truth and being. But, this limitation brings about the possibility of reflecting our own ideas onto the literature that we read: for example, one could think of freedom when one reads Hölderlin’s “The Ister”, as the phrase “the hunters love to roam” instantly reminds one of the power to travel in whichever direction one wants to (Line 18 of Stanza 2). Moreover, one can form connective ideas that result in a more complex picture of a poem: one could create a better sense of the freedom in “The Ister” through the description of where the hunters themselves roam, as the “valley” that the poem mentions amplifies this idea of freedom by giving the reader a certain (large) space to anchor their imagination onto (Line 17 of Stanza 2). By continually piecing ideas such as these together, one can form an overall understanding of a poem in the contemporary metaphysical paradigm of the interpretation of poetry.

On the other hand, the Heideggerian idea of poetry is quite different, as it does not allow the interpretation of a poem through symbolistic means, but asks the reader to feel the being of the poem in itself. In Heidegger’s Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, it is indicated that “all … interpretation [of poetry] borrows its tools and its effort indiscriminately from metaphysics” (18). As a result, Heidegger recommends that “The Ister” should not be read as a piece of poem that resembles another thing in nature, but rather that the “thing itself must be allowed to remain in its self-containment” (152). In this sense, the thing must remain in nature and be undisturbed by human reflection. Consequently, Heidegger argues that it is impossible to find being through the use of language insofar as it language is seen as a tool that creates ideas. In essence, language itself must be interpreted as something that directs feeling, wherein it must resonate with nature. Any further sensations that the poem develops must be resisted, as the reader will then focus on another thing instead of the poem in itself. The Heideggerian argument, therefore, is that being can only be reached by poetry because poetry can provide the sensation of being—the “general essence” of things (162). As a result, the experience of things and the feeling of being is extracted from the poem, but this experience must remain untainted by the mind. Perhaps it may be better to put the sensation that the Heideggerian poem reflects in a Nietzschean paradigm, wherein one could say that the drive of the poem is a ‘will to feeling’. The approach, thus, is an influence of the intangible that is mingled with a quasi-Dionysian drive—a drive towards being, the core of things and unity (The Birth of Tragedy, 40): the hermeneutics of being seems to be a drive towards the unknown. This idea is directly seen in Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, wherein Heidegger is singly focused on the rivers described in the poem; particularly, “nobody knows” what the river does (Line 31 of Stanza 3). Heidegger believes that this line is a perfect representation of his hermeneutics, as it describes the impossibility of humanity in capturing the essence of the river: “what the river does, therefore, not even the poet knows” (Hymn, 20). In this sense, Heidegger argues that “the “rivers” are therefore not to count as symbols of a higher level” (Hymn, 18) as the “work is preserved in the truth that happens through the work itself” (Basic Writings, 193). Heidegger’s hermeneutics directs a reader of a poem to feel the truth of the poem, but it does not endeavor for the whole of the poem’s truth. Only the “thrown projection” of truth is revealed to the reader—a fleeting glimpse of the world that the poem creates (Basic Writings, 197).

It will be impossible to try to argue that Heidegger’s hermeneutics is worse than that of contemporary metaphysics’—this is because as Heidegger argues that any interpretation in the hermeneutics of contemporary metaphysics is problematic, any alignment of the two methodologies is unfeasible; however, it is possible to argue for the hermeneutics of metaphysics by showing that interpretation has more value than the feeling of being (this argument, of course, is wholly in the realm of subjectivity). Firstly, a distinction that can be made is between the language that Heidegger uses as opposed to the language that is used by contemporary metaphysics. While Heidegger believes that language “brings beings as beings out into the open” (197), contemporary metaphysics uses language as a description of human nature (Philosophy and Truth, “Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense”, 84). The anthropomorphism of language is thus the factor that Heidegger tries to fend against with his hermeneutics. However, anthropomorphism in itself is the most familiar way of interpreting a poem, as it is the hermeneutic reading that is closest to us.  Though Heidegger’s view may be a better way to approach being, metaphysics’ interpretation offers more analysis of a poem. From this idea, one could say that Heidegger is appealing to a world-truth, while contemporary metaphysics is an approach that tries to find the truth in human perception—Heidegger gives us back the world but also loses us the human being. If one were to relate the river in Hölderlin’s “The Ister” to a human idea, one could say that the river is a symbol of mystery in itself—the mystery of the beauty of the river. The river is “driving his splendor higher” (Line 24 of Stanza 3); in this sense, the river is a thing of aesthetic beauty that does not have a particular function (but that of beauty) that can be perceived by humanity, as no one knows what it does. Moreover, as the river is a part of the Danube (which is seen from the title “The Ister”), and the Rhine is also mentioned in the poem, the two rivers seem to symbiotically grow in beauty as the Rhine is the one who drives the splendor of the Ister (Line 23 of Stanza 3). Geographically, the Rhine is connected to the Ister through the Rhine-Main-Danube canal. As a result, the two rivers grow in beauty through their connection. In the end, it is perfectly arguable that Hölderlin is referring to the impossible beauty of the Ister, and thus no one knows the important functions of the river in themselves. Hölderlin, perhaps, is not asking his readers to consider the Ister in its entirety, as the veneer of the Ister’s beauty is seemingly much too powerful to resist. In fact, Hölderlin mentions that “the earth needs furrowing”, but perhaps no one notices this furrowing because of the beauty of the river (Line 29 of Stanza 3).

It cannot be said that the human interpretation of Hölderlin’s poem does not have merit, as it seems that Hölderlin is trying to indicate something with his poem. I would argue that it is better to anthropomorphize a poem and to relate to it, as the work of art is a creation of the human being, so it should also reflect the human being. A mere idea of the poem is only obtainable if one views the words in themselves without thinking, which is the Heideggerian method of the perception of poetry: one must confine ideas and create an intrinsic emotive response to the poem in order to find truth. To revisit the Sartrean critique of Heideggerian poetry in What is Literature, the best poetry to Heidegger does not say anything (43), as it is supposed to be unfamiliar, to the extent that it is unappreciable in idea-relations. Instead, it is the mere presence of being that the poem exudes that we attribute to and focus on. We do not try to understand this poem, but rather we try to leave it as an undisturbed being. However, the poet’s intentions themselves have already disturbed the poem, so it is questionable as to what degree a poem can be truly undisturbed. This is why I believe that Heidegger believes that a quick glance at a poem is the best way to view one—the furtive gaze into a being, as “there is much in being that man cannot master (Basic Writings, 178). In the end, perhaps the best way to read a poem is to combine the hermeneutics of being with the hermeneutics of metaphysics—to leave the poem undisturbed in its truth as it projects the world, and then to find the interpretative details of the poem. Though the hermeneutics of being is unable to be regained after the metaphysical interpretation of a poem is revealed to the reader, the reader is still reminded of both sensations with the combination of these two methods of reading—the sensation of feeling and the sensation of familiarity. Thus, we regain both the world and ourselves in different times through different perspectives—we take in an impression of being at first glance, and then accept the relentless barrage of interpretation afterwards. With this method, it may be possible that poetry can give us the world back and be appreciated in a complete form.

Works Cited

Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”. Translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis, Indiana Univ. Press, 1996.

Heidegger, Martin, and David Farrell Krell. Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger. Routledge, 2010.

Hume, David, et al. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Kenneth P. Winkler, Hackett Publishing Company, 1996.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. Translated by Daniel Breazeale, Humanities Press International, 1979.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Edited by Raymond Geuss. Translated by Ronald Speirs, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays. Harvard University Press, 1988.

Hölderlin, Friedrich. Friederich Hölderlin: Hymns and Fragments. Translated by Richard Sieburth, Princeton University Press, 1984.

Read and edited by Justin Ho

When it comes time to find a new book or movie to watch, we each have our own process in doing so based on the importance we delegate to certain aspects. For some people, the author is the most important, for others it might be the plot, or maybe it solely on the structure. However, regardless of the path we each took to arrive at our chosen piece of entertainment, our final objective is to consume the content within, yet it is during this process of consumption that troubles me. Since our biggest bounty is when we analyze someone’s work, we come to the conundrum of priority. What I mean is that to what extent do we look outside of what is in a book or shown in a movie during our quest for knowledge? One prominent strategy is to enrich our understanding of someone’s work by considering the major events that went on during that work’s writing process: the author’s biographical information, purpose, to name a few. Is the analysis of works, from literature to the arts: of movies, plays, paintings, and more, really the way to proceed or should we be considering a different approach and setting that as our standard? Instead of this complicated paradigm, let us return to a more simpler time. Now I will not say that the end-all solution is contained here as that is simply impossible, but what I do have just might be worth a bit of consideration – the analyses derived with external help is more often than not already in the piece of work, just look.

So rather recently, an article written by Aaron Short appeared in Cracked.com, a website for the defunct comedy magazine that features a wide range of articles, opinions, and other interesting tidbits, talking about how Quentin Tarantino’s movie Death Proof is related to Uma Thurman’s story that ran a couple months back detailing her relationship with Tarantino during Kill Bill. But before the details and relevance of the article can be even discussed, there are a couple of things that must first be ironed out. Starting with a simple summary: Death Proof is about a serial killer stuntman aptly named Stuntman Mike, who tries to kill his victims in accidents where only he manages to miraculously survive until he sets the wrong group of people as his next target. Like any Tarantino movie, Death Proof contains a mix of comedy and action that is superficially enjoyable, but unless the audience is cognizant of some important relationships, the deeper meanings and what the Cracked article is talking about will be lost.

Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike

Quentin Tarantino

Although this is quite obvious, it is important to make clear that Stuntman Mike is the symbolic image of Quentin Tarantino and to do that, we have to realize the all-important foot fetish is one of the defining features of Tarantino. Seemingly like an affirmation to his well-documented attraction of feet, particularly of women’s feet, the movie contains multiple shots of feet: from the feet on the dashboard in the opening credits, to various moments of feet sticking out of cars as their owners lie reclined in their seats enjoying themselves, yet this array of scenes does not tie Mike to Tarantino since we are only affirmed as to the fact that Tarantino has a foot fetish. But then comes the kicker. About an hour into the film, Mike touches, sniffs, and indirectly licks (he wets his finger before touching the foot again) Abernathy’s foot while she sleeps with her feet out the window in the back seat. Since no one else besides Tarantino himself has this defining characteristic we associate Mike to Tarantino. But then, as a way to further imprint this message into the audience’s mind, we are treated to a visual spectacle. Although Kurt Russell plays Stuntman Mike instead of Tarantino, the prominent chin, the striking nasolabial folds, and the well-established brow furrow only heightens the idea that Mike is Tarantino. In fact, if we imagined a ten-year older Tarantino with a dark tan, grizzled look, and an over exaggerated hairdo, we must just come up with Mike and it is because the audience imagines Mike as Tarantino that the crux of the movie is addressed.

Uma Thurman

Zoe Bell

We must also explore the character the actress, Zoe Bell, plays – herself. The Cracked article mentions how back in Kill Bill, Zoe Bell was the stuntwoman for Uma Thurman (Short). While the tidbit on the origin of the actresses’ relationship is an interesting fact, the audience does not need to read Short’s article to realize that Zoe Bell is a reference to Thurman. Visually, the two actresses are similar enough that the audience could easily mistake one for the other. Sure, their voices sound completely different, but the initial impact is enough to cultivate the connection of Zoe to Thurman even when Zoe is her “own” character. When the audience sees Zoe for the first time, it is through the lens of Mike’s camera (like how Tarantino the director directs his film), but more importantly, this scene is shot so that the audience does not hear Bell’s voice which would break the illusion of Zoe being Thurman.

Now that we have ironed out some of the more obvious details, we can finally address the bigger issue at hand. Going over Short’s articles, he makes a couple interesting observations of which some we have already shown can be derived from the movie. But what about the other claims? In particular, the article insinuates that there is something twisted with Tarantino in his “obsession with Thurman” which culminates in a newly founded disdain for the director by the author. This is interesting because the author uses a plethora of external sources to come to this final conclusion, yet if we were to only examine the movie, we would come up with a totally different conclusion. Namely, Death Proof is not a movie to highlight and show off all the sick labels people now stick on Tarantino following Thurman’s allegations; rather, it is an apology in the form of a movie. It is a movie that Tarantino felt he had to make to express remorse to the woman he had mistreated a year prior.

Back in Kill Bill, as director, Tarantino had the power to command the various actors and actresses to do what he felt was necessary and if it was somewhat dangerous, then so be it. However, in Death Proof, the situation is reversed; this time Tarantino is under the whims of the cast. Mike, being the symbolic Tarantino and having failed to kill his intended victims, becomes the aggressed. The trio of would-be victims quickly pursues Mike over a long stretch of road performing the same actions to him that he did to them mere moments ago. During the few times the two groups in their respective car are side-by-side, Mike cannot help but scream “I’m sorry”, “I didn’t mean anything”, “I was just playing around” in rapid succession. Considering the rocky relationship between Tarantino and Thurman, this moment was Tarantino’s way of apologizing having not the ability to do so personally – a symbolic gesture from one proxy to another. While the finer minutia of detail in the movie requires watching Kill Bill, the audience can discern a dichotomy between the director and the actress without having access to external details because this message was an important one Tarantino wanted to convey.

But that is not all because the ending of the movie deviates from our normal expectations. After Zoe’s group finally detains Mike, they proceed to gang up and exact their “justice” via an onslaught of punches – a moment that empowered women like no other during the movie – before a roundhouse kick by Zoe knocks Mike to the floor where then “the end” flashes on the screen. The ending is weird because of how the juxtaposition of the end with the previous few scenes makes for a rather sudden halt to the movie. But if we consider what Tarantino was trying to convey, then the ending becomes all the more appropriate. So long as our previous propositions hold true, then what the ending really implies is that after a long time, symbolically shown through the extended car chase, Thurman and all the other women Tarantino might have offended in one way or another is finally able to openly wear all of their grievances, but Mike does not die as a result of the beating he sustains – nor is his fate ever explained – thus contributing to why the ending feels rather abrupt. This purposeful lack of clarification is brilliant in allowing Tarantino to highlight how the effects of his previous actions are still an ongoing issue.

Yet Death Parade is not the only Tarantino movie where an article’s conjectures can be found within a movie. Three years ago, with the Black Lives Matter Movement in full-swing, Tarantino was part of a Rise Up march condoning police brutality. Subsequently, The Guardian published a new article talking about how Tarantino’s actions have led to police boycotts of his movies and of how Tarantino has “recently been involved in a race debate” (Lee), but back in 2012, Tarantino’s movie Django Unchained already portrayed Tarantino’s stance towards racism. If we went further back to 1997, Tarantino cast an African American woman as a lead role in Jackie Brown when very few blockbusters had done so. None of the information in the article pertaining to Tarantino is news, for all we had to do was watch his movies.

The premise of Django Unchained is a freed slave tries to save his wife from slavery with the help of a sympathetic white bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz. Like the movie Defiance, the oppressed rises up to overthrow the oppressors. As a bounty hunter, Django kills a multitude of white men from overseers to plantation owners to stagecoach bandits as he journeys to save his wife. His remark “[being able to] kill white folks and they pay you for it, what’s not to like” only heightens the animosity that Django feels towards many pre-Civil War Southerners. But Django Unchained is less concerned with revenge and more about giving power back to black people whether it be through giving more authority to black people or by undermining the credibility of racist Southerners. In particular, there is one scene where Django, dressed in flamboyant blue, almost akin to a Medieval prince setting out to save his princess, confronts two overseers about to punish a black slave while triumphant music blares in the background. While the rest of the world is a splattering of brown and gray, the audiences’ eyes cannot help but be attracted to the bright blue outfit seemingly calling out: “look at me for I am the hero of the story.” Then, in a reversal of fortune, Django proceeds to whip the same overseer who had wanted to use the whip as punishment. Compared to killing white men, this is much more degrading as now the overseer is the slave in this scenario.

But the degradation of racist white men is not only through violence. More specifically, the movie goes at length to magnify various faults of these men. The overexaggerated Southern accents on the plantation overseers to the point that the audience has trouble understanding and their uncivilized appearance makes them seem like a part of the very same group they are in charge of. Additionally, no expense is spared in making fun of the Ku Klux Khan style outfits with the white hoods poked with two dots for eyeholes. The movie also highlights the brutality bigoted men treat black folk as was the case where Mr. Candie ordered the death of the slave, D’Artagnan, by attack dogs. Although such extreme treatment is thankfully no longer present in society, much of the mannerisms, like that of how plantation leadership addressed their slaves, remains a major issue in the racial divide present today. By subjecting his audience to brutal scenes that highlight the issues in racism is, we are able to easily see Tarantino’s viewpoint towards racial inequality even before he participated in marches against racism.

Yet, do not be mistaken in thinking that the point is to cast everything about the author away and only live in the plot. Rather, the point is to understand that knowing additional information such as author’s purpose, pertinent background or biographical information is potentially useful but only to a limited extent. At best, having knowledge the context can only supplement, not dictate, our learning as we ultimately have to prioritize the content over all else. In fact, it is from using a plethora of sources as evidence that critics are more likely to make a wrong conclusion as was the case with Short’s article. To be true to the information provided means sticking with the source material more so than relying on any other bits of information Hence, any conjecture not based on what is within the novel is simply conjecture and cannot be given precedence over what exists. At best, all those different viewpoints can only be interesting points to consider: for if it was really that imperative, the author would have made sure to highlight its importance without the need for external help, yet perhaps this suggestion is wrong in that we lose too much. Maybe the end result of literary analysis is one where multiple sides conflict, never to come to a consensus, but this question is one that we each must contend on our own.

Thank you Max Wu’21 for your help with editing.

Bibliography

Lee, Benjamin. “Quentin Tarantino Joins Police Brutality Protest in New York.” The          Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 26 Oct. 2015, www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/26/quentin-tarantino-joins-police-brutality-protest-in-new-york.

Short, Aaron. “The WTF Story About Tarantino’s ‘Death Proof’ You Never Knew.” Cracked.com, Scripps, 4 Apr. 2018, www.cracked.com/article_25507_the-wtf-story-about-tarantinos-death-proof-you-never-knew.html.

Tarantino, Quentin. “Death Proof.” Flenix , 29 June 2017.

Tarantino, Quentin. “Django Unchained.” Flenix , 12 May 2017.