Tom Sawyer: The Dark Forest and Black Trains

Playing Hookey on an official sense, but running away from emotional torment on the personal level,  Tom runs into the forest.   After pondering the magic marble-finding incantations and witch’s hoax, he hears the announcment of another presence:

“Just here the blast of a toy tin trumpet came faintly down the green aisles of the forest. Tom flung off his jacket and trousers, turned a suspender into a belt, raked away some brush behind the rotten log, disclosing a rude bow an arrow, a lath sword and a tin trumpet, and in a moment had seized those things and bounded away, barelegged, with fluttering shirt” (Location 941)   For Tom the forest is more.  Shedding his layers of civilizing attire, he turns the adornments of his constraints into functional tools of the forest.

And in Twain, Tom and his friends are so intimately in tuned with the forest that they can remember particular spots in the brush.  They have tools, specifically “rude bow[s] an arrow[s]” lying in wait for them if as in any moment in the forest they may leap into their indigenous spirits.  Though Tom could have just as easily played cowboys an indians (though this is more likely a form of play that he would have played had he been a 20th century boy).  Instead with the metallic blast of the trumpet and Tom’s accrued armory the forest has become mideval.  Sherwood forest has become a drama that Tom can live and participate in with both his active body and imagination rather than the imaginative place in a compelling albeit elusive book world (945).

The forest experience that Twain imagines for Tom is one that is perhaps at the door of civilization proper and the romantic primitive.  In just a few lines Twain invokes the primitives of the Native Americans, an imagery that would not necessarily have been glorified by Tom but would have been alluring nonetheless (think Injun Joe).   We then have the highly romantic chivalry of Robin Hood, but still with it’s Catholic rule lingering over rather unenlightened.  But Twain is also particular to let us see that the boys are playing by a script that they learned from the book.  Literacy and particularly evidence of the print culture of mid 19th century are suddenly interjected upon the primitive forest.  In fact they are not only imposed upon, it is by way of a certain kin of literacy that this particular imagining of the primitive and the romantic can take place, a dynamic that is only further underscored by the fact that we are witnessing the scene by way of printed text.

It’s important to understand that the forest is not without rule, nor is it simply an inbetween. It has its own “solemn monarchs,” with “crowns” and “drooping regalia” (Location 1440).  The significance of the forest as a mystically preserved site of the past is reiterated at the end of chapter eight.  Having to adorn their clothes, their civilized selves, once more and lay aside their accoutrement, the boys do so if not begrudgingly than with much lament:  “The boys dressed themselves, hid their accouterments, and went off grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss.  They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever” (Location 964). Here the liminality happens at the threshold, the exit and entrance [which is not just spatially defined, but also defined by the prepatory action of putting on or taking off clothes].  This threshold is a meeting place of past and present/ of noble primitiveness and modern citizenry, the space where outlaws and presidents both occupy the imagination.

It is hard to know whether Tom who ultimately seems to enjoy being the commander and chief and has a decidedly natural means of politicking for his interest would really say such or if it s Twain speaking through him and with the boys his own point of view.  Nor am I sure that in this moment the distinction matters.  For what we can see is that Sherwood Forest outlaws and the United States President are juxtaposed within the same line and that juxtaposition happens in the liminal space of leaving the forest.   Here Twain positions the child on what Victor Turner might call the “Edge of the Bush,” but I still prefer to think about as another type of threshold, the exit and entrance to the edifice of the woods, which is sometimes pictured as an edifice with its low hanging canopy, its thick walls of trees, it’s carpeted floor, an its many caverns and room like nooks.

At times the forest is a domestic edifice, a hideout or a hide, and at times, particularly at night, its architectures takes on a sense of religiosity: “The climbing fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared tree-trunks of their forest temple, and upon the varnished foliage and festooning vines” (Location 1440).  Here again we see the forest as ancient albeit edifice all the same. The trunks as pillars, the varnish, and the forest as temple bring the harken to ancient greek and roman temples.

I am interested in thinking about the forest as another edifice because one I think it’s important in understanding the relation of  the forest to the farm plantation and the town.  Some sixty years later, Faulkner will make the edifice of the forest more explicit in his Go Down Moses in which the deforestation that was set in motion with the push to grow agrarian America in the early 19th century started.   But it’s important to understand [CITE THIS ??] that as the plantation and the town become more established, there is a kind of imaginative displacement in which it is the the farm land that is natural, normative rather and it is the forest that is other.  The forest where ghosts and strange unnatural things  (that are really always already super natural) is secondary to the clearing and it becomes like an artifice that if it wasn’t explicitly built by man has been let live by man.    [It is true that we could say that the forest is a liminal space as Victor Turner’s studies have indicated and as much as this is a particularly childhood space, then  perhaps yes, but I within the context of the novel, that is both within the contexts of novels in general and within the context of Tom’s boy life, the forest is always there.  It is not a heterotopia, but the space of entering and exiting the physical and the realm of the forest is not as static.  How far in the forest must Tom go before he is safe from being spotted from adults or before the charm of its imaginative life can kick in?  How close to the edge of the close to the clearing can they get with their bare legs?

The thing about the forest is that whether or not there are people in it, it is always baring the aura of being “unpeopled”.   When Tom and the boys runaway to Jackson Island we learn that the uninhabited island is “abreast a dense and almost wholly unpeopled forest.”  The island itself is “wooded” (Location 1323).  And I would like to suggest that the presence of the island again supports my notion that the forest is not the betwixt and between place, but that it is another place.   For Jackson Island (which is next to but not a part of the forest)  is perhaps more clearly a piece of literary geography that speaks clearly to the symbolic liminality of childhood if it tried.  Being only a small strip of an island with only about half a mile of water separating it from the mainland the place is so perfectly suited for adventures, wildness, brushes with danger and getting found and easily going home.

There are numerous other happenings in the forest that make it more clearly a space of ritual, haunts and beliefs that the adult world in the novel seem excluded from, and further more a set of happenings that one must play hookey to see.  I will speak later on this when I talk about the child as a vehicle for playing hookey.  But what I would like to point out here about the forest is the kind of divine like descriptions Twain’s narrator embellishes with  Part of this move seems to be the narrators always wry and sometimes belittling way of indulging his characters, but some of it seems to be the narrator’s acceptance that this is what the forest is in this world.

–

“It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would return to civilization” (Location 1365). Here civilization bears the ghosts.  It is the tainted (the non virginal) forest.  Even as much as this statement perhaps most clearly represents the kind of nostalgic longing for a pre-industrial industrial intimate relationship with nature that Bill Brown says that Twain is in every way invested in.  At the same time, the idea of the “virginal” forest is a very industrial minded idea.  The idea that civilization has been productive, birthed some things, and the forest has not is in fact an echo more prevalent of Twain’s time than of his throw back to medieval Sherwood forest, which would not have seen the forest as virginal but rather loud with thieves and outlaws.   Even further here we can think  of the the boys as pioneering through the virginal in so many Freudian registers.  They are in this way akin to the movement of the machine, specifically the train into the forest.  They are not on a specific track, but they are a literary means of traveling into and out of the forest.  A literary means of conquering and/or harnessing the symbolic resources of the forest.    Where Benjamin Franklin would have the forest totally cleared and everyone harvesting potatoes, Twain and Hawthorne too with Pearl seem to opt for a world where the clearing rules but that through the child we export and import a host of symbolic and imaginative natural resources.

 

 

Chamberlain’s Colorful Mural or The Child: A Study in the Evolution of Man

Hey,  so I’m trying again. I just did this post and then I lost it due to internet outage. .. boo.  Let’s see what I can recreate.

Hey,

I’m back.  I want to look at another turn of the century scholar. Alexander Francis Chamberlain was an Anthropologist at Clark University. In 1907 he published his studies in a book called The Child: A Study in the Evolution of Man.  Chamberlain saw his work though as being an interdisciplinary draw from psychology, biology, and embryology (though not with the objective to reconcile these fields together).  He see’s his project as a study in evolution through a close study of the child.   He does draw heavily upon the work and influences of G. Stanley Hall, Franz Boas, Louis Robinson and D.H.W. Burnham.  The work is divided into several chapters.  In this post I want to look at a couple of the chapters:   the first chapter,  “The Meaning of the Helplessness of Infancy”, Ch. VII “The Child as Revealer of the Past”, Ch. VIII “The Child and the Savage” and Chapter IX “The Child and the Criminal.”

I am most interested in the rhetoric, images and examples, however before I begin to piece through these things,  I want to in this post talk a little about the underlying logic that I understand to be at work in this study.  I want to point this logic out first not only because it is essential to understand how I can read the conclusions being presented in the work but also I hope that in some later posts down the line, I will be able to compare this logic with the logic that literary authors and particularly black authors display in their depictions (which are always already suggestive of conclusions) about the child.

To be fair to Chamberlain he notes several times throughout the book the problem with essentializing “the” child as if there isn’t a diversity of children.  He explains that for every attribute described there will be some children who are uncharacteristically representative of these traits, and a few children will seem almost devoid of any traits identified as being indicative of “the child.
THE LOGIC: however despite these disclaimers relies on essentialization).  I don’t know if that is a function of the discipline since a part of his goal is in fact to understand and define the child as occupying and moving through particular (and thus identifiable) stages of human evolution [Interestingly enough in later posts, I hope to to show how literary and visual artists seem to capture this same dynamic positioning child in and moving through doorways and other articfices].  Like Sully’s work Chamberlain is making an argument that the child is the key to studying human evolution and thus the social and hard sciences must pay more attention to the study of the child.   Yet throughout the study, Chamberlain relies on the assumption that there is some essential (evolutionary) link between the child and lower races (indigenous peoples of the non European world) and lower species (especially monkeys and dogs).

For example:  Dr. Robinson holds that every trait, ‘physical or moral, of the young human being can be traced back to its forerunner in the offspring of

The pattern of logic here is that if A reasonably can be said to have an effect [esp. a positive one] on B then A must exist solely in order for B.   For example when talking about the size of human babies compared to monkey babies, his data notes that monkey babies are smaller than human babies, which must evolutionary be in order to allow the mother monkey to carry the baby as she moves through the trees.  Although the data is only observational, the interpretation becomes causal and inserted into how he understands human evolution functioning.   Because man has ceased traveling by trees, his babies can be slightly bigger however he notes that there are still resonances of this inclination in the babies because most of them have a grasp instinct that is a hold over from our monkey past in which grabbing palm first was essential way of getting around.

In a chapter called “The Child and Women” it is amazing that pages are spent just on talking about the physiological differences between the lower and higher races and whether the differences in the lower races are actually similarities to apes or humans.  The woman seems to drop out of the conversation because all in all there is no way to talk about within an recaptiulationist mind work without a kind of constant raking over the standings of the lower races.   In this section, Chamberlain in suggesting that primitive peoples might have more advanced body forms, but Europeans have more developed faces and cranial forms explains that “… certain cranial peculiarities, which Virchow has noted, cause some of the black races to approach the child or the female type.” (431).   What interests me here is the way in which black races approach a child and female form as if those forms are outside the black races, as if (which is perhaps the truth) the nature of the child and women form is not constituted by any study or understanding of the negro form. Again these inferences can only be made by working with an assumption that there is some essential child type, which is a little bit of a circular reasoning, since precisely what is in question or still in a pending state of being described is this child type.

I think we must keep in mind the work’s tendency to both assume an essential essence or type and to move to conflate what is at best correlation if not only coincidence into causation.  It’s important not only because it helps us to not take as truth any of the findings, but also because it gives us insight in to what I see as the narrative desire of this work, which is just that a desire to make narrative.  More specifically this type of narrative building seems to fit with myth making.  It is obsessed with origins, ontology, and it out and out believes in an original life essence.  There is a myth making here on the level of Barthes Mythologies.  That is to say the emphasis on big white heads and little monkeys swinging through the trees are not just if at all a part of data gathered.  They are a collection of signs.  While there isn’t one coherent referent like the saluting black soldier on the French magazine cover as there is in Barthes discussion, we might think of there indeed being something like a mural in this work, with certain reoccurring visuals (i.e. heads) that begin to act within a certain semiotics.  That is to saythe head works on a purely semiotic level.  Though the tone and the rhetoric and the genre is of science, empiricism, and objectivity.  There is no scientific study of neurology.  There is only a study of the visual sign of intelligence, the head.  And it is as if the larger the head than by semiotic reasoning, the larger the intelligence.

I am by no means accusing Chamberlain of being non scientific as much as I am suggesting that his work shows a kind of semiotic logic undergirding (at least) this turn of the century scientific method.   I am by no means the first to suggest that science is as much narrative making and at times as literary as literature.  [See Wald's Introduction to Contagion or Brennan and Sedgwick on affect.]  But I think it’s important to think about this as a mural because the mural or the tableau as Susan Stewart calls it in her On Longing has a long standing effect on our sense of origins, world making, and epistemoligies, but even as murals seem to be set on stone or a like substance in an official tome/tone they are always also a disruption of the surface of the material and there size a disruption of scale and the real.  They have both regulating, disruptive, and magical possibilities.  [note to myself and all you who are a part of my reading self: think about Nandi Cohen's dissertation work on Peruvian murals and their history of pre colombian and and post colonial influences and resistances].  What I am getting at here I don’t quite note, but what I am going to conclude with here is the following:

*Chamberlain as a representative developmental scientist and his narrative as a representative text is based on a logic that traffics in a priori essences and types and that conflates correlations and coincidences with causalities.

* This logic allows for the treatment and observations of signs to stand as the scientific treatment of specimens.

*This masked semiotics allows the study to become a mural that uses and “adds to” certain signs in a way that works with the various and overlapping strands of signification to form and/or reinforce mythologies.

*This is important because it allows us to think of the connection between literature and this developmental science and more specifically to think about the kind of worlds, fantastical creatures, and flights of imagination that this text creates by way of reveling in.

All the Pretty Machines: democracy by epidermalization; rule by expert machinists

I have to confront that in my suggestion that we consider childhood as analogous and corollary to machines  (and in the eyes of scientists, houses), my leanings toward the machine as an intimate of childhood in turn-of-the-century America’s narratives might also be because of my own attraction to machines.   This is to say there are perhaps other analogies with their own corollaries at work in the construction of childhood.  For instance there persists in rhetoric around children a discussion of pure soul, spiritual essence, etc.  Nature, animal, and criminals also make frequent appearances in the literary and scientific constructions of children.

And yet as I am reading the Kasson, I can see that the aesthetics of the machine are an important part of 19th century national and artistic aesthetic development.  As Kasson argues, Puritanical turned Republican zeal for a perfectionism, characterized by efficiency and mass production, readied Americans to look upon the systematic raising of pumps, the rhythmic pulling of spindles, and even the almost wild clatter and roar of engines and factory machines.  After providing several quotes of 19th century observers appreciating the beauty of machines, Kasson goes on to explain how those like Horatio Greenough sought to “apply the aesthetic lesson of machinery to the higher beauty of the fine arts.” (145)  “Fine” art (the fine being only a distinction that started to grow in the 19th century) and inventive technology share several common roots… they both stemmed from a shared prehistory in the artisan craftsmanship and design.   They were like siblings (to borrow again from Canada’s depiction of journalism and literary arts in the 19th century), with the inventors often claiming superiority on the grounds of being both useful and beautiful.

Kasson goes on to explain some of how that shared geneaolgy influences Machine aesthetic.  He points out that American machine’s were known for their elaborate ornamentation.  He argues that this might be in part due to the fact that in America early machine frames were made of wood and the artisan practice was of the same yarn as cabinet makers, and and other domestic woodworkers for whom aesthetic flourish and design was an integral part of the craft.  He also argues that because the machinery was complex and few really understood them that evaluation was often made by outward appearance.  It’s too much to say that it was a kind of epidermalization of the machine in order to allow the power of quality judgment to remain in the hands of the consumer, but it is interesting to think about inventors/and engineers pandering the outside casing of the machine to the dominate fashion and ideologies in away that allowed them to still preserve right of expertise over the mysterious internal mechanics.
I am paying attention to this move because the emphasis placed on the outward aesthetic and visual categorization here is among a larger 19th century trend of increasing reliance on the optic and the visual.  In everything from understandings of racial categories, physiology to the rise of photography and development of the cinema, 19th century America at least race to progress is also a fervent flight into the world of optic, not the least of which being Foucault’s panopotic.  In this analogous relationship between childhood and the machine, we might also think of the aesthetics of childhood that developmental scientists and literary artists purport.  What is its nature and what is it’s prehistory?  Assuming the outward aesthetics of the child, that is drawing from the already common and popular aesthetic notions of the child in visual arts, literature, and subsequently national imagery . . . developmental scientist too seem to establish themselves as experts of the internal working while always bowing to the established ornamentation of childhood and the child.

Think particularly when Chamberlain references what the common mother or teacher or parent know to be true from their outward observations of children.  These moments while they serve the purpose of reinforcing already popular notions of mother and child and the child as a universal figure that everyone has a legitimate knowledge about are almost always buttressed with Chamberlain’s quick follow up that even still the woman, the parent, and the teacher’s role in the defining and working the science of childhood is confined to a role of observation.  Only those scientists of psychology are uniquely trained to understand and interpret how observations do or do not relate to the inner biological and mental  functioning of the class of humans called child or occupying that state called childhood.  The corollary is just as true in this cases, when we consider as I mentioned in my earlier posts on child studies, that these scientists were often viewing childhood and their study of it as a kind of vehicle for the study and production of human race and its progressive evolution.  Everywhere in the G. Stanley Hall he argues for the classifying and promotion of the normative childhood factors as the way to ultimately improve the race both spiritually and physically and cognitively.

So… to wrap up

*Machines in America have an Aesthetic history that is utterly tied to Purtanical Republican desire for and attraction to forms and symbols of perfection.

*Machine technology and Fine arts share a prehistory in Artisan craftsmanship

*The more complex the machine and the harder for the machine to communicate the perfection of its inner working the more engineers and inventors designed on the outward ornamentation and design to continue meeting the public visual and aesthetic notions of industrial perfection.

* This move to valuation based off of the outward aesthtic signifying of perfection and efficiency mirrors the country’s overall move to a reliance on the visual in the 19th century.

* We can see an analogous trend in the way developemntal scientists detail and define themselves as experts on the inward mechanism of childhood while still appearling to the outward form and aesthetics as existing on universal plane that even the common man/woman can speak on.

*Even as we can see the analogy, we must also humor the possibility of childhood as an actual corollary, since at the end of the day, developmental scientists at least made no mystery about their studies of (constructions of) childhood as serving a greater function beyond the child whether it be as the basis for the psychological understanding of man or the biological understanding of embryology.

It’s true Benjamin Franklin was a Jerk

In D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence says of Benjamin Franklin, “And now I , at least, know why I cant’ stand Benjamin.  He tries to take away my wholeness and my dark forest , my freedom.  For how can any man be free without an illimitable background? And Benjamin tries to shove into barbed wire paddock and make me grow potatoes or Chicagoes” (24).   When my friend, fellow phd dork, Clare posted an excerpt of that quote on her away status last year, I thought it was super hilarious.  Mostly the sound and the idea of someone taking away “my dark forest” tickled me.  When she told me where it came from and I read the Williams, I was like, “daang”; I never really considered Benjamin Franklin.

But as I’ve been reading more and more about the rise of cinema and machines in the 19th century, Franklin looms larger and larger as a sinister figure, perhaps with horns.  In addition to being rather a prick o pricks who had no problem ripping off other people’s research and clogging up anyone else’s claims to inventions with crazy lawsuits, there’s just something again and again scary about Franklin’s ability to wax poetic about how we don’t need poetry.

In John F. Kasson’s Civilizing the Machine he quotes Franklin as voicing and helping to set America reigning idea about technology vs. arts:  “‘All things have their season, ‘ counseled Franklin, ‘and with young countries as with young men, you must curb their fancy to strengthen their judgment. . . . To America, one school master is worth a dozen poets, and the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael.’ . . ‘Nothing is good or beautiful but in the measure that is useful.’ “  (143).  Even those John Adams who Kasson labeled “[i]ntuitively sensuous” 143, still distrusted art’s ability to arrest the senses, to elicit powerful flows of emotion that “could become ready tools in the subversion of liberty” and the creation of the public.  Art needed to work to bolster the republic.   But it isn’t art here that is the problem is the sensuousness, the getting carried away with something, it is potential of unbounded sensuality, that is of experiencing and being more than what you can know or describe or control.  This is what D.H. Lawrence means by the “dark forest,” which he says is his soul, or rather “That my soul is a dark forest.”  and “That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.”  (Lawrence) 22.

The dark forest is also Hawthorne’s and Twains and Ambrose.  Hawthorne’s story are full of woods and the black man who lives in them.   For a greater discussion of this Hawthorne’s forest read “BLANKO”.   Twain though most known for his rivers is by know means a stranger to the forest.  The forest which is not always dark for Twain, but always away, features in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and parts of A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court.  What is most interesting to me about all three of these authors is that they are able to explore their dark forest most freely by way of their child characters who can find particular trees, make patches of sun danceable, and who see the whole of and adventure and a war at the end of a sturdy twig.

The idea that the soul is a deep dark forest and that children are the ones who can move in it is by no means depart from the prevailing rhetoric of the 19th century. Though at times and depending on the speaker there is more or less emphasis on the particular darkness of the forest the child travels in, we can see even in Franklin’s comment about a young nation, the assumed truth of children needed to be shielded from fancy.  What is also perhaps interestingly implied in Franklin is that fancy is for the cultivated and the adult.  It is a luxury to be earned after age, wisdom and industry are achieved.  This is interesting because it sets children up to be or at least to have in abundance a valuable resource for adults, that they themselves cannot manage or properly enjoy.

Though in some ways these authors who write children imaginatively roaming the forest stand against Franklin, by claiming that dark forest, by reveling in it by way or writing and reading.  Yet at the same time there is something of a kinship between Franklin’s implied notion that art and creativity while abounding in the young ought to be the luxury of the grown.  For these literary children at the end of the day are constructed by and for adults.  Tom Sawyer, as Bill Brown points out is less about capturing the essence of some true boy as it is of materializing and giving a body to nostalgic and ready-to-be iconic notion of the adventurous and romantically wild boy.  That is to say he is the materializing of adult dreams, the dark forests of those who supposedly working tirelessly to deforest their woods and make something useful of all that lumber and space.

so to wrap up…

* Franklin expresses an idea popular among his contemporaries about the young nation and development of technology and machines  vs cultivation of the arts that also has a corollary with his notions of adult maturity and progress and childhood fancy.

* D.H. Lawrence hilariously and poignantly describes Franklin’s preference of industry, technology, efficiency and the pruning of self towards “The Perfectibility of Man!” (15).

*The image of the dark forest is not Lawrence’s alone. It shows up in a number of 19th century author’s work as both the perimeters and the boundless possibilities around the official society.

*children continue to be the characters who can explore this wood freely and intimately.

House vs Machine

So here is something I’ve been thinking about.   My interest in children as machines has only happened in the past three to six months.  About six months to a year before then I had been more interested in the corollary and analogy between children and edifices, particularly houses.  In classic, ducker inclination to keep everything, I am beginning to wonder if there is a corollary and analogy between the child and both houses and machine.   When I look at author’s depiction of children in 19th century it is hard if not outrageous to notice the importance of movement.   Hawthorne, Twain, James, Alcott, Crane’s child characters, interestingly enough their girls too, foreground movement as a central elements.  They go where adult characters cannot fit.  They go in orders and paths that adults cannot find efficient, and the quality of their movement with jerks, delays tumbles and swings are from the adult world entirely inappropriate.  Remembering that this movement even as it works to capture some recognizable element that we have know as an essence of the child is still the result of adult imaginings… the child literally becomes a vehicle for these author’s worlds to expand physically and imaginative, the child is a literary machine that allows for a relish blur between the reality agreed upon and some extrareality still possible in Hawthorne’s Forrest, on Twain’s roof tops, and Alcott’s banisters.  The child is a literary machine for movement and not much expansion or development as growth.   James perhaps more than any of the authors plays with this notion.  James’ Maise and his ghostly children in Turn of the Screw, and even his Daisy Miller move between houses, about the town and the house, and while that movement is essential to the plot, it may be more accurate to describe that movement as a tangle and a growth rather than a clear linear and/or development.  The Turn of the Screw is indeed just that, turn after turn.  The mystery never unfolds, the children never progress, but instead there is an awkward twisting and turning back upon itself and then at times jutting out of itself that mirrors the children’s sudden excursions in the night after days of regular movements in the house.   What is interesting about these authors narrative constructions of children and childhood is that it at once seems to acknowledge that a certain unwieldy movement and growth are essential components to the nature of the sociality and life present in those said to occupy this space of childhood.  Yet at the same time these constructions clearly show how the construction of the child, the rendering of a recognizable depiction of childhood allows the author access to the seemingly inaccessible for the adult.     In this way they show their shared geneology with developmental scientists, James and James being literally brothers.  For the notion that the child is by way of being in a threshold, a kind of portal, provides the heart force of the recapitulationist science.  Believing that phylogeny repeats ontogeny, that children in their individual development go through all the stages of man’s evolution, developmental scientists and particularly psychologists saw children as the key to the study of the past as well as the doorway to ensuring future evolution of the race.   The language of doors, thresholds, and portals was key to the rhetoric used in these texts.  I believe that this imagery of the child that is both going through a door and providing access to a door is a shared component of authors and scientists.  The authors use their constructions of the child to create worlds and plots and scenarios that are lost to the official eye of the adult world, it allows to go back or rather to release the still present imagination of the adult, while still allowing the adult author claims to a realist style, while still being smarter, more rational, and responsible than the child.

Yet the authors seem fascinated by the movement and narrative growth made possible by their imaginings of the child.  They are of the notion that children move throughout spaces of childhood, spaces that are either not accessible or not wholly accessible to adult.  Their constructions of children than also suggest that through the narrative pondering and imagining the child, the reader who may be otherwise quite respectably adult can ride through childhood spaces.  And authors  have the added benefit of watching these children craft the space of the childhood in their narrative movements.  The narrative construction of the child in literary works becomes a kind of mobile machine for producing and experience childhood space, while at the same time, and perhaps most distinctly for reinforcing the parameters of the adult world and the adult narrative.

Development scientists are more clearly concerned with the threshold.  They are not as interested as the movement of and within childhood as they are with defining the perimeters of childhood.  For developemental science childhood and its extension, adolescence are more like a transitional neighborhood project.  Here is where those who are not thought to be able to live on their own reside.  Their neighborhood has a myriad of programs designed by the adults in the incorporated communities surrounding this project and designed for the habilitation of the child into a functional adult.   It is true that very early on the projects get more and more crowded, for there are some who will never leave the projects.  And it is they that begin to make up its mythology, it’s cultural expression, its aura, as well as becoming seen as integral parts of the landscape of this neighborhood, which while perhaps exciting and creative is ultimately dangerous, dirty, encroaching, and contagious.   Children for developmental science are in and at the doorway of the community of childhood.  They are at potential doorways, portals by which scientists can study the landscape of the very neighborhood they have helped build.

I know I’m traveling on metaphors here, and it is how I unabashedly move in life.  Still I think there is something to be said here.  Just as Canada argues that journalism and literary arts were siblings who grew apart in the 19th century as a chasm grew around increasing investments in the truth but with very different notions about what constitutes the truth and what methodologically constitutes accquring and presenting the truth,  I believe that literary authors and developmental scientists are siblings in this fascination with the child.   The chasm then that grows between them exists in the difference between imagining childhood as a house and children as doors or imagining childhood as a plethora of sites and imagining for which children are both the machines that produce that space and the vehicle by which one can explore that space. This chasm I have no doubts overlaps with Canada’s discussion about a growing concern about the methodology for portraying truth.

Okay these are my rants for today.

Project Update #2

Okay I don’t know  if this is really what my project is about, but this is how I’m starting to think about it for Mellon.

This dissertation proposes to explore notions of childhood and constructions of children in America as a modern apparatus, more extremely, as a machine, invented in the 19^th century and developed throughout the turn of the century.  Thinking of constructions of childhood in this way will enable not only a more critical conversation about the constellations of meanings at work when we refer to the child or when we depict the child, but it will also enable a more generative or at least, and i daresay more importantly, textured exploration of the possibilities that exist within and  because of, and yet still escape the machine . . .The space inside the machine, meaning the space that is in but not of the machine because it is not inherently among its constituent parts and yet it is always there and must be there and is there whenever the parts are assembled.   In the machine of childhood between its mechanism is space that is aligned with if it  not always a part of blackness, childishness, movement and growth.

Thinking about childhood as modern machine will enable us to see childhood not so much as a universal experience or a natural right but as an apparatus constructed by the narratives of literary authors, developmental scientists, evolutionists, and (often religious) reformists.  Indeed it has already been illustrated again and again since Philip Aires that childhood is culturally constructed.  It is not that childhood is constructed that I want to argue but that it is constructed in particular manner that places it intimate kinship with the great technologies of modernity at least within the US, childhood is on line with if not in between the train and the projector.   Indeed it is not so dissimilar from how Jean Baudry discusses the projector reel.  As Baudry explains, the camera and projector reel are machines that produces its product without any reference to the construction.  They propose  a naturalness and realness to the image it produces for consumption.  All the while it keeps invisible the assemblage of mechanics that makes the image possible.  It is this invisibility which allows the camera and the projector to transmit ideology without making it known as such.  Similarly childhood as I hope to make explicit, building on the already existing observations of other scholars, is a machine whose function is the making of the normative adult, the “man” who is cultured and civilized, who is citizen.  But it produces the adult without making any reference to its own construction or the mechanics  of how it shapes and brings about the adult. Scientists and authors alike position themselves as simply relating natural occurrence, rather than constructing a narrative image that promotes particular thoughts about what childhood is and ought to be.

While looking at the mechanics of childhood and developmental science will allow us to think through the ideological investments in such a thing as the child, looking at childhood as a machine must also help us be aware of the difference between those who could be said to be children or traversing the space of childhood and childhood, which i am arguing is not a space like a field or a edonic lost valley as is so often romanticized by poets and doctors alike, but that it is more liken to the space  (and it is true it is an imagine of a space) between and in a machine, that is a space with gears coming down and presses cramping up, conveyor belts and suspension,  but it is all the same  a space.   Like a train childhood’s developmental lines are linear and tracked and full of vibrations.  Like the train, childhood is thought about as a journey between two points in which deviations are not allowed and/or are considered extremely dangerous.   But also like the train there people on the train who are at once essential to the inner life of the machinery, their bones and skin and heart feeling the steady tremor of  metal on metal, the slight whiz of the wind against the windows.   There body adjusting to the speed and undergoing a multi-sensual perception change in relationship to their environment.   Thinking of childhood and rhetorical constructions of the child as a machine that carries one away  from infant to adult allows us to think of those who fall under the rubrics of children as passengers, as not reducible to but as part of the assemblage of parts (accounting for why it is so hard at times to distinguish between the image of the child and a person is actually thought to be a child).  They are also being carried away by the machine, which is to say that there is a movement, growth, and sociality within the machine of childhood that while it would be foolish to think we could harness and explicate in general does exist and that we can pay it as much as possible attention to understand what to me seems nothing less than an everyday miracle which is the untracked and untrainable that not only exists within the modern machine but is in some ways made possible by it.

Sully: Children as Mediators to Our Black Ghosts

At the foundation of my exploration is a reconciling or at least a determined desire to deal with rather than pretend away 19th century notions of childishness and childhood as being on par with/synonymous with/ even occupying the space of the primitive, savage, the dark, and black.  These words are not synonyms in and of themselves, but they do in self-help literature, developmental science, evolutionary theory, and literature of the 19th and turn of the century seem t be used interchangeably to get at something that I will (in a move that I believe is more generous/generative than original authors might have ever intended) think of of as “blackness”

In this post, I want to layout some of the rhetoric that I am encountering in these turn-of-the-century texts.  As with all of the posts (I imagine) this will be a post in progress.  Today I’ll just start with one author, but I hope to continue to add in the upcoming week work by Chamberlin, G. Stanley Hall, and next week I hope to include some of the places where I see the literature mimicking this language.  Feel free to post comments and help me out if you find stuff.

In 1895  James Sully, psychologist, copyrighted Studies of Childhood.  I’m working with the 1910 D. Appleton and Co. publication.

Sully,  like many scientists of his day, assumes certain evolutionary truisms [see:  discussion on Chamberlin and Sully for greater discussion of this idea] that I will argue leave their trace resonance on conceptions of the child even after notions of recaptiulation become less overtly in vogue.   Assumptions:  1) There are lower and higher races of humanity.   2) The lower races are actually preserved specimens of the higher race’s evolutionary past.  Thus 3) The primitives, savages (the lower races) found amongst the people of Africa, South America, Indonesia and their respective diasporas constitute living examples of these lower races which preserve for us something of  our evolutionary pass.  What Sully wants to point out here is that children (and by this he means children of the civilized) are also in close relationship to this primitive past:

“As we all know,”  Sully states in his introduction, “the lowest races of mankind stand in close proximity to the animal world.”  (5)  To be clear, the lowest races are those of the primitive and the savage indigenous places found (usually in the warmer climates) of Africa, South America, and Indonesia and their respective diasporas.  What interests Sully, and myself as well albeit for reasons I think are different, is that “The same is true of the infants of civilised races.  Their life is outward and visible, forming a part of nature’s spectacle; reason and will, the noble prerogatives of humanity, are scarce discernible; sense, appetite, instinct, these animals functions seem to sum up the first year of human life.” 5.

He goes on to establish the work of contemporary scientists as linking young children, particularly from a biological and behavioral stand point as being themselves mired in the murk of these evolutionary ghosts.   For the “foetal” development is parallel to man’s evolutionary history of posture.  (5)  And “[a]s Sir John Lubbock and other anthropologists have told us, the intellectual and moral resemblances between the lowest existing races of mankind and children are numerous and close. ” (9)

For Sully, the book which  will ultimately focus on child’s notion of imagination, art, and cognition, is also a means to claim psychology.  wants to expRecognizing the child as emerging out of “hardly more than a vegetative thing indeed,” Sully argues that the infant, “carries with it the germ of a human consciousness” and the process of developing is the process of  “this consciousness begin[ing] to expand and to form itself into a truly human shape from the very beginning.”  (6-7)  It is by this reasoning that Sully and his contemporaries locate the child as the exemplary site of psychological studies as well as the ideal place for educators and reformist trying to enhance not only the individual but the race at large.

The scientific interest and importance of the child not only happens alongside but also contributes to the rising concern about how to educate the child.  That is to say that the more the child is as identified as an evolutionary link to the past that is though still potentially malleable, a real tangible way to shape the future, the more society must think about how mold and shape the child.

It is for the study and by way of the study of the child, that psychology takes education study’s hand and asks it to explore while also building a ladder or door out of the blackness of child, away from the child’s “dark sayings” and their “ape”-like physicalities.  To make a horrible pop cultural analogies, it is as if psychologists are the ghostbusters and education is among their tools and particular technician for ghost trapping, removal, and disposal.

These ideas of recapitulation and an evolutionary ghost of blackness in which children and primitives and inferiors and animals reside shows up in other works of the time, but before I move on from Sully right now, I want to point out some moments in his introduction that I find of interest. I have put in bold words that hold particular resonance for me and my interests.

1) Importance of Dependency and the protracted infancy/childhood in Sully’s interest in the child.  Compared to other newborn animals, Sully explains that the human child “resembles for all the world a public building which has to be opened by a given date, and is found when the day arrives to be in a humiliating state of incompleteness.”  (5) I find this comparison to the modern construction of the building, to architecture, and something that “has to be opened” an interesting way of articulating what it means to be dependent. For Sully the child’s dependency says less about a state or a social existence particular to being dependent and more to the way the independent, and evolved, are challenged, forced to react to the dependency.  For dependency of the baby, Sully suggests, is a kind of foundation on which in their response to the dependent human morality and ethics and cultural traditions and rituals are built.  6

2)   Sully recognizes that “the modern world [has] erect[ed]  the child into an object of aesthetic contemplation” and “br[ought] to bear on him the bull’s eye lamp of scientific observation.”  10.  Though Sully is joining the ranks of such scientist this articulation articulates the child in this discourse as a thought object and as a specimen under the lens.  Most importantly the child is not a person, or rather a child by definition is a “not yet” person, which is to say always “not a person.”

3) Sully acknowledges the difficulties of “try[ing] to throw our scientific lassoo about the elusive spirit of a child of four or six, and to catch the exact meaning of its swiftly changing moves.”12.

4) As typical with psychologist narratives of the time including those of Freud, Sully makes reference to literary works as anchoring examples and at times relying on the substance of these works to the same degree one might rely on a case study.  [For a discussion of this kinship between psychologists and literary authors, check out Bill Brown's "Stephen Crane's Toys."  I hope also to examine this discussion in greater detail in a later post.]

For example as Sully talks about the difficulties in observation and interpretation of the child’s behavior and linguistic endeavors, he makes his most poignant point by referencing  Rudyard Kipling:  “Child-thought follows its own paths–roads, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling has well said, ‘unknown to those who have left childhood behind’.”  12

Additionally scientist look to authors and artists and their works as themselves case studies, that is treating the work as being a potential projection of the artists’ psychology, as evidence that particular biography translates into particular mental/psychic phenomenon.   Sully mentions Goethe and George Sand as examples of adults with strongly preserved senses of their child state. 16

5) Lastly I think it’s important to note/reiterate that the purpose of this introduction and the book is to establish psychology’s place in this interest in the child.  As such one of the main points that he wants to get across is who ought to be doing this work.   In trying to figure this out, Sully seems fairly conflicted about the importance of anyone else other than the psychologist, particularly about the importance of women and mothers which he treats as interchangeable.  After anecdotally disqualifying women (even properly trained scientific women who are always already mothers) from this job due to their “fondness for infantile ways” 23 and the inescapable bias that mother, as “baby worshipers” possess, Sully calls on the “coarser fibred man,” the fathers to take the lead, enlisting when necessary (for the more passive and quotidian observations) the aid of an available woman (who might be if properly groomed a “valuable labourer in this new field of investigation” 22).   After detailing the difficulties in similar experiments on infants and color discrimination waged by Binet (France), Preyor (of Berlin), and Baldwin (America) Sully comes to the ultimate conclusion that [while he welcomes anecdotal records of children's talk and other such potential evidence] given the complexities, given that “scientific men are still busy settling the point…] it seems hopeless for the amateur to dabble in the matter.” 21.

My Project Update #1

I hope to explore how black writers use, revise, or reject the literary constructions of children that evolved over the 19th century.   The question interests me because the child as it gets depicted by turn of the century evolutionary science occupies a relationship with the primitive and blackness that even as it marks these sites as essential to child development, it also defines these sites as just that, static sites, that are occupiable but not themselves ever a part of what it is the child who must pass through them will become.

This is to say that children for some period of a time are seen as primitive, savage, as directly in kinship (spiritually and biologically) with our evolutionary ancestors.  We might then go as far to say that children are for a period of time, black or in a close kinship with blackness and darkness.  This is not to say children are of African descent, which is not only a simply untrue statement, it  is also relying on an overly essentialist and biological notion of what black and blackness is.   On the flip side this kinship does put the child and the person of African descent in a social, political, cultural relation with each other.   This is to say that like children, peoples of African descent are black, or are seen as the carriers of, blackness.  They are torchbearers of all the taboo flames, and with a myopia that is part of the human condition, from any noticeable distance, it is easy to see not a bearer holding a flame, but to rather conflate the bearer and the flame as one being ablazed.

What then does it mean to write such a thing as a black child?  Again this is not a question about whether those of African descent are born and grow like everyone else biologically, nor is it altogether (as civil rights and justice advocates often portray it as) a question of whether or not people of African descent ever have childhoods.  The question is how can a writer claim a developing position, a rite of passage, an identity whose definition does not necessarily exclude their presence but excuses them from the very promise of passage that defines that space.

As Philip Aires’ seminal, albeit methodologically controversial, work, Centuries of Childhood,  would suggest, this problem is a problem of the particular construction of childhood that we see rise over the course of the 19th century.  This problem is due to the fact that with rise of literacy, the learned aristocracy, and I would argue capitalist economies there came to be a distinction in beliefs, habits, cognitive functions, and subsequently expectations for behavior between the now adult and the unlearned child.   Even where many adults did not fit into the learned aristocracy, the rise of enlightenment and rationalist philosophies helped encourage the idea that those unlearned were childish or childlike if not just grown children rather than view their existence a s a challenge to the naturalness of the rational and educate adult.

When we think then about black writers investing in particular constructions and even conventions of the child and childhood as something that exists and something that black children can inhabit if not even represent, it is as if we are watching a broken toy play with a trash compactor or a roach pushing down on a spray can.  These analogies are unsavory and problematic, I know.  I tried though to think of an analogy that did have black people sitting in the same seat as a roach or the broken, but this is precisely the machine of childhood implies about blackness, that it is something that ultimately must be nurtured [read: eradicated] out of the child that would be a rational adult citizen (where adult can already be said to comprise notions of rationality and citizenship).

If we think about Focault’s History of Sexuality, this notion of childhood as a machine has resonances far beyond this one moment of rhetorical appeal.   Where I believe as I go along, if you are not already to go with me, we will be able to accept childhood and/or rhetorical constructions of the child as an apparatus or a mechanism, that is a system for the purpose of producing a particular function.   Foucault and scholars after him have already shown education and schools with their relationship to prisons and the panopticon as being an apparatus for the proper indoctrination of future citizens.  I want to argue here that childhood as it is constructed in developmental science, literature, and various cultural texts is it self an apparatus operating in conjunction with education.   Childhood reducible to categorically defined points and stages of development is about presumably the tracking of normative development, but it is also very much as every minority education history in the US can attest to (From Zitkala Sa to children on NY’s first playgrounds) about the making of normative. It is a machine on par with the way Baudry thinks of the projector, that is is as a machine that not only mechanically produces but also works in such away as to mask its own cuts and edits,  portraying a real that makes invisible its machine reliance on the reel.  Just as Baudry points out that this invisibility of the machine allows it to impose ideology as natural, so does the machinery of childhood and childhood development.   The notion that people are born not yet human or at least not lest man where human and man are one with a cultured and citizened adult, leads to an ideal of children  as transitional species somehow apart from the humans they are destined to be.  It is as if childhood is a transitional neighborhood whose boundaries and “transition preparation programs” are less interested in the species of the child and more interested in policing the proper upkeep of the adult living communities.  Childhood then is a mechanism for making adults and weeding out defectives.

I want to think specifically about childhood and constructions of children as a 19th century machine because I am interested in the problematic automonic features of the apparatus and mechanism but I am also drawn to the machine as an assembly [a come together] of parts that work together to some [common] function.  This is to say that while the functioning and product produced by the machine may be homogeneously threatening to notions of distinct identity and self, I believe there is something to the assemblage that the machine is always raucously signaling to, something that is both erotic and not as homogeneous as it might appear.

Time to get on board

So I’ll be honest, blogging scares me.  Writing for a public audience in anything like real time, scares me.  Since I’m starting a WordPress for the class I’m teaching, I thought I’d go ahead and start my own site now.   Try to go easy on me; it just feels like a lot of pressure.