"The Profit of Unconscious Cerebration"
"I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry you've only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time, while you are asleep--also while you are at work at other things and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on. There was plenty of material now, and the book went on and finished itself without any trouble." (Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain in Eruption, 1940)
I. Looking back for a bit
Applying Amelie Rorty's "mini-history of the passions" to The Scarlet Letter gives me a half-dozen "new" (I mean, old!) ways of thinking about what happens when we juxtapose the forest and the scaffold, Hester's claim that "what we did had a consecration of its own" (140) with Dimmesdale's lament that "we violated our reverence each for the other's soul" (181).
- In the first, passion is imagined as coming from within, an expression of one's essential nature
- in the second, it comes from without, an invasion that should have been resisted.
- that the development of the capacity to think independently requires "mega-attention" in the early years
- that the women/mothers who provide the attention required for children's healthy development thereby disqualify themselves from citizenship
- does this require re-thinking our conceptions of human development?
- and/or re-organizing our social arrangements for child care?
- and/or challenging women to publicly engaged lives?
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1753) |  Hepburn Family (Image from website for "Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center, Bryn Mawr College) |
Consider, for instance (as Steph did!), Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking
(contra "scientific thinking," which sets up experiments by attempting to control all variables):
Mothers might be said to negotiate with nature on behalf of love. Nature can be thought of as a respected opponent with whom they are watchfully and sometimes antagonistically engaged...the work of protective love is likely to encourage in her a cognitive capacity for double focus....Negotiation with nature on behalf of love, harassed by daily demands, yet glimpsing larger questions, mothers acquire a fundamental attitude toward the vulnerable, a characteristic protectiveness that I call 'holding'....a way of seeing with an eye toward maintaining the minimal harmony, material resources, and skills necessary for sustaining a child in safety (77-79)
I would like to think more with you about/propose to you the possibility that we conceptualize Hester as an alternative to Rousseau's non-citizen mother, as (even?!) a model citizen.
Erin's Buddhist idea: attachments lead us to suffer.... we can become attached to ideas...to a conception of ourselves....
Amy: She had to give up her place in society because she did something which broke the norms, but then her place in society BECOMES, like, The One Who Breaks The Norms. So being outside of society she finds her place in society.
Remember Hester's plea to the governor to be permitted the continued care of her daughter?
Her daughter is wilful, an independent creature:
And in raising her, Hester becomes likewise....?
(In the language of David Ross:)
Was Hester profit-maximizing?
Was she happiness-maximizing?
How important was self-interest in her calculations?
What sort of social practices were applied to those self-interests?
II. What does Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have to contribute to this conversation?
Find a (new) partner and tell her:
- how Twain's book looks different to you now from in h.s.?
- what were you taught to notice then, what are you noticing now?
- what do you think Huck Finn has to add (so far) to our conversation about the individual and the social?
- in particular: what advice does Huck (Twain?) give about the role of books/reading in our education? in our living?
"You don't know abt. me, w/out you have read a book....made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth mainly...." (7)
Very quickly (in Chapter 2) it turns into a satire on the falseness of books (romances), insufficient guides in practical matters. Tom Sawyer instructs his gang in absurd procedures: "Because they are in the books, that's why... do you want to do things regular, or don't you? Don't you reckon that the people that made the books knows what's the correct thing to do? Do you reckon you can learn 'em anything?" (13)
Pap beats his son for a-swelling himself up, learning to read (21)
Huck, who didn't want to go much before, goes now to spite Pap (24)
however, when his father catches him and takes him up the river,
he finds it "lazy and jolly, with no books or study" (24).
I opened this course with Emerson's musing, "books are for scholars' idle times..."
A gift of my grad school friend Robert Sanderson, who added,
"...I will be idle no more," went mountain climbing and died.
If we really are to take this book seriously, we have to take seriously its critique of a reliance on book-learning as a guide to behavior.
Cf. my Uncle Millson: "That's the problem w/ books!"
(i.e.: they "tell the truth, mainly....")
My central claim for the next two weeks will be that what this book invites us into/challenges us to is not the discipline of hard study, but rather an engagement in play and humor, a reliance on the unconscious that evokes....
well, let's see what it evokes.
Let's look first @ the scene in Chapter 2 when Tom "must play something" on Jim (10).
Re-read/perform this, From Spike Lee's Huckleberry Finn
What just happened??
Cf. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, In Praise of "Spike Lee's Huckleberry Finn" by Ralph Wiley:
In Wiley's script, Jim shrewdly and consciously dons the minstrel mask as a strategic performance, playing a minstrel role when that is what a white person expects him to do. But it is a role, and that is key: he plays it out of self-interest. Wiley's Jim is smart, sensitive, savvy, self-aware, politically astute, generous, and stunningly altruistic, a compelling and intelligent father, and a slave seeking his freedom in a racist world determined to keep him enslaved. Because he sticks to Twain's text so closely, Wiley maintains that his view of Jim is Twain's, too. The fact that Huck has a more limited view of Jim should not lead us to mistake that view for the author's.
Was this conscious on Twain's part? I won't go there. I can't go there....We don't need to go there. A critic can make a case for an interpretation of a work of art without claiming that the artist had it consciously in mind from the start. But is this interpretation plausible given what's in the text? Absolutely. In fact, I have grave difficulty reading it any other way now. What it boils down to is: how much agency do we ascribe to Jim?
I often think of the optical illusion that appears to be two profiles if you look at it one way, and a wine glass if you look at it another way. That is one way of entertaining this new view of Jim without totally rejecting the old one. But as I think about this scene, the new interpretation edges the old one out insistently. I simply find Wiley's reading of it more compelling than all the others I have encountered.
this kind of play is child's play; it is also way Twain understood his creative process
Cf. The Grace of Revision, the Profit of "Unconscious Cerebration," or What Happened When Teaching the Canon Became Child's Play
Cf. also Forrest Robinson. "An 'Unconscious and Profitable Cerebration': Mark Twain and Literary Intentionality." Nineteenth-Century Literature 50, 3 (December 1995): 357-380:
writing makeshift, fragmentary, prone to drastic contradictions
no fully worked out formal scheme, no clear enduring self-conscious design
many disjointed episodic travel narratives, unfinished works,
"characteristic surrender to mind's natural drift,"
focus on dramatic incidents free of structural constraints
"characters are not made, they just grow"--> the way TS, HF came to exist
"I couldn't to save my life sit down and deliberately plan out a diagram... every book I ever wrote wrote itself."
"little slips, little inexactnesses, many desertions of a thought before the end of it is reached--real narrative, vastly better than artificial
"methodless method" of the human mind over narrative writing, always disappointing
admired improvisation; authenticity from lack of conscious design
no restraint, expediency, policy, diplomacy, tedious analyses:
"can't stand Hawthorne and those people:
see what they are at before they get to it and they bore me to death"
literary creation independent, unpredictable, unconscious
"mill whose machinery never stands idle:" unconscious cerebration
Mark Twain, like Huckleberry Finn, took pleasure in speaking spontaneously,
in noting the surprising things that arose
"I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come....for I'd noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth, if I left it alone." (173)
Jokes, too, can be very productive, the source of new thoughts....
For Thursday:
-
read to the center of the novel (through Chapter 20).
- think about a "Spike Lee" reading, especially, of the "trash" scene in Chapter 15--
what might Jim be up to there??
- think about a racist joke you'd be willing to tell in class
- We'll also pick up the threads of David Ross's presentation, "On Rational Choice and Economic Behavior", and think about its application to Twain's novel
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