“And Yet, We Hear a Band”: Transgressing Fantasy, Form, and the Flesh in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive

Photographer unknown, image from Pixabay.

by Angelia Thomson

A question that has been debated for centuries is what defines good art. This question leads us to probe deeper and ask who has the credentials to determine the value of art and how the general public’s aesthetic taste is formed. Although participating in discussions about art was once limited to an elite group of artists, their aristocratic patrons, and associated intellectuals, salons of 18th–19th century France that were devoted to the exhibition of newly created paintings, sculpture, and engraving, opened up a door for the general public to participate in intellectual exchanges about art. Charles Baudelaire’s text, The Salon of 1859, provides his takeaways from a particularly famous Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, where he critiques the emergence of photography and, as a matter of particular interest for this discussion, expresses his concerns about the future of art as the public becomes increasingly involved in the artistic process, influencing the artist to be “more inclined to paint not what he dreams, but what he sees.”[1] For Baudelaire, it is essential to consider how people form their opinions on art. When evaluating French art-salon culture, it becomes clear that social solidarity plays a role in shaping one’s aesthetic taste: in a room full of people with ideas and opinions, one “will inevitably be guided by a sense of what passes for the best view in the eyes of the majority.”[2] Baudelaire’s concerns regarding the public’s influence on the artist and art as a whole were valid.

Beginning with the exhibits of the French Royal Academy early in the 18th century, salons were one of the primary ways the public could contribute to discourse surrounding art, therefore holding a certain level of power over the artists who tried to fulfill their demands, and to the eventual commercialization of art as part of a growing public art market. If there were concerns in Baudelaire’s time about the public’s taste impacting art, then, when observing today’s day and age, these concerns are only amplified with social media and algorithms holding power over how people engage with many different art forms. This discussion will demonstrate how social media acts as the modern-day French salon and the impact algorithms have had on shaping public opinion, specifically analyzing how these social spaces and technological advancements have impacted the modern-day music industry, noting how the line between audience and artist has at times become almost non-existent, and how artists no longer have to cater to the preferences of the audience, but more importantly, to the algorithm that shapes those preferences.

Before the introduction of French art salons in the early 18th century, discussions about art were restricted to intellectuals who had dedicated many years of their lives to studying art. As salons emerged, people from all walks of life were allowed and even encouraged to participate in aesthetic discourse. It was evident from the eager interest the public displayed in these discussions that they had wanted to engage in this kind of activity but had never been given the chance. Opening up these discussions raised concerns about how the public’s ‘uneducated’ opinion could create a permanent disruption to how art was viewed and created. As Baudelaire makes clear, “obedient artists bow to the public’s taste,”[3] and if the opinions that were valued were expanded beyond people who had a wealth of experience in studying art, the demands of the public could become unimaginative, therefore leading to a decline in artistic value, and the progression of art would not only be stalled but could enter into a sharp decline for the worse. The French Royal Academy, who hosted the early salons, did not think that getting consensus from the public would harm the artist but instead carried the objective to “renew the ancient custom of exposing their works to the public in order to secure its judgment and maintain among themselves that praiseworthy emulation so necessary to the advancement of the fine arts.”[4] It was the belief of the Royal Academy that because the public was a “dynamic, anonymous, consensual voice, the public [had] no personal stake in its judgements and [was] hence quite literally impartial.”[5] What they failed to take into account is how the public’s taste would be formed and influenced by peers, and intellects; that the voice of the critics—going from being restricted to those who had acquired and maintained a certain level of credentials, and then shifting to a consensus of the public—would have consequential impacts on the type of art that would be produced in the proceeding years.

Salons provided a space for people to interpret art, make judgments, and share their thoughts about different works with peers, gaining insight from one another and furthering not only their own exploration but also that of society as a whole. Although salons intended to further artistic endeavour, and “encourage people to express themselves in public who otherwise might not have,”[6] another result appeared, which was “the social capital one could acquire by expressing one’s taste.”[7] The notion put forth by the Royal Academy that including the public in the discourse about art would provide an unbiased view begins to fade as the influence of how peers and intellectuals perceive them sways how they form and present their ideas. As we consider how taste is developed, it becomes apparent that it is not a “spontaneous expression of one’s particular character, but rather a reflex of social solidarity.”[8] This phenomenon is made clear on the account of Abbé Le Blanc, who describes a situation where one “hears something praised which he considered indifferent…looks carefully at the object, examines it, has feelings, and revises his judgement.”[9] Salons provided a space where these types of interactions ran rampant, often influenced most significantly by those who had clear, confident takes. Even though the public was technically developing their own ideas about art, “[t]he ‘natural’ to which individual taste aspires is defined by consensus values, as articulated by the most coherent voices.”[10] This relationship shows that even though the gates into the art world had been opened to the public, their opinion only amplified the voices of those who had always provided commentary. The taste conformity that seems to be innate to audiences further demonstrates that authentically individual taste was rarely practiced in the era of salons, and in modern times, it is essentially non-existent due to the introduction of social media and algorithms.

The phenomenon observed in salons, where the public’s aesthetic taste was predominantly determined by those who had a high level of expertise in art, is reflected at an even greater level when one evaluates how people’s taste is developed in the age of social media—more specifically, through the carefully tailored algorithms that keep users engaged. A near-subconscious process occurs in which we now carry around an “external mind”[11] in our pockets, where not only the “search and storage of information is handed over to, […] but we could also hypothesize that taste formation and creative inspiration, as well, happen more and more ‘out there’.”[12] The way we currently interact with music provides a strong example of how the algorithms of certain streaming platforms, along with social media, can influence our music taste. Spotify, one of the most widely used streaming services, holds considerable influence over the music preferences of today’s society through its algorithm, which suggests music for users to consume, particularly through its carefully curated Discover Weekly playlists. These playlists suggest music to listeners that Spotify thinks they will like, following a complex three-step process. First, there is “collaborative filtering, which analyzes both the user’s behaviour and the behaviours of other people”[13]; this tracks the number of ‘listens’ on a track, and actions users take while listening, such as saving the track to a playlist or visiting the artists’ profile. Next, there are Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, which analyze the “web constantly looking for written text about musical topics and identifying the ‘cultural vectors’ associated with specific artists and songs.”[14] Finally, there are the “audio models, which analyze the raw audio tracks themselves. […] Those models automatically rate the features of a song […] for instance, its ‘valence’, that is the emotional positivity or sadness conveyed by a track,”[15] and then add the assessed features to the user’s taste profiles. Discover Weekly playlists are just an example of how streaming services can manipulate the taste of users, but the algorithm’s influence over listeners’ taste is implemented in just about every action taken while using the app, from what music recommendations it makes when one first opens the app, to what is added to the queue to be played after their current song finishes. This relationship between the algorithm and listener is comparable across most streaming platforms and is not limited to Spotify. The idea that the general public conforms to whatever “those with some education”[16] preach rings truer today than ever, except for the fact that the voice of the intellectuals has been replaced with a quieter, more pervasive power—the voice of the algorithm.

The algorithm’s control over music listeners is arguably much more powerful, and it only brings society closer to Baudelaire’s concerns that the public’s taste can negatively impact artists’ creativity and imagination. The evolution of the algorithm wasn’t a two-step process from the traditions established in the 18th century by the Académie Royale—where intellectual taste makers determined the taste of the general public—to complex algorithms such as Spotify’s—manipulating what music is well received by listeners—but includes many intermediary steps, a notable one occurring during Baudelaire’s era. Baudelaire’s time marked a significant shift in how the public’s taste was formed, yet also served as a notable continuity in French cultural life between the Ancien Régime and post-Revolution France. By the time of Salon 1859, there were fewer concerns over an elite shaping the artistic opinions of the public, but rather a dilution of the aesthetic sensibility of those who had inadequate knowledge of art, and forming their own taste. During Baudelaire’s prime, one of his main contentions with discourse surrounding art was not so much that the public was perceiving art through the opinions of elites, but rather that the people contributing to discussion surrounding art lacked foundational knowledge of artistic traditions and therefore led to taste patterns that didn’t appreciate unique creative identities and imagination. It can be inferred that this deterioration of aesthetic sensibility that Baudelaire claimed to be occurring was a natural evolution from the dynamics of the early art salons of the 18th century: the confidence in how some people shaped their judgments, despite lacking indispensable knowledge of artistic traditions, allowed them to be easily swayed by social solidarity. This practice became so normalized that it was rarely questioned by the time of Baudelaire, allowing much artistic conversation to remain at a superficial level while promoting a progression in art that favoured replication and efficiency, which Baudelaire feared would only worsen.

Furthermore, Baudelaire raised concerns over the significant influence on art that the curators of the salons had by determining what art was even worth the public’s attention. It was the curators in 1859 who permitted the inclusion of photography, which was one of the primary catalysts that triggered Baudelaire’s reaction in his discussion of modern public and photography. The combination of the public being echo chambers of the elite in the 18th century, the dilution of aesthetic sensibility, and the power the salon curators held during these times has now been replaced by algorithms and social media. The looming influence of the algorithm has ulterior motives that are not just to “simply mirror our actual preferences” but, similarly to salon curators, to understand that “individual taste needs to be cultivated, curated, and expanded to maximize our engagement.”[17] However, the algorithm, unlike the intellectuals who carried influence in the discourse of salons, was created not only to have a more subconscious impact, but its predominant motives are in favour of increasing our engagement with an app, and competing with the limited attention economy that exists today, rather than the advancement of the arts.

A difference that can be observed between the effect of algorithms and other people’s opinions on shifting public taste is that algorithms and social media do not provide any escape from their influence, especially in the case of music. Currently, if a person wants to experience music, they will often listen to it through a streaming platform that, as we have seen, provides constant control over what music we like, even if we don’t acknowledge it. Although there are ways to listen to music in a more secluded manner, such as purchasing physical copies or attending a live show, it is still challenging to listen to music purely on one’s own. Even if one goes to a store to purchase a record or a CD, their decision to buy a physical copy of music is likely influenced because they already like listening to the music on a streaming platform or have seen advertisements and online discussions about it. In the era of salons, there were people, like Marc-Antoine Laugier, who believed they were resilient to the effect of others opinion stating, “[w]hen it comes to paintings, I do not let myself get captivated by the authority of others’ opinions; I interrogate my soul: its movements are the only experts that make-up my mind,”[18] while others “felt this pressure of the collective voice as a menace and attempted to distance themselves from the crowd,”[19] by literally avoiding “those turbulent quarter hours where one cannot view at one’s ease, and where the mind [is] distracted by the maelstrom of spectators.”[20] In terms of Baudelaire, one could perceive The Salon of 1859 as an attempt to distance himself from the coercive elements of the salon experience. Although it could be debated whether Laugier was truly autonomous in his interpretation of art, or if Baudelaire was successful in separating himself enough from the overbearing public opinion through his writing, avoiding “those turbulent quarter hours”[21] becomes nearly impossible in the era of 24-hour social media saturation.

In terms of Laugier’s claim that he would only listen to what his soul was speaking to him about art, in the modern day, even if one thinks they have naturally come across a song that speaks to them, it has likely been invisibly manipulated through algorithms to give them a song that they will statistically enjoy. Much algorithmic targeting and profiling has led to what is known as ‘corrupt personalization,’ “the process by which your attention is drawn to interests that are not your own.”[22] One could argue that the algorithm knows us better than we know ourselves, or more specifically, that our relationship with the algorithm determines what we even consider ourselves to be. On the other hand, the people who did acknowledge the hold that others’ opinions could have on them, and therefore developed strategies to avoid interaction with these influential beliefs, can be respected for these attempts; but in the present day, avoiding the effects of voices on social media and the ever-looming algorithm is near impossible. Even if one successfully removes comments and likes from their life, if they are still consuming music from a streaming platform, all of their music listening is, at least partially, determined by the algorithm. Due to the inescapable nature of algorithms today, autonomous taste formation is inconceivable, highlighting the downhill turn Baudelaire feared society could take in taste formation and art critique.

As Baudelaire suggests, the relationship between the audience and the artist must be treated with care. There is a reciprocal cycle in the sense that an artist provides work that the audience is satisfied with, and then the artist must continue to respond to these demands if they want to be ‘successful.’ In Baudelaire’s time, artists only had to worry that their work would appease the public; in current times, however, more importantly than impressing the public, artists must tailor their work to satisfy the algorithm. Ultimately, the algorithm determines what the public wants. Similar to how artists in Baudelaire’s era would attach “ridiculous titles”[23] to attract the eye, we can see modern-day artists manipulating their work to meet the demands of today’s music industry algorithms. Returning to Spotify’s algorithm as an example, “one listen is counted when 30 seconds of a song is played. This makes creating an incentive for an audience to repeatedly play the same piece of music much more of a priority.”[24] Statistics from the Billboard Top 100 between 2013 and 2018 show an increasing trend of songs starting with a chorus to grab the audience’s attention, and a decrease in the average song length of 20 seconds.[25] It is evident that musicians are manipulating their work to find an audience, and that what they are doing is working if their definition of success is based on the metrics of having as many streams as possible, rather than crafting unique aesthetics.

One reason music producers can be so successful in increasing their streams by trying to appease the algorithm is that there is no guessing game regarding what will work. Reflecting on times before the introduction of algorithms, although artists could adjust their work to do what they thought would perform best in the public eye, there were no statistics outlining exactly what would be well-received. Today, music producers “have access to an immense amount of data: they can know which songs are skipped after a few seconds, which are most listened to in a playlist, and which musical styles or rhythms are able to attract more attention.”[26] The detailed feedback artists receive on their work can help them further their careers, but it can also create a significant level of pressure to increase their streams and disregard their creative intuition. Catering your work to a series of calculations and statistics is exactly what Baudelaire feared: artists become machines in pursuit of perfection for consumer appeal, and, in doing so, lose all sense of creativity and imagination. The deluge of statistics and calculations that has poured the current foundation for music production is a prime example of artists no longer being allowed to create what they imagine, if they want their work to be appreciated by the general public.

Although the algorithm has the most power in determining what music will be successful in the public eye, the public has a new form of interaction with art, and that is, with the introduction of social media, not only can they provide feedback on music through likes, comments and shares, but they can actually have a direct creative voice in the production process. The concern that the salons provided a frightening opportunity for their attendees to feel that they had “the right to teach and guide artists, without having to go to the trouble of mastering arts,”[27] has been amplified tenfold when looking at the level of involvement music listeners can have in the creative process, and the current state of the music industry. An extreme example of the audience being involved in every step of the creative process is Charli XCX’s 2020 album how i’m feeling now, where she consulted her listeners, or in this case, her collaborators, on nearly every creative decision. The audience could send Charli beats, album artwork, music video concepts, lyrics, or any other element that goes into an album rollout, and she would then incorporate these ideas into her project. This unique, experimental way of creating an album entirely through connection with listeners through the internet “relies on making the material available before release and the creative process a public spectacle, from uploading pictures of lyric sheets to the final recorded product.”[28] It eliminates the idea of having to present a perfectly polished piece of work, and reshapes “the traditional creative process [which] was characterized by a phase of isolation and seclusion.”[29] Even though there have been concerns expressed since the early days of letting the general public contribute to discussion about art, and even more so today with the public’s taste being so intrinsically related to the algorithm, there can also be examples like how i’m feeling now that utilize these changes in a new, and creative way—advancing music to new heights.

Baudelaire’s anxieties, which emerged as the sphere of public influence on art grew during the salon era, would be at an all-time high if he could witness the extent of public involvement in art and the influence algorithms hold over artists’ creative exploration in the present day. With the public being able to contribute their opinions on art—and, in the case of this discussion, music—it has reached a concerning level of audience involvement, given how that involvement is currently being manipulated, at a depth far beyond what the curators of the salon of 1859 could hope to have achieved with their introduction of photography to art exhibition. With artists’ taste heavily influenced by an uncontrollable algorithm, tremendous pressure is being placed upon artists to produce mechanically, trying to achieve the correct design of a song to reach virality, rather than creating art as an expression of their dreams and imagination. There are many parallels between debates about letting the public into artistic discussions through salons and the level of audience involvement in current times. Outside of how the public can influence the artist, many argue that without a level of education in art, one can’t form valid judgments. In the salon era, it was common for most people to find social solidarity through taste and follow the lead of the ‘educated’ voices. Correspondingly, the modern-day general public is heavily influenced by what the algorithm subtly tells them is good music: it has created a vicious cycle of demand, where artists feed into the algorithm, the algorithm determines how ‘good’ the work is, and delivers it to those it thinks will appreciate it. Though there are elements of technological evolution that have allowed artists like Charli XCX to innovate new ways to create music—using it as a tool to advance the art form rather than to feed into a calculated algorithm—the shortening of song lengths, and the changes in melodic structure to gain listenership, should be a reminder to stay aware that how we interact with art can alter what is produced without us even realizing. To mitigate the negative impacts while maximizing the positives from modern-day technological advancements, it is essential to continue reflecting not only on the motives of the companies behind the algorithms, but also on the power they have over our music taste and the art that is and will be created.

Endnotes

[1] Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859,” 297.

[2] Ray, “Talking About Art: the French Royal Academy Salons and the Formation of the Discursive Citizen,” 539.

[3] Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859,” 297.

[4] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 532.

[5] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 532.

[6] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 537.

[7] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 537.

[8] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 539.

[9] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 539.

[10] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 539.

[11] Arielli, “Taste and the algorithm,” 78.

[12] Arielli, “Taste and the algorithm,” 78.

[13] Arielli, “Taste and the algorithm,” 84.

[14] Arielli, “Taste and the algorithm,” 84.

[15] Arielli, “Taste and the algorithm,” 84.

[16] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 539.

[17] Arielli, “Taste and the algorithm,” 87.

[18] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 536.

[19] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 540.

[20] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 540.

[21] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 540.

[22] Arielli, “Taste and the algorithm,” 89.

[23] Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859,” 291.

[24] McConville, “The Artists as a Subscription: Patching music as an artistic device,” 355.

[25] McConville, “The Artists as a Subscription,” 355.

[26] Arielli, “Taste and the algorithm,” 90.

[27] Ray, “Talking About Art,” 532.

[28] McConville, “The Artists as a Subscription: Patching music as an artistic device,” 359.

[29] Arielli, “Taste and the algorithm,” 91.

Bibliography

Arielli, Emanuele. “Taste and the Algorithm.” Studi di estetica, no. 12 (2018). https://doi.org/10.7413/18258646062.

Baudelaire, Charles. “The Salon of 1859.” In Baudelaire: Selecting Writings on Art and Artists. Cambridge University Press, 1972.

McConville, Thomas. “The Artist as a Subscription: Patching Music as an Artistic Device.” Organised Sound 28, no. 3 (2023): 352–61. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771823000626.

Ray, William. “Talking About Art: the French Royal Academy Salons and the Formation of the Discursive Citizen.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 4 (2004): 527-552. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2004.0047.

Image by William Carver.

by Lucas Rucchin

No geographical site seems to be more defined by myth than the U.S.-Mexico border. The extensive line of romantic cowboy novels, sensationalist television, and, most recently, rhetoric of Othering within the political landscape work together to shape the image of Mexico within the American cultural imagination. Breaking Bad, perhaps the definitive border fiction of our time, has given us the modern archetype of the evil Mexican and cartel mercenaries, who emerge in opposition to the American characters as quietly calculating, charismatically sadistic, and thoroughly un-American antagonists. Their mythology can be traced back to the era of Hollywood Westerns, which variously depicted ethnic Mexicans and Native Americans as a corruption for white gunslingers to rectify. Further back, we find border dynamics depicted with even slimmer sensitivity in cowboy dime novels and the vaudeville shows of Buffalo Bill. Still further, we find the historical backdrop of expansionism and settler colonialism, and finally, at the heart of the myth, the divine sanctioning of Manifest Destiny packaged up in the frontier dream.

It is easy to categorize Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses as yet another product of this mythology. In its most literal reading, the novel falls to all the tropes of border fiction. The reticent cowboy John Grady sets off on a journey into Mexico, where he encounters the thrill of nomadic adventure, an exotic love interest, and a sprawling, foreign country in need of taming. He confronts lawless Mexican foes, narrowly survives, and returns home in one piece. But the idylls of the novel belie its complexity. At its core, All the Pretty Horses is a deconstruction of Western mythology, in which the aspirational cowboy dream is evaluated and shown to be unattainable. In short, it is demythologized. Alone and without a ranch, riding out under a reddening sky, John Grady, newly weathered by the realities of Mexico, possesses nothing of the dream he once sought.

However, Cormac McCarthy is not interested in what his characters are thinking. By the end of All the Pretty Horses, John Grady has not explicitly reflected on where he intends to go, or how the mortal cost of his journey has affected him, or how his notion of the cowboy myth has changed. His thoughts, in the manner of the reticent cowboy, remain largely unexpressed. McCarthy’s stylistic power is instead devoted to the environment. Where we can locate John Grady’s mind—where we can trace the evolution of his cowboy dream as the events of his journey alternately propel, confuse, and dissolve the Western mythos—are indicated in the depictions of the grasslands, deserts, rivers, mountains, clouds, suns and moons of the rich and varied country he rides through. As Alan Cheuse notes, this is “more than a mere newly minted version of the romantic treatment of nature in fiction, in which landscape reflects the emotion of the characters” (174). What McCarthy embeds in his lands and skies is rather “an exterior version of the main characters’ inner universe” (174). John Grady’s inner universe is saturated with myth. He wants to reinvent himself in the image of the cowboy, which in the time of his story is merely a romantic cultural memory. Accordingly, McCarthy attunes the landscapes to respond to the condition of the myth, whether blossoming or slipping away within John Grady. Conducting a close reading of the landscapes in All the Pretty Horses therefore allows us to monitor McCarthy’s deconstruction of Western mythology in John Grady’s journey from America to Mexico, which is a journey from dream to disillusionment.

The novel begins with the death of a family member and the birth of a dream. John Grady is attending his grandfather’s funeral. A figure of the past, of the bygone world of cowboys, has been lost. From the beginning, the mythological reflections in the landscape are as clear as a passing train, like a revelation, which ruptures the solemn scene:

It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness. (3)

In a kind of mechanical evocation of Manifest Destiny, the train sanctifies the landscape, illuminating the darkness, seeming to spawn civilization and order in the fences “creat[ed] out of the night”. The image calls attention to John Grady’s desire to move and, on some level, participate in the expansionist expeditions of his forebears. Bright and shuddering with speed, the train appears in juxtaposition to the grey tones of the funeral in what may be called “the death of Cole’s way of life” (Sickels and Oxby 348), a moment before his journey begins where John Grady realizes the inadequacy of his home life and, embodied in the image of the train, the allure of the mythical frontier.

Most of the landscapes at the beginning of the novel rely on this kind of juxtaposition between the colourless sense of alienation John Grady feels at home and the attraction of the cowboy dream coalescing within him. In the morning of the funeral, he stands “like a supplicant to the darkness” before the “thin grey reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world” (3). The greyness, which appears in several points of the novel as a marker of personal displacement, tells of his estrangement, not simply from a family that is passing on and away from him, but from the age of cowboys that modernity has made obsolete and which exists only in imagination. The reef-like clouds tell of the inexperience of his character, which he knows, and wants to mend. He is jagged, shapeless, performing the cowboy life without having lived it. Before he leaves for Mexico, John Grady experiences another period of estrangement in San Antonio, where he seeks out his mother for the final time. Their relationship is an apathetic one. His mother is distant from his father, himself, and his wish to own the family ranch, positioned as a barrier to the cowboy life and proof to John Grady that there is little left for him in a rapidly modernizing America. Appropriately, it snows during his time in San Antonio. Under a “grey and malignant sky” (20), snow falls on the landscape, turning the world at first white and translucent, and later on dark, cold and listless as he comes to terms with his mother’s indifference:

It grew dark early. He stood on the Commerce Street bridge and watched the snow vanish in the river. There was snow on the park cars and the traffic in the street by dark had slowed to nothing, a few cabs or trucks, headlights making slowly through the falling snow and passing in a soft rumble of tires. (20)

McCarthy writes the landscapes of San Antonio with such stark ennui that it is clear that John Grady does not belong here. The land tells of his alienation. He feels his family does not have any answers on “the way the world was” (21), and the coldness of his trip confirms it. As much as he searches for some belonging with his father and mother, he knows his home life has “nothing in it at all” (21). Such alienating greyness McCarthy contrasts with John Grady’s growing devotion to Western mythos. In the evening after the funeral, he rides under a sun that sits “blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred clouds before him” (5). Historical memories of Native Americans seem to be embedded in the landscape, as the fiery sky triggers a stream of visions of Kiowa tribes: “painted ponies and the riders of a lost nation [coming] down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited,” who are “redeemable in blood only,” who pass by him in a “ghost of nation” (5). The past endures in the landscape, and therefore riding through it allows John Grady to make sense of the Western mythos. As Ashley Bourne notes in “Plenty of Signs and Wonders to Make a Landscape,” McCarthy’s landscapes are “haunted by the echoes of violence and primitive history” and “constructed by shadows of events from the past” (119); in this instance they are haunted by the historical conflict between Native Americans and their colonizers. By positioning himself in the landscape, John Grady has also positioned himself in the past, where the mythologized “ghost” of America, in all its blood, horses, and tribal strife, seems to be very much alive. In effect, the landscape connects him to history, “a history larger and more extensive than [his] personal experience” (Bourne 121). Cheuse underlines this connection succinctly: “Having a map to the territory before you means having a past, both personal and historical, whose visions and outer signs you may easily read in order to find orientation” (216). John Grady finds orientation in a landscape where the Western mythos can be reproduced, allowing him to escape his home life of rootlessness and discover a sense of personal fulfilment in a cowboy life of his own making.

The estrangement John Grady feels at home, coupled with the devotion he feels to the past, motivate his decision to cross the border, as he and Rawlins soon after agree to begin their journey to Mexico. In their decisive conversation, the stars are “falling down the long black slope of the firmament” (26). The imagining of a physical landscape in the sky, of stars in motion on hills, tells of his drive for movement, so fundamental to the cowboy mythos. When they finally depart, the stars are “swarming” in the “tenantless” sky (30), recalling the American expansion westward and the claim of territory. The sky is a “dark electric, […] a glowing orchard” (30), which evokes the colonial undertones of their journey: the civilizing element of electricity and the idea of the frontiersman as a bringer of light. “The landscape transforms itself to encompass their experience” (Bourne 34), that experience being their final commitment to reinventing themselves as cowboys. Aspects of the mythos radiate in John Grady’s mind as his journey begins.

Crossing over into Mexico, John Grady encounters the wild, primitive landscapes he wished for. Untouched by modernization, the country is as beautiful as it is “barren,” “desolate” and “still” (51), as he and Rawlins set out across green plains under a blue sky. A ghostly characterization of the terrain through the eyes of the aspiring cowboys reinforces the landscape’s connection to the past: “the mountains of Mexico […] [drift] in and out of cloud-cover like ghosts of mountains” (42), and rainclouds move behind them “like some phantom migration” (69). Later in the night, after John Grady hears wolves howling, the landscapes demonize themselves: the moon appears “cocked over the heel of the mountains” like a weapon, and the dawn becomes a “false blue dawn” which is “dragging all the stars away,” including the constellations of “Orison and Cepella and the signature of Casiopea,” icons that he hangs onto for familiarity in this suddenly unknown, hostile, and “wild” land (60). As conflict arises, the landscapes take on malignant forms. Consider the lightning storm that terrorizes and runs the characters into shelter:

Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lighting glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world. (67)

Beautiful, uninhabited, and sometimes dangerous, Mexico fulfills John Grady’s nomadic desires. “The life of the cowboy,” according to Bourne, must be “attuned to the weather, the livestock, and the land, riding miles of open country” (Bourne 121). But there is also a brutality present in the country that John Grady is reluctant to acknowledge, as it suggests that a certain ruthlessness shadows their mythological journey.

Further south, John Grady arrives at the “Hacienda de Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, a ranch of eleven thousand hectares situated along the edge of the Bolson de
Cuatro Cienegas in the state of Coahuila” (97). In “The Cost of Dreams of Utopia: Neocolonialism in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses,” Susan Lee observes how John Grady “uses the Mexican landscape to alleviate his disillusionment with American society,” and in doing so “unknowingly becomes the colonizer” (153). Through his mythological gaze, he “believes he has found a utopian landscape” that is “perfect for his recreation of the frontier myth” (152). Indeed, John Grady actualizes the Western mythos on the ranch. It is idyllic, lush and well-kept, “well watered with natural springs and clear streams and dotted with marshes and shallows lakes or lagunas” (97). It emerges from the lightning storm “in a deep violet haze” under “red galleries [of] cloudbanks” (93), and seems possessed of a perfect, “golden” lifestyle (93). He tames wild horses, and does it so impressively that his work attracts a crowd. He is respected for his knowledge and is even consulted by the owner of the ranch for his opinions. He goes with Rawlins into the mountains to find horses. He goes to the dancing hall to find love. In Alejandra he discovers not only the most intimate of connections but also the chance of owning “the spread”: the possibility of remaining a cowboy for his entire life. One night, under the stars, he is taken in a moment of silent catharsis:

He lay looking up at the stars in their places and the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead and he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead centre to the world, all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands. (119)

As the ranch represents the apparent fulfillment of John Grady’s dream, the landscape responds to that fulfillment. Here we have the emphasis of stars “in their places,” in the way that John Grady has found belonging in a place that corresponds with his desires; the “belt of matter” that is “hot” and “burning” in the way of his passion for Alejandra; the “dark vault” of the sky evoking the ceiling of a church, as though he is in a silent prayer of gratitude for his situation; and finally the landscape “under his hands” in a suggestion of control, as his mythological vision of the landscape affords him a kind of power to “mold his surroundings in order to attain his mythical and idealized frontier” (Lee 163), which he channels to dominate the region in pursuit of his dream.

John Grady’s time on the ranch is short-lived, as his indulgence in a contrived and romanticized lifestyle eventually causes its disintegration. His pursuit of a relationship with Alejandra and his disobedience of Alfonsa leads him to be “thrust out of this adopted landscape” because of “his inability to separate the romanticized vision of the place and the reality of social convention” (Bourne 121). Without the safety of the ranch, and by extension without the illusion of control over his mythological vision, the landscapes of Mexico return to their strange and hostile aspects. In the drive to the prison, lightning appears again in the landscape, reminding him of the ruthlessness of the country: “summer thunderheads were building to the north and Blevins was studying the horizon and watching the thin wires of lightning” (175). Strangeness haunts him: the car passes “feral cattle the colour of candlewax […] like alien principles” before it arrives “in the yard of an abandoned estancia” under the watch of “hawks […] in the upper limbs of a dead tree” (178), all of which culminates in Blevins’s execution. His death sobers their journey, as the mythos John Grady has followed to this point seems futile compared to its mortal consequences.

What follows is the dissolution of the myth. Released from prison, John Grady returns to the ranch to find “the countryside much changed, the summer past” (222); the landscape no longer glows with the same utopian life. In his final attempt to preserve the myth, John Grady seeks out Alejandra. When she rejects his offer of marriage, the last foundation of his cowboy life crumbles. He is left alone and without a ranch. Once again he inhabits the role of the outcast that he did back home in the world of faded fathers and absent mothers. He sees “very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all” (254). The landscape returns to a cold greyness: “a fine rain” falls in the town where he is deserted, and like the snow of San Antonio, it reflects his estrangement. Later on, when John Grady is camped out in the wilderness, McCarthy draws the landscape with a distinct hopelessness: he listens to the “wind in the emptiness” and watches the stars “trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness” (256). Hunting and killing a doe lead him to perhaps his most revelatory moment, as landscape and mind converge to lay bare everything that John Grady has learned:

The sky was dark and a cold wind ran through the bajada and in the dying light a cold blue cast had turned the doe’s eyes to but one thing more of things she lay among in that darkening landscape. […] He thought that in the beauty of the world there hid a terrible secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverting equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes may ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. (282)

Cold and alienated, he realizes the failings of his journey: that he could not temper myth with reality, and that the pursuit of a single mythological vision cost him the lives of so many.

At the end of the novel, as John Grady rides into the desert, the bloodred sky is invoked repeatedly. However, it does not signify the fervor for the mythological it did in the beginning of his journey. The figure of the cowboy has been demythologized. He has lived the reality of Mexico and has emerged disillusioned. As he and his horse’s shadow merge, he becomes no longer the performance or the dream of a cowboy but a cowboy of his own. McCarthy mirrors the very same landscape at the beginning of the novel—the redness, the sun coppering his face, and the wind blowing down into the landscape—to illustrate the full circle of John Grady’s character, who begins by crossing into Mexico inexperienced and ends by crossing into Mexico experienced, who begins with an aspiration for Western mythos and ends with a reality of bloodshed and grave mortal cost. He has accepted his role as outcast, relinquishing himself to the world, not to the “ten-thousand worlds for the choosing” of myth (30), but what is real and imminent, the “world to come” (301).

John Grady’s journey into Mexico is rooted in a romanticized perception of Western mythology rather than the actual country he traverses. Mexico and its landscapes function not as a site of genuine cultural appreciation but rather as a mechanism through which he represses his disillusionment with the alienation of his home life and American modernization. Not so much a backdrop as a narrative and thematic guide, the landscapes of All the Pretty Horses map out the condition of the Western mythos in John Grady’s mind, which begins in romantic colours and progresses into sobering forms as the dream is unraveled, as the cowboy is desanctified, and as the mythology is revealed for what it truly is—myth.

Works Cited

Bourne, Ashley. “‘Plenty of Signs and Wonders to Make a Landscape’: Space, Place, and Identity in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” Western American Literature, vol. 44, no. 2, 2009, pp. 108–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43022719.

Cheuse, Alan. “A Note on Landscape in All the Pretty Horses.” The Southern Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 4, 1992, p. 1401.

Lee, Susan. “The Cost of Dreams of Utopia: Neocolonialism in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.” Confluencia, vol. 30, no. 1, Fall 2014,
pp. 152–170.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. Vintage Press, 1992.

Sickels, Robert C., and Marc Oxoby. “In Search of a Further Frontier: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 43, no. 4, 2002, pp.
347–359. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111610209602189.

Image by Mohamed Ahabchane, via Flickr.

by Amelia Kiessling

In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s A Discourse on Inequality, a key theme that Rousseau explores is the relation between inequality in civil society and the reality of people living for and through the gaze of others. Rousseau suggests that this reality is a major force behind the inequality within society, acting as one of the chains that people unknowingly “[run] towards” (122). Though Rousseau published the text in 1755, over a thousand years after Homer’s Odyssey was likely composed, there are notable examples of Rousseau’s ideas already in play within the characters and events of The Odyssey, suggesting that these ideas have truth and validity, perhaps even extending back to the age of Ancient Greece. If we observe in particular the character of Odysseus in comparison with a few key passages from A Discourse on Inequality, along with supporting evidence from Frederick Neuhouser’s Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition and George E. Dimock’s “The Name of Odysseus,” the resemblance between Rousseau’s position and Odysseus’s nature is striking.

Odysseus is at once a cunning, powerful warrior and a highly egotistical man. Throughout The Odyssey, as Odysseus ventures back home to the island of Ithaca after the Trojan War over the course of many years, he continually finds himself stranded and in life-and-death situations. This is certainly not by chance. Odysseus is a character obsessed with glory and how the world perceives him, constantly looking for new, dangerous opportunities to gain renown. He is focused on and driven by the gaze of others to a fault, harming himself and those around him in the process. Like Rousseau suggests about the people living in what he deems civil society, Odysseus “knows how to live only in the opinion of others” (136). In order to further analyze the similarities between Rousseau’s ideas and Odysseus’ character, let us closely examine each passage and its evidence in Homer’s Odyssey.

Before civil man begins to live through the gaze of others, Rousseau writes that first comes the establishment of property through the cultivation and division of the land. It is after this that talents come to be prized, as “the stronger did more productive work, the more adroit did better work, [and] the more ingenious devised ways of abridging his labour” (Rousseau 118). This is where Rousseau believes that people then begin to live for the gaze of others, as personal strengths and skills become very important and, as a result, people have to find a way to demonstrate said qualities, whether real or false. After this, Rousseau continues,

…it is easy to imagine the rest. I shall not pause to describe the successive invention of the other arts, the progress of language, the testing and employment of talents, the inequality of fortunes, the use and abuse of riches, and all the details which follow from this… (118)

This brings us to Odysseus’ time, where social ranks and certain forms of laws and government have been established, even if in somewhat rudimentary form. Moreover, individual qualities and strengths are highly valued, and the way one appears to others is necessary to maintain or improve one’s status and public image. It is of this early stage of civil society that Rousseau writes:

Behold all the natural qualities called into action, the rank and destiny of each man established, not only as to the quantity of his possessions and his power to serve or to injure, but as to intelligence, beauty, strength, skill, merit or talents; and since these qualities were the only ones that could attract consideration it soon became necessary either to have them or to feign them. It was necessary in one’s own interest to seem to be other than one was in reality. Being and appearance became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose insolent ostentation, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their train. (118-119)

Odysseus is remarkably resemblant of this description, firstly through his role as king. A king with power over all of Ithaca, as well as a warrior who has commanded an entire army, Odysseus is among those of high rank. This power is determined through many different things, such as his wealth, or “quantity of … possessions” (Rousseau 119), as well as his might, or “power to serve or to injure” (Rousseau 119). But, moreover, his ranking is also solidified by his “intelligence, beauty, strength, skill, merit [and] talents” (119), as Rousseau lists in the passage above. Odysseus is famed for his deceitful wiles and his strength in battle, with which he helped win the Battle of Troy; he also uses both in The Odyssey itself, notably employing the former as a strategic method regularly throughout the epic, and it is these qualities and his prior achievement in Troy that make up and uphold his legacy. This legacy is perhaps equally as important to his societal rank as his title as king is, as it is through this that Odysseus “attract[s] consideration” (Rousseau 119), such as can be measured in the hospitality he receives from the Phaeacians, for example—and as opposed to the lack of hospitality he later receives from the suitors awaiting in Ithaca. However, this reality manifests as a dangerous flaw for Odysseus, as he continually seeks out danger, looking for new feats to add further renown to his name. He does not seem to be able to do without them, placing his own sense of self-esteem, or Rousseau’s amour-propre, in the praise and attention he gains from other people.

However, according to Frederick Neuhouser’s Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition, “the immediate and primary end that amour-propre seeks is not self-esteem” (34), but “esteem (or recognition) in the eyes of others” (34). He continues,

This is not to say that self-esteem is not an important good, nor that those who have amour-propre do not desire it. Rousseau’s point, rather, is that beings who possess amour-propre care about the good opinion of others directly and for its own sake, independently of its role in producing or reinforcing self-esteem. (Neuhouser 34)

According to Neuhouser’s explanation, amour-propre is not searching for self-esteem, but rather for recognition, and furthermore what that recognition itself can bring. The search for self-esteem and recognition may go hand in hand, but what is distinctive about amour-propre is that it seeks the appreciation of others independently of the search for external reinforcements of self-esteem: the recognition of others has inherent value, due to what benefits it may bring, outside of whatever boosts it may provide to one’s self-esteem. Thus, Odysseus may not necessarily be placing his sense of self-esteem in the opinions of others, but, at the very least, he is actively pursuing others’ recognition and acclaim.

Odysseus is also quite representative of the rest of Rousseau’s above description, or in particular the idea of “being and appearance [becoming] two entirely different things” (Rousseau 119). Many times throughout The Odyssey, Odysseus chooses to “seem to be other than [he] is in reality” (Rousseau 119) as a method of gaining an advantage in the situations he encounters. He regularly adopts the identity of ‘nobody,’ using his characteristic “deceitful cunning” (Rousseau 119) to trick those around him—first as a method of self-preservation, but also allowing him to later reveal his true identity and gain the powerful recognition from others that he so desires.

This idea of Odysseus taking on the role of ‘nobody’ can be observed in his encounter with the Cyclops, Polyphemus. When Polyphemus discovers Odysseus and his crew have broken into his cave, he does not take up the role of hospitable host that the men hope for. Rather, he violently rips apart and eats some of the crew, leaving the rest terror-stricken and hoping desperately for a chance to escape. Odysseus quickly comes up with a plan to incapacitate Polyphemus, first by making him drunk and then by blinding him by stabbing him through his singular eye. As Odysseus coaxes the Cyclops to drink the wine, Polyphemus demands that he reveal his name. Rather than answering honestly, Odysseus responds, “Nobody— that’s my name. Nobody— / so my mother and father call me, all my friends” (Homer 9.410-411). This is a cunning move, as later, once Odysseus has blinded Polyphemus, he cries out for help, only to tell his friends that he has been attacked by ‘nobody’: “Nobody’s killing me now by fraud and not by force!” (Homer 9.454-455). Believing that Polyphemus is alone and suffering from a plague sent by Zeus, from which “there’s no escape” (Homer 9.459), his friends do not come to his aid. In this situation, it truly is vital to Odysseus’ “own interest to seem to be other than [he] is in reality” (Rousseau 119), as it means the difference between life and death. Though the distinction between being and appearance is not portrayed in such life-and-death terms in the Discourse on Inequality, nonetheless, as Rousseau suggests, it is from this distinction that “deceitful cunning” (119) comes about, as is evident in this situation where Odysseus uses it to his advantage.

In fact, Odysseus uses this strategy more than once. He similarly takes up the identity of ‘nobody’ on the island of Phaeacia. When he first arrives, he is freshly shipwrecked, bedraggled, and fully naked. Not only is he a nobody in the sense that he is a foreigner and a stranger, but he is also a nobody because he is naked: he is in his most natural physical form, without clothing to provide any preconception about his character or his rank (although, of course, he also appears unkempt). Thus, when Nausicaa discovers him, her moral character as host is tested, considering the societal expectations present in ancient Greek society, though inactive in Rousseau’s modern civil society. Heeding these expectations, Nausicaa provides Odysseus with clothing, and Athena then transforms his appearance from disheveled to glorious, but Odysseus maintains his identity as a stranger, leaving his name undisclosed. This tactic again acts as a precaution, allowing Odysseus to discern the character of the Phaeacians before taking the risk of revealing his true identity.

But this strategy that Odysseus employs not only helps him survive: it gives him the opportunity to then have a grand reveal of his true identity. After Odysseus and his crew make a narrow escape from the Cyclops’ island on their ship, Odysseus cannot help but yell after Polyphemus and reveal his identity, despite now being free:

Cyclops— / if any man on the face of the earth should ask you / who blinded you, shamed you so— say Odysseus, / raider of cities, he gouged out your eye, / Laertes’ son who makes his home in Ithaca! (Homer 9.558-562)

Odysseus’ desire for attention takes over, and he tells Polyphemus his name in order to shame him further while bringing glory to himself. But, along with this reward of glory, this act is almost rewarded with a guest gift: another benefit that comes with consideration, as referred to earlier with the Phaeacians. As Polyphemus hears Odysseus’ declaration, he realizes that this event, in which he has been blinded, was prophesied many years ago. Polyphemus then seems to switch his intentions: first being keen on destroying Odysseus and his men, he now seems to come to terms with the offense, in fact appearing to welcome Odysseus as he calls him back to give him a “guest-gift” (Homer 9.575), and to “urge Poseidon the earthquake god to speed [him] home” (Homer 9.576). Odysseus’ reputation, which Polyphemus is aware of through the prophecy, changes his view and treatment of Odysseus. While Odysseus was previously a nobody to him, he now instead counts as somebody, and thus Polyphemus changes his behaviour.

According to George E. Dimock’s “The Name of Odysseus,” “[t]his cry of defiance [the revealing of his name] is thought to be foolish of the wily Odysseus, no less by his crew than by the critics, but it is in reality, like the boar hunt, a case of deliberate self-exposure for the purpose of being somebody rather than nobody” (55–6). Odysseus’ choice to reveal his identity to Polyphemus may seem rash or unwise, but it is an intentional act to transform from ‘nobody’ into somebody, and it is, in fact, rewarded by the Cyclops. Along a very similar line, Neuhouser writes the following in an analysis of Rousseau’s amour-propre:

For now it is sufficient to note that to ‘be someone’ — the ultimate aim of amour-propre— is, in part, to ‘count as someone’ for other subjects … What a being with amour-propre seeks, then, is not only, or primarily, a mere sentiment but a confirmation of its being as a self, which, more than just a feeling, is a public object in the sense that it is partially constituted by what others think of it. (36)

If Odysseus did not declare his name, he would forever be ‘nobody’ to Polyphemus, thus lacking the “confirmation of [his] being as a self” (Neuhouser 36), and thus not being offered a guest gift from Polyphemus. Therefore, by boldly proclaiming his name, he claims the conquest of Polyphemus as his own, tying it to his identity and his legacy, and gaining his longed-for recognition.

However, it is after this that Odysseus calls aloud again to reject Polyphemus. Rather than returning to shore to accept his guest gift, he verbally batters him and incites him to throw yet another boulder after the ship. With this in mind, Odysseus is also representative of Rousseau’s ideas in yet another way. More than revealing his name as a method of acquiring renown, this choice, along with his choice to further taunt Polyphemus afterwards, can also be seen as a tactic of making up for the pride he lost when Polyphemus ate some of his crewmates. By first getting revenge on Polyphemus and then by showing him to whom he lost, Odysseus is able to regain this lost pride. Just as Rousseau describes the development of man upon “[learning] to value one another” (Rousseau 114) and understanding the idea of consideration of one another,

…henceforth every intentional wrong became an outrage, because together with the hurt which might result from the injury, the offended party saw an insult to his person which was often more unbearable than the hurt itself. (Rousseau 114)

The injury that Odysseus feels towards his pride inspires him to not only take revenge on the Cyclops, but to take said revenge one step too far, taunting and rejecting Polyphemus even after he offers to make amends. In consequence, Polyphemus launches two enormous boulders after his ship, one before Odysseus’ taunting and another after. More significantly, by blinding Polyphemus, Odysseus incites the wrath of Poseidon, who significantly extends Odysseus’s journey home with additional hardships. Here, Odysseus’ character is evidently quite like Rousseau’s characterization of the emergent civil man.

But Odysseus is also interestingly like Rousseau’s depiction of civil man even through the meaning of his name. In Dimock’s comments quoted above regarding Odysseus’ proclamation of his name to Polyphemus, he briefly refers to the “boar hunt” (56) in Book 19. This boar hunt is an event from Odysseus’ past, in which he had participated with his grandfather, Autolycus, and for the first time lived up to his name (Dimock 55). Odysseus is translated as meaning “Son of Pain” (Homer 19.464) in Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey, though Dimock explores other translations in his essay, “The Name of Odysseus.” But in both Fagles’ translation and the translations that Dimock discusses, pain is a central idea: it is in this boar hunt that Odysseus gains his first victory, courageously charging at and killing the boar, but also gains his first experience with pain, as he is left with a scar after the boar stabs him in the leg. Thus, Odysseus earns his name as both a “causer of pain” (Dimock 55) and a “sufferer” (Dimock 55). Moreover, he is celebrated by his family, making his first time receiving major acclamation from others linked to his first major experience of pain. Relating this to the idea of recognition that is so important to Odysseus, Dimock states:

To be Odysseus, then, is to adopt the attitude of the hunter of dangerous game: to deliberately expose one’s self, but thereafter to take every advantage that the exposed position admits; the immediate purpose is injury, but the ultimate purpose is recognition and the sense of a great exploit. (55)

As Dimock reveals, recognition is closely tied to Odysseus’ identity through its tie with his name. Thus, with the pursuit of recognition being so important not only to Odysseus’ character but to his name and identity, Rousseau’s amour-propre is distinctly relevant. Odysseus’ very identity exists in amour-propre, in seeking the praise and approval of others. Moreover, the meaning of Odysseus’ name, and therefore the expectation that comes along with it, could, in its own right, be seen by Rousseau as an invention of society that restricts social man. Hence, Odysseus truly “derives the sense of his own existence” (Rousseau 136) from the judgements of others, as his identity practically revolves around them.

The relevance of Odysseus’ character to Rousseau’s description of “social man” (136) can also be observed through his behaviour while on the island of Phaeacia in Book 8. After Odysseus has arrived and has been helped by Nausicaa, the Phaeacians warmly welcome him and host a series of contests as a show of skill in his honour. Odysseus simply watches at first, until he is taunted by Prince Laodamas and the champion Broadsea to participate. Thus incited, Odysseus reveals his unmatched strength and dexterity in discus. As a warrior and veteran, he is insulted by Broadsea’s mocking words and the provocation to partake in the challenge, trivial and nugatory compared to the feats he has performed. As he takes up the challenge, he picks a discus that is “huge and heavy, more weighty by far than those the Phaeacians used to hurl and test each other” (8.217-218). Like the feat he later performs of stringing his bow, this is a challenge that no other can take up. Thus, Odysseus severely outperforms the other competitors, who are unable to wield such a discus, then boasts of his skills. This is not simply out of a naturally competitive nature, if we look through the lens of Rousseau’s ideas. Rousseau states,

I would observe to what extent this universal desire for reputation, honours and promotion, which devours us all, exercises and compares talents and strengths; I would show how it excites and multiplies passions, and how, in turning all men into competitors, rivals or rather enemies, it causes every day failures and successes and catastrophes of every sort by making so many contenders run the same course… (132–3)

From this perspective, Odysseus’ competitiveness stems from a societal desire for honour, praise, and respect. This desire leads people to compare themselves to one another, “[exciting] and [multiplying] passions” (Rousseau 133), which in Rousseau’s account ultimately ends in disaster. In this situation, though Odysseus’ showing off leads to some tension with the king and people of Phaeacia, it does not have outright disastrous consequences—at least, for him.

We can also observe Rousseau’s discussion of social man as “[living] only in the opinion of others” (136) in Odysseus’ storytelling, notably in the palace at Phaeacia. It is when Odysseus begins to tell his story, on the prompting of King Alcinous, that he finally reveals his name. He says, “I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, known to the world / for every kind of craft— my fame has reached the skies” (Homer 9.21-22). Odysseus cannot tell his story without telling his name, as he links his storytelling to his identity; he must have others know who he is and what he has accomplished, as these accomplishments would mean nothing to him if there was no one to know that they had happened and that the credit belongs to him. This is not unlike the encounter with Polyphemus: like Odysseus reveals his name only after defeating the Cyclops, here he reveals his name only after he defeats all the other competitors in the discus challenge. His name is tied first to pain, both inflicting and experiencing it, and then to recognition for this pain.

Rousseau states that, ultimately, social or civil man “[attaching] importance to the gaze of the rest of the world” (136) is the cause of the many troubles that are faced in society, as people pile these troubles on themselves in pursuit of honour and success. Rousseau writes:

Civil man, on the contrary, being always active, sweating and restless, torments himself endlessly in search of ever more laborious occupations; he works himself to death, he even runs towards the grave to put himself into shape to live, or renounces life in order to acquire immortality. (136)

This is evident throughout almost the entire story of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus continually finds himself in, or propels himself into, dangerous and life-threatening situations. Though he claims he wants to return home, he repeatedly puts himself in difficult circumstances just to gain renown, “[renouncing] life in order to acquire immortality” (Rousseau 136) of name and legacy. The many challenges Odysseus faces, such as multiple shipwrecks and inconveniences in consequence of inciting Poseidon’s wrath, are a result of his own rash and selfish decisions made with the gaze of others at the centre of his mind. Odysseus puts these challenges upon himself out of his obsession to appear powerful, heroic, and honourable, regardless of the cost—even if that cost is pain, suffering, and risk of death to both himself and others, hence displaying a self-love fully at the service of amour-propre.

There is one exception to this passage, however: Odysseus’ time on Calypso’s island in Book 5. Stranded on the island of Ogygia, far away from Ithaca, Odysseus is miserable, ostensibly longing for his family and his home. Calypso will not let him go, desiring to have him as her lover and even offering him immortality to entice him. Nonetheless, Odysseus resists and remains trapped on Calypso’s island paradise. Though it truly is a paradise, Odysseus suffers severely, despite having no “laborious occupations” (Rousseau 136) to seek. Moreover, rather than “[renounce] life in order to acquire immortality” (Rousseau 136), Odysseus does the exact opposite. When offered true, literal immortality, he rejects it. For, as put by Dimock, “[t]hough [Calypso] offer[s] immortality, not death— an immortality of security and satisfaction in a charming cave—it is still an immortality of oblivion, of no kleos [recognition], of nonentity” (Dimock 58). Eternity with Calypso would mean giving up his legacy and any future recognition he might gain, or rather regain (after losing much of his hard-earned riches and pride from Troy), and it is for this reason that he suffers. Odysseus suffers from a lack of suffering, as his identity is so closely related to his experience of pain, and his experience of pain is so closely tied to the recognition he receives from others. Eternity with Calypso would mean that Odysseus would truly become ‘nobody,’ and that would contradict his entire character and identity that is so based in the gaze of others, whether that be the gaze of other human beings, or the gaze of the gods: as Athena says, “my heart breaks for Odysseus, that seasoned veteran cursed by fate so long” (Homer 1.57-58).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s suggestion that “social man lives always outside himself” (136) is very much supported by the character of Odysseus in The Odyssey. His identity can many times be observed to be based in Rousseau’s amour-propre, not only in his actions but even in the meaning of his name. There are many instances in which Odysseus demonstrates a desire for the awe and approval of others, even though this desire brings him hardships and grief. Reflecting on Rousseau’s ideas and their evidence in The Odyssey, readers can be inspired to bring such perspective to their own lives, and how they themselves may be living through the gaze of others, and at what benefit or cost.

Bibliography

Blumberg, Naomi. “Odyssey.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 9 Sept. 2024, www.britannica.com/topic/Odyssey-epic-by-Homer. Accessed 1 Dec. 2024.

Dimock, George E. “The Name of Odysseus.” The Hudson Review, vol. 9, no. 1, Spring 1956, pp. 52-70, ProQuest, www.proquest.com/magazines/name-odysseus/docview/1296489374/se-2.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin, 1997.

Neuhouser, Frederick. Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition. Oxford UP, 2008.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Discourse on Inequality. Penguin, 1984.

Image from the 1873 edition of Around the World in Eighty Days, illustrator unknown, via Wikimedia Commons.

by Gabriel Bell

Separated by centuries, genres, and even intended audiences, Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando appear to be radically dissimilar texts, and nowhere does that difference reveal itself more obviously than in their handling of time. Observing the sheer importance Verne imbues every passing second with in contrast to the chronological indifference of Woolf’s century-jaunting protagonist, time seems to be a topic where the texts are not simply dissimilar, but are diametrically opposed. One conceives of time as an impersonal unit of measurement that humanity must fit or fall short of, the other as an imprecise experience which is beholden chiefly to a person’s perception of its passing. I argue, in contrast, that a closer reading of either text suggests that both Verne and Woolf engage in criticism of blind adherence to standard time – the former by showing the shortcomings of such blind adherence, and the latter by showing how a defiance of that standard produces a narrative more natural – and arguably more honest – to an individual’s lived experience. What accounts for their diverging deliveries of such a similar criticism, is the historical context of both authors.

Published in 1871, Verne’s Eighty Days is rooted in a time of both radical technological development on the transportation front, as well as one of the most dramatic reductions, both literal and psychological, of distance and travel time in modern history. In view of the effects these reductions had on those in industrial society, Verne endeavors by way of his protagonist to show a man who is an avatar of such society, and to portray his actions as the consequence of dogmatic adherence to this new order. Conversely, Woolf’s Orlando, published in 1928, finds itself steeped in an era of disillusionment that a contemporary of Woolf’s, René Guénon, called the “crisis of the modern world,” as the once-revered innovations of Verne’s day were weaponized against man so destructively in the First World War that industrial society spiraled into disillusionment with the sciences they had so readily entrusted their future to only decades earlier. In this context, Orlando’s disregard for standardized time comes to embody a broader shift in the shape of social and cultural thought across the industrial world: individuals, having their hopes of a grand future through the science of “today” thoroughly dashed, rejected scientific systems and sought to understand the world through a more self-referential lens.

The stance that both texts are substantively an argument against standardized time is not new, and I will rarely contradict existing scholarship on the topic as I find my argument in relative harmony with much of it. However, what existing secondary literature on this topic is markedly hesitant to draw on are the ways in which either text’s historical contexts motivated and shaped a given text’s means of expressing that criticism. Jane Carroll’s “‘You Are Too Slow’: Time in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days,” for example, makes reference to the most profound technological developments of Verne’s day, but stops just shy of exploring what the attitude of the newly-industrial public was in response to this technology, and how that attitude influenced the tone and technicalities of Verne’s novel. Carroll does assert that Verne’s text embodies the Victorian anxiety that “all of the technology and mechanical progress of the nineteenth century may still end in regression,”[1] but this hinges on the idea that Victorian society saw regression as counterfactual to their own world, implicitly one built on progress and cultivation – a world which Carroll’s paper makes little direct reference to. Discussions of Woolf’s Orlando suffer a similar aversion to historical context. James O’Sullivan’s “Time and Technology in Orlando” makes reference to modernist styles of authorship, but only in the context of Orlando herself adopting them later in the text; it speaks to history only as a literary device within the text, and not in terms of the broader context within which the text was written. This gap in the academic conversation makes for a promising opportunity to contrast the delivery of their similarly-grounded criticisms, as these differences of delivery, I argue, prove to be a telling clue toward the importance of historical context to their creation and consumption. Eighty Days’ juxtaposition of its mechanized air alongside images of travel technologies faltering and failing, as well as Orlando’s unquestioning expression of abnormally-lengthened hours, days, years, and lifetimes, are as much the product of shifting historical thought currents as they are creative choices by their authors, and must be understood as such.

Applying this lens to Eighty Days, it is important to first understand the time, and thus the context, in which Verne writes. Carroll’s work is correct in its assertion that Verne’s text “could only have possibly been written at that time, scarcely four years after the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869 and three years after the completion of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway.”[2] The practical effect of these developments, historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch writes, was that “any given distance was covered in one-third of the customary time: temporally, that distance shrank to one-third of its former length.”[3] An essential dimension of Schivelbusch’s argument is the equal shrinkage of time and space – as one was reduced, the other necessarily followed, and both would continue to shrink in lockstep with one another throughout the late-nineteenth century. Much more important, however, were the cultural effects of such a shrinkage – what Schivelbusch, quoting an 1893 Quarterly Review publication, casts as the “‘gradual annihilation, approaching almost to the final extinction, of that space and of those distances which have hitherto been supposed unalterably to separate the various nations of the globe… ‘”[4] The effect of this “annihilation” on the industrial world cannot be overstated; the world shrank more significantly during Verne’s day than at any time in living memory, and all at once industrial society came to place itself in the hands of a new time and a new space, profoundly reduced relative to the time and space of its forefathers. Given this context, one may best understand Verne’s argument across Eighty Days not as a total admonishment of modern technology, but as a warning against surrendering fully to standardized time as a self-totalizing law of the universe.

How do the late-nineteenth century’s evolving views on space relate to Verne’s criticisms of empirical time? The answer is found not outside of space, but through it: borrowing an observation from Carroll, Eighty Days may rightly be said to operate under a “chronotope” where in time, space, and money are so inextricably linked that any violation of or impediment on one must necessarily affect the others. Examples abound throughout Eighty Days: governments offer “£25 bonus[es]… every time a ship arrives twenty-four hours ahead of schedule,”[5] and Fogg himself offers the captain of the Tankadère “£100 a day and a bonus of £200 if you get me [to Yokohama] on time.”[6] Even the bet itself is built on these three cornerstones: a wager of £20,000 (money) that Fogg can circumnavigate the globe (space) in eighty days (time). As this relationship is so solid, it stands to reason that an attack on one is an attack on all – that is, that affronts to either space and money may reasonably be called indirect assaults on time as well. Moments like the Indian railway suddenly ending near Kholby, the missing of the train in Nebraska, and the battering of the Henrietta by hurricane-force winds constitute such affronts to both space and money, as they both impede Fogg and company’s capacity to cover ground and, by way of fees for usage and bonuses for timeliness, cost Fogg handsomely. An interesting dimension to these impediments, however, is that their solutions are either low-tech or plainly natural. In India, Fogg and his cohort travel by elephant where the railway cannot take them, and in Nebraska a “sled rigged as a sloop”[7] carries the crew by wind to their final destination.

Of special importance here, however, is the shredding of the Henrietta to make up for its fuel shortage. A steamship, a modern marvel of travel technology, is torn apart and lit on fire to fuel the last of Fogg’s journey – a striking image of the industrial future being consumed by an ancient and undomesticated element, but consuming itself at man’s behest. The burning of the Henrietta also constitutes a divergence between my argument and Carroll’s, as her article goes on to conclude that Eighty Days “may be read almost as an allegory by which Verne suggests that success in business, travel and love, comes only when time is not viewed as rigid or restrictive and when contemporary advances in technology and in society are fully embraced.”[8] On the former moral we agree, but my analysis of Eighty Days argues that moments like the shredding of the Henrietta, among many, many others, come to constitute the heart of Verne’s criticism of empirical time, which is only a part of a wider criticism of blind faith in modernity: that however exceptional these technologies are in their capacity to shrink the world around them, they are nonetheless fallible. In the end, Fogg’s journey, prompted by the uniquely late-nineteenth century sentiment that the world has all but literally shrunk thanks to modern technology, turns out to be saved time and time again by markedly natural, non-industrial methods.

With regard to Orlando’s criticism of standardized time, one must look beyond the immediate world surrounding Virginia Woolf and cast an eye toward the developments to come. Writing in 1928, Woolf lived in a world struggling to reconcile its earlier praise for industrial development with the unprecedented and distinctly mechanized carnage of the First World War. Shattering the view of history as the inevitable march of progress toward the advent of the just society, the First World War called into question what the purpose of this “advancement” was if it were only to result in larger and deadlier conflicts – concerns which were amplified dramatically by the Second World War only decades later. In the wake of that second conflict, writers like Michel Foucault would come to lay the foundation of what is today called postmodernism. Summarizing Foucault’s philosophy, American philosopher Steven Best emphasizes that his work “‘problematizes’ modern forms of knowledge, rationality, social institutions, and subjectivity that seem given and natural but in fact are contingent constructs of power and domination,” and makes particular note of his work on human identity and its relation to power. Best writes:

Human experiences, such as madness or sexuality, become the object of intense scrutiny, discursively reconstituted within rationalist and scientific frames of reference (the discourses of modern knowledge) and thereby made accessible for administration and control. Since the eighteenth century, there has been a “discursive explosion,” according to Foucault, whereby all human behavior has come under the “imperialism” of discursive intervention, regimes of “power/knowledge,” and technologies of truth. The task of the Enlightenment, Foucault argues, was to multiply “reason’s political power” and to disseminate it throughout the social field, eventually saturating the spaces of everyday life.[9]

This perspective on heretofore-accepted “truths” as instead being the imposition of higher institutions or manners of thought, then, begets rebellion of one particular kind – the amplification of the personal over the empirical. Foucault’s (and the broader postmodern tradition’s) emphasis on questioning presumed universal truths and on elevating personal experience over institutionally-imposed categories finds ample representation throughout Orlando, which may have been published well before the advent of a codified postmodern philosophy, but which saw many of the historical and social trends involved in its founding already in motion, albeit nascently. It is through the context of Orlando as a precursor to the emerging postmodernist school that Woolf’s criticism of standardized time may best be understood – that is, as a powerful endorsement of the emerging school of personalized time.

Orlando rarely delivers its endorsement of personalized time via direct address, often preferring to let its disregard for and bending of that standard speak for itself, but it finds a rare direct mention in its second chapter. Here, the novel’s narrator expounds on how “an hour may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length” in one person’s subjective experience, and that this “extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.”[10] Unique within Orlando, this passage is a rare active call for personal interpretations of time to be placed at the forefront of discourse on lived experience, but it also has the more subliminal effect of conflating “time on the clock” and “time on the mind” in its argument – here, they are two items on the same list, described with much the same language, devoid of the usual subjugation of the psychological to the chronological. In a similar vein, O’Sullivan’s work rightly argues that Orlando “demonstrates that subjective time holds personal prominence over any objective measure”[11] and concludes that it “is not until Orlando makes herself a product of her own time—achieved with the aid of her external devices—that she becomes an embodied self.”[12] Of special importance here is the use of the phrase “her own time,” not describing her as coming to possess one century or generation as her own – after all, she lives across several – but characterizing her rejection of any given century or generation in favor of a time wholly her own and wholly weighted according to the subjective power of each moment.

The reality of Orlando’s living across centuries also comes to constitute the text’s main way of advocating for personalized time, where its flagrant disregard for universally-understood standards implicitly undermines the power of those metrics on Orlando’s own perception. Look to the text’s loose-fitting application of chronological benchmarks in its overall narrative: centuries come and go under the reader’s nose, and the few times the date is mentioned, the leap from the last stated time is titanic. O’Sullivan’s work identifies this as Orlando “problematiz[ing] conventional periodization,” looking to the portrayal of the nineteenth-century’s dawn and remarking that “[f]emale oppression did not immediately evaporate with the close of the Victorian age, and to make cultural distinctions in such a chronological fashion is, to Woolf, an arbitrary endeavor.”[13] In a similar vein is the leap from chapter three, which begins with the reign of Charles I, to chapter four, which ends a mere fifty-eight pages later with the dawn of the nineteenth century. Some one hundred and fifty years have passed between the two chapters, yet Orlando remains alive and much the same person and age. Either case demonstrates how this disregard for symbols of standardized time, in this case centuries or “ages,” is not mindless, but intentional in its message – the real measure of Orlando’s life rarely aligns with the measure of the world around them, but this in no way devalues or diminishes their lived experience. That latter leap of one hundred and fifty years also constitutes a step up from the earlier claims made by chapter two – far from merely saying internal time should be taken into account, the narrative externalizes its character’s own perceptions of time, mapping them onto the “real” world. In so doing, Orlando’s narrative treats these jaunts across time as unquestioningly as one would treat a standard human lifetime, and that refusal to question such a preternaturally long life and document these great chronological leaps without implying they are unnatural or incongruous with reality is itself another subliminal endorsement of personalized time, coming not by way of what the text outright says but what it makes a point to not say. This narrative-wide diminution of standardized time is the heart of the text’s criticism, as it is a practical – albeit fictionalized – application of exactly what the text encourages the reader to do: to put the markers and milestones of standardized time by the wayside and consider the personal weight of each passing moment. In its proper historical context, one can come to see this call to action as an embryonic form of a more self-referential worldview which did not fully emerge in Woolf’s lifetime, but saw its motivating cultural and philosophical shifts begin to emerge into formal development around the era of Orlando’s publication.

Ultimately, the conclusions drawn by scholars like Carroll or O’Sullivan are in large part honest to both the broader themes and finer details of their respective texts, and are truthfully only one dimension shy of a sufficiently complete understanding of either. What I argue is that this neglected dimension, the influence of history, is non-negotiable, and neither text can ever hope to be fully understood without proper reference to history’s influence over the worlds, lived experiences, and personal philosophies of either author.. It is true that Verne’s text concludes on the notion “that success in business, travel and love, comes only when time is not viewed as rigid or restrictive…”[14], just as it is true that Woolf’s text “demonstrates that subjective time holds personal prominence over any objective measure”[15] but these ideas are not without origin. By placing both texts in their respective historical contexts and viewing them as being equally products of their authors and their eras, a fuller, more extensive understanding of both texts emerges. One comes to conclude that both texts make a substantially similar argument – that standardized time has its shortcomings, and must not be blindly submitted to out of fear of losing some part of one’s life or self – but different perspectives of what exactly is lost and why exactly one ought not trust standardized time emerge based on historical context. Verne, writing in a world utterly enthralled with modern marvels of transportation like the railway and the steamship, cautions against standardized time just as he cautions against blind adherence to many of the technologies of his day – on the grounds that they are not perfect, and to buy into them as though they were is to put oneself, uninformed and unquestioningly, at the mercy of uncertain and unstable machinery. Woolf, living at the end of that illusion of progress and the beginning of a period of questioning and reflection, openly advocates for personal time as an alternative to standardized time, believing that submission to the latter sacrifices the depth of the personal experience, and that only the former can maintain the self in the fullest sense. Although they are dissimilar works in their finer details, it is through their shared warning against a strict and dogmatic adherence to universal standards of chronology that these two texts find common ground, and by understanding their respective criticisms as products of their historical contexts, one finds them to be two voices in the same choir.

Endnotes

[1] Jane Suzanne Carroll, “‘You Are Too Slow’: Time in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days,” in Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes, ed. Trish Ferguson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 81.

[2] Ibid, 78.

[3] Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 1977), chap. 3.

[4] John Murray, The Quarterly Review (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1839) quoted in Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, chap. 3.

[5] Jules Verne and William Butcher, Around the World in Eighty Days (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 29.

[6] Ibid, 105

[7] Ibid, 172

[8] Carroll, “‘You Are Too Slow’,” 92.

[9] Steven Best, “Foucault, Postmodernism, and Social Theory,” in Postmodernism and Social Inquiry (London: UCL Press, 1994), 28-29.

[10] Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 59.

[11] James O’Sullivan, “Time and Technology in Orlando,” in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Stories, Notes, and Articles 27, no.1 (Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis Inc., 2014), para. 7.

[12] Ibid, para. 11.

[13] Ibid, para. 6.

[14] Carroll, “‘You Are Too Slow’,” 92.

[15] O’Sullivan, “Time and Technology,” para. 7.

Works Cited

Best, Steven. “Foucault, Postmodernism, and Social Theory.” Postmodernism and Social Inquiry, 1995.

Carroll, Jane. ““You Are Too Slow”: Time in Jules Verne’s around the World in 80 Days”.” Victorian TIme: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes, 2013, pp. 77–94.

O’Sullivan, James. “Time and Technology InOrlando.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 27, no. 1, 2 Jan. 2014, pp. 40–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769x.2014.880143.

Verne, Jules, and William Butcher. Around the World in Eighty Days. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 11 Sept. 2008.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The Railway Journey : The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley ; Los Angeles, The University Of California Press, 1986.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.