Duke University
Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room A103
114 S. Buchanan Blvd.
Box 90766
Durham, NC 27708
A fact-based re-imagining of the life of a famous man's wife who was a woman with a racy and unforgettable story all her own.
Under consideration.
A meditation on the status of the classics today interlaced with a memoir on encounters with death and mortality.
Preface A study of headhunters in the Philippines includes a haunting story that I have never been able to forget. Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo was doing research among the Ilongot, a group among whom he and his wife had lived on and off for years. In October of 1981, during what had seemed like a routine hike, Michelle slipped and fell 65 feet down a mountain, to her death. After making the descent, Rosaldo discovered her body, lifeless, as he had feared. Thrust into a state of mourning that deepened all the way to despair, Rosaldo was for a time unable to work. Fifteen months passed. Then, when he finally felt able to re-open the notes he had taken among the headhunters, something astonishing happened. Material he had previously interpreted in a scholarly way revealed to him suddenly “the emotional force of a death…an intimate relation’s permanent rupture.” He wrote a small essay that made a profound claim that has stayed with me. “It took some 14 years for me to grasp what Ilongots had told me about grief, rage, and headhunting. During all those years I was not yet in a position to comprehend the force of anger possible in bereavement, and now I was,” he said. I was struck by the length of time needed to unfold meaning – in this case, fourteen years – and by the suddenness of insight, when it came. On this fatal trip, he and his wife had been interviewing the Ilongot to determine why they headhunt, while other tribes in the remote Philippines did not. They were also interested in how prohibitions newly enforced by the Philippine government had affected the group. The work was part of an ongoing inquiry into a different, more family- and place-related, sense of history among the Ilongot revealed in its narratives and story-telling. What, the anthropologists wondered, do the Ilongot think of headhunting? What feelings did it create? What motivated it and its elaborate rules? And why did joyous, carnivalesque celebration often follow? How had life changed after it ended? Previously, Rosaldo’s data had made sense to him only in an intellectual way. For when asked about head hunting, his informants routinely and unblinkingly gave long, dry genealogical lists of their ancestry, kin, and places they had gardened. They stressed changes during the Japanese invasion in World War II, which had removed them from their usual land – repetitive stories that Rosaldo confessed bored him. The Ilongot seemed to resist, or at least not to understand, self-reflection. Miscommunication, secrecy, fear of governmental prohibitions, different mental wiring, perhaps even some kind of ironic or communal joke might have been at work. Then, under the impress of his own recent emotions, Rosaldo suddenly understood that the Ilongot had not at all been holding back. Their genealogies and place lists gave the answers to his questions, and gave them quite concisely. The Illongot headhunt to affirm kinship lines that mark their space in the universe. Headhunter identity roots so deeply in ancestral bodies that bones have a place within the household, with the head of the household often sleeping on his father’s skull. Most of all, the Ilongot headhunt to create a feeling of buoyancy and energy in the face of mourning, so that its absence left them without customary feelings of release. In the past, when they had attacked a village and collected enemy heads, they were not just enacting violence or inflicting revenge or, more sensationally still, pursuing cannibalism -- the motives usually attributed to head hunting. They were achieving a much-desired sense of elevated or heightened consciousness, of “lightening.” What does this story have to do with rereading the classics? In a surprising number of cases, including mine, everything. For the last five years, after several decades of working on modern literature with forays into fields like Anthropology, I’ve been rereading the classics with attention although not, like many advocates of the classics, following any specific, pre-determined guide or list. I re-read Homer and Dante, Vergil and Milton -- Europe’s universally acknowledged masters – a kind of intellectual crossing back to books I had studied in school or taught years ago in a class on epics. I also re-read recent fiction I sensed might already be or might become contemporary classics over time. I did not worry too much about the parameters of establishing a canon of contemporary fiction, although my readings laid the basis for doing so. Nabokov’s Lolita, Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Roy’s The God of Small Things, Sebald’s Austerlitz, Mc Ewan’s Atonement: these would be some of my leading candidates for contemporary classics -- and they were all books I had taught or written about in the past. Not coincidentally, most had to do with mortality, with reconstructing the past, with war – or, and in a surprising number of cases, all three. My original motivation was my mother’s death – a event common to most lives but still profoundly unsettling, and one that requires crossing back into family memory in an acute way. When my mother died, I continued to function quite normally and even at a high level, but I felt out of balance and it showed up in numerous ways. I had difficulty in carrying through writing tasks, stopping and staring more often than usual. I noticed far more quarrels than usual at home. I felt restless and not quite at ease. Perhaps the most telling sign was physiological. The day after I cleaned out her apartment, dividing up her many tablecloths and pieces of costume jewelry with my two daughters, I woke up dizzy, with a first-time-ever case of vertigo. Later diagnosed as an inner ear imbalance -- which it certainly may have been – it seemed to me nonetheless symbolic, and reminded me of Rosaldo’s story. For the Ilongot, genealogical stories or lists of places touch base with the stability of the past, assert continuity with tradition, and thrust into the future. They represent something core, something remembered firmly amidst flux and the inexorability of loss and change -- “an intimate relationship” always being subject to “permanent rupture.” As someone who believes in literature, I turned to the classics to connect with some shared sense of being human at a time of rawness, grief, and confusion. My predilection was for pre-modern or contemporary classics that dealt with war, love, mortality, and loss – reflecting my interests, I thought at first, as author of Gone Primitive and, more recently, The War Complex. But I came to realize that all classics, early and late, deal with these four themes, as well as with the power or the impotence of words to do them justice. They also, surprisingly often, render identity through networks of genealogical connections – a pre-modern view that survives more strongly than we realize into the present. To borrow a title I have always loved of a famous book – we have never been modern – and, in some ways, and we all sense this. Our genealogy is what endures and what we preserve in memory.
Using the new technology, I've reprinted a snippet of the Preface.
An investigation of how to map and establish a canon for contemporary fiction, with sidebars drawn from the actual experience of teaching our smart, i-pod plugged-in, cellphone weilding studients how to read what is new, untested and, sometimes, offensive.
An exploration of the cultural memory of World War II with attention to facts that have all but disappeared from contemporary understandings of war history in America. By probing cultural representations of four large topics - D-Day, Adolf Eichmann's war crimes trial, memories of thinking about Germany and the Holocaust, and the incendiary and atomic bombings - the book uncovers what I call the war complex: an unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) attitude towards mass death, produced by human volition, often under government and political auspices, marked by technological speed, affecting civilians, and sometimes not just killing, but burning or vaporizing bodies -a combination that has been one of the most troubling legacies of World War II. With lapses during periods of Soviet-US detente and especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war complex lingered after 1945, ready to condition reactions to 9/11. The book sees the war complex at work in the memory of World War II and in the evolving cultural memory of September 11.
Reviews in New York Times Book Review, San Francisco Inquirer, Boston Globe, Women's Review of Books, and others.
Reviews in Washington Post, Nation, World, Women's Review of Books (front page), Italian Americana, and others. Several chapters sought for reprinting in college writing textbooks.
Reviews in New York Times Book Review, daily New York Times, Village Voice Literary Supplement, Art in America, Art Journal, Nation, Modern Philology, Transition, and others. Used in courses including Art and Anthropology.
Reviews in Times Literary Supplement, Novel, Modern Fiction, and others.
Reviewed VLS and elsewhere.
The title of the book will, I suspect, change:bot my call, though
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA: 2013 Performance Art, Marina Abramovic, and the art of provocation.
NASSS is the journal of the Japanese American Studies Association.
An exploration of the powers and limits of fiction making in art and art history, using "Marina Abramovic," a 2010 landmark exhibition of performance art at the Museum of Modern Art as test-case.
Program in the Arts of the Moving Image
Duke University
Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room A103
114 S. Buchanan Blvd.
Box 90766
Durham, NC 27708
Phone: (919) 660-3030
Fax: (919) 681-1378
Email: ami@duke.edu
