literature

“Of Master and of Slave”: words speakable once again

They’re not only potentially speakable once again, either. In May 2026, the immediate aftermath of the United States Supreme Court’s eradication of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they are being actively spoken in one Southern legislature after another. Most of the legislators speaking happen also to belong to the political party that was once the party of Abraham Lincoln. History rhymes, sometimes. It’s ironic.

It has to be, because rhyme itself is an irony originating in the discovery that even after a word is spoken it’s capable of changing its mind half a line later and meaning something else. Try listening half a line later, for instance, to the line below from a nineteenth-century poem (Ernest Dowson’s “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae”) which includes the words “I have forgot much.” Down among those words, of course, it hasn’t forgotten a word. At that, in the aftermath of the nineteenth century it will help you remember even more words, because this time the line about forgetting will come scrolling by for a second time, this one on a soundtrack.

In 1939, the year the track was laid, it sang a politicized nineteenth-century quickstep whose words then gave way to women’s voices vocalizing only a slow Woo ah. That whited-out libretto was projected from a reel filmed in a nineteenth-century font projected from right to left, and ever since then it has been unscrolling from the nineteenth century back to us. But now, in 2026, the reel may have rereached its 1939 beginning.

At any rate, what we hear now seems to sound once again like beginning’s genre, the commandment. It may say I am that I am; it does say Tolle, lege: take up and read. Then, adding a new register to itself by unreeling filmstock from the lab, it says:

I am reel as I have been scroll. I command you from this day backward. From here, my order of operations will begin on the side facing away from the light. It will be from right to left; from time present to time past; from ending in light to beginning once more in darkness. 

 

Again, Bobby Jr.

Teaching undergraduate literature at second-tier universities in the late twentieth century, I used to get lucky with “The Use of Force,” a short story by a modernist poet who earned his living as a pediatrician. He wrote it in 1938, as a kind of casenote.

https://openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu/premedical-society/wp-content/uploads/sites/328/2020/10/William-Carlos-Williams_The-Use-of-Force.pdf

“You know,” I’d suggest to the class, “this is a story about rape.”

“No!” the class would roar back. “The man is a doctor! He’s trying to help the little girl!” But then we would start actually reading the words that the doctor actually wrote, and faces would light up.

But after the late twentieth century gave way to the early twenty-first, the lights stayed off. “Big deal,” jeered the 19-year-old healthies seventy years after 1938. “Every male-female relationship is a rape.” So I stopped teaching “The Use of Force.”

And after all, by then there remained few physicians who had ever even seen a case of diphtheria.

But oh, Mr. Secretary Jr.: how wonderful the word “again” may be about to become again.

I didn’t say good.

But I do say wonderful.

Twinning and special

In 1925 the two big volumes of Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy were published nineteen years after the occurrence of the one little non-fiction on which they were based: a small-town murder, followed by the murderer’s apprehension, trial, and execution. Bit by bit during the nineteen years, Dreiser laboriously traced the historiographic relationship between himself and those data. For the 1948 World Publishing Company edition of his final transcript, H. L. Mencken explained:


“It really happened”: italicizing Dreiser’s words as if they were foreign, Mencken distanced them from his own. He seemed to assume that he himself wrote under the control of a literary norm, whereas Dreiser’s discipline was something like an autobiographical sociology.

But the source of the language that immersed Dreiser wasn’t entirely under Menckenian genre control. Look below, for instance, at this twinned pair of stories from the Detroit Free Press for Sunday, July 15, 1906. Together they were printed on the front page.


There below the fold they appear side by side: first an early text of the upstate New York drama of Chester Gillette; then, with no space whatever between, the text of a drama closer to Detroit. The Detroit text and only the Detroit text is tagged “(Special).” It also comes to us marked with a time term, “Eight years ago,” which points to the little did she know genre of dramatic irony. A mere six years after Chester’s boat capsized, the Titanic went down.

On a page, such a pairing of texts becomes one more text. Think of the infinitesimal between the liftoff of Ignatz’s brick (Zip) and its touchdown on Krazy’s head (Pow). Think of Ignatz and Krazy’s George Herriman as a geometer writing an equation that reveals that curve through time as one more thing: uniting the mouse, the brick, and the cat, their integrating idea.

Think of Herriman’s no longer read older contemporary Theodore Dreiser as almost another such artist, but this one the one who wrote thousands of slow words about a trajectory through time without being able to name it. Little did he know: its name was the infinitesimal Zip.