Hello readers! This was later than usual because o was in meetings much of the day at my new job! It’s two reviews and a Mithra pic. I think by next week there should be enough of one of projects to post, I hate to send out parts of extended projects when I haven’t got a good ending point. Stay tuned!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Bramen, American Niceness
Lispector, Complete Stories
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Cat on a Box!
REVIEWS
Carrie Tirado Bramen, “American Niceness: A Cultural History” (2017) - Americans… mean, mean, mean, or… nice?! Well, opinions have differed! And in keeping the modalities of the “new” (well, “new” as in “closer to Foucault than Burckhardt,” not “new” as in… Olivia Rodrigo? She’s a new singer people like, right??) cultural history, historian Carrie Bramen does not come down on one side of the “are Americans nice?” question. That’s not the point. The point of this book is to interrogate how Americans have deployed the concept of “nice” over the course of the nineteenth century, the era in which that overused word took on something like it’s contemporary meaning.
It would also be easy enough to write a history of how niceness, the most banal of positive descriptors, had been used to paper over social conflicts. Arguably, that was a major thrust of bourgeois thought and activity, in the nineteenth century and continuing on to today- the idea that the problem isn’t who has power, but who is nice to whom (see arguments over “civility” in the last few years). There’s a material element to that, too; niceness culture grew more powerful as standards of living rose. “Nice” as in manners is one thing, “nice” as in “nice kitchens, bathrooms, indoor heating arrangements” actually does change lives. You can see why people could kind of drift into thinking that a system that produced all that had to be ok, if people would only behave in accordance with our newly-nice surroundings.
Well, now I’m reporting my own ideas and not Bramen’s. Bramen’s work on niceness is a little more abstract. She has chapters themed around a few contested ideas of niceness. Native Americans- cruel, or nice (see the concept of “Indian giving”)? The smile of the slave- proof of docility, and if so, what does docility mean? Or was it all a ruse to hide their potential for violence? Different people argued different things, mobilizing the tropes of niceness for their own ends. Some cultural historians really can’t get over the way tropes can mean different things to different people. Admittedly, so much cultural analysis is so thoroughly one-dimensional — this trope means this and only this — that you can see why they’d want to nail the point home.
Probably the most interesting throughline has to do with gender and the valuations given to different kinds of rhetoric. Niceness was and is a thoroughly feminized concept. Much of what we’re looking at in this book takes place before the great big gender freakout of the late nineteenth century, when men throughout the white world decided they’d been emasculated and needed to embrace the macho and eschew the ladylike. What we’re looking at is high nineteenth century “separate spheres” ideology. It wasn’t exactly “woke” but it wasn’t as deeply misogynistic as what came after. The sphere of women was, in many respects, understood as key to “civilization,” the source of both progress and power (whereas after the freakout, femininity came to be understood as corrosive to civilization). What you see in a lot of “American Niceness” is the application of niceness as a feminine, civilizing virtue to various groups and concepts, usually by women (Harriet Beecher Stowe is the closest to a main character in this book) but not always. Probably the most interesting chapter to me was the “nice Jesus,” and all the dimensions of that.
Bramen eventually gets into post-freakout territory with the effort to make America’s empire in the Philippines seem “nice,” which it did mainly through two classic American means: sending schoolteachers (a feminized profession) to fan out across the archipelago to teach American-style niceness, and the emphasis a lot of (generally male) American propagandists played on the ingenuousness and self-effacement of American imperialism as compared to the British or German models. Bramen talks some about the relationship between niceness and violence in America, the way that the former apologizes for and covers up the latter, but I think the conclusions she draws here are generally more tentative and not as strongly followed-up-on as other ideas she has. All in all, a decent showing and showcase for both the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary cultural history model. ****
Clarice Lispector, “The Complete Stories” (2018) (translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson) - I think I get it. This isn’t really “for me.” Clarice Lispector is hot new shit in certain literary circles, despite (?) having been dead since 1977. Born into a Jewish family in the Ukraine, Lispector’s family made the smart move of getting the hell out of there before the wheels came completely off, and Clarice was raised a middle-class Brazilian. She became a literary success early on, and a social one too, moving in Brazilian high society and marrying a diplomat. The biographical details are mainly relevant insofar as they inform the glamour that has wrapped around Lispector’s name, first in her native Brazil, and then in anglophone literary circles as her work came to be translated. I’m trying to find a generous way to say it, but basically, I think there’s a lot of hype here. Divide Latin American literary hype — breathy, exotic, not your granddad’s dour (or sappy) northern hemisphere literature — by the sort of hype that surrounded the recently-deceased Joan Didion (harshly “literary,” and a beautiful elegant woman readers can project themselves on to) and you’re more or less there.
Well, I read Lispector’s short stories, supposedly her most accessible works- apparently she really gets into some modernist weeds in her novels. They weren’t bad, necessarily… or maybe they were and I’m just trying to be “nice.” They were mostly tales either of cities being weird and surreal, or women dealing with bad men, or both. The language is supposed to be “lush” but I can’t say I experienced it that way. The stories are more notable for what they lack- no moral or “point,” especially not a political one, and you have to imagine contemporary literary readers breathing a sigh of relief on that score. Not much in the way of character, often anonymous men and women described by surface characteristics and behaviors. You can’t really get avant garde points with a focus on character, anyway, or plot, which the stories don’t really have either.
What do they have? Well, a vague air of tropical decadence- cf my notes about “Latin American literary hype,” anglophone and Western European readers have been looking to Latin American writers for that at least since “The Boom” in the mid-twentieth century. It’s ushered great writers onto the global literary scene, this literary escapism. Who knows, maybe Lispector is one and I’m too much of a literal-minded lunkhead to enjoy! Kinda sucks that the best they can find to renew that source of interest in world letters has been dead longer than the people “discovering” her have been alive, but thems the breaks, I guess. I was never that much of a stickler for “show don’t tell” but Lispector does a lot of telling about people’s inner states. There isn’t much here that sustains my interest, I’ll admit.
Shot in the dark- as Dril put it, “this whole thing smacks of gender!” Not in the sense that Lispector’s work is where it is because she’s a woman or something stupid like that. I mean in the sense that many of these stories comment on gender relations in a groove well worn by millennial thought on the subject. The bad men with whom Lispector’s protagonists deal aren’t dissimulators or opportunists like many abusers. They advertise themselves as the nihilists they are, the protagonists find themselves irresistibly drawn into their orbit, and are usually changed in some way- and callooh, callay, a miracle! In the differently-moraled global south they don’t jump immediately to “the woman gets murdered” to send the point about bad men home. In fact, they seem empowered by the experience, to use a term Lispector would probably stick her arm in a bear trap rather than use. Not by sticking with the bad man, oh no. Just in general. They’re badder and vaguely witchier.
From the cheap seats of cis manhood, it appears the great comic theme of millennial women’s writing — and men, especially straight men, keep saying things but have less and less to say that transcends the level of overly-elaborated grunting, so most writing these days is done by women — is that you can be gay! The comedy of errors that is compulsory heterosexuality straightens, if you will, itself out and everyone can go off and be happy. The central tragic theme of millennial women’s writing is that most of the time, they either love, or have loved, or will love, a man or men, alas. Lispector stories show the shittiness of loving men, but, like certain genres less of literature (though it’s there) and more of music and social media aesthetics, depicts a ability one might have to have one's cake and eat it too by emerging from the tragedy of dealing with our dumb male asses stronger and more independent. Well! I’ve heard worse visions. ***
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Cat on a Box!
More or less what it says