A Visual Metaphor for waiting for the bus after a friend’s going away party because my bike had a flat tire and I was tired and a little bit drunk and its been a long week

Looking and the Rendition of Identity: MLK and Hoover

In the bad old days, people like J. Edgar Hoover had an extraordinary inclination to conflate black agitation with communism. But while the state department and the FBI were never really sure if they were harassing people like Paul Robeson or W.E.B. DuBois because they were black radicals or because they were sympathetic to a Marxist explanation of history, they also didn’t lose much sleep over the distinction. Hoover’s project of surveillance and blackmail against MLK was, as he understood it, a specifically cold war campaign–he never got over being tapped to lead the FBI while Dulles got the newly formed CIA–and even though all the data they collected showed that King was not at all sympathetic to secular communism, and had no real connections to foreign groups outside the United States, they persisted in seeing the spectre of incipient communism everywhere they looked.

The easiest explanation is that people like Hoover were simplistic tools, sufficiently warped by cold war ideology that when they saw someone like Robeson, DuBois, or King dare to question the American way, they could only parse the data in manichaean terms: not American, therefore communist. That might be it; that shoe might fit. But maybe they also saw communism everywhere they looked not because they were bad lookers, but because of what they understood looking itself to signify, precisely because they were very good at looking. In other words, I wonder how much of what they saw was not a product of what they were obsessively looking for, but a byproduct of how “looking” was being conceptually understood by them: as with torture, while surveillance is supposed to be a mode of detecting crimes, in practice it can very quickly shade into evidence of a crime. If those guys incarcerated at Guantanemo Bay were innocent, then why were they picked up in the first place? If MLK was innocent, after all, why were the FBI bugging his hotel rooms? With torture, once the line has been crossed, the person being tortured has to incriminate himself or the torture cannot conclude (since the torturer will have difficulty admitting that the subject proved himself under torture to be innocent) and the fact of having been tortured, in practice, becomes a proof of guilt. And perhaps something very similar with FBI surveillance?

There’s a fine hair I’m trying to split here, the difference between seeing what you’re looking for because, say, you’re so obsessively looking for it (a fault in your seeing), and producing what you’re looking for precisely because of how your sight functions is quite a fine distinction. But the difference is in where we locate the origin of the perniciousness seen: is it a malfunction in the way things are seen (Hoover’s inability to properly judge the data because he was such a cold war freak) or a kind of perceptive function whose rationality is unimpeachable, however grotesque? There is nothing illogical, per se, about the reasoning that detained Guantanemo Bay terrorism suspects can never be released into the world: despite having been wrongly arrested in the first place, they have become guilty by the very process of having been interrogated, tortured, and rendered. It is not, in this sense, so much a having been convicted of anything as having been interpellated into an identity. And while the theoretical distinction might be fine but significant, the practical distinction may not exist at all. Is there a practical difference between being interpellated as a criminal type and having been convicted of a crime? How many accused pedophiles would you trust your children with? Would you allow an accused terrorist on an airplane? We know how the “stereotypical American,” that son of a bitch, would answer those questions.

Anyway, I started thinking about MLK and Hoover not because of this surprising and gratifying ruling, but because of something someone I met in a cafe recently told me about how “natives” understand tourist photography in parts of Indonesia. She said that when she was taking pictures of things and people, she was very careful–being a sensitive and liberal academic researcher–to ask people’s permissions first. She didn’t want to exploit them by taking their picture without their understanding of what was involved, didn’t want to “prey” on them with her camera. But she said that they (I think it was in Java? can’t recall now) didn’t see it as an exploitation at all; for them, it was a demonstration of their own power, their own charisma, that someone would come across the ocean to take pictures of them. For them, the power relationship was reversed: whereas she presumed that taking a picture placed her in the position of power, they presumed the opposite, that the fact of being photographed was a sign of the the photographee’s power.

As real anthropology, of course, the “snapshot” I’ve just given is most likely misleading and certainly inadequate. One of the most persistant fictions within anthropological literature is the idea that “natives” can have one set of beliefs while “the West” has another, a fiction because anthropologists only study “natives” who are already well acquainted with the “West” (and have often figured out their nativeness by long engagement with Westerners), because neither category holds up under scrutiny, and because it expresses so clearly something we would like to believe, usually without reference to whether there is actual evidence or not. But the distinction being drawn there, a conceptual distinction whether or not it’s a distinction in practice, does raise an important question for me: do we, to the extent that we do, conceptualize looking as an invasive and aggressive act because of its long imbrication, as practice, within the arsenal of police work? Within the practices of labor discipline? Within the exertion of authority to produce socially normal behavior? After all, looking at someone isn’t necessarily a hostile or aggressive act; it’s a passive form information gathering, and–one could think–easily ignorable. Yet I can recall quite clearly the disquieting feeling of being stared at by children in Tanzania, an irrational feeling of a latent threat I had no idea how to deal with. To be the center of attention of a field of strangers; why should that be threatening? After all, maybe they were merely paying tribute to my awesome power and charisma.

The point I’m making, laboriously, is simply that the manner in which “the West” conceptualizes “seeing” (at least in situations of power imbalance) is so often already as a kind of violence, or at least a threat of violence (and let us not forget that, legally, “assault” merely signifies the threat of physical battery). Which brings me back to MLK and Hoover. Maybe it was the very fact of having been surveilled, of having been subjected to the disciplinary apparatus of the FBI, that made it so clear in Hoover’s mind that MLK was a communist. Like with someone you’ve already started to torture, you can’t stop halfway through and decide you’ve made a mistake without some serious psychic consequences. Conversely, how, having once accused someone and set the wheels of surveillance in motion, could someone like Hoover step back and undo that act of interpellation? One cannot, in the logic of red-baiting, undo a smear, and they didn’t tend to do so.

The Days When They Were Stupid Enough to Say What They Think

Secretary of State Dean Acheson on escalation in Vietnam:

“We are willing to help people who believe the way we do, to continue to live the way they want to live.”

(from The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, William Appleman Williams, p17)

Isn’t that good? Not really a tautology, but it has the same wonderful symmetry. Though perhaps my nostalgia is misplaced, as I think on it; McCain seems to be trying to bring those days back again.

Tarzan!

A lot of Tarzan films used to get made; in the thirty-six years between 1932 and 1968, thirty-one big-screen sound versions were made. Ten silent Tarzans had been made before 1932, and the post-’68 period (in which there is a marked decline) can partly be explained by the onset of color television, which Derral Cheatwood (whose article I’m stealing all this from) points out as having taken away from the franchise many of the things that made it unique. And it was unique, as both the prodigious number of adaptations of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels illustrates and the fact that it’s the only cinematic franchise that stretches from the beginning of American film to the present. I’m not fully convinced by Cheatwood’s explanation for the end of the franchise; things like, say, explicit racism going slightly out of vogue seem more likely to me to have been the cause. And Tarzan isn’t completely gone, as the occasional George of the Jungle, Disney cartoon, or comic strip illustrates. But its hard to disagree Cheatwood’s argument for the franchise’s significance: “For over four decades, these films provided Americans with their major source of information and mis-information about Africa and Africans, and thus for a sizable portion of the population the only real sense of their native land.”

It took me a minute to parse that last sentence; the “sizable portion” of “Americans” he’s referring to is, of course, African-Americans but the “native land” reference threw me off a bit. If they are Americans, isn’t the western hemisphere their native land? Obviously, I understand why the syntax gets confused here; it’s not like Cheatwood is to blame that African-Americans are blessed with being (depending on who’s talking) African, American, both, and neither, all at once, but the mixed subjects of that sentence (and my moment of confusion reading it) do serve to illustrate that more general cultural problem. And the Tarzan films illustrate, in a weirder way, how that kind of problem makes American representations of Africa so different than they might be, for example, in Britain or France, why America’s Africa (or why Tarzan) is what it is.

This is a big part of my first chapter, so I’ll probably have more about it later. But here’s an interesting little nugget that’s worth passing along: When making Tarzan movies in the thirties, MGM set down some guidelines for how Africa could be portrayed, and even hired actual Africans as advisors. According to Edmund Carpenter,

“To avoid offending African governments, MGM insisted that no film on Africa resemble Africa. Prince Modupe’s task was purely creative: Design buildings, songs, shields, dances, masks, even ‘languages,’ all of which Americans would accept as authentically African but which no African would recognize as his.” (Edmund Carpenter, Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me)

Isn’t that weird? I mean, it make perfect sense, given the situation MGM found itself in, but there’s something fascinating about the way an “Africa” has to emerge which can have no real reference to any of the specific, local versions of Africa. If it were Maasai or Zulu or Kikuyu, it wouldn’t be–by Hollywood’s creation of it–the right kind of realistically portrayed Africa. The Africa it creates has to be de-localized, de-contextualized, a totally imagined community, closer to Kwanzaa than to anything that exists in sub-saharan Africa itself.

James and Braudel and the Berkeley Farmer’s Market

“ …even today, nothing is easier in Europe–I do not include the United States here–than to observe a municipal street market, or an old-fashioned shop, or a peddler who is quick to tell you of his travels, or a fair, or a bourse. Go to Brazil, to the back country of Bahia, or go to Kabylia or to sub-Saharan Africa, and you will find the oldest form of market still active under your very nose.”

(p.21, Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism)

(Berkeley farmer’s market)

Braudel doesn’t, of course, include the United States. Why not? The United States is, of course, the place where “the oldest form of market” could never exist because–paging Louis Hartz–the US’s Americanness is practically defined by its being sui generic: everything that happens here happens because of here and now, not because of tradition, not like in Europe. We don’t have tradition in the United States, of course, we have modernity.

Braudel’s “United States,” is crossing streams with C.L.R. James’s sense of the US, which is that “The American Civilization is identified in the consciousness of the world with two phases of the development of world history. The first is the Declaration of Independence. The second is mass production. Washington and Henry Ford are the symbols of American civilization. And on the whole this instinctive judgement is correct” In this sense, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not distinguishable from mass production and industrial modernity, together forming some kind of entity he calls “American Civilization.”

I was snide and blithe in my angry denunciation of James for daring to be sort of critical of John Ford–my blood still seethes at the affront–but this sort of thing illustrates quite well why he would consider DeMille to be more American than John Ford: whereas Ford is obsessively concerned with American pasts, the different forms and conceptions of tradition within US cultures, people like Braudel and James gesture towards the US less as a place than as an ideal. Whereas John Ford’s America is always mediated and defined by the dialectic between modernity and tradition (a modernity defined by tradition and a tradition defined by modernity), the US seems to be functioning for these two erstwhile and brilliant Marxists* as a kind of transcendant spirit of modernity. “America” quite often seems to be like that, an idea that is not only detached from historical trajectories (of, say, Brazil, Quebec, or the United States, which are, as such, historical traditions with pasts) but kept categorically distinct: America is the future. Only to the extent that a place or a thing can be seen as representing the future can it be seen as American. Thus, while James might like The Informer (my fifteenth favorite John Ford movie), it can’t really be American, because it represents a pre-modern past, which America, of course, does not have.

The trick, though, is that these become tautologically defined categories. If America (the land of Washington and Henry Ford) is the land where the future happens first, then things which are not of that future are de-Americanized, like John Ford. Ford, then, one of the most important and influential director during the formative period of the Hollywood system, which James sees as a central pillar of “American Civilization,” gets extracted from a narrative which, by any reasonable standard, he should be seen as central to. And Braudel has to pretend that a Berkeley farmer’s market cannot exist, while a market in Europe or Africa can only exist as a remnant from the past, not, of course, because it’s an efficient method of delivering a certain niche of economic products in the here and now.

* also extremely strange Marxists; like Marx himself, their Marxisms are totally unique to their particular intellectual careers.

Demolition by Neglect

The Washington Post’s article on the problem of abandoned embassies on Mass ave mentions the DRC’s former embassy:

Congo vacated its New Hampshire Avenue embassy in 2004 because of disrepair. Renovations were planned, but a war that claimed almost 4 million lives made the project less than a priority…With its peeling paint, rotting windows and ever-weakening roof, the mansion is “a classic example of demolition by neglect,” the league wrote.

“Demolition by neglect.” Boy, if that doesn’t just sum it all up.

My Second Run on Karma Went Better Than the First

The first time I saw Johnny To’s Running on Karma, I liked it. As is often the case with To, the opening sequence is worth the price of admission alone, though for once the payoff is conceptual (and a delayed gratification) more than simply visual theatrics. To cram it into one ridiculaous sentence: Andy Lau’s excessive masculinity is a vehicle for voyeuristically enjoying a certain kind of embodiment that the rest of the film frames and analyzes, but the scene also deftly uses Lau’s vulnerability as embodied to start the film’s romantic drama rolling. A less ridiculous sentence: it’s incredibly well done, so go and see the film.

But the first time I saw it, I was also vaguely irritated by the film’s implicit glorification of police work. Even though the Hong Kong police are portrayed as fairly vindictive and brutal, the female lead attempts to work off her karmic debt by catching criminals, and Andy Lau assists her. There’s even a key moment in the film when the male lead believes she’s given up her calling in the police force (he sees her wearing rave gear in the company of rave-types) and he’s gravely disappointed. We’re gravely disappointed. But, of course, it turns out that she’s been working undercover, busting rave types instead of partying. Whoo! What a relief.

The nadir for me was the ominous tabla music that plays when the creepy scary indian criminals show up and menace Hong Kong, the way a “middle eastern scale” might start playing in the background when islamo-fascists menace the republic in a good clean patriotic American drama. Racializing criminality (or criminalizing race) is subtle that way, teaching you to fear the cultural markers of difference, but there was nothing subtle about this: the murderous criminals they chase down are as unambiguously bad (and as clearly ethnically differentiated) as you could possibly want. They’re even rendered in an almost comic book super-villain idiom, with particular super skills, just to make it totally clear that catching them is utterly within the realm of good clean decent police drama. And like a Spider-man comic, our hero Andy Lau catches them not by using deadly force, but by humanely caging them in elaborate metal traps, and then leaving them there for the police to collect.

There’s several moments in To’s Breaking News where a child refuses to help or serve food to the criminals that are holding him and his family hostage, and I’m not sure how to take such moments. On the one hand, the film (sometimes called a “Hong Kong Dog Day Afternoon“) clearly empathizes with its bad guys, no less than Lumet empathizes with the bank robber that Deniro plays in DDA. But, on the other hand, the film also kills them all off; while it can’t exactly side with the police (like DDA it prefers to show them as deceptive and frighteningly violent) neither does it want to imagine a world in which crime pays, so it insulates itself from all the problems it raises by wiping the slate clean by the end. We might like the criminals, the way we might sympathize with the indians in cowboy movies, but we’re enabled to do so by the inevitability of their doom.

This is characteristic of a broad sweep of American genre tradition, I think, and it’s a way to conceptualize why The Wire can’t stop killing off the criminals and why all of its redemption narratives have to center on the forces of law and order. We toy with perceiving criminals as human, but their narratives are always tragic; only the police narratives can comedically resolve into a re-establishment of hearth and home. There’s a kind of dialectic that you can find in a broad sweep of these American genres, which mediate between tragedy and comedy, between sympathizing with the doomed and being vaguely unsatisfied with the victorious. The bad guys are always at least a little bit good, and the good guys are always at least a little bit bad, but the essential lines of demarcation don’t fundamentally change.

So I was irritated, initially, when Running on Karma didn’t seem to be playing by these rules. It was not merely blandly self-assured in praising the self righteousness of police work, as in Kurasawa’s Stray Dog, for example; it was downright messianic, using the vast heavenly mechinery of Karma to endow catching dirty ethnic criminals with transcendent virtue. This seemed less good to me.

But the second time I saw it, I picked up on a variety of things I’d not noticed before. For one thing, I’d forgotten how much care is taken to quietly establish, early on, that Andy Lau’s character is an illegal alien himself (from mainland China). And I’d forgotten how much police brutality there actually is in the film, how much unnecessary violence the cops end up exerting as they chase their comic book villains (and against Lau, for no reason). Perhaps more importantly, I’d also misunderstood why it was that all the police officers seemed to harbor such an enormous grudge against the female lead: in the opening chase sequence, she accidentally shoots a police dog (because the super ninja she’s chasing wraps a chain around her gun) and the rest of the squad is angry at her.

Events, it turns out, simply and amorally have consequences, something the film takes increasing pains to establish as the real force driving its narrative, like a passenger being plucked out of a speeding car by the rapture. If the police are brutal, there’s a reason; maybe not a good or bad reason, but a reason. And as this theme takes over the film’s final third, I started to get what it was doing in a way I hadn’t the first time. The last part of the film is so suprising, so creepy, and yet so sweet, that the first time I saw it I simply hadn’t processed the radical reconstruction it performs on the film’s first half. And while I was quick to respond to this Hong Kong police and kung fu drama as if it were simply an American genre piece, the thing that makes it work, finally, as a unified artistic work, is the fact that it resolves a conflict that feels very American in origin to me–the stereotypical depression-era loss of faith in good guys and muted sympathy with bad guys thing–by employing a set of resolutions that could not exist in an American film. So as I was biking home, I suddenly noticed, and marvelled at my prior myopia, that the movie’s actual ending hinges on the thing I had been thinking it rejected: the rehabilitation of the criminal as human and a repudiation of the violent function of police work. That was a pretty good film, I though to myself.

Commonplace

Sometimes the best kind of bad writing is a well crafted undoing:

“We might all take pause from the accumulation of studies that employ some variant of an equation between social change and acute anxiety to explain human behavior in almost every decade from the middle of the 17th to the late 20th century. The history of a paranoid society? I believe that adjective and its near relations have lost their analytical value. To say of the early 19th century that Americans were participating in patterns of change that they did not understand simply consigns them to the human condition. To say that they tried to salvage values from the past implies that they might otherwise have cut loose from history and floated freely in the present, or perhaps selected values through a foreknowledge of the future. To say that with only fragments of information they envisaged groups of people scheming to aggrandize wealth and power suggests, on balance, that they understood their world reasonably well.”

Robert Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (1984), xiii-xiv.

C.L.R. James disrespects John Ford

From American Civilization:

…To put it more harshly still, it is in the serious study of, above all, Charles Chaplin, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, genuinely popular novels like those of Frank Yerby, men like David Selsnick, Cecil deMille, and Henry Luce, that you find the clearest ideological expression of the sentiments and deepest fellings of the American people and a great window into the future of America and the modern world. This insight is not to be found in the works of T.S. Eliot, of Hemingway, of Joyce, of famous directors like John Ford or Rene Clair.

He goes on to mention that “I have never been to see The Informer without being tied up in knots inside for days afterwards.” But it’s too late; the damage is done. C.L.R. James, you are dead to me.

“What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records”

A reviewer for the Chicago Tribune made that comparison, and it feels apt, whatever one takes the difference between “recording” and “implying” to signify. Caldwell and Faulkner do seem to be doing something strikingly similar, even if they go about it so very differently. While novels like Sanctuary are as close as Faulkner comes to producing “the South” as the lurid object of the reader’s voyeuristic gaze, the calculated way that Caldwell produces voyeuristic fantasy after fantasy would seem to take this to a whole other level.

Peer through that hole in the fence, for example, at a typical sex scene in God’s Little Acre:

“Take me, Will-I can’t wait,” she said.
“You and me both,” said he.
Will got on his hands and knees and raised Darling Jill’s head until he could draw her hair from under her. He lowered her pillow, and her long brown hair hung over the bed and almost touched the floor. He looked down and saw that she had raised herself until she was almost touching him.
He awoke to hear Darling Jill screaming in his ear. He did not know how long she had been screaming. He had been oblivious to everything in the complete joy of the moment.
He raised his head wide after a while and looked into her face. She opened her eyes wide and smiled at him.
“That was wonderful, Will,” she whispered. “Do it to me again.”
He tried to free himself and arise, but she would not let him move. He knew she was waiting for him to answer her.
“Will, do it to me again.”
“Damn it Darling Jill, I can’t right now.”

I’m struck, in such scenes, by the bizarre way Caldwell manages to be both very explicit and completely coy in describing what’s going on, the way the “camera” both does and doesn’t “cut” away from the scene. Look at the attention to mechanical detail-what to do with Darling Jill’s hair, for example, or the problem of maneuvering their bodies vis-a-vis the pillow and bed. And yet there’s a jump between when she raises her body to almost touch him and when he “awoke to hear Darling Jill screaming in his ear” that feels glaringly incongruous. How can a sex-scene include lines like “Take me, Will” and “Do it to me again” but so woodenly avert its gaze from the actual sex scene itself? There’s something something very weird about directly referring to “the complete joy of the moment” and then cutting that moment out of the scene itself.

So I go back to the evocative distinction between “implying” and “recording.” I’m not sure it serves as a useful way of distinguishing between Caldwell and Faulkner in any broad sense, but the way it problematizes the issue does signals what I think is at stake: how to negotiate between showing and telling.

On the one hand, Caldwell is explicit in a way that’s almost more graphic than actual pornography. As Dwight Garner, writing for Slate, puts it, reading Caldwell is still a sort of startling experience: “Caldwell’s id-his naked obsessions with sex, class, and violence-cuts the surface of every page like a dorsal fin. You can’t stop turning the pages, because you want to see how much further your jaw can drop.” Yet there’s also a careful prudishness about actually describing what is happening that seems counterintuitive. What can we make of an author both calculatedly shameless and carefully self-censoring?

The easy answer might be that he could explicitly imply but not explicitly show (if that makes sense) because he wouldn’t want to be charged for producing pornography. Maybe. I don’t really understand the laws regulating the printing of obscenity in 1933, but that’s not just because I’m a dilattente; it was in that year that District Judge John Woolsey ruled that Ulysses could be admitted to the United States, but his reasoning for that decision is wonderfully hard to follow. This, naturally, is par for the course where lines drawn around indecent material are concerned. As the cliché goes, obscenity is thing that “I know it when I see it,” but the right words to describe are incredibly difficult to find. Or, to put it another way, it is something better shown than told. And Judge Woolsey seems to adjudicate according to that principle: while Ulysses is a work of “unusual frankness,” it could be admitted because he did not “detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist.” In other words, it makes all the difference that Joyce tells (however explicitly), without explicitly showing.

I think that’s a useful way to understand what’s going on in Caldwell as well. He is utterly explicit in telling but inversely cautious in what he is willing to show. Take this bizarre scene from his novel Tragic Ground, in which a father walks into his daughter’s room, unexpectedly finding her in bed with some guy:

…Spence opened the door and walked in. The shades had been drawn over the windows, and at first he could see only the dim shadow outline of the room. He went forward several steps and stopped.
“Libby?” He called apprehensively. He held his breath while he waited for her answer. “Libby?” he called again. By that time he realized he could not even hear the sound of his own voice above the music coming from the radio. He went to the nearest window and pulled back the shade. “Libby, what in the world–” he said, reaching for the radio.
Without taking his eyes from her, he found the knob and switched off the music.
“What’s going on, Libby?” he asked slowly. He went to the foot of the bad.
“Papa! Get out!” she said crossly when she realized he was in the room. “Go on out, Papa!”
Spence’s mouth fell open as he stared at her. She was in bed with a man who had a long purple scar on his shoulder that looked like a bayonet wound. As Spence leaned over the foot of the bed and stared at him, he was surprised to see that the man’s face looked familiar. He appeared to be about twenty-five years old, or at least several years older than Libby, who was twenty, and he had thick muscular shoulders and a broad weather-beaten face. The purple skin over the would was recently healed. He looked up at Spence and smiled friendlily. Spence stared back at him uncertainly. He did not know whether to smile at him or to scowl. It was the first time he had ever seen Libby in bed with a man. He chewed the tip of his tongue, wondering what to say.
“Papa, please go on out!” Libby said uneasily. Spence leaned over the foot of the bed and peered searchingly at the boy’s grinning face.
“It’s Jim Howard Vance!” spence shouted gleefully. He went around the corner of the bed in two strides. “Dogbite it if it ain’t! Where in the world did you come from, Jim boy?”

Note, again, how carefully Caldwell orchestrates what his reader is able to see and what is merely implied. Initially, we share in Spence’s unseeing: he walks into a dark room and while his eyes are still adjusting, we stare into the darkness with him, equally thwarted in our gaze. But while his eyes adjust at some point (and opening the window shade lets in some light), he takes in the scene before him without sharing that gaze with us; the words “Without taking his eyes from her” indicate that he has seen something we are not allowed to see. To use Woolsey’s phrasing, the “the leer of the sensualist” is absent.

If we think of censorship in purely negative terms, none of this is surprising, or even all that interesting. Caldwell was maybe the first big mass-market paperback writer in the United States (his book jackets proudly proclaim him to be “America’s most popular writer”), and even though the Modern Library placed Tobacco Road on their list of 100 Best Novels in the English Language , he increasingly geared his writing to fill the marketing niche he found himself occupying, a kind of pornographer of the South. I use this term advisedly, though. As I’ve shown, the lengths he goes not to cross the line indicates that Caldwell is careful to not be a pornographer in any literal sense. Instead, I’m using the term the way David Roediger (in turn citing George Rawick) uses it in Wages of Whiteness to describe blackface minstrelsy. Roediger writes:

“…blackness came to symbolize that which the accumulating capitalists had given up, but still longed for. Increasingly adopting an ethos that attacked holidays, spurned contact with nature, saved time, bridled sexuality, separated work from the rest of life and postponed gratification, profitminded Englishmen and Americans cast Blacks as their former selves … All of the old habits so recently discarded by whites adopting capitalist values came to be fastened onto Blacks. As Rawick wonderfully puts it, Englishmen and profit-minded settlers in America “met the West African as a reformed sinner meets a comrade of his previous debaucheries.” The racist, like the reformed sinner, creates “a pornography of his former life…In order to insure that he will not slip back into the old ways or act out half-suppressed fantasies, he must see a tremendous difference between his reformed self and those whom he formerly resembled”

This kind of metaphor is, I think, just as apt for describing the type of voyeuristic stories that Caldwell peddled so successfully. As with blackface, the “back road” story as a genre portrays a fantasy of the South as a pre-industrial society, a place where one can still peer in and view unbridled sexuality and close-to-nature living. The paratextual apparatus of the books themselves strongly suggests this kind of interpretation, in fact. Note how each of these covers invites the reader’s gaze to gaze in at something which was previously hidden from sight:

Caldwell cannot, in 1933, actually show coitus in more detail than he does in these novels, so he doesn’t. But, to wax Foucaultian for a moment, the fallacy of conceptualizing censorship in purely negative terms is that it overlooks the ways censorship informs and directs, rather than inhibits, the manner in which a story is told. And I’m struck by the ease and aptness of a cinematic language for describing the ways Caldwell negotiates what he can and cannot write. As I was writing, I found it difficult to paraphrase how the narrative works in that scene without referring to “cuts” and “cameras” and “off-screens,” which makes me wonder if Caldwell is thinking in those terms as well, if he too is “blocking out” these scenes in his mind.

With respect to the film industry, we tend to talk about “pre-code” and “post-code” films, referring to the effort in 1930 to formalize A Code to Maintain Social and Community Values in the Production of Synchronized and Talking Motion Pictures. But the need to avoid offending the audience was, in practical terms, less a matter of externally imposed censorship than a continuous part of the long process of self-regulation that movie-makers put themselves through as they struggled to create something that would sell. In other words, while authors and studios might rhetorically cast themselves as the victims of repressive pressure from outside, they maintained control over their product by treating censorship like a generic convention, writing to it the same way a scripted comedy had to be written to conform to the rules of the comedy genre. It’s worth noting, therefore, that the best genre criticism doesn’t treat genre as a constricting, repressive mechanism, but understands the function of genre as an enabling system of signification, a convention that gives the narrative its shape. I think the pressure of systemic censorship need to be understood the same way here: it makes the narrative what it is, a precondition for its signification rather than a limiting factor.

In this sense, calling Caldwell’s style “cinematic” means something quite vexed. On the one hand, the way it interpellates its readers as voyeurs (via devices like the covers) encourages a pose of spectacular detachment, the way that an Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, rail against the effects of mass entertainment as produced by the mode of reception. Precisely because the mediating objects between are given so much prominance, the viewer is alienated from the subject, and “the South” becomes purely an object of scrutiny and analysis, not of identification. Yet at the same time (as Roediger and Rawick recognize) the audience needs these layers of mediation precisely because the act of gazing encourages identification: if telling respects the difference between subject and object, then showing has the tendency to blur those boundaries, to draw the audience into feeling what the object of their gaze feels. Far from being determined and foreclosed by these pressures, therefore, the narrative orchestrates and navigates these two opposing desires, for distance and for intimacy, in the same ways a film like It Happened One Night (1934) is simply a string of raised and deferred expectations of sexual climax.

As it happens, what I would call the Caldwell’s “cinematic” qualities were the thing that translated least well into the film versions of his novels. John Ford’s 1941 Tobacco Road, for example, is a disaster; all the interesting stuff that Caldwell is able to do in the turnip scene (which absolutely begs for a psychoanalytic reading) disappears as the film tries to turn it into a version of his previous The Grapes of Wrath, and fails. It’s a shame, really, because Ford seems like the director you’d expect to do well with this material. His best films succeed precisely because they do what Caldwell’s Tobacco Road does, but which Ford’s particular version does not: carefully negotiate between the power of showing to draw the viewer in and the power of telling to hold the reader back.

The particulars of Ford’s career, as it happens, make this even easier to illustrate. A premier director during the silent era, Ford was also one of the few to make the transition to talkies and thrive in the new medium. And while his silent films were (by most accounts) hampered by an overreliance on dialogue, his talkies are notable precisely for their visual storytelling style: a good Ford film is usually good because it doesn’t tell, it shows. Or rather, because it tells by showing, there’s a dynamism within Fordian images produced by the interplay between looking at and talking about, between distancing oneself from the object of gaze and being drawn into identifying with it.

Caldwell’s best voyeuristic pornographies, it seems to me, work the same way, yet they not only manipulate the audience’s response according to this dynamic of attraction/repulsion but they do so with a bluntness that calls attention to itself. Take this delightful bit of dialogue from Tobacco Road, for example:

“Ellie May’s acting like your old hound used to do when he got the itch,” Dude says to Lester. “Look at her scrape her bottom on the sand. That old hound used to make the same kind of sound Ellie May’s making, too. It sounds just like a little pig squealing, don’t it?”

While we, the reader, are obviously being urged to gaze voyeuristically at the scene before us, our response is more likely to be a Kurtzian “The horror” than the film version (for example) was willing to allow. This is, after all, one of the most Faulknerian passages I can imagine, and also one of the least. As with Caddy, the operative idiom is the threat that sexuality poses to Southern womanhood (and there are even black laborers standing by watching, to make the parallel complete). Yet the ludicrously heavy-handed naturalist metaphor goes so far beyond Caddy’s “soiled drawers” as to make the comparison almost impossible, as to specifically deny that a comparison is even appropriate. So much is here recorded, perhaps, that implication can only devolve into farce.