Marc Shell, Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics, and
Nationhood. (New York: Oxford UP, 1993).
Here is another good, thought-provoking, and rather odd book from the hand of
Professor Shell, whose philological tenacity and massive erudition have altered
their focus from questions about economics (The Economy of Literature.,
1978; Money, Language, and Thought, 1982) to those about kinship (The
End of Kinship, 1988). The latter book explored "the ideal of universal
siblinghood" in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; this one analyzes the
contradictions in that ideal as they unfold in a much vaster range of contexts:
from fifteenth-century Spain and sixteenth -century England to
nineteenth-century America and (not quite) contemporary Qubec, with constant
excursions into ancient (Platonic and Roman), medieval, and biblical versions
of universal brotherhood. The general aim of the book is to show how, and how
often, the "apparently genial motto 'All men are brothers'" gets actualized in
politics as "only my 'brothers' are men" (vii), with the predictable and
depressing result that such universalism "does not allow for conceiving a
creature as being at once nonkin and kind and thus encourages us to treat as
nonhuman those we might already regard as nonkin" (38)--as was literally done
in the Spanish designation of conversos as marranos (pigs). The
elimination of any middle ground between species (kind) and family (kin) is
what, repeatedly, transforms such "apparently genial" doctrines of toleration
into endless acts of intolerance. On this score, Christianity, of course, does
rather more damage than either Judaism or Islam, both of which have such a
middle ground, a space for human (and religious) others between the coreligious
brethren and the animal kingdom. As a critique of universalist doctrines, and a
plea for "potentially tolerant particularism" (194), the book is admirable,
convincing, and timely.
/pp. 4-5/
Its intelligence in this respect is moral in the best sense: that is, it never
levels easy accusations of hypocrisy at any writer or institution or way of
thinking; instead, it locates the problem in the ideologies themselves, and
sympathizes with those who must struggle with their contradictions. Equally
intelligent, and sometimes amusing, is the ground on which the critique
proceeds: the dismantling of the common assumption that we can know for sure
just who our parents or brothers or sisters are. From the epistemological
problem that certain knowledge of consanguinity is almost never available,
through the historical problem of changelings, bastards and foundlings, to the
social problem of competing ways to define "families" -- genetic, adoptive,
collactaneous (a fine archaic term for 'sucking the same milk'), ritualistic or
ceremonial -- Shell continually demonstrates the near-impossibility of
distinguishing between 'literal' and 'figurative' kin, and the consequent
significance, especially for politics, of the metaphorical latter.
These metaphors have real consequences for people's lives and beliefs: the
medieval doctrine of "carnal contagion" (by which siblings-in-law fell under
the incest prohibition), for example, was the basis for Henry VIII's declaring
his daughter Elizabeth illegitimate. In the densest chapter of the book (4),
Shell describes this situation and Elizabeth's response, which was to present
herself, both literally and figuratively, as a Virgin Queen who replicated with
her kingdom the Virgin Mary's fourfold relation to (the twofold Christian) God:
as child, mother, sister, and wife. Notwithstanding the utility, for the
monarch, of thus conceiving her subjects as her children, it imposed on the
children the (metaphorical?) inevitability of their all being incestuous. The
next chapter (5) is an original and thorough re-reading of Hamlet in
this light, as a tragedy of the necessary refusal or denial of incest. From
"more than kin, and less than kind" through the "nunnery" (i.e. celibacy as the
only solution to incestuous whoredom) to the only "union" that remains possible
- -- death, the play must destroy the (symbolic?) siblinghood that threatens
universally.
/pp. 5-6/
If the variously linked royal families in Hamlet suffer from too much
siblinghood, those in the tragedies of Racine (Ch. 6) suffer from too little.
Here "orphanhood" (the literal status of Jean himself) is the condition to be
sublated (or sublimated?), in the royal family by the Roman practice of
adrogation, and in the citizenry of the nascent modern state by regarding it as
the parent who will (later) guarantee our universal fraternité.
In this neatly contrastive picture of the familial figurations for the
relationship of the citizen to the government in the then (17-18cc) dominant
and competing imperial powers of Europe (supplanted by the account, in Chapter
2, of the first such power, Spain), there are numerous, and fertile,
implications that the history of the modern (psychological) subject is a
function of his and her political definition. Shell does not directly pursue
such implications, but recounts instead, by developing a suggestion of Edmund
Leach, the modern history of keeping pets. For these amiable creatures are
"intermediating" (169) between our categories of the human and nonhuman, the
paradoxical combination of kin but not kind. They get treated as consanguineous
family members (we don't copulate with them) and not as animals (we don't eat
them). Shell teases out of this borderline status an "ideology of pethood"
(175) -- from St. Francis to the SPCA -- that sentimentalizes and obfuscates
the more nefarious operations of the notion of universal brotherhood.
I hope to have indicated much of the brilliance and some of the oddity of this
book. Its most apparent structural oddity is the chapter (3) on bilingual
advertisements in Québec, which is quite remotely tangential to the
subjects of kin and kind. It is made more tangential by being mainly a reprint
of a 1973 article, whose point is that the real problem is not the rivalry for
domination of either the English or French languages but rather the use of both
merely to mediate and serve the interests of commodification. Et alors?
What language in the First World does not serve such interests? What
advertisement in any language fails to assure us that all sorts of "problems
are solvable by economic consumption" (56)? What exact threat does commercial
use pose? Not only was this not specified in 1973, but Shell offers no effort
to test this curious diagnosis in the twenty years since. Amusing bilingual
signs still exist in /pp. 6-7/ Montréal; droll examples of Franglais and
Fringlish, conversational plaisanteries that exploit both interference
and code-switching are hearable everywhere (as Shell is well aware). Nor have
political antagonisms decreased. Has commodification, not diminished either,
anything to do with all this? And what, above all, has advertising to do with
brotherhood? Shell's twenty-year-old photographs do not show ads promising
siblinghood (in either language) as the result of consuming the same brand of
soap powder. In other words, the point of the article was dubious then; now and
in this book, it seems neither cogent nor coherent.
The larger oddity that menaces general coherence is the kind of lapidary
pedantry habitual to Shell: I mean his entrancement by details, his exactitude
and magnitude of citation, his breadth of genuinely interdisciplinary
reference. All these are good in themselves; they are requirements of serious
scholarship. But all are overdone here, to a combined extent that makes it
sometimes difficult to follow the larger argument through the thickets of
documentation, and that makes the whole book somewhat user-unfriendly. It
contains 198 pages of text, with 154 pages of endnotes, bibliography, and
index. Despite some obvious efforts to keep readers on track (general summaries
in preface and conclusion; titled subsections of chapters), we often have a
hard time figuring out why a given issue is being raised at a given point. And
the more interested we are in the wealth of tangential detail, the harder the
going is, since the copious notes are both expository and documentary. The
former lead us down various, sometimes fascinating, tangential paths that leave
us badly disoriented when we've flipped back to the text. And the latter
necessitate two flipping operations to identify full references: flip from text
to notes, which contain abbreviations that require flipping onward to the
bibliography. Perhaps this regimen was imposed by the publisher; it is in any
case wasteful of our energy and trying to our patience. Tangents ought to be
explored in the text or even in footnotes (as they were in some of
Shell's earlier books); references should be findable in a single flip -- as
they would be if made parenthetically in the text. The format employed here,
whoever is responsible for it, is a terrible and typical compromise made by
humanists in /pp. 7-8/ defiance of the much handier social-science practice.
And it does serious disservice to a book as dense and provocative as this one.
If we citizens of the republic of letters are not quite siblings, we are at
least fellow-workers who owe each other the common courtesy of making the tasks
we share easier, instead of harder.
Richard Waswo
Université de Genève
waswo@uni2a.unige.ch
/p.7/