IT'S CLEARLY ABOUT THE TESTICLES
No man can go through life without thinking about castration at least a little. Gary Taylor, a professor of English at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, was prompted to ponder the whole history of the delicate subject by A Game of Chess, an allegorical play by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Thomas Middleton. A eunuch in the play made him see that if he was to understand the character, he would need to find out about castration history and symbolism, pre-Freud. The result if Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood (Routledge, 2001), in which he relates the practice to Christianity, manhood, and many other cultural notions, in a breezy, often slangy style – it’s not words he minces.
Why is the history of masculinity the history of castration?
Because the eunuch represents a kind of man that isn’t a man. Since the eunuch originates in the cradle of civilization, what it has meant to be a man has been what it has meant to be a male who isn’t a eunuch.
Is castration about the testicles, or the penis?
It’s clearly about the testicles. The whole historical record makes that clear. Castration of humans followed from the castration of domesticated animals, which was always about the testicles. Freud is responsible for confusing the meaning of the word for all of us, because when he talked about the ``castration complex,’’ he acted as though castration removed the entire male genital apparatus – so he could imagine that a castrated male looked like a female. He completely changed the meaning that the word had for thousands of years.
Where was Freud wrong about castration?
I see psychoanalysis as a kind of urban myth. Freud didn’t have any experience of what castration meant on a farm. For him, castration was intimately connected to his Jewishness. Because of circumcision being widely wrongly regarded as a kind of castration, Freud tried to generalize a mark – the mark of circumcision that had been used to separate out his race and to condemn it; Jews were considered a separate race. Freud generalized that category, so it wasn’t something that couldn’t be used to denigrate Jews. It was instead something universal to all men. And in order to do that he had to talk about it in terms of sex in relation to pleasure rather than sex in relation to reproduction.
What does the history of castration suggest for the future?
With the mapping of the human genome, trans-sexual surgical operations, and cloning, we can’t help but be aware that there is a series of choices that are suddenly very real choices for our species. Parallels and precedents in castration, an earlier example of bioengineering, will help us to understand what may be involved if we start interfering with our biology in this way. The history of the eunuch tells us that there will be a great deal of fear, prejudice, hostility, against anybody who is produced in something other than the normal way, and who has features that don’t fit into our patterns of male and female.
ALLIES OF THE FREE WORLD BEWARE!
In 1975, after South Vietnam fell to the Communists of North Vietnam, one million South Vietnamese allies of the United States were forced into “re-education camps” where they suffered humiliation, cruelty, starvation rations, and relentless brainwashing for up to 25 years. The political prisoners who survived the camps were so reviled as collaborators that many fled to the West as “boat people” or other kinds of refugees. What these “abandoned allies” have endured “is beyond my capacity to fully comprehend,” writes Robert S. McKelvey in A Gift of Barbed Wire: America’s Allies Abandoned in South Vietnam (University of Washington Press, October 2002). A professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, he served in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine Corps captain, and later worked there as a psychiatrist.
Q. How did the survivors cope with their ordeal?
A. Most had some kind of philosophy that helped them through, or they did it for the sake of their families. In terms of how they ended up, most of them saw themselves as strong survivors, not as victims – as tough people who had overcome. Others thought that survival was random, almost a matter of luck or fortune – of karma.
Q. What do you make of your interviewees’ talking often of their small forms of resistance, such as learning English in secret, despite the threat of severe punishment?
A. Right, or making jokes about Ho Chi Minh, or having a secret radio. They found quiet ways of fighting back. Rather than turning their anger and hatred inwards and becoming depressed, they were able to turn it outward, so that it might not eat away at them so badly.
Q. Did the US have any alternative to abandoning those allies?
A. We used the Vietnamese for our own purposes and then when the negatives outweighed the pluses, we abandoned them. I don’t see how you can see it in any other way. A lot of people in the U.S. are very cavalier and careless in their approach to the world outside. I wanted to get across the point that when you go over and drop bombs in places and make all these promises and kill people, it has some very, very long-term consequences. Probably most if not all countries do things like that, but if I were one of our allies, I’d want to keep that in mind.
Q. Did your interviewees have a sense of that?
A. At least some of them were pretty bitter at the U.S. for leaving them in the lurch. In a sense, we failed them twice – in Vietnam, and then here, in terms of not helping them get back on track with their own lives. Doctors worked as janitors, that sort of thing.
MISOGYNY AND RHETORIC
Misogyny was common in British literature in the 18th century. In Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (University of Kentucky Press, 2000), Laura Mandell, an assistant professor of English at Miami University of Ohio, argues that it was not merely sexist; it had varied rhetorical functions. For example, it served to make emerging capitalism attractive – to inculcate an appetite for consumerism – when, for example, writers portrayed entrepreneurship by men as noble compared with commerce in women’s flesh, and women’s flesh itself. Misogyny was, however, put to varied uses_at times, even, to promote feminism. Mandell draws on her ongoing training in psychoanalysis to inspect the uses of misogyny in the writings of such figures as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and many lesser-known authors. Ultimately, she claims, misogyny catalyzed fundamental changes during the century in the way literature was produced and consumed – for example, the way “the canon” was established.
You talk about misogyny at times preserving the “literariness” of texts.
That’s right. That’s what I see going on in the most famous sources of 18th-Century misogyny – Swift, Pope, and Dryden. They’re very often read as just men who despised women, but it seems to me that what they’re crucially trying to do is to resist commodification of literary texts, resist having them reduced to not literary, but objects of literature. Misogyny was one means they had for fighting against reductive readings, preserving a kind of play of identification for readers. It was not an ideal way to do it. I wouldn’t choose to have them be misogynous writers. But it seems to me that they were trying to do something besides just express their own distaste.
And that reduction of texts to objects obviously is part of the rise of capitalism, which you say misogyny at times promoted.
Yes, in discussions of the rise of capitalism in the 18th century people often just presume that any group of people who come in contact with what capitalism has to offer would automatically desire it. That’s not true. It had to be made attractive to people. Misogyny was one way of making it attractive.
In the way this all works itself out during this period, why are Mary Leapor and Anna Letitia Barbauld key figures, for you?
Anna Barbauld seems to be aware that the kind of aesthetic that promotes the canon is hierarchical in a very profound way. But, as a radical Dissenter, she believed in radical equality, so she was interested in developing an aesthetic that didn’t depend on hierarchical distinctions and didn’t foster them. And because she so wholeheartedly believed in what she’s doing, the way one can only believe in God, because she had that kind of faith, she really wasn’t bound by some of the presuppositions that governed other kinds of writing production. And the same with Mary Leapor. She was an outsider, as a laborer. No matter how much Samuel Richardson and his peers wanted to idealize her, by saying she was kind of a Pamela figure, she was really very angry, and expressed her anger in her poetry, at being oppressed. She wasn’t a sweet servant who wanted to be obedient. Because of their status as outsiders in that way, and because somehow they had a lot of faith in their abilities despite the system that was trying to hide those abilities, they were really able to do things with their writing that women aren’t always able to do.
Anna Barbauld was interesting in that she wanted to write about something other than melancholy.
Yes, she really did. She saw melancholy – that whole notion of melancholy feelings as poetic feelings – as a kind of transposition of feudal desires into the aesthetic realm, which is I think what Pierre Bourdieu [the postmodern sociologist] is doing. That is very interesting to me.
A general question is whether women of that period were not just actively excluded from publishing, but suffered from a more deeply instilled misogyny that shaped the nature of reading and readership itself.
That’s right. Women were publishing like crazy in miscellaneous texts and other kinds of texts that collected authors, but when it came down to the emergence of anthologies that collected the most important works of English literature, they’re not there. I tried to see what that exclusion might be doing at a psychological level, and if you think about women, which of course the traditional misogynous rhetoric does, as “the body,” and what you want to do is set up a sense of canonical authors as transcendant and disembodied, you can scapegoat women for having a body, and then throw them out. And what’s left are these disembodied, transcendental great authors.
What does all this mean for ‘the literary canon’?
The kinds of debates surrounding the canon have been, ‘How do we open the canon?’ And then there’s all kinds of resistance to opening it, by people like Harold Bloom. If my argument about the beginnings of the canon is at all correct, it might be the case that it’s not possible to open the canon. If the canon itself requires seeing male authors as disembodied, somebody else is going to have to take the heat of being ‘the body.’ So for me it seems that the canon itself needs to be dismantled. ... I think it’s tendentious to always be thinking about other writers in relation to the canon. I think the only way you can really SEE writers, or see what they were doing, is to not think about a canon at all.
SOCIAL AUTHORSHIP
Until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the hand-written manuscripts was the primary medium in Britain for the circulation of literary texts. The emergence of book publishing would change all that. This period of transition reveals much about the nature and practices of early-modern authorship, writes Margaret J.M. Ezell, who is the John Paul Abbott Professor of Liberal Arts in the department of English at Texas A&M University, in Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). She finds, surprisingly, that many writers had no desire to see their writing in print “or to play our games of authorship.” The period also saw the formalization of copyright laws, with telling results. Multiauthor, uniform-volume series presenting the work of “national poets" began to appear which would shape later notions of the literary canon of "the classics"; however, often they resulted because editors had selected not the monuments of their national literature, but merely the texts for which they held copyrights.
Q. When trying to understand the literary environment of the period you discuss, why is it not enough simply to study the history of publishing of books?
A. Because I am interested in reconstructing a literary environment or culture rather than a guide to literary landmarks – great authors, great texts, great literary quagmires_I wanted to investigate not only what people wrote, but where, under what circumstances, and why. This combined traditional histories of the book trade with an interest in what I call "social authorship" practices, where texts were circulated among friends and families in manuscript form. Some of these texts eventually ended up in print, such as Ann Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse, but many, many other examples did not; however, such materials were still a large part of what men and women were reading and writing in response to well into the eighteenth century.
Q. What is surprising about the way the "game of authorship" was played during this seminal period, and the way it differed from authorship in our own time?
A. As every academic seeking tenure knows, the game of authorship today is to be published, to be able to claim a printed text as one's own intellectual property. What I discovered looking at social authorship practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that many of the literary and academic texts were created socially, collaboratively, and had multiple forms of existence with different readerships. While we have tended to focus on literary authorship as a solitary pursuit, it would appear that for many writers in the early modern period, it was just the opposite.
Q. Why is Alexander Pope a particularly interesting figure in this regard?
A. Pope is typically presented as one of the first profitable professional poets, one who understood and manipulated the book trade. What gets lost in this image is his extensive connection throughout his life and writing career with social authorship practices; most of his poetry – as opposed to his translations – existed in multiple manuscript versions for many, many years before they came together as a single, printed poem. Pope not only wrote for manuscript readers, he was also continuously reading others’ manuscript texts.
Q. What is particularly interesting about women authors and readers, and those outside London, during this period of transition?
A. Literary histories which work on the tour guide model very often leave one the impression that all literary life was in London where the printers were. I became interested in what would happen if you were a budding poet or playwright living in rural Lincolnshire or Cornwall – whom would you read? who would read what you wrote? how would you obtain a readership? This also brought to light the extensive roles women often had in collecting family manuscripts, transcribing, and circulating them in addition to creating volumes of their own writings.
Q. What does the period you discuss have to tell us about our own era's emerging competition between printed and electronic text transmission?
A. The various questions raised about authorship on the Internet_interactive texts, social collaboration, the ability of the author to transmit his or her text to a readership without involving the services of a commercial editor, printer, or middle-man – give us some new ways of reconsidering the practice of manuscript circulation and the ways in which it remained an attractive and competitive alternative to printed publication for many early modern authors. In the same way that social authorship required no more than a pen and paper to create a text which could be read, responded to, reproduced, and preserved, regardless of the geographical location or the gender of the writer, the Internet provides the possibility of global readership unfettered by the institutions of the literary marketplace or academic publishing.
