Elmer Gantry

What George Lakoff analyzes scientifically and linguistically (see previous post), Sinclair Lewis dramatizes (somewhat melodramatically) in Elmer Gantry, his 1927 fictional satire on evangelical Christianity in America. Gantry is a master manipulator and rhetorical razzledazzler, who uses religion and human gullibility to gratify his own ego, satisfy his own desire, and build his own social power. He instinctively knows how to find the right frame and milk the right metaphor to take optimum advantage of his rhetorical situation.

Lakoff does not address the ethics of strategic framing, manipulation of metaphors, and the use of emotional appeals. Back in 1927, Lewis used those same methods to expose how they can be misused by a skillful and charismatic rhetorician to deceive, mislead, and harm an unsuspecting and ill-prepared audience.

Lewis uses the well-established frame of the American success story. In three different episodes Elmer Gantry rises from relative obscurity to a position of power. In the first third of the novel, he goes from irreligious student in a Baptist college to ordained minister to small congregation pastor. After disgracing himself, he begins the second episode as a traveling salesman and rises to prominence as right-hand-man and lover to a nationally known touring woman evangelist. After a fire destroys his evangelical ambitions as well as his lover and patron, Gantry joins the New Thought movement before becoming a Methodist minister, marrying a minister's daughter, who has been groomed as the perfect minister's wife, and moving up as a leading crusader against vice and the first radio broadcasting preacher in his state. He is nearly brought down by a couple of scam artists, who use sex and flattery to trap him in scandal, but, as on previous occasions, he manages to wriggle free, return to his pulpit, and begin eyeing his next young conquest in the choir.

Each episode follows the pattern of a rise to social power, sexual temptation, a fall from power, and a restoration. Gantry's success story is, of course, a satirical inversion of the popular narrative, designed to target evangelical hypocrisy, of which we have seen enough in the last 40 years to make Gantry's exploits seem tame. Lewis' satire seems almost equally directed at the naive and gullible followers of unscrupulous evangelism. It could also be read as a critique of the archetypal American success story itself, which not only falsifies the typical American experience but undermines the validity of the socially successful hero.

The irony is that, like every other creative writer, Lewis uses the methods of narrative framing, metaphor, strategic appeals to values, and emotionally connotative language in his critique of those who misuse such methods and those who fall for them.

Another way of viewing the novel is as a trickster narrative, in which the mischeievous "hero" clarifies the social norms by breaking them. The trickster character is often admired for challenging the social rules. In the case of Elmer Gantry, however, the character functions to expose the hypocrisy of our most socially admired social heros, our religious leaders.

While, in some respects, the novel seems dated, in others, it seems all too reflective of current reality, in which public figures in both religion and politics who uphold principles of "sexual purity" and "family values" and are vocal in their conemnation of those who don't act in accordance with such principles are revealed to be as two-faced and hypocritical as the now iconic Elmer Gantry.

The Political Mind

If you liked Don't Think of an Elephant (2004) by George Lakoff, you will appreciate this 2008 expansion on his thesis. The Political Mind is a generally accessible account of how recent research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and linguistics informs current understanding of the way brain activity and metaphors unconsciously shape our political thought.

For example, conservatives refer to the "public option" in health insurance reform as a "government takeover" of the health care system, thus framing the debate in terms of an oppressive federal government overpowering and restricting the freedom of individuals and private insurers to function at will in the open marketplace. Lakoff's advice to health reform advocates might be not to accept this frame by trying to refute it, but rather to replace it with a different frame, such as consumer protection and empowerment through individual choice and market competition: "Uncle Sam looks out for YOU!" or "Uncle Sam has your back!" or something like that. (Does the "Uncle Sam" metaphor have too many negative connotations to work?)

Lakoff finds middle ground between traditional correspondence theory of meaning and post-modern constitutive theory. Brain biology and universal human experience in the material world shape language and language shapes the way we think. Change the language and linguistic frame, reinforce it enough, and rewire the brain (within limits, of course).

The book is easier to comprehend than to apply, but provides basic tools for analyzing political discourse and strategically producing it, something conservatives have been much more effective at than liberals. The brain biology gets a bit technical at times and a lay reader just has to take his word for it, but the cognitive psychology and linguistics seem fairly accessible, at least for the generally educated reader.

Lakoff uses post-modern critique effectively, but does not go so far as to discredit nature, biology, and science. Facts and logic have (relative) credibility, but the human mind doesn't naturally think in terms of facts and logic. To be persuasive, we must think strategically in terms of values, metaphors, and emotionally connotative language. So, which frame in the health reform debate is more "true"? It's not just a matter of facts and logic; it's also, perhaps primarily, a matter of values and world view.

If you believe in individual autonomy, free enterprise, market discipline, private charity, and limited government, then the "government takeover" metaphor will be true for you. If you believe in community, protection of basic human rights, the public good, consumer protection from profit-hungry private business, and government regulation of market excess and irregularity, then the metaphor of a protective government that promotes individual well-being and the common welfare will be true for you.

Since, according to Lakoff, most of us shift back and forth between both world views depending on context, it is possible to "frame" political discourse so that it appeals across conventional political divisions. The whole notion of right/left, conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat polarities is itself a simplistic frame which ignores our full complexity.

I wish I were smart enough or ambitious enough to analyze Lakoff's own frame. I'll keep working on that.

Emily Dickinson's Poetry II

So how did Emily Dickinson critique conventional views of reality? (See previous blog post.) Numerous examples could be given of her challenges to the dominant religious world view and prevailing attitudes toward marriage, domesticity, gender, sexuality, and human psychology. However, her most influential challenge was perhaps to the poetic conventions of the 19th century.

For all of her poems she used a very standard four-line ballad stanza (4 beats, 3 beats, 4 beats, 3 beats), with second and fourth lines rhyming). This is also known as common meter, folk meter, and hymn meter. Most of her poems can be sung to the tune of almost any church hymn or folk song. Try it!

However, Dickinson experimented with multiple variations on this stanza, such that it is not always recognizable until you scan its meter and compare it to the standard form. She used a popular, conventional form and adapted it to some highly esoteric uses, thus inviting general readers in and then stretching them beyond their familiar expectations. Instead of relying on standard rhymes, she experimented with what is called slant rhyme, approximate rhyme, or off rhyme, to the point where, again, it is not always immediately recognizable. As one critic said, “For Emily Dickinson, the world didn’t rhyme.” Her variations on the ballad stanza and experimentation with rhyme served to reinforce in a formal way the questioning of conventional views that can be found in the content of the poems.

Dickinson is also known for her unconventional punctuation (liberal use of dashes) and capitalization. She did not use titles or standard grammar. Her use of ellipsis and grammatical truncation again reinforces the unconventional content, but also contributes to obscurity. These technical idiosyncrasies and her use of highly unusual imagery and metaphors often create a cryptic opaqueness, which almost defies interpretation. Her riddle poems (“I like to see it lap the miles,” “A narrow fellow in the Grass,” “A route of Evanescence”) are playful versions of her penchant for seeing the world as a cryptic mystery.

Her experimentation with persona, sometimes speaking as a child (“I’m Nobody!”), a male (“A narrow Fellow”), a wife (“I’m ‘wife’—I’ve finished that”), a male lover (“Wild nights--wild nights!”), a voice from the dead (“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—“) further disrupts our conventional expectations of identity and social role-playing.

Along with Walt Whitman, Dickinson was the most experimental and technically innovative American poet of the 19th century.

Emily Dickinson's Poetry I

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Emily Dickinson introduced psychological realism into poetry. Earlier poetry elegized, lyricized, sentimentalized, gothicized, and romanticized psychological states. Dickinson unflinchingly confronted psychological suffering, exploring in depth the emotional experiences most of us seek to avoid: grief, sadness, fear, doubt, loss, instability, and psychic pain. The only negative emotion that she rarely expresses would be anger, though that too can be detected in some of her biting satire.

Yes, she wrote "happy," playful poems, but even they were tinged with negative notes: "I'm nobody!" She rejoiced in nature but was always alone. Her love poems were painful expressions of unrequited feelings, loss, or unsatisfied longing.

General readers and critics have pathologized her as suffering from some kind of mental illness: seasonal affective disorder, depression, agoraphobia, bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies. Certainly she was eccentric; her fellow townspeople in Amherst (MA) referred to her as "the Myth." She was known for her solitary ways and for wearing white.

Truthfully, we don't know if she was mentally ill or not. We do know that our cultural environment stigmatizes mental illness, making it possible to dismiss her poems as "symptoms" of mental illness or neurosis and therefore less credible.

If she was mentally ill, perhaps that condition was a gift, an alternative consciousness which made possible her brilliant critique of conventional views of reality. On the other hand, perhaps she was a perfectly sane, if eccentric, pioneer of the psychic frontier, able to confront directly the mental states that we all experience but prefer to deny.

Poems like "There's a certain slant of light" (about seasonal sadness); "I felt a Funeral, in my brain" (about mental instability); "After great pain a formal feeling comes" (about grieving); "One need not be a Chamber to be Haunted" (about the frightening hidden self) all courageously explore the darkest recesses of the human psyche. The gothic poems of Edgar Allen Poe exaggerated this terrain in an appeal to popular sensationalism, but Dickinson showed realistic restraint, representing our psychic world in terms that we can all recognize as a part of our common human experience. Who has not felt "zero at the bone"?

Waiting for the Barbarians

Published in 1980, Waiting for the Barbarians by South African author J. M. Coetzee, could be read in the context of apartheid as a strong critique of white supremacy, racism, colonialism, and cultural imperialism. However, it is written as an allegory and could just as well be read in light of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the history of the British Empire, the current superpower status of the United States, or, perhaps, of any ruling political power. As an allegory of political oppression, it is no simple narrative of "boo Empire, yay Barbarians." I was not left with the impression that the arrival of the barbarians would usher in a new age of equality and justice. On the contrary, I was left with the impression of a Hobbesian world of perpetual power struggle, in which oppressor and oppressed just keep changing places--a dark, rather hopeless image of human destiny.

Embedded in the narrative is a psychological study of the protagonist, a magistrate in the Empire, and his relationship with a "barbarian" woman who has been taken prisoner. This relationship mirrors the whole "master-slave" parasitical dynamic in which oppressor and oppressed feed off each other. The woman exercises sexual and psychological power over her "master," to the point where he eventually risks his life to return her to her people. The power dynamic is represented as a complex interaction of social, psychological, and physical forces, in which the "master" becomes as much a prisoner of the system as the "slave."

The setting of the story is an imperial outpost in the midst of a desert wasteland, where lonely humans engage in a continuous struggle for survival, self-gratification, and dominance--an apocalyptic vision with no hope of renewal and rebirth.

The only hope this dystopic novel offers is the possibility that it will raise awareness of our desperate condition to the point we might take action to break the cycle of the power dynamic. If Coetzee's outlook is indeed entirely hopeless, why would he write the novel in the first place? Is he a modern Sisyphus engaged in a never-ending effort to push the boulder of awareness up a hill of futility, or does he hold out hope for us to redeem ourselves through an evolution of consciousness?

Their Eyes Were Watching God III

So, who is right, Molina or Valentin? Is each of them missing something that the other has? Can they learn from each other? Is the kiss necessarily poisonous? Does the sting always kill? Are the kiss and the sting both necessary to the wholeness of life? of the literary experience? (See previous posts and  Kiss of the Spider Woman 8/16/09.)

Is Molina's universal sense of human tragedy and the possibilities for redemption, of a quest myth that all humans can participate in (regardless of race, gender, class, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, time or place), of an enduring human conflict between individual fulfillment and the need for love and belonging--is her reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God based on a sentimental fantasy of transcendent human experience, a fantasy that denies the reality of our socially constructed identities? Is the dream of shared humanity a sweet kiss filled with the poison of "false consciousness"? Or, are our socially constructed identities merely individual microcosms of a larger human truth?

Is Valentin's tough-minded analysis of historically specific sociopolitical power systems and the way they produce situated subjectivities; of racist, sexist, and classist struggles for social and economic dominance; of human differences rather than human similarities--is his reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God based on a a myopic, materialist view of human experience, a view that denies the authenticity of transcendent human identity? Is his focus on material power struggles a painful sting that shocks us out of false consciousness? Or, is the social power struggle itself an example of shared human experience that transcends time and place?

Is Janie both (1) a poor African-American woman struggling with power and longing for love in a post-slavery age of racial aspiration, feminism, and economic desperation, and (2) a 20th century African-American female avatar of a universal human hero seeking power, freedom, love, and community? Is this the story of an individual "subject identity"; of a representative African-American woman of her time and place; and is it also an enduring story of the human spirit seeking to fulfill its potential, asserting itself against the obstacles that stand in its way, suffering its trials and tragedies, and ultimately achieving some form of redemption?

Are the kiss and the sting both necessary to the wholeness of life? Of the literary experience? Is Their Eyes Were Watching God a novel embedded in the political struggles of its day AND a retelling of the universal human quest myth? Is it greater for being both? Or less?

Their Eyes Were Watching God II

How would Valentin read Hurston's novel? (See previous post and Kiss of the Spider Woman 8/16/09.)

He would be rolling his eyes at mythic themes and human universals, irony and contradictions notwithstanding. This is an African-American novel that represents the oppression of African-American women who are the victims of a racist, sexist, classist social system. It challenges that oppression and the psychology of victimhood through a heroine who refuses to accept a subordinate role, asserts her independence, struggles with power, and achieves a sense of relative self-sufficiency. In doing so, however, the novel reinforces the well-established American tradition of individualism and self-reliance. While community is valued, it is primarily by her own efforts that Janie resists oppression and achieves an African-American version of the American dream: economic independence, freedom, and power in a specific social context.

While Valentin would celebrate the novel's resistance to racism, sexism, and classism, he would disapprove of its failure to lift up the power of collective action in the battle against oppression. As a male reader, he might not take note of how the novel captures the dilemma of African-American women whose feminist aspirations are in conflict with their loyalty to African-American men, with whom they share the experience of oppression by a white supremacist American culture. As a Marxist, he would undoubtedly approve of the way the novel realistically depicts marriage as the primary means to social advancement for women and exposes the economic base of the institution of marriage. The role that Janie plays in the death of Joe and Tea Cake merely symbolizes the power struggle at the heart of even the most loving of marriage relationships.

As an anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston would be well-versed in this kind of structural social analysis. Valentin would admire the way she was able to dramatize the functioning of systemic power in fictional form. For another portrayal of both the romance and the hard economic reality of marriage see her short story "The Gilded Six-Bits."

Ah, Valentin, Molina might say, what a political puritan you are to admire the social analysis at the expense of beauty, romance, and the sheer transport of art. And Valentin might reply with the Argentinian version of "Bah, humbug!" (See next post.)