I received this email from Nick Lawrence while I was out west:

 

Dear Ron,

 

Here's my response to Louis' post (7/08) on reading allusion, via Bruce Andrews:

 

Does Bruce Andrews write satire? Or is his a post-satirical satire, in which the conditions underpinning traditional satire no longer obtain —no sense of normative consensus among its audience, perhaps no necessary sense of audience itself; no determinate context for the ridicule in its speech acts; no semantic or syntactic imperatives beyond preserving the most basic allusions to social content.

 

Taking for a moment the "down" staircase in Louis' typology of allusion, let's murder to dissect a little:

 

One thing the line "Where's a battered woman — I want to beat her up?" might do is inspire laughter — laughter primarily at the absurdity of substituting the expected exclamation point end-punctuation with a question mark [1], which seems simultaneously to lampoon the misogyny of the remark by calling into question its decisive aggression, and at the same time to ludicrously mimic the "upspeak" intonation associated with Valley Girls [2] in the '80s ("My name is Jessica?"). But the laughter is at best weak, dying away with the acknowledgment that we are, after all, dealing with a form of violence that only in the last few decades has become stigmatized and is, nonetheless, as old as the hills and the bullies that dwell therein. (Can we make jokes about hillbillies, now? [3] Wasn't it pointed out recently that they constitute the last safe butt of ethnic humor in America? Will class continue to subtend race in the variegated terrain of US cultural politics? Why hasn't Baudelaire's title been adopted by current political discourse — is it because "poor-bashing" puts a name to what happens all the time?) Or are we inspired to a fresh series of hollow chuckles by noting that the speech act gets it all wrong: that battered women are almost always intimates of their batterers, that men typically don't need to go looking for women to beat up — silly! — the way they do gay people (though pausing soberly here to acknowledge that lesbians and gays, too, are underacknowledged victims of domestic abuse). Is violence formal? The line has the rhythm of a stand-up joke [4], setup followed by (literal) punchline, but the punchline's botched by the inflection, and silence, punctuated by a few titters [5], greets its delivery — the kind of silence that was reportedly common at sets by so-called postmodern comedians like Andy Kaufman and his ilk, back in the '70s.

 

The great temptation in reading Andrews is to treat each speech act or micro-sentence as structurally equivalent, as together constituting a conflictual "field" of discourse or overall social horizon. But the method itself negates this assumption; it is, after all, based on a highly selective, obsessively organizational approach to its materials. So reading this line as a "wild" allusion to retrochic seems to me right in its nod to the decontextualization (heightened ambiguity) of the speech act as punchline, but misses the real edge of Andrews' project in Shut Up, which is an all-out war on liberal pieties — the kind that led, via '70s complacency, to the Reaganite '80s. Call it prog-chic — or, as it became a flashpoint in the '90s culture wars, political correctness.

 

Nick

 

[1] "Questions are wimpoid translations of statements" (165)

[2] "Teenage girls are a race apart" (193)

[3] "everything's a putrified hillbilly spitting up sinecure" (190)

[4] "Why did the Israelis let the Christian militia into the camps?—to impress Jodie Foster" (159)

[5] "Too bad we can't pee out of our nipples" (192)