a whole new [non-homogenous] world

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[CN: colonialism, anti-black racism, white supremacy]

The more i think about the so-called New Atheists the less i think of them. It’s not just the mean-spirited inanity of attacking all systems of belief while knuckling down to the altar of Dr. Dawkins, or promoting the same racist imperialism as the religious right — a secular crusade — the hypocrisy is even broader. The secular modern world chucked off religion and took on another belief system that is no less arbitrary; yet part of its appeal is that we take it as nonreligious. Whether it’s theology or economics or scientific racism, the fundamental desire is the same: for a definition of human, an ordering system for reality’s chaos, and a knowledge to safeguard against the inferior stock.

Sylvia Wynter’s breathtaking essay “1492: A New World View” opens with a dualism. The Columbian Exchange set the germs for globalization and the interrelatedness of our current existence — that much is beyond doubt, but how should we feel about it? The white people of the rich global north call it a triumph, the indigenous of the world call it an atrocious nightmare that hasn’t ended. The former wants to carry on the torch and liberate the earth’s people from their respective stone ages and idolatries; the latter wants to bring and end to history. Wynter ends up suggesting that both positions, like the reality of globalization, are beyond dispute, that they are two sides of the Janus face that is the modern situation. And by her sharp prose and analytical horsepower this doesn’t come off as wishy-washy liberal humping; indeed liberal humanism is squarely in the cross-hairs.

In this piece Wynter offers a new kind of framework for confronting this violent history, one that tries to take the concerns of all of humanity into account. To do so she tells the story of two revolutions in the Western intellect, from Copernicus to Foucault, in 50 pages of dense critical language and a masterful handling of poetic images. It’s a hell of a journey.

essay canon bonus B — “Rupture, Verge, and Precipice, Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not” by Carole Maso

The Puppetmaster by Hao Hsiao-hsien, found here

[CN: Sexism, assault]

It seemed to be everywhere in the texts from the 90s. Endless think pieces and interview snippets from the literati as it contemplated its impending demise. The meanie bo-beanie feminists and theorists taking over the University, vandalizing Harold Bloom’s precious *~Western Canon~* and pasting “check your privilege” signs on the walls. Jonathan Franzen is perhaps the most shameless of these voices, persisting into the new millennium (with a great counterblast by Ben Marcus). But even David Foster Wallace, in a really enjoyable review essay on Dostoyevsky and Joseph Frank’s biography, cant help but throw in a bit of culture war curmudgeonry at the end.

Woe is them; the novel and the printed word are dead; the kids these days don’t read literary fiction anymore; the image dominates society; theory and PoMo weirdness have fucked up the American novel beyond redemption, draining it of the human subject these cishet d00ds were so used to seeing reflected back at them; we’re looking at the post-literate generation; yadda yadda yadda. (And i write this as someone who reads DWG [dead white guy] literature all the time and with relish. And im saying the DWG canon is what it is.)

There’s a lot i could say in response to this, but why bother when the last word was so perfectly stated in a 2000 experimental essay by Carole Maso?

“history is how the secular world attends to the dead”

[CN: Slavery, colonialism, anti-blackness, white supremacy]

There’s a massive database called Voyages, containing an exhaustive catalog of every slave ship which moved across the atlantic, including scans of manifests and ships arrested by the British after slavery was outlawed. At the head of this massive “data-set” are two white English dudes, one of whom is an economic historian.

But what can any of it tell us, really? How can it hope to answer the question of what made black bodies slaveable? The numbers give us a view from the position of the slavers; reify the monstrous ideology that turns humans into commodities, stripping them of their humanity history so that they are not people but merely “Negros.” Saidiya Hartman’s LOSE YOUR MOTHER begins from the recognition that a true connection with this past has been annihilated, as was the goal of the slave trade and the capitalist accumulation it served.

essay canon bonus A — “Looking for Zora” by Alice Walker

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[CN: Misogynoir]

In this reading project assigned by the CNF Journal i forgot that the selections were meant foremost to teach the reader how to be a better writer, which they certainly did. Another imperative was to “diversify the anthology,” and so i cant help but note the critical neglect of black women’s voices.

Let’s break it down: 3 white women, 4 black men, 3 white men. Somebody (not me) could put together a decadal canon of essays by black women in the last two centuries. Now the makeup of this all-black women canon would im guessing feature a lot of essays of a much more polemical nature than the CNF canon i read. The selection had a bias for pieces based on memoir and personal stories, perhaps because that’s where the $ is when it comes to the nonfiction market. Du Bois, James Baldwin and Richard Wright were represented by memoirs although if we included their political tracts as candidates, foundational texts for 20th century black radicalism and general anti-Capitalism as Robinson argued so effectively, it would bust the range of options so wide that i wouldn’t envy anyone who had to pick just one essay for one decade.

Maybe the angry and passionate writing from people like Ida B. Wells or bell hooks or Angela Davis would feel out-of-place along side the chosen pieces, which are very tempered in tone, sometimes as overt strategy like in MLK, Jr.’s “Letter.” But if black women bearing witness to their own life experiences, just as all the other authors in the canon are doing, comes off as “too political,” “too angry,” that isnt their problem.

Around the middle of this reading project i started bookmarking more pieces which might amount to my own attempt to expand the canon, beyond the established range of voices as well as the sub-genre of life writing. Part of the original web page’s project was to show that the essay is capable of reaching the same levels of sophistication and artistry as the other writing practices. This thrilling 1973 essay by Alice Walker, part memory and part literary journalism, shows that an essay can directly impact the literary culture.

essay canon dispatch no. 9 — “A Philosophy of Handicap” by Randolph Bourne (1910’s)

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[CN: Ableism, racism, class warfare, eugenics]

The commentary for this piece in the CNF Canon mentions a struggle “to be both objective and personal.” Sentences will use both “he” and “I” as pronouns, and “the handicapped man” is used as a kind of metonym when Bourne is probably talking about something intensely personal.  Randolph Bourne was born prematurely, and the doctor’s forceps deformed his face and the side of his head. Later on tuberculosis permanently bent his spine, making him a “hunchback.” His essay here which represents the 19-teens for the decadal canon list is appropriate since Bourne’s vocation as a writer was devoted to the USen Progressive struggles going on — first wave feminism, and reform for the education and treatment of immigrants and working class-families. The revised version can be found as the closer to his book YOUTH AND LIFE.

The piece is also performing another struggle alongside public vs. personal. Bourne’s tone and diction is genteel and optimistic, not only bc of the mainstream style (it first appeared in the ATLANTIC) but bc the subject matter and the depth of Bourne’s radicalism actually made this writing dangerous business.

cedric robinson, slave uprisings, and the black radical tradition

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essay canon dispatch no. 8 — “On Being a Cripple” by Nancy Mairs (80’s)

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[CN: ableism, objectification, depression, suicide]

If you only got time for one of the essays in the CNF Canon, make it this one.

One cant predict link rot, and the only place where i can find the 1983 essay is this tumblr blog post. Much thanks to them! The only other location i found was a pdf scan of an excerpt for an AP english exam. Like the canon article says, these essays are among other things really teachable. It’s wild to go to Nancy Mairs’s writing voice after WCW — this is decidedly un-experimental; the writing is tight, clear, emotionally mature and well organized. It is this direct and confident quality that struck me the most, and provoked an intensely personal response.

essay canon dispatch no. 7 — “An Essay on Virginia” by William Carlos Williams (20’s)

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[CN: Racism, slavery]

Essays. Fuck ’em, right?

Those insipid puff pieces on banal middle class+ experience, with their naturalist language which reinforce family values and conformity while sapping true imagination. Their cozy and apolitical maundering express the unsolicited thoughts of complacent lily white suburban yups with their delusions of safety and national community. The consensus of the Post WWI culture, when Europe was in shambles yet still spread its toxic old world influence on the US like influenza, seems to be that the essay was so humdrum that it hardly deserved any serious attention, let alone a truly Modernist intervention like what was happening with painting, music, poetry, and the novel (Virginia Woolf’s nonfiction is an exception).

But the CNF essay canon is a ‘murican canon by god, and the selection for the 1920’s is appropriately an avant-garde trip by the USen Modern champion WCW, promising to liberate the essay from its bourgeois prison, re-theorize it, and present in its endless refractions and surfaces some sense of Amerikkka, where it is, where it came from, where it is going. For some reason i had a hard time finding “Essay on Virginia,” which was collected in an album of short prose published through Ezra Pound. And then, almost by accident, i stumbled on a collection called IMAGINATIONS in the library, which was like an album of albums from the 20’s. It holds some wild stuff in case, like me, you thought all WCW did were minimalist poems about red wheelbarrows and stories about a doctor.

essay canon dispatch no. 6 — “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White (40’s)

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So according to the CNF essay canon, this short and sweet piece by the scribe of grade school treasure CHARLOTTE’S WEB is THE essay of the 1940s. The author describes cherished memories of visiting a lake in Maine with his dad, and then later returning with his own son. The blurb on the webpage doesn’t do much to sell it at first, calling it

a nostalgia piece about fathers and sons, often serving as a prompt for a what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation essay.

But there is something creepy and sinister working through the text. As i think about it, i cant settle on right model to get at what im feeling. Is it a wholesome on the surface with the skeeviness kept hidden? Or maybe a center-margin sort of thing, that is, while the body of the work is about safety and eternity and the glorious summers of youth, at the margins is encroaching destruction and death.