Privileged Standpoints

Over at the excellent Letters from a Librarian, Lauren has been writing beautifully about Evelyn Scott's Escapade (putting me quite to shame in my inability so far to follow up on my intentions!). In the last few days she's put up three posts (one, two, three), in which she provides some excellent passages from the book, along with thoughts of her own (which she incorrectly thinks of as not "substantive"), touching on Montaigne, Aristotle and Blake, Woolf and Duras, and even A.S. Byatt.

I still have some additional thoughts of my own about this book, beyond what I've already written, but for now I want to pursue a line of thought prompted by Lauren's remarks in the second of these posts. She addresses a passage from Escapade about childbirth and the many "truly worrisome notions that work their way into treatises on the art of living", by philosophers and essayists, by, for example, Montaigne and Aristotle. Here is the passage from Scott:

I wondered why the birth of a child appealed so little to the imagination of the
artist. Why were all the great realistic novels of the world concerned with only
one aspect of sex? This surely was the last -- the very last thing -- one needed
to know before one came to conclusions about life.

Lauren observes that there is an "easy answer to her question" which "can be passed over in silence". Of course this easy answer is intimately related to those worrisome notions on the art of living. Such treatises have tended to be written by men, and artists for so long were generally men, men who did not have to worry themselves with the messy business of bearing or raising children, or even being near them, who were able to separate themselves from the world, to thus be able to enjoy solitude and to engage in deep self-study. The events of pregnancy and childbirth are ignored because they, historically, have nothing to do with such concepts (though in the highly individualized West, the United States especially, even these experiences are apparently to be understood as part of the same process of selfhood).

I maintain further that we are only recently coming to grips with how the brain works because science and philosophy were for so long completely male endeavors--again, away from community, away from the practice of raising children, from the experience of being regularly around children. A few months back, I quoted what I called a "crucial observation" from Levi at Larval Subjects to the effect that philosophers tend to "privilege the standpoint of the adult" and ignore childhood development. I have no doubt that this observation is true. In fact, I'm arguing here that it's substantially true of scientists, too. That is, though there have clearly been remarkable advances in recent years in what is known about how the brain develops, the truth is that much of this new knowledge ought to have been at least philosophically available well before it was possible to observe the technical details.

Why would philosophers and scientists privilege the adult standpoint? Indeed, why would they privilege the male standpoint? I think I've already answered these questions. Men left children to women, period. But, as I suggested earlier, anyone who'd ever spent time around a child could tell that they are learning constantly, and that they are formed by both biology and history--the idea of the "bidirectionality of causal relations" should not be only a relatively recent development in modern neuroscience. At his blog Plastic Bodies, which I discovered via Graham Harman, Tom Sparrow writes about the important concept in neuroscience of "plasticity":

No longer is the brain being conceived as a preprogrammed CPU; it has been opened to history. The term "plasticity" names the capacity of the brain to be molded by history, to be informed and shaped by corporeal experience, and to likewise give form to history through corporeal activity. The plasticity of the central nervous system is particularly liable to change while still developing, but its capacity for change remains throughout the span of a life–which means that each individual’s capacity to learn, adapt, and act is singularized insofar as his or her history is unique.

Obviously many of the details associated with this could only have been recently discerned or observed. But I find it embarrassing that the brain could ever have been "conceived as a preprogrammed CPU". This speaks of a science and a philosophy, for all their wonderful contributions, that have operated too far removed from life itself, as lived by ordinary people, in particular as lived by women and children.

Notes on Evelyn Scott's Migrations

So, you ask, how's that whole Evelyn Scott project coming along? Not quite as smoothly as I'd hoped, but then whoever said literature was supposed to be smooth? I still have another Escapade-related post in the works, but in the meantime I've been looking into a couple of her novels.

In the wake of my happy discovery of Scott and my fruitful reading of Escapade, I checked Migrations and The Wave out of the library with some excitement. Some of this excitement was dissipated upon opening the two volumes, both of which are historical novels of sorts and on first blush appear to be much more conventional than I'd hoped. But then they were both published, still, in the late 1920s, so what seems conventional now may not have been then. Migrations is the shorter of the two, by far, and is the earlier novel, so it was no contest which one I'd attempt to tackle first. In addition, Migrations is subtitled An Arabesque in Histories, which sounds much more interesting than narratives of the Civil War, the subtitle to The Wave. Having now read Migrations, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, though I certainly enjoyed large portions of it.

"Arabesque" is one of those words I've always avoided looking up, preferring instead to just let it remain suggestive in its strangeness. (I think I first encountered it used by a writer describing the music of the Throwing Muses: "Zep arabesques" he wrote; the phrase seemed to capture something elusive about the band's music, though I really didn't know precisely what he meant. But I digress.) I did finally look it up and, with all apologies to Andrew Seal, it means, when applied to the fine arts, "a sinuous, spiraling, undulating, or serpentine line or linear motif." Here I'd say it means a more or less free indirect prose and stream of consciousness narrative, in the multiple-character Mrs. Dalloway sense (assuming my memory of Mrs. Dalloway is remotely accurate). A species of "pyschological realism". Only occasionally does it appear as if the third-person descriptions of the external world are not also reflected in the direct experience of a character but belong to an outside observer, one who objectively knows, and, indeed, the one occasion when a new character's back story is extensively filled in by a narrator's voice, it feels gratuitous.

The novel takes place in the 1850s and is divided into three chapters, each with several sub-divisions, with interrelated characters but no real plot or narrative arc uniting them other than the theme hinted at by the title. In chapters one and three, we're among slaveholders and slaves in Tennessee. Some of the slaveholders are ambivalent about owning slaves, though not usually for any discernible moral reasons; they all think they treat their slaves well. In both chapters, a slave runs away; in chapter three this leads to a confrontation between mob justice and a suspected abolitionist--who nevertheless owns slaves of his own--and his scandalously mixed-race ("quadroon") wife. Chapter two is considerably longer than the others and traces the journey to San Francisco (in the wake of the gold rush), by way of Jamaica and Panama, of a married couple who've left the town in Tennessee in search of better opportunities.

The book is interesting as a depiction of aspects of life in the antebellum South, but I admit that my attention occasionally flagged the closer it veered to reading like a semi-objective historical narrative, however unresolved. The characters are much concerned with the nature of their own existence, and Scott invests her female characters especially with rich, complicated inner lives, bound up in questions of class, gender, and race. We are also treated to the slaves' thoughts and inner struggles. Beyond The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I have no direct experience with fiction from this time or earlier that deals with slavery and slaves, so I can't say anything about how "progressive" this may or may not have been, but I thought it was worth noting. And it appears that Evelyn Scott aspired to be as "realistic" as possible, so she attempted to render the speech of the slaves in dialect, as well as that of poor whites, or other characters not of the slaveholding class predominant in the book. The language and thoughts of that class is, perhaps inevitably, the more or less standard English of the main, free indirect narration. I get the sense, in some of what I've read about her, that in many ways Scott positioned herself as a writer in opposition to the Southern Agrarian critics of her day (by the way, there is a connection here with the New Critics, such as Cleanth Brooks; more on this in another post, I hope), and thus, I gather, wished to break down the romantic Old South narrative dominant in her youth. I have little doubt, then, that she thought of herself as in sympathy with the former slaves, as well as with Native Americans. Nevertheless, some of this speech is difficult to read, as such rendered speech often is, regardless of the author's best intentions. Also, I probably don't need to tell you that the characters make liberal use of the word "nigger" (or, in the slaves' case, "niggah").

Of course this isn't any kind of review, and obviously there is a lot that could be said about any one of these issues, which I'm not going to delve into here. However, before closing I do want to leave you with some sense of the writing. This is towards the end of chapter one, Captain George is dying, and his wife Miss Sara has rung the bell for help, but everyone is out looking for Silas, the runaway slave (italics in original):

But the lane to the Quarters continued to open an abandoned perspective. Uncle Blossom did not move. Miss Sara was conscious of her ineffectualness, could almost see herself, her thin face under her crushed cap, her diminutive body, her wide sedate lady's petticoats, and her arms upreaching. Why had she not been born a man. Why had the men been sent away on other missions when the Captain was sinking and in a state like this. They should have come to her for their orders. What did anything matter but this--this last struggle against the--but was it inevitable. Her wrists slackened exhaustedly, and she half reclined herself against the long deal table upon which, in the morning, her precious bowls of milk were set out evenly for her to skim the cream from them.

No one had heard her. Staring across the stripped stubble of the brownish tobacco fields, she began to weep silently, her mouth, penciled in its fine lines of age and pain, quivering, her bleared gaze reproaching the distances. Thomas and Edwin do not know. They can not know. A long life--all over--and what for. But there was no need for the 'what-for.' Living-being-alive--was sufficient. We require no explanation of it. In God we trust. A long life. Ah, how she hoped yet to live a long time.

And this is from towards the end of the book. Bosh has also run away, but he hasn't made it very far. He's made it to the Gilbert property, where his mother is a slave and he basically gives up; she has hidden him away, tried and failed to get him to leave in advance of the inevitable mob justice (the mob is after him not only because he's escaped, but because he "attacked" a white women--really, he scared her; he was hungry and trying to get some food):

"Dey's free whut the law sets free," she answered acidly. She was shaking as with palsy, and felt herself in danger of another nervous seizure such as she had experienced in the afternoon. In her flat ponderous countenance, her small eyes sparkled with that constant glitter of anger, aroused from the first instant in which Bosh had thrown insoluble responsibility upon her. She began to set the room to rights, rearranging her small belongings so that they might appear orderly. Some rush baskets and similar odds-and-ends, she stacked in a nook by the chimney, leaving, between the baskets and the wall, a space in which Bosh could, if necessary, secrete himself. The single unbleached sheet on the bed was smoothed out nearly, but she removed her fine quilt of many-colored patchwork and held it in readiness. Surely, as she listened, the tramp of strange men drew nearer.

[...] Ready to expire, she gave up her efforts to shift the bed. It was too late now, truly. Footsteps were indeed audible, and some, as yet, indistinguishable cries. "Snuff dat candle, Bosh," she whispered, but, anticipating his uselessness, did not wait on him. Rushing forward, she laid her broad palm upon the wick. The candle guttered, went out redolently, and, from beneath the door, sagging above an uneven sill, the flat moonlight gushed suddenly, in faint blue traceries. Save for the vivid relief of a spot on the floor just before the door, the room was pitch-black. Mammy Mary, her fists clenched and shaking, sank on her knees, half suppliant, half defiant with a desperation which she recognized as futile. In the night invisible, the sound of shouting voices grew always louder. She could not see Bosh, and only guessed that he was beside her.

Noted: Evelyn Scott

Also from Part VI of Escapade:

Manoel felled a tree in which was an owl nest and when he showed me the small blinded bird I asked him to let me keep it. I cut one of the owl's gray-brown wings and I have allowed him to run loose while we sleep. All night long I hear his hunting moan in the dark. I imagine him free; a gray cloud of feathered quiet drifting, his low cry, and his claws clinging to a young bird--clinging, clinging like an unlifting shadow. From a moral standpoint death, which is most inimical to human relations, should be hideous. But the owl has convinced me of the superficiality of moral judgments. He is the cruelest of creatures and the most innocent. In the morning he sits on my knee and I give him bits of our maggot-laden meat. He is resigned to me utterly. When I call to him in the daylight he always comes feebly toward the sound. And he stares, stares at me with his great helpless eyes, feeling perhaps, because I have given him meat, that I have become a part of his sightless world.

It is different with the hawk. Tilting himself back against the side of his cage, his claws, at the end of his thin stick-like legs, clutch tensely at the air, and when I attempt to feed him his terrible eyes select unerringly my moving finger. More than once he has dragged at it with his beak and torn my flesh. He was wounded when he was captured and it would be useless to free him. Nothing will free him but starvation. He sees us too plainly. His vision has placed us outside him forever. He recognizes our antithesis. He also reminds me of a child. He is another Death.

Noted: Evelyn Scott

From Part VI of Escapade, wherein Evelyn (named but once in the book) and John have bought some land in the mountains, hoping to make a living raising sheep and various crops--things don't go well and they are living in unbelievable poverty, alarming at times even to the locals (who are themselves very poor):

I love the rich purplish color of the floor where a sun spot moves on it. I lie here. I am better today. I have had my dinner of our unvarying food, boiled red beans and mandioc mush, with a red pepper to make it tolerable and large crystals of salt like gray-white rock. How warm and comforting food is. How entirely worth while to live to be able to eat. Life seems to me so sweet, so precious, that I wonder that everyone is not kind like John. When there is this awful impersonal Enemy to fight why are not people gentle to each other? Why do they not always stand together protecting themselves against it? I feel that I ought to warn them, to tell them of the danger they are in. It is, almost, that I have a mission to the race. I must make others realize what I alone seem to know, that all of us are subject to the obscure attacks of misfortune, that we have nothing to waste in unnecessary struggles which we ourselves precipitate. But, of course, I only mean that I want people to accept my view of life, my way of looking at marriage and at everything else. I have no wish to force myself on the world, but I want at least a tolerance which will allow me to exist. And at home John and I are actually considered dangerous. Do you not see how pitiful we are? I want to say. But in this also they will misunderstand me, for I love myself entirely, completely, and I will not accept from them any criticism of my acts.

I think sometimes that my pride is as strong as my pain--not quite, perhaps, but very nearly so. If I were the only one made to suffer I should accept everything out of pure defiance. It is through John and Jack [their child] that my self-respect can be subjugated. My pride affects me as an exaggeration of myself. Protest expands all of my being. My self-righteousness is much more intense than anything which I can intellectually define or encompass. Because I alone of all the world can understand and pity myself, I am God. I alone of all the world can offer equality to myself.

Another forgotten writer: Evelyn Scott

Forgotten or neglected writers abound. In March, I blogged about Olive Moore, who it seems was so little known she wasn't even forgotten. And not too long ago, at ABC of Reading, I learned of Evelyn Scott. Scott, Thomas McGonigle tells us in another post, was published in The Little Review, alongside a slew of still-famous names: Eliot, Hemingway, Joyce, Stein, Hart Crane, Djuana Barnes, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens. She introduced Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and, McGonigle says, "received for her troubles his back-handed compliment, as being pretty good for a woman". I sense a glimmer of recognition at this remark; I must have read previously of Faulkner saying such a thing, though I obviously never looked into it.

Well, I'm interested. Most of Scott's books appear to be out-of-print. I check the library, and it has several, ranging from 1923 to 1941; the library provides no further information online. I somewhat arbitrarily put a hold on the earliest, Escapade (which, it turns out, is itself not out-of-print, available in a University of Virginia Press edition), which I subsequently check out. The volume is old, though clearly not a first edition. It's not covered in any kind of protective sleeve; there are signs of mildew. For all that, the book is in decent condition; it was obviously well made. It was last checked out in 1991. After beginning the book on my commute in yesterday, I'm more than ever curious how such a writer can fall through the cracks, so I look Scott up on Wikipedia: virtually nothing, though I do learn that she was born in 1893 and died in 1963, and links are provided to a bibliography and a short biographical sketch ("Tennessee's Prodigal Daughter: Evelyn Scott" by Caroline Maun), the latter being part of a modest website devoted to celebrating Scott and her work. I skim the bibliography, but I don't find Escapade. I read the opening of the biographical sketch (where I learn that "Evelyn Scott" was a pseudonym for Elsie Dunn), and midway through the first paragraph I read of "Scott's first autobiography, Escapade (1923)", and I go back to the bibliography and sure enough, there it is, listed not under "Novels" but "Autobiography". If I hadn't looked up this information, I'm sure I would have read the entire book without having any inkling it was autobiography.

Anyway, I'm now more than halfway through Escapade, and friends, it's good. It was immediately evident that I was in the presence of a writer. (Says the description at the website: "It explores female subjectivity and breaks new ground in literary modernism." Whatever that means.)

Interestingly, there are other similarities with Olive Moore's Spleen, beyond simply being forgotten. Here, the narrator has escaped the States with her married lover; it's a major scandal back home; she is twenty, pregnant. They are in Brazil. She resents the life she left that looks down on her actions; she is confident, assured, modern. Independent-minded. She writes about the locals, with sympathy, if not always with warmth, and about her opinion on the scandal and her ideas about life and existence ("Death is like the unknown lover to whom the child, in infancy, is already dedicated.")--there are many references to being; remember, the book was published in 1923. And she writes about her pregnancy and about the birth itself and about being a mother. It strikes me that, with Moore's novel, we have perhaps the earliest literary writing about pregnancy (though I strain to come up with any more at all; for one, there's Carole Maso's diary about pregnancy and depression, A Room Full of Roses; no doubt in my ignorance I am missing many). In the great 19th century novels, this kind of thing happened offstage. But here we also have writing about being a mother, about the work, and the weariness:

It was always dark in the bedroom. I lived in the long contemplation of a blank wall, of a pale violet light that fell across me as it penetrated the blinds of the sala window which was opposite my door. The baby lay beside me. He seemed fragile. I was heavy with response to the new indescribable smell he gave out. I had been close to babies before but I did not recognize the odor as anything familiar. I had found something which I had needed for a long time. I knew now what I had needed.

When he drank of my milk, all of me was arrested in the sensation of his soft clinging touch. I was mindless, beautiful. I wanted to be like that forever and ever. I let him drink too much. His head fell back and the white milk trickled warmly from between his parted lips. His mouth was loose and red. He half closed his eyes and I could see the delicate pinkish veins in the thin lids. He looked drunken with himself, and I was drunk also. We were in a relaxation that was almost a debauch.

Once a bat came into the room while we were alone. I was terrified of bats, but I got up and put a mosquito net over the baby. I had a sharp painful pleasure in my fright, in my sense of bondage to my child. I would always belong to him. I would always think of him first. My abandon to him was humiliating and sweet like abandon to a lover. I thought, It is my body I give to him. And I was surprised in recognizing this. I had imagined maternity as something thin and ideal.

And a bit later:

I am exhausted. The housework and the care of a heavy child are too much for me so soon after leaving my bed. My nerves are too vivid, exhausted by responsiveness. I feel as if I were dying already of too much life. I am in terror of my fatigue which is strong and impersonal--stronger than I am. I pray to something or other, beg myself to go on, beg the baby to sleep, to give me a little rest.

When the baby cries in the night I get up in the dim relaxation of despair and talk to him. "Oh, baby, I can't bear it any longer. Please go to sleep. Please go to sleep."

And: "My back aches. And the baby is merciless. Yes, sometimes I am so tired that I long for the irresponsibility of insanity in order to escape."

It's not all about being a mother, but it's all writing. Occasionally Scott's lyrical descriptions lose me in their piled up metaphors, but even these are often marvelously vivid and well-chosen. I'm already prepared to rank this with the great literary memoirs: Thomas Bernhard's relentless Gathering Evidence; Edward Dahlberg's Because I was Flesh; Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (and, no, I still haven't read Nabokov's Speak, Memory). I'm excited to know that there are several other Evelyn Scott books quietly awaiting my attention at the library. Many thanks to Thomas McGonigle.