Fantastic Metropolis

The politics of narrative, the narratives of politics, and the intelligibility of texts preoccupied me this year, and since reading tends to be serendipitous, I seemed constantly to be bumping into essays that helped me to think about these subjects. These included Ann Kibbey, “Gender and the American Ideology of War,” (Genders 37), Joan Wallach Scott, “Reverberations” (differences 13,3 Fall, 2002), Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, “Representation is Futile? American Anti-Collectivism” (in Jutta Weldes, ed., To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and Iris Marion Young, “Feminist Reactions to the Contemporary Security Regime” (Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 18, 1 Winter, 2003). Some of my thoughts about these can be found on my Night Shade Books message board (particularly my “politics of narrative forms” thread). Peter Yoonsuk Paik’s “Smart Bombs, Serial Killing, and the Rapture: The Vanishing Bodies of Imperial Apocalypticism” (Postmodern Culture 14,1) looks at “post-ironic” narratives of imperial apocalypticism popular among far-right wing fundamentalist Christians in the US since 9/11; although I had some quibbles with it, I found it thought-provoking. But of all the political essays I read this year, Edward W. Said’s brilliant “Dignity, Solidarity, and the Penal Colony”, written with such stern ardor and blazing passion that I found myself imagining it causing my printer to burst into flames, most moved me. Lest anyone wonder whether I’ve abandoned my usual feminist interests, let me recommend, also, Celia S. Stahr, “Elaine de Kooning, Portraiture, and the Politics of Sexuality” (Genders 38) and an astutely Bourdieuan consideration of underwear by Wendy A. Burns-Ardolino, “Reading Woman: Displacing the Foundations of Femininity” (Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 18,3 Fall 2003).

Thoughtful interviews have always engaged my attention, but I’ve lately been struck by the rapid development of the print interview genre, encouraged presumably by the proliferation of Internet venues. Most interviewees offer interesting replies only the first few times they are interviewed; thereafter, they tend to repeat the same words and phrases in interview after interview, never straying beyond a small selection of ideas they are prepared to elaborate, such that collections of interviews of a single person tend to be disappointing, excepting those rare instances when the interviewer is well-prepared, imaginative, and skillful. Fortunately, there are exceptions. The best known of these, of course, is Samuel R. Delany, who has made an art of using stupid questions as a springboard for serious discussion. Edward W. Said, I discovered this year, must be counted another such artist of the interview. The 450 pages of interviews found in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Vintage, 2001) span a quarter of a century and not only address the scholarly, academic, and political issues of passionate interest to Said, but also afford Said’s readers an opportunity to trace the shifts and developments in his thinking. Josh Lukin’s expert, informed interview of mathematician and science-fiction writer Chandler Davis (Fifties Fiction: Paradoxa, No.18) gave me another kind of pleasure, that of glimpsing the long view of a seasoned political exile of keen eye and generous spirit as he reflects on his experience as a leftist sf writer in the US during the McCarthy era. For those interested in the production of scientific knowledge, I recommend Hélène Mialet’s “Reading Hawking’s Presence: An Interview with a Self-Effacing Man” (Critical Inquiry 29, Summer 2003). Mialet’s “reading” of her interview of Hawking offers fascinating insight into the generalization that “all scientists are in some sense handicapped insofar as they are unable to think without being attached to a set of instruments, machines, and laboratories through which their intelligence is distributed. This is why Hawking, contrary to the image generally presented of him, does not have a mind free from all worldly constraints; it is precisely because he suffers from a real handicap that I have discovered that he is more incorporated than any other theoretician.” Mialet observes that “in a certain sense, Hawking’s handicap becomes a window both on the representation of how science and scientists work and on the actual presence of science.” Hawking’s physical difference, then, rather than making him an exception, provides the means for understanding how all scientists work. And finally, of the many literary interviews I’ve read this year, I found the wide-ranging “Birnbaum v. Charles Baxter” especially well worth my while, not least because of his explication of what he calls “hypothetical masculinity.”