After I took the GRE Subject, I decided that now, at last, was the time for me to actually read something that other people actually read for a change, to actually read leisurely, with no pressure, no deadlines, no burn-out. The question then became as to what I should therefore read; my mind had long ago rebelled against so-called "light" or "vapid" or "escapist" reading as insufferably unreadable--there's a reason I first picked up Dante's Inferno instead of another Dan Brown novel all those years ago; like Sherlock Holmes, "my mind rebels against lack of stimulation." So I split the difference between fun and literary by picking up "The Complete Sherlock Holmes" itself at Barnes & Noble, and then just kicked back and let Sherlock do my thinking for me.
So imagine my surprise when I read the first novella in the collection, "A Study in Scarlett," wherein we learn how Watson met Sherlock, are introduced to Holmes's acute abilities of reasoning and observation, and see him one-up Scotland Yard in catching a vengeful murderer, only to find roughly 5 chapters of intense anti-Mormon propaganda. Part I of "Scarlett" ends with Sherlock aptly nabbing the murderer, named Jefferson Hope, who then goes on to explain at length as to why he went about with his murders; it is a tale involving salacious Mormon polygamists in Salt Lake City kidnapping Hope's bride-to-be under the direction of Brigham Young. She dies shortly after she marries one of them in the endowment house; Hope swears vengeance, tracking the two polygamists responsible across the United States, then across Europe, finally catching them in London where he exacts revenge.
Mormonism itself has absolutely nothing to do with how Sherlock solves the crime; he resolves the crime through logic and clues, as he is famous for; he isn't finding clues in the Book of Mormon or Temple symbolism or any nonsense like that. My point, simply, is that the Utah back story is utterly gratuitous; Doyle could've saved himself five chapters by having Hope just say, "they murdered my wife so I tracked them down and killed them," and none of Sherlock's dazzling detective work would've been upset. The long Mormon back-story all smacks of pure penny-dreadful sensationalism, exploiting the worst slanders of Mormonism then circulating in England, just to make the story "sexier" and create sympathy for the villain.
Upon finishing the first tale, I reflected that, well, Mormons were hardly the only marginalized group to be characterized by degrading stereotypes in Victorian England; this thought was apt going into the second novella, "The Sign of Four," which features degrading stereotypes of India. For while the clues and deduction varied, "Sign of Four's" basic structure remains the same as "Scarlett's"; sensational murders, bizarre clues, the police baffled, Sherlock catches the sympathetic villain, who then gives his lengthy back story.
In this case, Jonathan Small is a British Army enlistee stationed down in India during an infamous mass uprising of the barbarous natives (that the people of India perhaps did not wish to be occupied by a foreign force and were justified in revolt never seems to occur to anyone). Down in India, "where a man's life is not as valued" as in Worcestershire (as though to commit murder is solely the predilection of "uncivilized" nations needing the restraining influence of noble Anglo-Saxons), Small has a knife put to his throat by one of his Indian guards; they tell him that if he swears to join him and two others (hence the "Four") in murdering a nobleman traveling in disguise, that they will split his wealth with him. He consents, the dirty deed is done that night, but after the uprising is quashed, all four of them are caught and put in prison, but not before they hide the fortune so none can find it.
Years past, and he finds that the English Captain running his prison is hard up in gambling debts; he uses the buried treasure to bargain with the Captain for an early release. But, the Captain betrays him, and takes the whole treasure for himself and returns to England. Small, with the help of an Indian "savage," escapes from prison and slowly makes his way back to London where he exacts his revenge. As in "Scarlett," all this back-story could've been spared if Doyle had just written,"He stole my money so I got revenge."
Just as the Mormons are portrayed as salacious and perverted in "Scarlett," the Indians are gratuitously portrayed as uncivilized and savage in "Sign of Four;" Doyle certainly wasn't deviating from established stereotypes when he wrote Sherlock Holmes.
Except...he still kind of was. Sherlock himself, for example, is a confirmed bachelor, which in family-friendly Victorian England was itself socially deviant (a BYU English prof. once said Mormon lit. is like Victorian lit; lots of kids runnin' around, nobody talkin' about how they got there). Times have certainly made that particular deviancy less jarring; but then, perhaps to ensure that time wouldn't lessen Holmes's brand of deviancy, "Sign of Four" explicitly opens with Holmes jabbing a hypodermic needle up his vein while Watson says with a sigh, "What is it this time, morphine or cocaine?" Now that's all sorts of deviancy, even for today.
At one point in "Sign of Four," Watson, while admiring Holmes's incredible intellect, says how lucky it is that Holmes chose to be a detective rather than a criminal, for he would have been unstoppable. In other words, Sherlock Holmes the detective, punisher of crime, champion of justice, help of the police and bane of crooks everywhere, is only a notch away from being a full-fledged deviant himself.
All this is just a round-about of saying that although Doyle was still reinforcing dominant stereotypes about "deviants" like the Mormons and India, their mere inclusion in the opening tales of Sherlock Holmes reveals a preoccupation with deviancy itself, implying that deviancy is where Sherlock's true sympathies lie. Now, neither Mormons nor India are the better for their portrayal in Sherlock, but it is note-worthy that both groups are used to to create actual sympathy for the chief deviant, the murderer! Rather than the standard Scooby-Doo ending where the captured villain says, "And I would've gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!", Doyle goes long out of his way to ensure the readers' sympathies are not with the police, not with law and order, not with the victims even, but with the deviants themselves!
Also, in both novellas Sherlock employs "the Baker Street Irregulars," a gang of filthy "Arab" street urchins, to gather his intelligence, preferring them over the entire police force; that is, Sherlock excels at catching deviants precisely because he prefers the deviants themselves. Sherlock constantly declares his distaste for the "common" and "mundane" of the "everyday," because it is out in the margins, in the deviancy, where he prefers to exist, even flourish. Sure, he protects the "everyday" through his detective work, and he keeps the deviant marginalized as the "everyday" demands; hence in Sherlock's world, the Mormons must remain salacious, and India must remain uncivilized. But I suspect that even if Doyle had known better, even unconsciously, he still couldn't have "legitimized" the Mormons and India, even he'd wanted to; for to legitimize something is to normalize it, so that it is no longer unusual, no longer stimulating, and Holmes's mind "rebels at lack of stimulation."
Doyle makes the murderers sympathetic even as he punishes them; he brings in Mormons and India without redeeming them. In every case, Sherlock Holmes casts in his lot with the deviants without normalizing them, because somehow, intuitively, Holmes understands that the greatest crime he could commit would be to normalize something interesting.
Perhaps the kindest thing Guy Ritchie's recent Sherlock Holmes movie did was make Sherlock deviant again (any who complain about his Ritchie's characterization clearly hasn't read the books).
And though I can't speak for India, perhaps the kindest thing Doyle did for Mormonism was to keep us in the margins; Hugh Nibley once said that we in the Church spend far too much time trying to include ourselves in the world, to participate in Babylon, to go "mainstream," sweeping the "weird" things we do under the rug, forgetting that the scriptures themselves say that we are to be a "peculiar people." Brigham Young himself said that his greatest fear was that this Church would become popular, and thus all earth and hell would join and drag us down to hell with them.
So, while I can't excuse Doyle's regressive characterizations, I can at least give thanks to Sherlock Holmes himself, for keeping us "peculiar," for keeping us unpopular, deviant, and interesting; in this manner he keeps us from stagnating, he keeps us stimulated, he keeps us from being dragged down to hell.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
On China
Jacob and I share the same first name and briefly the same bed--I slept in it Fall '06, he in Winter '07. The bed in question was in an apt. complex in Anqing, Anhui Province, People's Republic of China, just about a 10 minute walk away from Anqing Foreign Language School, where we both taught English to Chinese middle-school students--again, I in the Fall, and he taking my place after the New Year while I returned to school.
While our times there did not overlap, we both walked past the exact same farmer's market on the way to class each morning; since it was the same school year, we taught the exact same students in the exact same grades; taught from the exact same text books; played the exact same guitar; worked with the exact same teachers, befriended the exact same students, watched pirated DVDs on the exact same TV, ate out at the exact same restaurants, and wandered around the exact same city. We both visited Beijing, both stood on the Great Wall, we both hiked Huang Shan and saw the view that inspired countless poets and artists before us; in the middle of the most populous country the world has ever known, we both stood in awe at intersections where all walked at once--old women, children, rich, poor, fast, slow, all together with bikes, mopeds, cars, trucks, and buses, and somehow all knew at once how to walk around each other, obeying an order out of chaos alien to our narrow Western consciousness.
Nevertheless, as Jake and I caught up this last weekend and compared notes, we quickly discovered that our Chinese experiences were utterly foreign from each other--he stood on the old, collapsing Great Wall, while I stood on the one restored for the tourists (and we each envied each other because of it); I was in Beijing in the Fall, he in the Spring; I hiked Huang Shan with a friend in the rain, he alone in the sunshine; our friendships and relationships with students, teachers, headmasters, roommates, so on and so forth, were miles apart.
It was good to realize this as we swapped stories--for a few years there I'd begun to gently dismiss my Chinese experience, as something unoriginal, even derivative, for countless English majors and others have made the same pilgrimage over the Pacific as I had, to engage in the exact same occupation. Not that I'd gone to be unique or popular--I went to see something fantastically foreign and boy did I get it--but I confess to feeling slightly embarrassed to have engaged in an adventure that was, after all, rather "pedestrian" after all.
And yet, if ever two Chinese experiences should have been carbon copies it should have been ours, yet though mere days separated my departure from his arrival (and none separated our sheets), our experiences of China were fundamentally different. If these two Jacobs should be see the Middle Kingdom so differently, how much more have I seen China differently than all the other countless Americans who've gone before and after me--and they likewise from me?
My experience was unique, for the exact same reason that all I do is unique--because no moment ever repeats itself, and my experiences and knowledge and perceptions are unreproducible in another. China was consequently reborn to me, and I could treasure that experience once more.
Jake and I's conversation caused me to remember the bright, Sunday morning, a brash young 21-year-old, reporting on my mission to the Stake High Council of the Centralia, WA stake. They asked questions, I answered truthfully and candidly, yet all along I could see in their eyes that these men, these full grown men with knowledge and experience beyond what I could comprehend, had no idea what I had just gone through! Their eyes even spoke silently of how they were then remembering with joy their own missions from years past, yet even as their eyes spoke their minds remained fundamentally inaccessible to mine, just as mine was to theirs'.
Many Post-Modernists found reason to despair at this epistemological/ontological alienation of one from another; but long before I ever learned the names of Derrida and Beckett, I already knew that this separation was cause for rejoicing, for exaltation--for my common experience was inexpressibly singular, unique, separate from the world and therefore beyond its reach. Take all I have, but you can never take me from me.
I said many Post-Modernists, not all--a professor of mine last semester discussed her book, God Between the Lips, wherein she posits that Post-Structuralism, a theoretical framework constructed to dismantle and deconstruct religious assurance, nevertheless having to utilize a religious vocabulary, one of faith that a world exists beyond our private perceptions. Such was the project of my mission itself--we gave a book and begged the Puerto Ricans to read it and have an experience for themselves, something incommunicable, un-transferrable, inaccessible even to ourselves, for mine was mine alone, and theirs was theirs alone, and therefore was ours and none else could take it from us. Thus an experience we desired all to have was inexpressably singular, unique, to each of us, a treasure beyond appraisal, a pearl without price, worth the world and inclusive of it all.
Fortuitous, I suppose, that I had this insight on China, for the Buddhist prayer beads, which I had bought as mere tourist kitch at the foot of Huang Shan yet was wearing when the fog lifted over Yellow Mountain and revealed the view the rain cloud and hidden from me (one of the few times in my life when the beauty of a thing brought me reverently to my knees) has recently snapped and scattered. I'd often worn that bracelet, not devotionally per se, but as a reminder that the cloud will lift for me alone and reveal things always there yet new and everlasting.
An end of an era, I'd supposed when it unceremoniously snapped on a Monday or Wednesday morning. But like the old women wandering around the buses in the seeming chaos of an Anqing intersection, the world does indeed flow much more intuitively and perfectly than we are willing to realize, and I'd soon received an invitation from the other Jacob to come spend the night, where we discussed China deep into the night.
Our experiences, like all experience, were singular, unique, ours alone, mine alone, yet these same experiences brought us together and connected us in a manner that happened only when our experiences were allowed to be alone, apart from the world. We had walked those intersections as well, as unique and alone as every other person crossing with us, yet we were altogether, all one, and flowing into and out of each other as ineffably and really as the cloud over Huang Shan, as the flight plans that intersected two Jacobs in space and time, as the Holy Spirit shedding it's light upon the hearts of man--
While our times there did not overlap, we both walked past the exact same farmer's market on the way to class each morning; since it was the same school year, we taught the exact same students in the exact same grades; taught from the exact same text books; played the exact same guitar; worked with the exact same teachers, befriended the exact same students, watched pirated DVDs on the exact same TV, ate out at the exact same restaurants, and wandered around the exact same city. We both visited Beijing, both stood on the Great Wall, we both hiked Huang Shan and saw the view that inspired countless poets and artists before us; in the middle of the most populous country the world has ever known, we both stood in awe at intersections where all walked at once--old women, children, rich, poor, fast, slow, all together with bikes, mopeds, cars, trucks, and buses, and somehow all knew at once how to walk around each other, obeying an order out of chaos alien to our narrow Western consciousness.
Nevertheless, as Jake and I caught up this last weekend and compared notes, we quickly discovered that our Chinese experiences were utterly foreign from each other--he stood on the old, collapsing Great Wall, while I stood on the one restored for the tourists (and we each envied each other because of it); I was in Beijing in the Fall, he in the Spring; I hiked Huang Shan with a friend in the rain, he alone in the sunshine; our friendships and relationships with students, teachers, headmasters, roommates, so on and so forth, were miles apart.
It was good to realize this as we swapped stories--for a few years there I'd begun to gently dismiss my Chinese experience, as something unoriginal, even derivative, for countless English majors and others have made the same pilgrimage over the Pacific as I had, to engage in the exact same occupation. Not that I'd gone to be unique or popular--I went to see something fantastically foreign and boy did I get it--but I confess to feeling slightly embarrassed to have engaged in an adventure that was, after all, rather "pedestrian" after all.
And yet, if ever two Chinese experiences should have been carbon copies it should have been ours, yet though mere days separated my departure from his arrival (and none separated our sheets), our experiences of China were fundamentally different. If these two Jacobs should be see the Middle Kingdom so differently, how much more have I seen China differently than all the other countless Americans who've gone before and after me--and they likewise from me?
My experience was unique, for the exact same reason that all I do is unique--because no moment ever repeats itself, and my experiences and knowledge and perceptions are unreproducible in another. China was consequently reborn to me, and I could treasure that experience once more.
Jake and I's conversation caused me to remember the bright, Sunday morning, a brash young 21-year-old, reporting on my mission to the Stake High Council of the Centralia, WA stake. They asked questions, I answered truthfully and candidly, yet all along I could see in their eyes that these men, these full grown men with knowledge and experience beyond what I could comprehend, had no idea what I had just gone through! Their eyes even spoke silently of how they were then remembering with joy their own missions from years past, yet even as their eyes spoke their minds remained fundamentally inaccessible to mine, just as mine was to theirs'.
Many Post-Modernists found reason to despair at this epistemological/ontological alienation of one from another; but long before I ever learned the names of Derrida and Beckett, I already knew that this separation was cause for rejoicing, for exaltation--for my common experience was inexpressibly singular, unique, separate from the world and therefore beyond its reach. Take all I have, but you can never take me from me.
I said many Post-Modernists, not all--a professor of mine last semester discussed her book, God Between the Lips, wherein she posits that Post-Structuralism, a theoretical framework constructed to dismantle and deconstruct religious assurance, nevertheless having to utilize a religious vocabulary, one of faith that a world exists beyond our private perceptions. Such was the project of my mission itself--we gave a book and begged the Puerto Ricans to read it and have an experience for themselves, something incommunicable, un-transferrable, inaccessible even to ourselves, for mine was mine alone, and theirs was theirs alone, and therefore was ours and none else could take it from us. Thus an experience we desired all to have was inexpressably singular, unique, to each of us, a treasure beyond appraisal, a pearl without price, worth the world and inclusive of it all.
Fortuitous, I suppose, that I had this insight on China, for the Buddhist prayer beads, which I had bought as mere tourist kitch at the foot of Huang Shan yet was wearing when the fog lifted over Yellow Mountain and revealed the view the rain cloud and hidden from me (one of the few times in my life when the beauty of a thing brought me reverently to my knees) has recently snapped and scattered. I'd often worn that bracelet, not devotionally per se, but as a reminder that the cloud will lift for me alone and reveal things always there yet new and everlasting.
An end of an era, I'd supposed when it unceremoniously snapped on a Monday or Wednesday morning. But like the old women wandering around the buses in the seeming chaos of an Anqing intersection, the world does indeed flow much more intuitively and perfectly than we are willing to realize, and I'd soon received an invitation from the other Jacob to come spend the night, where we discussed China deep into the night.
Our experiences, like all experience, were singular, unique, ours alone, mine alone, yet these same experiences brought us together and connected us in a manner that happened only when our experiences were allowed to be alone, apart from the world. We had walked those intersections as well, as unique and alone as every other person crossing with us, yet we were altogether, all one, and flowing into and out of each other as ineffably and really as the cloud over Huang Shan, as the flight plans that intersected two Jacobs in space and time, as the Holy Spirit shedding it's light upon the hearts of man--
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Isn't Halloween Just Weird??
For once a year, we decorate--actually go to the trouble to decorate--our homes with cobwebs, corpses, skeletons, and other such kitsch specifically reminiscent of death, corruption, darkness, and the inevitable encroachment of entropy on us all. And what's more, we don't do so somberly, solemnly, despairingly, with a grim acknowledgment of the dark mystery of the grave that envelops us all--no, no, we celebrate it! We dress up in funny costumes, give candy freely to small children (the one sample of the population that needs least to be hopped up on sugar), we throw parties, we enjoy ourselves on Halloween!
What's our motivation here? Are we unconsciously containing the dread of the hereafter by trivializing it, making levity of it, neutralizing the nameless horror by embracing it whole-heartedly, not simply "staring into the abyss until the abyss stares back into you" but jumping on it gleefully and giving it a fat, wet kiss on the lips?
Maybe we reconcile ourselves to (or at least hide ourselves from) the necessity of dying by swathing ourselves in dead signifiers, since the symbol itself is lifeless? Perhaps we explore, through our costumes and kitsch, not the representation but the absence of signification, for we shall all one day be literally absent from this earth itself?
Perhaps even we collectively participate in some some sort of Bakhtinian Carnivelesque, a burlesque grotesque-realism that degrades everything down to the ground in order to fertilize it and bring it back from the dead, more radiant and full of life than before, just as the Autumn leaves that Halloween inhabits will crumble down to silent (deathly) winter and be reborn as Spring again?
Some combination of all of these? None of these?
All I know is that I have a sudden hankering to carve a Jack-O-Lantern, be in a house with some cobwebs and plastic spiders and black cats, and that I will be dressing up as a "recursive Che" for the fiestas, and I sincerely hope I get some small children Trick-or-Treating for candy. If one of them is dressed in a white-sheet with holes a la Charlie Brown, it will make my night.
What's our motivation here? Are we unconsciously containing the dread of the hereafter by trivializing it, making levity of it, neutralizing the nameless horror by embracing it whole-heartedly, not simply "staring into the abyss until the abyss stares back into you" but jumping on it gleefully and giving it a fat, wet kiss on the lips?
Maybe we reconcile ourselves to (or at least hide ourselves from) the necessity of dying by swathing ourselves in dead signifiers, since the symbol itself is lifeless? Perhaps we explore, through our costumes and kitsch, not the representation but the absence of signification, for we shall all one day be literally absent from this earth itself?
Perhaps even we collectively participate in some some sort of Bakhtinian Carnivelesque, a burlesque grotesque-realism that degrades everything down to the ground in order to fertilize it and bring it back from the dead, more radiant and full of life than before, just as the Autumn leaves that Halloween inhabits will crumble down to silent (deathly) winter and be reborn as Spring again?
Some combination of all of these? None of these?
All I know is that I have a sudden hankering to carve a Jack-O-Lantern, be in a house with some cobwebs and plastic spiders and black cats, and that I will be dressing up as a "recursive Che" for the fiestas, and I sincerely hope I get some small children Trick-or-Treating for candy. If one of them is dressed in a white-sheet with holes a la Charlie Brown, it will make my night.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
English and Computer Science: Same Words, Different Languages
A former roommate and I once did a quick comparison about how each of our respective fields (computer science and English lit.) used similar vocabulary but with completely different definitions. For example:
Deconstruct:
-In English, to identify the unstated implicit assumptions underlying every textual statement.
-In Computer Science, to carefully take apart a machine piece by piece.
Binary
-In English, to artificially construct two sides as being inherently opposed to each other, with one side being privileged over the other by virtue of said construction.
-In Computer Science, the series of open and closed circuits by which computer language and software interface is constructed.
Explode:
-In English, to invalidate a previously accepted assumption that has far-reaching implications.
-In Computer Science, to lose the machine itself in a burst of flames.
Language
-In English, style, content, and meaning.
-In Computer Science, the code by which the engineer interacts with the software.
Same goes for Grammar, Syntax, and Text.
Unpack
-In English, to explore every possibility of meaning in a statement.
-In Computer Science, to remove things out of a box.
Registers
-In English, to acknowledge the co-presence of multiple possibilities of meaning at once.
-In Computer Science, for a program to function at multiple levels and/or to register a new product on-line.
To Create a Space
-In English, to formulate an argument in such a manner as to allow for new avenues of discussion.
-In Computer Science, presumably to move some boxes and/or furniture around to make room for a new device.
Piracy
-English: A Robert Louis Stevenson novel!
-Computer Science: Free music/movies/software!
Deus ex Machina
-In English, a lazy plot resolution maneuver.
-In Computer Science, worship of the machines that will one day take us over (just kidding).
Deconstruct:
-In English, to identify the unstated implicit assumptions underlying every textual statement.
-In Computer Science, to carefully take apart a machine piece by piece.
Binary
-In English, to artificially construct two sides as being inherently opposed to each other, with one side being privileged over the other by virtue of said construction.
-In Computer Science, the series of open and closed circuits by which computer language and software interface is constructed.
Explode:
-In English, to invalidate a previously accepted assumption that has far-reaching implications.
-In Computer Science, to lose the machine itself in a burst of flames.
Language
-In English, style, content, and meaning.
-In Computer Science, the code by which the engineer interacts with the software.
Same goes for Grammar, Syntax, and Text.
Unpack
-In English, to explore every possibility of meaning in a statement.
-In Computer Science, to remove things out of a box.
Registers
-In English, to acknowledge the co-presence of multiple possibilities of meaning at once.
-In Computer Science, for a program to function at multiple levels and/or to register a new product on-line.
To Create a Space
-In English, to formulate an argument in such a manner as to allow for new avenues of discussion.
-In Computer Science, presumably to move some boxes and/or furniture around to make room for a new device.
Piracy
-English: A Robert Louis Stevenson novel!
-Computer Science: Free music/movies/software!
Deus ex Machina
-In English, a lazy plot resolution maneuver.
-In Computer Science, worship of the machines that will one day take us over (just kidding).
Friday, October 1, 2010
The Test Itself is Tautologically the Test Itself
I had a professor last semester who informed us that back during the 80s, there was a trend in literary studies whereby it was fashionable to say that, if one deconstructed a text enough, then what one finds is that every work is really about the medium itself--i.e. every book is really just about writings books, every movie is really just about making movies, every TV show is really just about TV shows, etc, etc.
We've since moved on to Foucaultian power networks and such, but as I prepare to retake the GRE this afternoon, I can't help but feel that all a test really tests you on is, well, your ability to take a test. Every essay you're assigned isn't on your command of the material, but on your ability to write an essay. And all exams examinate is, well, your examination abilities. At least, so I keep telling myself.
We've since moved on to Foucaultian power networks and such, but as I prepare to retake the GRE this afternoon, I can't help but feel that all a test really tests you on is, well, your ability to take a test. Every essay you're assigned isn't on your command of the material, but on your ability to write an essay. And all exams examinate is, well, your examination abilities. At least, so I keep telling myself.
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