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The Lost and the Longed For

The five essays in this issue have, on the face of it, little in common, the subjects being Raymond Chandler’s tough-guy detective stories, Nelson Algren’s naturalistic portrayals of the most down and the most out, one of Mark Twain’s most ethically and aesthetically problematic novels, Toni Morrison’s most ethically and aesthetically stunning novel, and a pairing of a (supposedly) nonfiction Israeli report on the Sabra and Shatila massacres with a fictional Palestinian vision of the same event, which, of course, was not the same event. Steven V. Daniels shows how Paul D and Sethe overcome the difficulty that victims of oppression have in finding a voice that allows the articulation of their experiences and their choices as opposed to what happens to them only by putting his story next to hers, stories complementary as much by their differences as their similarities. They seem to be a step ahead of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe who, as John Hilgart convincingly argues, holds on to a precarious autonomy only by a private poetry spoken by himself to himself: “The privilege of being a cultured social critic, working with language and knowledge of a rather high level, comes, it would seem, at the price of being an inconsequential social agent.” Certainly Algren’s characters lack social agency, yet they derive an odd dignity from the neon light that enhalos them. William Brevda demonstrates how in a harsh American urban world the divine and supernatural light has been transmuted to neon yet how neon becomes a sign—in every sense of the word—of what has been lost. All of the above deal with what Royal’s essay on Pudd’nhead Wilson calls “existential slavery,” a kind of slavery that may reduce a character to literal slavery by means of an identity determined by such scientific rationalizing technologies as fingerprinting. Arguably Twain was not so much looking back at slavery as ahead to an era of increasing rationalization of everyday life, epitomized as well in Morrison’s Schoolteacher and in the “hegemonic marketplace” against which Marlowe launches his sardonic but unspoken similes. Rationalization in both Weber’s and Freud’s senses is what is found in Steven Salaita’s analysis of the Kahan Commission Report, which dealt with the massacre of Palestinians in “legal” discourse, as opposed to Liyana Badr’s stories “about that same population, which sees something that was lost and something still longed for daily.” As Salaita, Daniels, Hilgart, Brevda, and Royal see something that was lost and something still longed for daily.