Todd F. Davis

Saints, Sinners, and the Dickensian Novel: The Ethics of Storytelling in John Irving's 'The Cider House Rules.'

In his novels, John Irving continues to experiment with a narrative voice that seeks to thwart deliberately his readers’ expectations, to upset our notions of conventionality, and to blur the boundaries that linger between good and evil, right and wrong. From the life-affirming presence of the “good, smart bears” in The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) and Owen Meany’s shrill voice of reason in A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) to the convoluted sexual politics of The 158-Pound Marriage (1974) and the conspicuous proximity of the “Under Toad” and the tragedy of the Ellen Jamesians in The World According to Garp (1978), Irving adorns his fictions with a host of ethical signifiers that challenge readers at every turn throughout his labyrinthine, deliberately Dickensian fictions. Irving makes little secret of his affinity for Dickens and in particular for the Victorian writer’s eye for complexity of narrative and literary character. In “King of the Novel,” Irving writes that “Dickens was abundant and magnificent with description, with the atmosphere surrounding everything— and with the tactile, with every detail that was terrifying or viscerally felt” (364). As with Dickens, because Irving loads his own narratives with considerable detail and description, he makes it virtually impossible for readers to render facile ethical decisions in the face of so much information about a given character’s humanity.

Finding Forgiveness, or Something Like It, in David Mamet’s House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner and State and Main

When we speak about confidence games, we consider them almost entirely in terms of their artfulness, the cleverness with which their perpetrators succeed in the act of deception. We speak about con artistry as being “choreographed,” as something to be admired, as being the product of deft timing and intellectual skill. In his screenplays, David Mamet functions as the auteur behind many of contemporary cinema’s most intricately staged confidence games. Mamet asks his audience to revel in the well-timed sleight of hand, to set aside their ethical preconceptions to enjoy the mastery of his textual masquerade. In short, Mamet’s dramaturgy tempts us to lose ourselves in his films, to become conned along with his characters. As viewers of Mamet’s films ponder the implications of his con games—pulling back the veil, examining how the cloth was hung so deftly—the gravity of where these lies and deception take both his characters and audiences becomes clarified in terms of Mamet’s ethical intentions. Rather than being reduced to a simplistic moral code, Mamet’s ethical imperatives find their embodiment in his enduring interest in the mysterious nature of human relationships.1

Always Becoming: The Nature of Transcendence in the Poetry of Mary Oliver

The desire to transcend one’s position in the world, to move beyond the limited and limiting moorings of the physical self, serves as the essential foundation for transcendental ideas and the narratives of questing found in numerous religious and philosophical traditions around the world. While this desire clearly functions in the nineteenth-century writings and teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and later in those of Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and, perhaps most memorably, in the poetry of Walt Whitman, little scholarly attention has been paid to this same impulse in the work of some of contemporary poetry’s most noted authors. While the bulwark of contemporary literary theory ignores or is blind to this particular domain, who upon reading the poetry of James Wright can deny the desire for transcendence that permeates nearly every line and stanza of his work? For instance, in “Trying to Pray” the speaker says that he has “left [his] body behind [him], crying / in its dark thorns,” and in “A Blessing”—perhaps Wright’s most famous poem—the speaker confesses that he yearns to step out of his body, to “break / into blossom” as a horse nuzzles his hand in the middle of a Minnesota pasture.

Writing Back through the Body: The Communion of Flesh and Spirit in the Work of Mary Swander

The desire or, more accurately, the need to write back through the body pulses beneath the lines of Mary Swander’s poetry and prose. From her first book of poems, Succession (1979), to her most recent memoir, The Desert Pilgrim: En Route to Mysticism and Miracles (2003), Swander has made every effort to write and rewrite her way back through the flesh, the body she claims and which claims her, shaping not only the patterns of her life but her emotional and spiritual center as well. Her Catholic heritage, her life as a citizen of the rural Midwest, her struggles with environmental illness and other physical maladies, and her particular feminist vision coalesce in her work in ways that not only challenge the dominant views of illness and the body that harbors it, but also the traditional Western conception of the soul and the paths we may choose to understand better the relationship between body and soul, flesh and spirit. For Swander, writing the body represents her last, best hope for establishing a living, breathing present in the face of a blinding, uncertain future.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Magnolia

Paul Thomas Anderson’s third film, Magnolia (1999), is at once a solemn and terrifying cinematic experience, a crushing and a heartening movie encounter. It is the kind of film whose structure and content spin you backward into your seat with the centrifugal force of narrative. It represents the work of a young auteur who not only ignores the pressures of crass commercialism, but also eschews the even stronger and divisive forces of ideology and philosophy. It dispenses with Hollywood’s simplistic dichotomies between the more serious aesthetic of the independent film and the crowd-pleasing aesthetic of popular cinema’s happy endings. Magnolia makes use of postmodernity’s metafictional techniques to draw attention to its own textual nature, while still pleading that we see what is “real” within it. In other words, Anderson gathers us around the complex, despairing lives of his characters—literally pushing us closer and closer to the void—and then he offers a possible way out, a means to begin negotiating a postmodern humanism based on the constructed

“Everybody had a hard year”: The White Album and the Beatles’ Poetics of Apocalypse

Music possesses an innate power to move us in myriad emotional, spiritual, and sensual ways, and the Beatles understood this concept implicitly. They pulsed our adrenaline with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; they broke our hearts with “Yesterday”; they thrilled our minds with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967); and they touched our souls with “Let It Be.” But with The White Album (The Beatles 1968), the Beatles literally took us everywhere that music can go. In a self-consciously constructed song cycle that guides the listener from the Cold War-inspired “Back in the USSR” through the psychosexual “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” the somber realities of “Blackbird,” and the sheer terror of “Helter Skelter,” The White Album pits our yearnings for love, hope, and peace in sharp contrast with an increasingly fragmented postmodern void.1 Through parody, hyperbole, and bitter irony, The White Album tells the story, in highly metaphorical fashion, of the sociocultural calamity that the world experienced in 1968. From assassination and racial unrest to political disjunction and the growing shadows of the Vietnam War, 1968 displaced the optimism of 1967’s Summer of Love with equal doses of alienation and uncertainty. And The White Album—with the blank, empty space of its glossy pearl cover—dares us to re-inscribe the Beatles’ art with our own passion, our own reality, our own terror.

“What’s Filipino? What’s authentic? What’s in the blood?”: Alterity and Ethics in the Novels of Jessica Hagedorn

Migration—the desire to explore, to reposition, to overcome—is a fundamental human impulse. It is an urge characterized by movement, adaptation, and progression, yet it is also fraught with dislocation and uncertainty. In such visionary novels as Dogeaters (1990) and The Gangster of Love (1996), Jessica Hagedorn explores the impact of Americanization and cultural bifurcation upon the Filipino pre- and post-immigrant experience. In Dogeaters Hagedorn examines the turbulent world of Manila during the Marcos era, a morally convoluted environment in which the importation of American movies seems to provide her high and low characters with a means of escape from their politically corrosive world. Yet at the same time, their vast consumption of American popular culture continues to obliterate their sense of national identity. In The Gangster of Love Hagedorn traces the story of the Rivera family after they make their immigrant journey from the Philippines to the United States. Haunted by the lingering memory of their homeland, the Riveras find themselves confronted with ubiquitous sexual promiscuity, the artificiality of the American success myth, and the moral vacuousness of Western materialism.

Curses and Blessings: Identity and Essentialism in the Work of Sherman Alexie

How does or should the white reader/critic interpret work by the indigenous writer? How, as middle-class, Caucasian, English professors, do we (literally the two writers who have written the book that rests in your hands or upon the table in front of you) engage with the world that Sherman Alexie chronicles in his poems, fiction, and films? If a person has never set foot upon a reservation, if a person has never had a close friendship with a Native American, how can he or she enter into the imaginative landscapes created by Indian authors?

“Our long national nightmare is over”: Moral Repair and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides

For the storytellers under review in this volume, negotiating the void often involves an attempt to effect a solution for the devastating changes that postmodernity has wrought, while continuing to evolve under conditions of fragmentation, alienation, and uncertainty. As human beings, we inevitably struggle amongst the historical and sociocultural factors that mark our existence, with hope—that peculiarly human sense of optimism—illuminating our way. Yet how can we enjoy hope’s comforting manna and appreciate our own selfhood, and the selfhood of others, while living under the disquieting shadow of our fractured historical pasts? How can we establish moral repair—indeed, how can we reclaim our collective particularity—when confronted with both the ethical failures of the institutions in which we place our trust and the vexing, bewildering nature of our contemporary present, with its moral ambiguity and its ethical fissures?

Performing Empowerment: Revisiting Liberation Pedagogy in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues

As we learned in our discussion of the poetry of Mary Swander, the body is a highly performative text that is capable—in its own, uncanny way—of extracting particular truths about the nature of our humanity and our capacity for endurance. This is especially true of the work of playwright Eve Ensler, who challenged an entire civilization’s perspectives about the female body.