Class #15.1

So I think the party today was a success, but perhaps the lesson was not. Hopefully I can try to repair the situation a bit here. This is maybe the fourth time I've said this now, but I cannot thank you enough for making this a wonderful semester. You all make me want to sing, "Zippity Doo Dah."

Links: Speaking of that song, here is Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit, from Disney's Song of the South. I gave different interpretations of this in Lesson #14... in addition to this being an example of the long-lasting "plantation nostalgia genre," it's also an example of a new cultural idea about African-Americans that the white majority begin to develop in the 20th century. It will remind you of previous attitudes about American Indians... the idea is that blacks are somehow more magical or spiritual than whites. They live a more authentic life, in other words. Wait, what? Don't they live a life of alienated double consciousness? Well if you know any Marx or Hegel, you may recognize the idea here that the master himself is alienated because he does not do any work. Spiritual life is actually, in this theory, a sort of consequence of physical suffering; this is why the first modern musical genre that develops from slave spirituals is called "the blues." This article makes the analysis very well, and very concisely; look for the (surprising (to me)) comparison to Song Dynasty China!

Finally, Birth of a Nation. I showed you the movie's introduction, but you may also watch later scenes, as it seems the entire thing is on YouTube. Look for the later scenes of the white woman being sexually assaulted by the black slave man, and also the black Senators behaving idiotically and eating in a messy way during a legislative session. I stress that this is not historically accurate, but it is true there were black Senators from 1865-76. The next one was in 1969... almost a hundred years later (!), unless you count this baseball team. Barack Obama was elected to the Senate in 2005, making him only the third African-American Senator since the failure of "Reconstruction" (!). I remind you that this "black" or "African-American" group represents 36 million people, or 13% of the total U.S. population. Oh, and also I remembered why I showed you the Birth of a Nation video. It wasn't the idea of the political struggles over historical memory, or the idea of (white) American anxieties about "invasion"; these are just others I "discovered" through improvisation. My main point was supposed to be that Birth of a Nation disagrees with Twain's/Yankee's theory of training. We will discuss this in more detail next semester.

Homework Count: Has been updated. If you think I am wrong, just provide evidence by "copying and pasting" all of your posts into an email to me.

More Missing/Botched Lessons from Today:
-I did discuss Lucille's excellent answer to 120, wherein she compares Twain to Dubois as theorists of ideological "training" or "retraining." I mentioned that we will find this point explored elsewhere in Twain's work; for instance in Pudd'nhead Wilson he gives a demonstration that racial identities are cultural rather than genetic (see 2.2 and 2.3 here), and in "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" he questions whether "Americanization" training is effective, worthwhile, or even good at all. Then I think I lost myself when I began the movie clip. What I meant to say is that this is a major question in Early American Literature, as well as an open question for scientists and humanists today: what part of a personality is genetically determined, and what is culturally determined? Are we like "blank paper," or not? Of course the true answer is that it's the interaction of genetic and cultural determinants that makes a person, an idea that is developed quite well in the ancient world by both 孟子(Mencius) and Ἀριστοτέλης (Aristotle). This would certainly be a suitable topic for your final exam... either a "big essay" to replace the exam (on both the philosophical issue and its relevance to E.A.L.), or a "small essay" to replace one third of the exam (focusing more closely on its relevance to E.A.L.).
-I won't discuss 121. Hopefully Alyssa will give her answer, and you will consider other possibilities for the exam. You can see my idea just from the question; my idea is that Yankee≠Twain. And yet also sometimes, Yankee=Twain. So I suppose we can say that Yankee≈Twain?
-Tady's answer to 122 shows me that I wrote the question badly. Tady provides the cause of the war, which is the Church's desire to regain power from the Yankee; he then goes on to analyze the Church's anti-democratic and anti-technological orientation. But what I really meant to ask is what is the "catalyst" of the war? Tady describes the dry tinder, but let us also describe the match that lights it, and then we will truly understand the fire. Well, the catalyst is a financial panic, of a very modern sort. So Twain reminds us that warfare is not only "barbaric" or "ancient," but also modern. And indeed more common, more violent, and larger in scale in the modern era.
-I will await Zoe's answer to 123, because I sure as hell don't know how to answer it.

And even more:
-We discussed Letitia's answer to 124 about the connection between Reconstruction in the southern states from 1865-76 and the Yankee's "Man Factory." Let me also introduce some terminology. The white landlords in the south called the northern merchants and capitalists who came down with the army to try to modernize the southern economy by the name of "carpet-baggers," because they often carried their personal possessions in a certain kind of bag. They called people who helped the blacks and carpet-baggers by the name "scalawags." This was a terrible insult. One complicating factor is that there is an entire group of people we never discussed... what about poor white people living in the south who were not rich landowners/slavemasters? Well, the wealthy men used these insults like "scalawag" and "nigger-lover" insult to force their cooperation. In other words, they used racial affiliation and regional affiliation to overcome economic class alienation. This entire dynamic is captured quite well in Yankee, where we see that the carpet-bagger himself is not a perfect Man.
-Teresa's answer to 124 discusses the carpet-bagger concept more closely, although she does not use this name. She considers Hank Morgan to be the typical man of his era. Meaning a practical, resourceful, self-reliant man for a new industrial age. Sometimes historians call this age of American history "The Gilded Age," because there was great wealth (like gold), but the wealth was not solid, only an outer coating of gold. Why? Well they refer either to the era's recurring series of financial crises, or to the fact that only a very small number of people controlled the wealth despite American political rhetoric about equality and so forth. So many political critics in the U.S.A. now refer to our time as the "New Gilded Age."
-Winnie's answer to 125 discusses the Yankee's "duty to educate," and raises some suspicion of this idea. Let it be enough to say that the name of this duty, according to British writer Rudyard Kipling, was "the white man's burden." She also makes a smart comparison to early European imperialists like Columbus, Champlain, Williams, and so on, who spoke in similar terms. I would say, however, to be perfectly clear, that European imperialism in the 1500s-1600s is really quite different from European imperialism in the 1800s and 1900s. The sophistication, the scale of organization and impact, are quite bigger in the later case. The imperial network becomes much stronger. We saw this clearly in the sorrows of Cabeza de Vaca. So if Twain is making some comparison, he's probably comparing to European activities in Africa during the 1880s. (Example: Did you know that the most prestigious university scholarship for American students, which pays them to attend Oxford University in the U.K., is named for this horrible, horrible man.)
-Meg's answer to 125 is quite different. She discusses how the idea of something foreign presents an attraction, sexual and otherwise (很辣!), but that the "Pocohontas" myth is a false one because such relationships always feature inequities of power. The connection is that Twain shows this in the novel by means of the Yankee's love affair with Sandy. Hey, maybe this is also the answer to 123? Hello, Central!!!

And still more:
-On to your questions.
-Carol asks if Twain's novel is historically accurate, as we might expect from a writer associated with the development of "realism." Not, it's not. However, his main goal seems to be to destroy the idea that the original King Arthur stories themselves are historically accurate. So we may say that his depiction of England in the 500s is more accurate. He hasn't done any serious research; he's just pretty sure that the King Arthur mythology is 屁 and in this he is certainly correct.
-Clara asks a question related to genres. Can we say Twain is making a "satire" of the 6th century, or only that he is making a "satire" of the 19th century? Well this depends on how we want to use the term, but I tend to think that satire should be a fresh joke. In this case, not fresh to you and me, but fresh to Twain. So to write in the 1880s about medieval life is not really satire. Unless you are secretly making a commentary on modern life, and that would be satire. Twain helped to make the following idiom popular to describe social criticisms that are not fresh: "flogging a dead horse." Always be careful of someone flogging a dead horse, especially politicians; usually this means they are sneaking into your farm at night and flogging your live horse when you're not paying attention.
-Crystal asks if Twain has any interest in time-travel as a scientific concept. Well... he was certainly a scientific enthusiast, just like the Yankee. But I think the easier answer is that this is one of many similar novels in the industrializing Western nations in the 1880-90s, although probably the only funny one. Most of these novels imply that the modern, industrial world is better than the ancient, pre-industrial world. Oh, also this one. Twain's analysis is more complex than that, of course. In a related question, Zoe asked why the Yankee himself never tries to analyze why his time travel has occurred. You may consider this just a clumsy plot device for Twain, but perhaps it shows us the Yankee's pragmatic or practical character. He's more interested to "fix" a problem than to consider how it came to be.

There couldn't possibly... yes, there's more:
-Now the two most difficult questions.
-Qian-Yu asks how Americans felt about Catholicism in the 1880s. Well of course some of them were Catholics who immigrated from Ireland, Italy, Hungary, and so forth. So I guess they felt pretty good about Catholicism unless they had double consciousness (like O'Sullivan maybe?). But the majority were Protestants, and to consider Theodore Roosevelt's idea, Catholicism was the sort of belief you certainly had to 'wash yourself clean from' when Americanizing from Europe. In particular because Catholics believed the Pope in Rome was the central authority of their church. So American anti-Catholicism derives from British anti-Catholicism, but it's even stronger because Americans had no state-sponsored religion, and because they were supposed to be "self-reliant" instead of reliant on some distant Merlin. Certainly Twain is tapping this common anti-Catholic feeling in his book. But I also think that his satire isn't really against Catholicism, more like against Merlin in all forms, even perhaps the Yankee form of Merlin. Anti-Catholic literature is something we don't have much time for in our course. Here is a nice cartoon sample. Consider also our greatest U.S. president, Lincoln. He is famous for freeing the slaves, but less famous for suspending all of our laws and for being elected in large part by people who were strongly anti-Catholic. The first Catholic president of the U.S. was Kennedy (Irish family), much later, in 1960. But many people think he had the help of the Italian-American mafia to engineer the election. I find history disappointing sometimes. I look for 俠 and I find only 眩人.
-Zoe asks what the origin of the term "Yankee" is. I don't think there is any accurate information for its origin. At some point during the revolutionary era it comes to mean the American who opposes the British, so in this sense it is specifically anti-imperial. Consider the song "Yankee Doodle," about a humorous rural man who joins the army, wearing a feather in his cap to make fun of what he considers to be the ridiculous nature of army uniforms. Apparently the British-Americans first sang this song during the "French and Indian War" of the 1760s. Then the Americans sang it in the anti-British meaning in the 1770s. Later "Yankee" came to refer specifically to the "New England" area of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, etc. - the small states northeast of New York. It's one of the (nicer) words that people from the South use to describe people from the North; it's what they called my family, for instance, when we moved from New York to the "Carolinas" in 1985. I think this is where "New York Yankee" comes from when they named the team in 1913. Then of course there is the global meaning of Yankee, which refers to all U.S. Americans. What Marti might call "Your America." This meaning is also a kind of insult, I think. Certainly an insult if you're traveling around in South America. The basis of this insult, then, is the irony that the Yankee believes himself to be an anti-imperialist whereas he acts rather like an imperialist. A friend of Twain named Ernest Crosby wrote a novel that has one interesting scene in which a Chinese professor reverses a common stereotype, by accusing Americans of having no "sense of humor." His evidence? That they cannot perceive this irony in the meaning of their national song "Yankee Doodle."