Some Reflection on Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation

In Baudrillard, reality and thought are one. I do not agree that hyperreality bears no relation to reality (6). The relation is evolutionary and I think Baudrillard would agree, to the extent that we do not get caught up in causal historicizing. Further, he distinguishes hyperreality to reality to point to the tendency of human thought and to trace its development. If not only to distinguish hyperreality from another mode of thinking, why not just call it reality if it is what is? Beyond this, it is difficult to criticize writing characterized by the fleeting, a writing that constantly points to neutrality and to disappearance. I both like and dislike (funny it should have this effect) his writing for his assumption that humanity is a large collective within which difference is eliminated. Moreover, even while he takes this perspective, he accounts for a conception of difference, as if no matter how homogenous humanity becomes, there is always “the trait of reversion—the single ironic smile that effaces the whole discourse” (163). My problem (because I can not criticize) takes root in his preoccupation with “the big picture,” with analyzing events in terms of the collective. The idea of death pervades his essays, but his writing is preoccupied with larger systems, with the collective, and with death as something that occurs in the realm of ideas. Therefore, I have difficulty determining how he understands the physical death of the individual body.

Baudrillard seems to account for death as imagined, as something the system (and power) confronts itself with in order to avoid it. He seems to assume that one’s understanding that the crowd is immortal should supersede one’s understanding (and one’s fear) of individual death. Does it follow that our understanding that we are the collective and not a distinguishable part of it should efface any fear of our individual death? While I agree that it is a preoccupation with origins and with ends (and I add to this: fear of the end) that leads to ideology, I notice Baudrillard refrains from moralizing on the effect of ideology. I could say his writing tempts the reader into ideological thought only to shake the reader out of it, but I would only be projecting my own ideological thinking onto his work. His vocabulary of metastasizing leukemia (32) to describe the human race begs the reader to blow the whistle of morality. However, Baudrillard, blurring determinism and freewill, questions the reader’s temptation to think of human beings in terms of redemption and “the fall.” My temptation is to assume that thinking in terms of binary, and thus divisiveness—the foundation of ideological systems—leads to suffering. Further, my temptation is to see war and suffering as “bad,” as things to be avoided, whereas, while Baudrillard is careful not to reason away suffering, he posits that these phenomena are manifestations of the system itself.

My feeling is that a society that perpetuates itself on the basis of fear is bound for destruction. Baudrillard would say this is itself an “imaginary of the end” (161). According to Baudrillard, this fear—nuclear deterrence, for example—is precisely what prevents our (self-)destruction. At the risk of being too bold in an interpretation of Baudrillard: perhaps divisiveness and fear are intrinsic to human thought and human hyperreality—part of our evolution—not something to struggle against or to overcome. The key may be in a confusion of our fear of ideological death and our fear of physical death. Perhaps in a more evolved human society, war amongst humans will be fought as in a game of chess, purely in the mind. After all, our mind and ideas are intrinsically linked to our physical experience. To some extent, they shape our realities, or hyperrealities. Our fear seems linked to our passion, which for the moment, may be our saving evolutionary adaptation.

A Short Essay on James Fenimore Cooper

Environmentalism and Cooper’s The Pioneers

The Pioneers presents conflicting claims on exploiting the wilderness through the opposing ideals of Natty and Richard, who represent two extreme views of sustainability and wastefulness. Cooper attempts to resolve the conflict through the characterization of Judge Temple, who represents an uneasy compromise between the two extremes. Cooper and his readers saw significant expansion and development of the American landscape since the time of The Pioneers. Pervading the novel, a sense of the inevitably of western settlement calls for a compromise between extreme waste of the land and the settlers’ dependence on the use of the land for survival. The Pioneers calls into question the necessity of constant growth and expansion, yet it presents the movement west, not as necessarily intentional, but as the effect of various factors that drove pioneers to seek new land as the law and economy shifted in the developing east.

Richard’s wasteful disregard for natural resources seems to speak for the settlers’ sense of an endless bounty in the new country. In the landscape as described through Elizabeth Temple’s eyes, the western frontier of the settlement thrives with “boundless forests” (213), where “plants have not yet taken root” (35)

and the view to the west is only limited by “undulating outline[s] of bright light” (213). The settlement’s place in a small clearing amongst seemingly boundless forest probably justified wastefulness to the settlers. Not having a clear picture of the west or where it ends, the resources seem endless to the settlers. Richard is the figurehead of development and waste, wanting to use trees to create piping for Templeton (103), leading the battle against the pigeon flocks (245) and devising the net to catch prodigious amounts of fish from the lake (258).

Natty appears in both the pigeon shoot and the fishing scenes in direct opposition to Richard, always arguing “use, but don’t waste” (250). Natty would not condemn the use of the fishing net if the fish had fur to use. Further, Natty condemns agriculture and clearing, arguing in favor of hunting, for which the forest is naturally attuned. The woods are “made for the beasts and birds to harbor in” (250) and men hunt the animals when they need fur or food. Farming, according to Natty, destroys the woods and makes the animals scarce, causing the need for hunting laws (160).

Judge Temple is often in agreement with Natty about the use of natural resources. He condemns Richard’s use of maple for firewood as setting a bad example to the settlers, “who are already felling the forests as if no end could be found to their treasures” (103). Judge has foresight to know that if the settlers continue to waste resources now, they will want them later. Judge also praises Natty’s condemnation of the settlers during the pigeon shoot and the fishing scenes. However, despite his power over the settlers, Judge Temple stands as a casual

observer watching the wastefulness of the settlers and doing little to stop it. Unlike Richard, he does not condone wastefulness and unlike Natty, he does not live in harmony with the land. He lives a settler’s agricultural lifestyle and would rather create a new law to limit hunting than to limit agriculture to repopulate the forests (159). Moreover, Judge Temple talks about the land as wild and unforgiving (235) when he first climbed Mount Vision and beheld it. To Judge Temple, the development and clearing of the land is also a symbol of the settlers’ comfort and the result of their hard work.

Judge Temple’s uneasy compromise of the views of Natty and Richard probably echoes the author’s anxiety about western expansion, a phenomenon that seems outside of any individual’s control. Settlers moved west for reasons independent of each other. Hiram Doolittle, for example, moves west because he sees that his practice of law is incompatible with what Templeton has become (452). In the last pages of the novel, Natty, “weary of living in clearings” (459), heads west to the woods where laws do not designate hunting seasons and where a man “made for the wilderness” (460) belongs. Though Natty is a man of the woods and lives in harmony with nature, he is still a white settler. In his movement west, he is “the foremost in that band of pioneers who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent” (462). Where Natty moves westward, people like Hiram Doolittle also move westward, taking their wasty ways with them. Though Natty represents an ideal that cannot exist amongst the destructive ways of the settlers, he

paves the way for other white settlers to follow him and continue their destructive lifestyle.

The compromise at the end of the novel brings Oliver Edwards into control of Templeton, who like Judge, understands and reveres Natty’s way of life, but who lives amongst the settlers, by their laws. Though it seems Cooper does not approve of the misuse of the land, his resolution of the environmental debate seems uneasy, as the expansion westward is an unstoppable force and there are too many who believe that the resources are endless.

Works Cited

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers. New York: Signet Classics, 2007. Print.

A Short Essay on Hawthorne

Sexuality and Free Will in “The Custom House” and The Scarlet Letter

Hawthorne provides the reader with opposing views of the men in the Custom House– the figures of their youth, “ancient sea captains… standing sturdily against life’s tempestuous blast” (10) and their present aged state, “gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bedridden” (10). The image of “ancient sea captains” recalls the image of the sailors in the marketplace celebrating the election of the new governor toward the end of the novel, virile men “with immensity of beard… belts clasped with a rough plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife… or sword… [with gleaming] eyes [that] had a kind of animal ferocity” (206). The gouty and rheumatic state of the ancient sea captains is not the natural result of aging, however, as Hawthorne depicts aged figures such as the seventy-year-old inspector “with his florid cheek… [and] brisk and vigorous step” (13). Further, the old inspector is animalistic, like the young sailors, “so earthly and sensuous… with no higher moral responsibilities than the beasts of the field” (15). Thus, the decrepit state of the old Custom House officials results instead from the burden of moral responsibility. Further, the sailors in the marketplace are free of the confines of man’s law, “[having] been guilty… of depredations of the Spanish commerce such as would have perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice, [but] the sea… swelled and foamed, very much at its own will… with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law” (212). Hawthorne has at play here ideas of wildness and virile sexuality tied in with moral and legal codes.

Comparing Hawthorne’s depiction of Hester Prynne to the young sailors and the old officials somewhat untangles the interplay of sexuality and morality in The Scarlet Letter. Hester, as the creator of the letter on her chest, is sometimes identified with it, as it is “modeled after her own fancy, [seeming] to express the attitude of her spirit [and] the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity” (46). She designs it with “so much fertility” and wears it upon her bosom (46). Hester’s physical appearance parallels the young sailors and the old inspector. Her hair “is dark and abundant” (46, 177) like the sailor’s beards and her complexion is marked by “richness” (46) that recalls the inspector’s “florid cheek.” As the young sailors are marked by their long swords, Hester is frequently referred to in terms of her “bosom” throughout the novel, which “burns with the heat of [the] red hot” (23) scarlet letter.

Hester and the sailor’s sexuality ties in with their free will and their positions within and outside of the patriarchal structure. Hester emerges from the jail “repel[ling]” the town beadle, “with a sword by his side and a staff in his hand… by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and step[s] into the open air, as if by her own free will” (46). While the sailors and the beadle are both identified with their swords, they differ in their positions in relation to the political structure of the colony. The sailors are lively and their belts are plated with gold, whereas the beadle is “grim and grisly” (45) and “represent[s] in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code.” Hester, as a woman and an outlaw, is more like the sailors, who live according to their own free will on the open sea. Despite her similarity to the sailors, however, Hester’s sexuality is distinctly feminine and she lives within the Puritan community while the sailors live outside of it. Hawthorne’s depiction of his heroine in her old age marks her lack of burden with Puritanic morality as it parallels the regard of the old inspector and simultaneously opposes the decrepit officials. Hester is remembered in the papers the narrator finds as “a very old, but not decrepit woman, of a stately and solemn aspect” (28).

Hester does not exist outside of the Patriarchal Puritan structure as she is subject to the laws thereof, however her position as outlaw is empowering to her and subversive to the structure. As an outlaw, Hester is free to remain an emblem of unbridled sexuality and free will. Moreover, Hester is free to leave the colony when she is released from prison, yet she chooses to remain. Even when she leaves with Pearl at the end of the story, she eventually returns alone as “here had been her sin; here her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence” (239). Like Hester, the narrator chooses to remain within the bosom of his native soil, as “the long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any moral circumstances that surround him” (8). He is a writer and therefore an outlaw in the eyes of his ancestors, bureaucrats like the Custom House officials (7). However, the appearance of the old officials is likely a result of “leaning on the mighty arm of the Republic, [their] own proper strength depart[ed]. [They lost] the capability of self support” (34). On the other hand, the vitality of youth in the old Hester results from her free will and determination to sew her own mode of existence. She “[warms the vixen breast of the cold and unforgiving]” (3) Custom House eagle by her choice to exist within the community that marginalizes her. As a “flung off nestling” (3) Hester tenaciously rejects rejection by remaining within the nest that has rejected her.

Work Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Signet Classics, 1999.

Annotated Bibliography for Gide's The Immoralist

The Politics of Sexuality in Gide’s L’Immoraliste: An Annotated List of Works Cited

Abstract

The majority of current critical discourse of Gide’s L’Immoraliste is not discussion of the reprehensibility of the narrator Michel’s actions, but rather what are the political implications, sexual and moral, behind the author and the text. As the narrator Michel’s actions are purely selfishly motivated, tied in with sexual taboo, and ultimately cause the death of his wife, ambiguity regarding what is really at stake in the novel abounds. The story is often read as a (homo)sexual awakening, a travel narrative chronicling the illness, self-discovery and reinvention of Michel, a Frenchman in the colonial Near East. Gide refrains from overt discussion of sexuality and hides his own beliefs behind the veil of a first person narrator confessing his history to a group of mute interlocutors (Cohen 68 and MacKenzie). While some scholars, such as Michael Lucey, choose to focus more on Gide’s biography, reading the understated homosexuality in the text as a response to the homosexual taboo in early twentieth century French society, others such as Joseph A. Boone and Edward Said focus much more largely on what the work says about Western imperialist ideology and the “othering” of the Arab colonial subject. Despite the amount of weight scholars give to the political and social implications of colonialism, it is present in some form in all scholarly work regarding sexuality and L’Immoraliste. L’Immoraliste speaks of power dynamics encompassing heterosexual and homosexual subjects, of a sexuality that brings Michel further into himself, disconnecting him from and blinding him to the Arab Other that he objectifies (Lucey 186); Moreover, L’Immoraliste ties together the economic, social and political implications of colonialism for colonizer and colonized, painting an image of colonialism as a sort of sexual imperialism.

Annotated List of Works Cited

Boone, Joseph A. “Vacation Cruises; Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism.” PMLA 110.1 (1995): 89-107. Web.

Heavily influenced by Edward Said, Boone’s essay “sheds light on the sexual politics that complicate Western male travelers’ encounters with a homoeroticized Near East” (101). Critical of Said’s heterosexual interpretive framework, Boone attempts to push the boundaries of Western ideas of homosexuality by illustrating the ways in which Western writers have imposed their sexual and gender norms on Near Eastern subjects. The intersection of the Western homosexual’s view of the colonial Near East as “a gay sanctuary with certain historical and economic factors of Western colonialism allowed a level of exploitation potentially as objectionable as the experience of marginalization that sent these travelers abroad in the first place” (101). In L’Immoraliste, Boone’s ideas are illustrated by the dependency of Michel’s awakening on “the orientalist move of equating the Near East almost exclusively with the body and surfeit… there is no room for art or intellect” (101). For Michel, the Arab boys are objects, rather than subjects, onto which Michel projects his inner psychology.

This essay provides a historical textual map of Western conceptualizations of Near Eastern gender and sexual identities, while situating the sexuality enacted in L’Immoraliste in a larger framework of Western social and cultural values.

Cohen, Keith. “Confessing and Withholding Secrets: Masculine Anxieties in Gide and Proust.” L’Esprit Créateur 43.3 (2003): 68-78. Web.

Cohen reads the literary form of first person narration as a foundation for confessional power in terms of Foucault’s idea of “screen discourse, a mode of which sexuality [is] talked about as an avoidance mechanism making it possible not to confront ‘the unbearable, too hazardous truth of sex’” (68). In his essay, he reads Gide’s “masculinities” as disguised in Michel’s sexual confession to his interlocutors. Cohen includes a psychoanalytical reading as he sees Michel’s burgeoning sexuality as a “narcissistic rediscovery” (70), a self-infatuation inter-mixed with homosexual and heterosexual love.

Michel’s masculinity is balanced in his gallant, protective love of Marceline and in his erotic love of Arab youth and aspects of their bodies that he once possessed himself (70). After the death of Marceline, however, filth, masculine youth and low social station are signifiers of his same-sex attraction. In his confession, Michel (and Gide) constructs space that renders his actions “value-neutral” (72) because he both pins his homosexual desire on “the curious gaze of the colonial tourist” (72) and he never betrays Marceline. Supporting Cohen’s reading is the underlying idea of the colonies as lawless space where (sexual) acts deemed morally reprehensible in France can be safely enacted.

Lucey, Michael. Gide’s Bent. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.

Lucey’s work focuses on the period from the 1920’s to the 1930’s, during which time Gide became more outwardly expressive of his homosexuality, traveled extensively in Africa and subsequently developed anti-colonialist political leanings. His overarching argument in the book is that personal (sexual) expression cannot be separated from political and social thought. In chapter five, Lucey compares the scene in L’Immoraliste in which Michel watches Moktir steal Marceline’s scissors to a similar scene in Les Faux-Monnayeurs to illustrate “the ways in which apparently transgressive desires for escape are structured into the social and economic fabric of French life, ways such ‘transgressive’ desires might fail to be so” (146-147).

In chapter six, Lucey discusses Paul de Man’s idea that sexuality “’can be experienced as a bridge toward another, as a way to reenter the social world from which one has [morally retreated],’”concluding that Gide’s portrayal of Michel’s sexuality is a bridge inward, rather than outward, and concludes that “sexual revolt is not inherently liberating… one runs the risk of re-aestheticizing oneself in an equally unacceptable way” (186). Lucey’s book ties the idea of Gide’s inward sexual expression to the political implications of such expression, particularly on the colonial subjects of Western sexual expression.

MacKenzie, Louis A., Jr. “The Language of Excitation in Gide’s L’Immoraliste.” Romance Quarterly 37.3 (1990). Web.

MacKenzie reads L’Immoraliste as a novel about “dis-covering” and revealing. Gide, he argues, “[artfully dodges] the question of the erotic” that is central to the book. Gide’s inexplicit talk of sexual excitation is “consonant with [Michel’s] psychography,” his lack of sexual experience synonymous to a lack of language to describe his actions and feelings. Thus, Michel uses metaphor and imagery to uncover and define his emerging sexuality and masculinity. Michel recognizes “youthfulness [as a] swing term that legitimize[s] his association with the unfettered vitality and eroticism of the youthful objects of his desire.” Michel is a kind of adolescent, “only partially aware [of the] profound physical, psychic and social changes” he is going through and “sufficiently inhibited by convention.”

Echoing Cohen’s argument about confession, MacKenzie concludes that “the demure quality of confession inject[s] Michel’s resignation with legitimacy” which forces the interlocutor to suspend judgment of Michel’s sexual practices and their social corollaries. MacKenzie’s discussion of convention, covering, and revelation strengthens critical ideas about Gide’s demure handling of homosexual content in regards to the taboo of homosexuality in nineteenth and early twentieth century French society. MacKenzie’s idea of “dis-covering” also parallels ideas about Algeria as a place for revealing hidden identities and desires of the foreign tourist.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1994. Print.

Said’s book is a follow-up to his previous book Orientalism. In Culture and Imperialism, Said defines culture by “all those practices that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that exist in aesthetic forms,” like the novel, “one of whose principal aims is pleasure” (xii). Culture, he posits, “includes a refining and elevating element” and eventually becomes associated with a national identity, which in turn marks a xenophobically loaded difference between “us” and “them” (xiii). Culture as a marker of identity translates, in terms of imperialism, to the imperialist’s dependence on the subjugated party for self-definition.

Said’s post-colonialist frame is relevant to a discussion of sexuality in L’Immoraliste as he reads a “homosexual complicity” among Ménalque (a colonial officer), Michel, and Motir as “unmistak[ably] a hierarchal relationship.” Michel gains self-knowledge from Moktir, which Ménalque helps to define. Moktir’s thoughts and feelings are irrelevant, however, and Gide hints that they are “racially mischievous” (192). Michel’s imperialist gain is afforded by a sexual relationship. Said, like other critics, also touches on the first person narrative structure in rendering any reading of L’Immoraliste, including one with a of frame sexuality and/or power, ambiguous.