Response to Bending Genre
James Bezerra
There was a significant, though never previously reported upon meeting long about 1852 which brought together the greatest American minds living, dead, and otherwise. Tesla was there too, but dressed in drag as he was not at that time a citizen and because Edison had said he would not attend if Tesla was invited. Whitman was there, sitting on Emerson’s lap. The ghost of John Winthrop was there, annoying everyone by sliding a penny up a wall, which he had only recently learned how to do. The as yet unborn consciousnesses of T.S. Eliot and Thomas Pynchon were projected into dilithium crystals. Andrew Carnegie had called the meeting. He was at the time beginning the project of assuaging his soul by building libraries across the country and when he called the meeting to order he set down on the table in the center of the hall two books, one was The Scarlet Letter and the other was Moby Dick and he asked the honorable assemblage of Americas, “What are we supposed to do about this?” He was an officious man and needed his adopted country to choose a literary tradition.
Before reading Bending Genre I had a vague notion that it would either be about creative nonfiction or that it would be composed of creative nonfiction.
After finishing reading Bending Genre I have a vague notion that it was either about creative nonfiction or that it was composed on nonfiction.
I’m still not sure.
That was and is, of course, the point.
Though the transcripts of the meeting have been lost to history, the minutes were kept in an un-numbered safe deposit box in the vault below the tower which J. P. Morgan built and filled with gold doubloons and which he frequently amused himself by swimming through while wearing a top hat and waistcoat. The minutes are clear about the group’s decision, but one need not read them to know what was decided. It was Nathaniel Hawthorne who carried the day and this decision has been rippling down through the American literary tradition since. It was a decision in favor of the straight line, a decision that texts are allowed to be no more than 20% weird, and a decision in favor of retaining guilt and shame as primary characteristics of the American consciousness, though ones which need not ever be addressed directly.
In “Ostrakons at Amphipolis” Michael Martone tells us that the original title of North by Northwest was The Man in Lincoln’s Nose (173) and what a wonderful world it would be if that title had remained. How ashamed we would all have to be if one of our most sacrosanct films came fitted with the albatross of such a stupid name. How required we would have been to acknowledge the sublime and the strange present in the incongruity of all things. Low how that might have challenged our sense of the superiority of rigid categorization.
One of the chief claims made against Moby Dick was that its alternating chapters presented too much information that was essentially true, albeit about whales. It was wondered if the country’s population would have to begin to be able to distinguish on their own between that which was fiction and that which was not. It was worried that asking the reader to develop the muscle to discern the difference would create an unruly population no longer willing to simply believe that what was written in their newspapers and hymnals was true because it claimed to be. Ultimately it was a decision made in favor of protectionism. A tariff placed on the imagination.
In “Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries” Kazim Ali writes, “What is painting: Ono, who first exhibited paintings along with their instructions and then dispensed with the paintings and exhibited only the instructions.” (30)
As a concession to Melville, it was agreed that Moby Dick was henceforth to be regarded as a Great American Novel (GAN), though with the provision that no one would actually ever read it.
In “Study Questions for the Essay at Hand” Robin Hemley warns us, “This essay practices Hot Yoga, but it’s tired and it’s bent out of shape and is blending with other essays and other forms of discourse within its personal space” (193).
Once the meeting was adjourned, Melville was summarily executed and replaced by an imposter who was a very handsome lunatic. The body was buried at sea.
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