Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges (2010)

Reviewed by Patrick Hallstein / McEvoy-Halston

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Saving Liberals from Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, in Death of the Liberal Class, ostensibly isn’t wishing the liberal class to die – he’s simply demarcating it as deceased, or so he argues – but he certainly doesn’t have much good to say about it either, and as a DeMausian psychohistorian, I’m probably normally not much in mind to defend it myself.  He describes it, the liberal class – a composite of left-leaning artists, journalists, and academics:  lefty intellectuals – as if it entrance to it now requires abdicating anything that meaningfully defined liberals as liberal in the first place.  You have to agree to no longer serve, to betray, the people, their best interests, and effectively end up sycophants to the mandarin corporate ruling class.  And to see my sort of psychohistory at all accepted within academia right now, I would likely have to see it especially emphasize the destructive aspects of patriarchy, how it afflicts women; I would have to see it value all periods of history, applauding any acute psychohistorical study, whether it concern Ancient Greeks or modern times; and I would have to see it adopt the academic tone and focus tightly on subject matter, thanking friends and loving support “for making our work possible” but otherwise keeping our personal life, and the personal—out.  And this would mean full disrespect of the remarkable truth that patriarchy, though indeed now retrograde, was once significant psychogenic evolution—people moving up the scale.  It would mean implicitly slighting the fact that evolution of the old kind, gradual betterment of people through time, is real, that the further you go into the past the more primitive the people you are dealing with are, making deeper descent into history an increasingly more harrowing descent that at some point must stop you into bluntly asking yourself why you were so eager to climb down in the first place?  It would mean betraying our awareness that our families didn’t just give us the support we needed but likely determined exactly what we’re up to in this reified realm of scholarship, and that the measured, neutral, reason-clearly-in-charge-here voice usually shows signs of its being an older psychoclass innovation.  It would mean betraying what I ought to love, degrading myself, ostensibly too, from heights to lows, knight to accomplice, elf to forlorn orc.  Nevertheless, if I am true to what I’ve either learned or confirmed from exploring DeMausian psychohistory, I’m not about to judge Hedges my peer; and am in fact trying to use the book to help keep faith in the same liberal establishment which treats the sort of psychological ideas so precious to us so very warily.

Wanting War, Jeffrey Record 

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Jeffrey Record, in “Wanting War” (2009), would have you know that the Iraq war was/is a war of hubris, that Iraq presented no pressing threat but an enticing prize, neo-cons and George W. Bush made use of a nation’s powerful need to simply trust to empower their intent to go after.  I’m sure you’ve heard this one before, and possibly long, long ago accepted it in full, thinking what we most needed to know about the war has been repeatedly revealed; and perhaps for this reason, principally, we should go into why Record’s account does us all little good.

Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Be Well Leery of the Ring

Remaining true to what you know you’ve just seen, in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”

July 2009

I’ve taken Lord of the Rings out of my film collection several times. With no trepidation, with no dis-ease.  I know by this, I think, that it is unlikely to partake of the One and Only’s inevitable draw.  But it may be that it in fact does, but under better guise.  A beautiful, radiant golden ring is good form for an evil essence with intentions of being returned to master, but less than best for convincing anyone at all roughly hewn that’s its unusual properties are simply, all in all, rather a nice plus.  An Oscar-winning franchise about good triumphing evil is, however, better suited to remain long in your hands without you ever suspecting it might debilitate more than it sustains.

Star Trek, J.J. Abram

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Come into My Space Dungeon and Let Me Poke You with a Pogo-Stick

Review of J.J. Abram’s Star Trek, Part One

May 2009

            It’s not exactly what Star Trek offers, but the film is perhaps most easily, if not most fairly, assessed as belonging to the bread-and-circuses school of societal extension.  It offers a plot, a delineation of the way ahead, people can readily imagine themselves participating in, readily imagine themselves wanting to participate in, which if followed by a similar national narrative could at least help pave the way for a neat and orderly—if totalitarian—way of finishing all things off.   The pro-offered life of adventure appeals; the sense of purpose, also very much so.   But the best “drug” it provides comes from it allowing you room to imagine yourself playing a part in something like this, and thereby partaking in the dopamine-high of specialness counting yourself amongst the few select geniuses good enough for the Enterprise allows you.

Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Help Wanted

May 2009

            With “Wendy and Lucy” involving one proud woman traveling through rugged or decrepit surroundings, hoping to work her way to the one place available which might promise a secure life, and perhaps also fulfillment (i.e., Alaska), the film could be deemed post-apocalyptic.  But in films of this genre, where civilization wears and wolves encroach, setting serves to highlight and facilitate/necessitate heroic action from the main protagonist, and overall register a strong sense that this is the only appropriate backdrop for manly, independent living—the one gigantic thing civilization cannot offer because it ostensibly comes at the expense of.   The film works the other way around, where adults born when American society felt assured prove still worth seeking out; for they may be, if not the only, certainly still the best source available to help orient you to take on a more substantive, human way of relating with the world.

Generation X, Douglas Coupland

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Soothing Satire

Mending Our Way to Better in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X

July 2006

Generation X purports to offer “tales for an accelerated culture,” but it really offers tales that service the needs of a select group of people—those who constitute Generation X.  Its aim is therapeutic; it seeks not so much to scold as to heal.  But if we care about such things, it may yet still be judged a satiric text.  For healing requires the construction of a group surround, a secure, distinct sense of themselves as different from all others, and recent scholarship has it that this is something satires are wont to do too.  Though we may not be prepared to imagine satires as as much about the construction of groups as they are about criticizing them, in The Literature of Satire Charles Knight argues that eighteenth-century satires, at least, did nurture the development of “nations” (a particular kind of group), and that they did this by “celebrating” “the characteristics of one’s nation” while “mock[ing]” “those of others” (58-59).

Love and Anger, George Walker

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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The Good Fight

July 2006

           

            George Walker’s Love and Anger celebrates the virtues of a good fight, of a good war, and the rewards it offers its participants.  Though wars are a kind of an embrace, they cannot be engaged in by lovers—they require good guys and bad guys, who hate one another.  Walker implicitly understands how the desire for war mostly moves all wars, and communicates it primarily by cuing us to appreciate that all the good characters involved in the play’s battle between good and evil have similar-seeming evil counterparts.  That is, he guides us to see everyone involved in the fray as potentially interchangeable, as truly of the same kind.  So if war is being praised, is there anything or anyone in the play subjected to unmitigated critique?  Yes, someone is.  Though it well might be missed, Eleanor is set up for brutal criticism; for she is an agent of the cruel suppression peacemaking affords, and the play is strongly aligned against goodly doers of this worst sort.

“The Birth of Sensibility,” Paul Langford; “Read this and Blush,” Brycchan Carey; “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” Karen Haltunnen; “Stedman:  Slavery, Empathy, Pornography,” Marcus Wood
Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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How Insensitive!

Historiographical Assessments of the Eighteenth-Century Writer and Reader of Anti-Slavery Literature

July 2006

Historians once assumed that the termination of the slave trade evidenced that Britons are—or at least can be—a genuinely sensitive people.  That is, they didn’t understand eighteenth-century sensibility as a culture, a phenomenon, a cult.  Things have changed, however, for outside of popular history little history is being done these days where sensibility is taken at face value.  In this exploration of how historians are currently characterizing mid-to-late eighteenth-century abolitionists and their ostensibly sensitive audience, I suggest that historians now prefer to characterize them, not as bad, but as calculating and self-interested.  But if the current preferred conception of the sensible “man of feeling” is of him as a rational man and/or a man of artifice, there are murmurs arising from current research into pornography and abolitionist literature which suggest that he is in the process of becoming understood, rather, as perverse, lecherous—as a subject worthy neither of admiration nor of dispassionate assessment, but simply of scorn.

Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Moderns and their Mothers’ Reach

May 2006

 

            In Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas argues that moderns felt they needed to find a way to free themselves from the influence, from the control, of their Victorian predecessors, and discusses how their cultural products were means to this end.  Free, they created one of the richest cultural periods of all time.  But she also argues that moderns well knew that a price would have to be paid for all this self-fulfillment and self-growth.  She writes that they knew that at some point the Maternal—the “object” they repressed and beat back—would stage a return and make them pay for their insolence and neglect.  Some theorists, notably those influenced by object-relations’ thought, argue, however, that how most of us experience our own self-growth and freedom ensures that moderns would themselves stage the return to a matriarchal environment—that is, that she wouldn’t need to return, for they would feel compelled to pay her a visit.  In this essay, I will argue that prominent modernist plays served to both help effect the matricide Douglas argues modernist cultural products produced, and to provide means to temporarily vicariously return to the maternal environment moderns so loathed and feared.  Specifically, I will explore how Brick and Margaret in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Biff in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, are made to seem empowered moderns who exist outside of a maternal environment, but who risk upon their return to it the loss of their hard-won independence.

“Servants of the Map,” Andrea Barrett

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Grabbing Hold, for Departure’s Sake

How Max Vigne clings to home while he prepares to move on, in Andrea Barrett’s “Servants of the Map” (Andrea Barrett)

April 2006

Max Vigne makes use of the ostensibly dangerous Himalayan mountain range as if it was a Greenworld, that is, as a place which facilitates experimentation, self-discovery, and renewal.  It’s an odd place to use as a playground, but he needed some place that would serve:  it is clear that his life in England was safe but routine—hum-drum.  It is what was afforded him after a shock—his mother’s death—necessitated a life moved by necessity rather than by romance.  Though he at first makes it seem as if his surveying position abroad is really about bettering his position at home, not long into the text it becomes apparent that it is really about rediscovering a life of “charm” (22), a life he had been familiar with before his mother died.

The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Matricide in the City

The story of an invisible man, the story of New York, in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

February 2006

Chapters twelve to fifteen of The Invisible Man, in which the invisible man moves away from the mother-figure Mary toward Jack and the Brotherhood, might be read as staging the Freudian drama of the child’s move away from his mother at the father’s command.  But since with Freud the child prefers to remain united to the mother, and since the invisible man—despite his claims to the contrary—clearly does not want to remain alongside Mary, the drama here isn’t a Freudian one.  What it is, instead, is a dramatization of the story behind modern, thriving New York in the 1920s, for New Yorkers believed their freedom depended on detaching themselves from the influence of the preceding age, an age of smothering subservience, lorded over by Victorian matriarchs, and in creating its counterpart, its counter—an unforgiving Masculine era.

As For Me and My House, Sinclair Ross

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Quitting Home

January 2006

If we were to assemble a canon of Canadian texts based on their ability to help Canadians live better lives, we would do well to include Sinclair Ross’ As For Me and My House as one of its core texts.  The text is not simply “prairie lit”; it actually speaks to the concerns of most contemporary Canadians.  The text’s narrator, Mrs. Bentley, often expresses in her journal her fear that she lives in a threatening and insecure environment, yet she ultimately portrays her environment as more secure than insecure.  It is in fact inspiring—the various pressing threats are manipulated so they actually empower her.  And for the reader, the reading experience would not be anywhere near as claustrophobic and uncomfortable as we might assume it to be, given her frequent complaints of Horizon’s horrors.  The text in fact often feels spacious, roomy, and offers the reader pleasing variety; and ultimately serves as a place to settle in awhile while we learn to make our re-engagement with the “real world” more purposeful and legitimate.

Stanley Kunitz

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Consolidating Gains

Warding off Annihilation in Stanley Kunitz’s Poetry

December 2005

           

            Jahan Ramazani, in Poetry of Mourning, argues that we have great need of elegies.  “[We] need them because people die around us every day,” and we are powerless to do anything about this as “neither science nor technology can fix death, reverse loss, or cure bereavement” (ix).  However, Ramazani may underestimate what we are capable of doing with technology, for we make use a certain kind of technology—our narratives—to make us feel less susceptible, less vulnerable to death.  Indeed, we may ask even more of them—and for an opposite purpose.  Particularly in his mother-son poems, Stanley Kunitz, for instance, uses poetry to consolidate himself to his life’s gains, making it for him foremost an instrument of acquisition, and perhaps never truly of defense or repair.  Even true for his many elegies, that is, his poems are much more about the better claiming of still-available riches than they are about recovering from what’s been lost to him.

Think of the Earth, Bertram Brooker

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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A Good Place for a Pump and a Dump

December 2005

The literary critic Norman Holland believes that a literary work is something we turn to in order satisfy “rather unsavory wish[es]” (104), without alarming our conscious ego or superego censors.  We might expect such a viewpoint from a critic heavily influenced by psychoanalytic thought, and it is one I will use as the basis of my exploration of Bertram Brooker’s Think of the Earth.  I contend that for certain readers this book can serve as a fueling site, a place where oral needs for attendance and love are satisfied, and also as a dumping site, a place where undesired aspects of oneself can, if only temporarily, be expunged from one’s system.

As for Me and My House, Sinclair Ross

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Critical Introduction

October 2005

Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House excites many of those who study Canadian literature.  As we read criticism of the work, again and again we encounter critics who make use of their essays to announce their delight in knowing of at least one Canadian writer who wrote something which can unapologetically be called modernist.  This is the broad significance of the work:  apparently, its merits are so obvious that it announces, beams like a bat-signal to all interested that Canada did manage to produce a work of fiction between the two wars that not only is not an embarrassment but which might well be a modernist masterpiece.  Without it, it sometimes seems, critics of Canadian literature would have evident reason to study Victorian Canadian fiction—that is, fiction written by Canadians during the Victorian era (because nothing more could have been expected of them)—and, of course, our bounty of postmodern literature, but would not have much justification for studying literature “between the gaps” (which really could and should have been so much more.)  By itself, that is, it seems to justify further explorations into the literature written in Canada between the wars (for, for such a work to exist, presumably there must have been something very worthwhile about the Canadian milieu during this time-period).

“The Foresaken Merman,” “To Marguerite—Continued,” Mathew Arnold; “Caliban Upon Setebos,” Robert Browning; “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” Edward Fitzgerald
Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Getting Noticed

Warranting attention in the work of various Victorian poets

July 2005

            In his poetry Matthew Arnold deals with abandonment in a way which struck me, at least, as un-Victorian.  His speakers rage against the perpetrators; the fault is with them, not with the speakers.  But Arnold settled on a different reaction to abandonment and isolation as he “matured”:  re-union, a desired community, he decided, can be created, so long as the critic/poet remains resolutely faithful and good.  But fascinatingly, other poets in the Victorian era suggest through their works that they think abandoning parents are drawn mostly to acts of misbehavior, not to notable instances of right-thinking, pure intentions, or good works.  Specifically, we can look to works such as Robert Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setebos” and Edward Fitzgerald’s “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” for evidence that at least some notable Victorians understood that gods (and other parental figures) are most quick to attend to their flock when they spot them out in blatant acts of disobeyance.

“The Lady of Shalott,” Alfred Tennyson

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Maintaining the Peace

May 2005

Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” is the sort of work Victorians might have turned to for reassurance.  It provides the reader with a soothing, predictable space/world, wherein s/he is well prepared to encounter and process the New.  There is disequilibrium in the poem:  Lancelot is described as such an unusual, affecting sight that his appearance shocks the Lady of Shalott (hereafter, “Lady”) into activating the curse.  However, the Lady’s subsequent activity is equal to and nullifies his emblazoned entrance, leaving us with an appropriate pairing:  a gentle knight, amidst a newly becalmed realm.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Useful Object

A Man as the Means Toward Salvation in “The Beauty Queen of Leenane”

April 2005

Maureen Folan, in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, is constantly grumbling about the daily chores she performs for a mother she is rarely shown not fighting with.  She dreams of being comforted by and of going away with a man, but since these dreams arose her unsureness of her actual appeal to men, they actually serve to strengthen rather than loosen her ties to her mother.  However, the play argues that a man is exactly what she needs for her to leave her everyday life behind her.  For though Maureen initially tries to make use of a strong, gentle man who enters her life—Pato—as if he were just another prop with which to wage her ongoing war with her mother, Pato is actually the means for her to forget all about that and begin a better life for herself.

The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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The Visible Invisible Man

Giving Notice in Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man

March 2005

            In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the invisible man repeatedly draws our attention to how he captures the attention of discerning individuals.  Supposedly, this is not the sort of attention he craves.  What he really wants, he tells us, is for others to take an interest in him, but not only so as to better discern if he is useful or a threat.  Unfortunately, “[n]o one really wished to hear what [he] [. . .] called himself” (573).  We have reason to believe, however, that the attention he does receive is exactly the sort he craves—or, rather, the sort he can enjoy and still live with.  For not only does he consistently show in his account that he attends to whether or not people take “special” (301) notice of him, he shows he prefers they not interact with him in a manner that makes it difficult to at some point leave them behind.

Evelina, Frances Burney; Young Werther, Goethe

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Worthy Companions

Assurance Through Association, in Frances Burney’s “Evelina” and Goethe’s “Young Werther”

March 2005

Evelina, in Frances Burney’s Evelina, and Werther, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Young Werther, might seem the opposite of one another, for they seek out such opposite company—Evelina, the high-born; Werther, the low-grounded.  However, though their eyes are cast in different directions, their inclinations are one and the same:  they both seek admiration from whomever most appropriate, to confirm them as far superior to their own particular worst-sort of people.