JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 16, Number 2, 1996 Page: 218
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218 Special Issue: Who Does the Teaching?
recognition, may, even in the very act of emancipation, remain in love with the ideal
of power that has been denied to them. Though they may reject the master's right
to domination over them, they nevertheless do not reject his personification of power.
They simply reverse the terms and claim his rights as theirs. (Bonds 220)
Or, as David Mura says, "[O]ne must learn first how liberating anger feels, then
how intoxicating, then how damaging, and in each of these stages, the reason for
these feelings must be admitted and accurately described" (149). Or as Audre
Lorde said, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (123).
Or as Harold Bloom never said, maybe women writers also slay their fathers.
Or as Benjamin's terms reverberate frighteningly for me: maybe instead of being
Angela Davis I was really more like Mark David Chapman.
Having reached this dramatic crescendo, let me qualify it: yes, I fetishized
David Bartholomae, but not extraordinarily or pathologically so. As he himself
would probably grant, a certain amount of fetishization is endemic to anyone's
passage through graduate school and on to the professional academic discourse
community. As I suggested earlier, it's through a peculiar process of
commodification and introjection that the canonized writers in a field become
the graduate student's training wheels. I certainly never had any desire to
assassinate Bartholomae; my self-portraiture here is hyperbolic. (Such reliance
on hyperbole is nothing new in the world of writing theory; try readingDerrida
on the "violence" of language while riding the New York subway during a week
when women are pushed off platforms onto tracks and token booths are torched.)
Brent Staples, in his memoir Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White, goes
much further in his revelations of fetishization when he describes stalking Saul
Bellow while a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Staples is
consumed with envy for Bellow's luck, talent, and fame as well as with rage at
his novelistic depictions of black men. He reads Bellow's books, searches for
him in crowds, and periodically checks to see whether Bellow's name is still on
the bell of his apartment building. "I wanted something from him," he writes.
"The longing was deep, but I couldn't place it then. It would take years for me
to realize what it was. I wanted to steal the essence of him, to absorb it right into
my bones" (229). Yet he also wonders, "What would I do when I caught him?
Perhaps I'd lift him bodily and pin him against a wall. Perhaps I'd corner him
on the stairs and take up questions about 'pork chops' and 'crazy buffaloes' and
barbarous black pickpockets. I wanted to trophy his fear" (228). Graphic as it
is, Staples's, too, is a hyperbolized pathology; just as he takes wry pleasure in
frequenting paths with dark shadows so that he can observe the terror his mere
presence evokes in white couples, his fantasy of Bellow lampoons the deviance
that successful white writers have easily ascribed to black masculinity.
My interest here is not in the graduate-student-as-maniac. From hyperbole,
however, one can glean some insight into the ways that we eradicate those of
whom we write from what Walter Ong has famously called the larger "fiction"
we construct of our audience, and how this becomes a routine act of dehuman-
ization. When Brent Staples prepared his manuscript for publication, how did
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 16, Number 2, 1996, periodical, 1996; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28616/m1/22/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .