It seems journalistically irresponsible to describe the Hollow’s rides without experiencing at least one of them firsthand. The Kiddie Kopter is a carousel of miniature Sikorsky prototypes rotating at a sane and dignified clip. The propellers on each helicopter rotate as well. My copter is admittedly a bit snug, even with my knees drawn up to my chest. I get kicked off the ride when the whole machine’s radical tilt reveals that I weigh quite a bit more than the maximum 100 pounds, and I have to say that both the carny in charge and the other kids on the ride were unnecessarily snide about the whole thing. Each ride has its own PA speaker with its own charge of adrenalizing rock; the Kiddie Kopter’s speaker is playing George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” as the little bastards go around. The late-day Hollow itself is an enormous sonic mash from which different sounds take turns protruding—mostly whistles, sirens, calliopes, mechanized clown-cackles, heavy-metal tunes, human screams hard to distinguish from recorded screams.
It isn’t Alan Thicke, on closer inspection.
Both the Thunderboltz and the Octopus hurl free-spinning modular cars around a topologically complex plane. The Thunderboltz’s north side and entrance ramp show still more evidence of gastric distress. Then there’s the Gravitron, an enclosed, top-shaped structure inside which is a rubberized chamber that spins so fast you’re mashed against the wall like a fly on a windshield. It’s basically a centrifuge for the centrifugal separation of people’s brains from those brains’ blood supply. Watching people come out of the Gravitron is not a pleasant experience at all, and you do not want to know what the ground around the exit looks like. A small boy stands on one foot tugging the operator’s khaki sleeve, crying that he lost a shoe in there. The best description of the carnies’ tan is that they’re somehow sinisterly tan. I notice that many of them have the low brow and prognathous jaw typically associated with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The carny operating the Scooter—bumper cars, fast, savage, underinsulated, a sure trip to the chiropractor—has been slumped in the same position in the same chair every time I’ve seen him, staring past the frantic cars and tearing up used ride-tickets with the vacant intensity of someone on a Locked Ward. I lean casually against his platform’s railing so that my Credentials dangle prominently and ask him in a neighborly way how he keeps from going out of his freaking mind with the boredom of his job. He turns his head very slowly, revealing a severe facial tic: “The fuck you talking bout.”
The same two carnies as before are at The Zipper’s controls, in the exact same clothes, looking up into the full cars and elbowing each other. The Midway smells of machine oil and fried food, smoke and Cutter repellent and mall-bought adolescent perfume and ripe trash in the bee-swarmed cans. The very Nearest-to-Death ride looks to be the Kamikaze, way down at the western end near the Zyklon roller coaster. Its neon sign has a grinning skull with a headband and says simply KAMIKAZE. It’s a 70-foot pillar of white-painted iron with two 50-foot hammer-shaped arms hanging down, one on either side. The cars are at the end of these arms, twelve-seaters enclosed in clear plastic. The two arms swing ferociously around, as in 360°, vertically, and in opposite directions, so that at the top and bottom of every rotation it looks like your car is going to get smashed up against the other car and you can see faces in the other car hurtling toward you, gray with fright and squishy with G’s. An eight-ticket, four-dollar waking nightmare.
No. Now I’ve found the worst one. It wasn’t even here yesterday. It must have been brought in special. It may not even be part of the carnival proper. It’s the SKY COASTER. The SKY COASTER stands regally aloof at the Hollow’s far western edge, just past the Uphill-Bowling-for-Dinnerware game, in a kind of grotto formed by Blomsness-Thebault trailers and dismantled machinery. At first all you can see is the very-yellow of some piece of heavy construction equipment, then after a second there’s some other, high-overhead stuff that from the east is just a tangle of Expressionist shadows against the setting sun. A small but steady stream of Fairgoers leads into the SKY COASTER grotto.
It’s a 175-foot construction crane, a BRH-200, one of the really big mothers, with a tank’s traction belts instead of wheels, a canary-yellow cab, and a long proboscis of black steel, 200 feet long, canted upward at maybe 70°. This is half of the SKY COASTER. The other half is a 100-foot + tower assembly of cross-hatched iron that’s been erected a couple hundred yards north of the crane. There’s a folding table in front of the clothesline cordoning off the crane, and there’s a line of people at the table. The woman taking their money is fiftyish and a compelling advertisement for sunscreen. Behind her on a vivid blue tarp are two meaty blond guys in SKY COASTER T-shirts helping the next customer strap himself into what looks like a combination straitjacket and utility belt, bristling with hooks and clips. It’s not yet entirely clear what’s going on. From here the noise of the Hollow behind is both deafening and muffled, like high tide behind a dike. My Media Guide, sweated into the shape of a buttock from my pocket, says: “If you thought bungee jumping was a thrill, wait until you soar high above the Fairgrounds on SKY COASTER. The rider is fastened securely into a full-body harness that hoists them [sic, hopefully] onto a tower and releases them to swing in a pendulum-like motion while taking in a spectacular view of the Fairgrounds below.” The hand-printed signs at the folding table are more telling: “$40.00. AMEX Visa MC. NO REFUNDS. NO STOPPING HALF WAY UP. “ The two guys are leading the customer up the stairs of a construction platform maybe ten feet high. One guy’s at each elbow, and I realize they’re helping hold the customer up. Who would pay $40.00 for an experience you have to be held up even to walk toward? Why pay money to cause something to occur you will be grateful to survive? I simply do not get it. Plus there’s also something slightly off about this customer, odd. For one thing, he’s wearing tinted aviator glasses. No one in the rural Midwest wears aviator glasses, tinted or otherwise. Then I see what it really is. He’s wearing $400 Banfi loafers. Without socks. This guy, now lying prone on the platform below the crane, is from the East Coast. He’s a ringer. I almost want to shout it. A woman’s on the blue tarp, already in harness, rubber-kneed, waiting her turn. A steel cable descends from the tip of the crane’s proboscis, on its end a fist-sized clip. Another cable leads from the crane’s cab along the ground to the tower, up through ring-tipped pitons all up the tower’s side, and over a pulley right at the top, another big clip on the end. One of the blond guys waves the tower’s cable down and brings it over to the platform. Both the crane’s and tower’s cables’ clips are attached to the back of the East-Coast man’s harness, fastened and locked. The man’s trying to look around behind him to see what-all’s attached to him as the two big blonds leave the platform. Yet another blond man in the crane’s cab throws a lever, and the tower’s cable pulls tight in the grass and up the tower’s side and down. The crane’s cable stays slack as the man is lifted into the air by the tower’s cable. The harness covers his shorts and shirt, so he looks babe-naked as he rises. The one cable sings with tension as the East-Coaster is pulled slowly to the top of the tower. He’s still stomach-down, limbs wriggling. At a certain height he starts to look like livestock in a sling. You can tell he’s trying to swallow until his face gets too small to see. Finally he’s all the way up at the top of the tower, his ass against the cable’s pulley, trying not to writhe. I can barely take notes. They cruelly leave him up there awhile, slung, a smile of slack cable between him and the crane’s tip. The grotto’s crowd mutters and points, shading eyes against the red sun. One teenage boy describes the sight to another teenage boy as “Harsh.” I myself am constructing a mental list of the violations I would undergo before I’d let anyone haul me ass-first to a great height and swing me like high-altitude beef. One of the blond guys has a bullhorn and is playing to the crowd’s suspense, calling up to the slung East-Coaster: “Are. You. Ready.” The East-Coaster’s response-noises are more bovine than human. His tinted aviator glasses hang askew from just one ear; he doesn’t bother to fix them. I can see what’s going to hap
pen. They’re going to throw a lever and detach the tower-cable’s clip, and the man in sockless Banfis will free-fall for what’ll seem forever, until the crane’s cable’s slack is taken up and the line takes his weight and goes tight behind him and swings him way out over the grounds to the south, his arc’s upward half almost as high as the tower was, and then he’ll fall all over again, back, and get caught and swung the other way, back and forth, the man prone at the arc’s trough and seeming to stand at either apex, swinging back and forth and erect and prone against a rare-meat sunset. And just as the crane’s cab’s blond reaches for his lever and the crowd mightily inhales, just then, I lose my nerve, in my very last moment at the Fair—I recall my childhood’s serial nightmare of being swung or whipped in an arc that threatens to come full circle—and I decline to be part of this, even as witness—and I find, again, in extremis, access to childhood’s other worst nightmare, the only sure way to obliterate all; and the sun and sky and plummeting Yuppie go out like a light.
1993
greatly exaggerated
In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions their teachers had held as self-evident and making the whole business of interpreting texts way more complicated by fusing theories of creative discourse with hardcore positions in metaphysics. Whether you’re a fan of Barthes, Foucault, de Man, and Derrida or not, you at least have to credit them with this fertile miscegenation of criticism and philosophy: critical theory is now a bona fide area of study for young American philosophers interested in both Continental poetics and Anglo-American analytic practice. H. L. Hix is one of these young (judging by his author photo, about twelve) U.S. philosophers, and I’m pretty sure that his 1992 Morte d’ Author: An Autopsy is a Ph.D. dissertation that was more than good enough to see print as part of Temple University Press’s “The Arts and Their Philosophies” series.
One of the wickedly fun things about following literary theory in the 1990s is going to be watching young critics/philosophers now come along and attack their poststructuralist teachers by criticizing assumptions those teachers have held as self-evident. This is just what Professor Hix is doing with one of the true clarion-calls that marked the shift from New Criticism and structuralism to deconstruction, Roland Barthes’ 1968 announcement of “The Death of the Author.” Barthes’ seminal essay has prompted twenty-three years of vigorous interjournal debate among European theorists (pro-death) and U.S. philosophers (anti-death, mostly), a debate that Hix has impressively compiled and arranged between two covers, and a debate that he has, rather less impressively, sought to resolve by accusing all parties of not being nearly complicated enough in their understanding of the term “author” ’s in- and extensions.
If you’re not a critical-theory jockey, then to appreciate why the metaphysical viability of the author is a big deal you have to recognize the difference between a writer—the person whose choices and actions account for a text’s features—and an author—the entity whose intentions are taken to be responsible for a text’s meaning. Hix, paraphrasing the ever-limpid Alexander Nehamas, uses the old saw about monkeys and typewriters to illustrate the distinction: “It is surely possible, though obviously unlikely, that a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters could by sheer chance produce an encyclopedia. If they did, they would be able to account for all the features of the text: Everything in the text was put there… by monkeys at Smith-Coronas. But… there would be no way to account for the meaning of the text’s features, because… the monkeys could not have meant anything by their typing.” Authors are monkeys who mean.
And for Romantic and early-twentieth-century critics, textual interpretation was author-based. For Wordsworth, the critic regards a text as the creative instantiation of a writer’s very self. Rather more clinically, I. A. Richards saw criticism as all and only an effort to nail down the “relevant mental condition” of a text’s creator. Axiomatic for both schools was the idea of a real author, an entity for whose definition most critics credit Hobbes’s Leviathan, which describes real authors as persons who, first, accept responsibility for a text and, second, “own” that text, i.e. retain the right to determine its meaning. It’s just this definition of “author” that Barthes in ’68 was trying to refute, arguing with respect to the first criterion that a writer cannot determine his text’s consequences enough to be really responsible (Salinger wasn’t hauled into court as an accessory when John Lennon was shot), and with respect to the second that the writer’s not the text’s owner in Hobbes’s sense because it is really critical readers who decide and thus determine what a piece of writing means.
It’s Barthes’ second argument here that’s the real poststructural death certificate, and this line is really just an involution of the New Critics’ WWII-era reaction against Richards and the Romantics. The New Critics, rather level-headedly at first, sought to dethrone the author by attacking what they called “the Intentional Fallacy.” Writers are sometimes wrong about what their texts mean, or sometimes have no idea what they really mean. Sometimes the text’s meaning even changes for the writer. It doesn’t matter what the writer means, basically, for the New Critics; it matters only what the text says. This critical overthrow of creative intent set the stage for the poststructural show that opened a couple decades later. The deconstructionists (“deconstructionist” and “poststructuralist” mean the same thing, by the way: “poststructuralist” is what you call a deconstructionist who doesn’t want to be called a deconstructionist), explicitly following Husserl and Brentano and Heidegger the same way the New Critics had co-opted Hegel, see the debate over the ownership of meaning as a skirmish in a larger war in Western philosophy over the idea that presence and unity are ontologically prior to expression. There’s been this longstanding deluded presumption, they think, that if there is an utterance then there must exist a unified, efficacious presence that causes and owns that utterance. The poststructuralists attack what they see as a post-Platonic prejudice in favor of presence over absence and speech over writing. We tend to trust speech over writing because of the immediacy of the speaker: he’s right there, and we can grab him by the lapels and look into his face and figure out just exactly what one single thing he means. But the reason why the poststructuralists are in the literary theory business at all is that they see writing, not speech, as more faithful to the metaphysics of true expression. For Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, writing is a better animal than speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a function not of presence but of absence: the reader’s absent when the writer’s writing, and the writer’s absent when the reader’s reading.
For the deconstructionist, then, a writer’s circumstances and intentions are indeed a part of the “context” of a text, but context imposes no real cinctures on the text’s meaning, because meaning in language requires a cultivation of absence rather than presence, involves not the imposition but the erasure of consciousness. This is so because these guys—Derrida following Heidegger and Barthes Mallarmé and Foucault God knows who—see literary language as not a tool but an environment. A writer does not wield language; he is subsumed in it. Language speaks us; writing writes; etc. Hix makes little mention of Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought or Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy, where all this stuff is set out most clearly, but he does quote enough Barthes—“To write is… to reach that point where only language acts, performs,’ and not me’”—so you get the idea that author-as-owner is not just superfluous but contradictory, and enough Foucault—“The writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression’; [it is] an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier”—so you can see that even the New Critics’ Holy Text disappears as the unitary lodestone of meaning and value. For Hix’s teachers, trying to attribute writing’s meaning to a static text or a human author is like trying to knit your own body, you
r own needles. Hix has an even better sartorial image: “Previously, the text was a cloth to be unraveled by the reader; if the cloth were unwound all the way, the reader would find the author holding the other end. But Barthes makes the text a shroud, and no one, not even a corpse, is holding the other end.”
Hix himself is a good weaver; Morte d’Author is a tight piece of work. Its first half is a critical overview of some of the major positions on authorial vital signs. Not only is there Hobbes and Frye on what an author is, there’s Foucault v. Nehamas on just how to recognize what an author is, and Barthes v. William Gass on whether to even bother trying to find an author. There are also brief critical summaries of Derrida, Culler, Stecker, Booth, and Burke. Hix’s discussion isn’t comprehensive, quite: Heidegger and Hegel are scarcely mentioned, Husserl (a major influence on Derrida) is absent, as are such important contemporary figures in the debate as Stanley Cavell (whose Must We Mean What We Say? is at least as important to Hix’s subject as Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction), Paul de Man, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. And Hix’s analysis of the players he does cover suffers from the scholarly anality that’s so common to published dissertations, an obsession with the jots and tittles of making excruciatingly clear what he’s saying and where he’s going. Wearying t-crossings like “I will isolate three of his claims in particular, disagreeing with two of them and agreeing with the other,” and microprecise critiques like “Wimsatt and Beardsley’s error may be hidden behind the passive voice; Cain’s is hidden behind the present tense” make the reader wish Hix’s editor had helped him delete gestures that seem directed at thesis committees rather than paying customers.
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