Modern Humiliation Monthly
'90s sociology, servants in children's fantasy, prurient lurkers of the world unite, icymi
“More significant here than the litanies themselves was the march of the dragon that accompanied them in many French and Flemish cities. As described in Jean Beleth’s twelfth-century Summa, on the Monday and Tuesday of Rogations [Rogation days = the three days preceding Ascension, a time of communal prayer processions for the expiation of sins], a dragon holding its tail high (cum longe cauda et inflata) was carried in the very front of the procession, preceding even the cross and banners. On Wednesday, the dragon followed the cross with its tail down. The liturgists agreed in interpreting the dragon as the devil, the prince of the world who rages against humanity, but who is conquered by Christ in the end. … Townsmen frequently gave it familiar names and fed it by throwing coins or small pastries into its gaping mouth, apparently regarding the dragon as a symbol of the city.”
--Mary C. Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France
Welcome to this, my first substack. Nothing here involves current American politics (directly) so feel free to save this for when you’d like a hit of that sweet, sweet irrelevance. First, a short book note.
Mitchell Duneier, Slim’s Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity. Like Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, this is a 1990s ethnography whose author not only recognizes but admires and learns from the moral world of its subjects. Toward the end of the book Duneier makes explicit what he’d hinted at earlier, that the working-class black men of the Valois Cafeteria in Chicago have a style of masculinity which offers both strength and caring, both vulnerability and self-possession—these men have what so many white men at the time said they needed.
Duneier points out how much previous sociology simply posited that middle-class black people were moral icons of honesty, perseverance, “decency”: Their material success proved their moral worth. (This assumption has not vanished from sociology!) Duneier himself is refreshingly blunt about his morals: He doesn’t hesitate to uncork his opinion that thrift, sobriety, stable families, and respectability are good things to which we all should aspire and you don’t have to get weird about how they’re Just One Lifestyle Choice Among Others. This isn’t even entirely true (respectability is not a Christian virtue) but it helps him enter the moral world of his subjects/friends. He’s also got a great and related bit about how often public discussion of black people is more about proving the “innocence” of the (usually but not always white) speaker than about finding the truth. And for him, the truth lies in knowing and learning from black communities.
My readers specifically might check out the first chapter, “Slim and Bart,” about the tentative creation of kinship bonds which cross the color line. Sociologists and whatnot tend to call these things “fictive kinship” but like, if something saves your life it seems pretty real.
Kreacher Feature
Last year I was trying to write something about servants in children’s fantasy. It never quite came together, but one of the pieces involved stories where the servants completely identify with the house and/or the employer. There’s one children’s fantasy, which I otherwise like a lot, where an angry servant ghost haunts the kitchen where she worked in life. She throws pots and pans around and creates ghastly tableaux of her suicide. Then the daughter of the house (that familiar Biblical opposition, the child of the house or the servant of it) reassures her that she is welcome there, that nobody will take her kitchen away from her. The ghost calms down and begins baking treats, happy to spend her eternity in service.
Then the daughter of the house ends up falling in love in a different country and leaving her anyway and the ghost is never, ever mentioned again, because she’s just a subplot. Meanwhile Philip Pullman gives all the servants dog daemons! Because they’re so, uh, loyal.
I was trying to think of counterexamples in which the fantasy servants are explicitly shown to have interests which diverge from the interests of those they serve. (I don’t think role-reversal fantasies like The Whipping Boy really count here—that’s a different kind of story.) And it occurred to me that J.K. Rowling returns to the fantasy-servant well a whole bunch of times, and what she does there is frequently messed-up but often interesting.
So there’s Filch, first of all, who’s relegated to janitorial work because he can’t do magic, which seems perverse on both ends: Do you need magic to be an accountant? On the other end, wouldn’t somebody who could, like, magic away dirt be more useful as a janitor? Filch fits certain servant tropes in that he’s tied to a particular place, and he seems existentially degraded by his low-status work.
But more obviously there are the house-elves, and here things get weird. House-elves are such a terrible idea! They’re kind of enslaved (HERE LIES DOBBY, A FREE ELF) but also they kind of like it? Winky weeping in the drunken abyss of her freedom, Kreacher completely identifying with the family that mounts house-elf heads along the stairwell like daggone elk, the Hogwarts house-elves rejecting Hermione’s attempts at liberation… what is the deal here?
The narrative presents Dobby as a heroic paragon, not a weird outlier. And yet the elves have no politics of their own; the only liberation movement we see is Hermione’s Witch Bountiful act. The Society for the Protection of Elf Welfare, with its subtle acronym, is perfect Rowling in that it’s a parody of nice white lady social activism, it satirizes people who don’t bother listening to those they’d liberate, and in this way it allows the fantasy servant race to have their own interests and opinions… except that their own interests and opinions turn out to be that they like being servants very much, thank you, it is what they are for. (And Hermione would have known this if she weren’t a pushy immigrant! Lol this whole storyline, I swear.)
So this is all very much my stereotype of British people, they just can’t help themselves, except that Rowling also wrote the whole Regulus-Kreacher storyline. Regulus is the only member of the children’s-fantasy employer class I can think of who essentially (I’m oversimplifying a bit) sacrifices his life out of love for his servant. Regulus identifies with Kreacher, rather than expecting Kreacher to identify with the house. A son of the house gives his life to take a servant’s side; the moral world of the economy turned upside-down.
While we’re on the subject of Christianity it is strange to read Orlando Patterson’s discussion of pro-slavery metaphysics, in which the slaveholder imagines that the enslaved person becomes an extension of himself, an extra limb animated only by his own will, and then pray the Domine, non sum dignus, in which the centurion’s words about his servant in Matthew 8 become our words about our own soul. Centurion:servant::penitent:soul mimics this slavery metaphysics—in order to overturn it. We penitents are the centurion not because we’re powerful but because we recognize our unworthiness; our souls are the servant not because we command them (we only kind of do!) but because Jesus cherishes and heals them.
Then When the Hurdy-Gurdy Man Came Singing Songs of Love
Last year I read Otessa Moshfegh’s novel Eileen. Eileen is one of those characters who harbor a secret world inside their heads: not a memory palace but a Jame Gumb basement, with stained bathtubs and uneven floors. She’s a dowdy lurker with a prurient relationship to her own body. She’s judgmental and angry in a way authors rarely let their narrators be, maybe especially their women narrators. (I am always too much in love with my characters to let them be like this.)
Other people mean a lot to her—they mean too much, or the wrong things. Other people are hieroglyphics in her secret sentences. When she collides with another woman who also regards other people this way—who regards Eileen herself as a word scissored from a magazine to make a kidnap note—sparks fly, it is true love.
I didn’t think what Eileen did with that collision was interesting or insightful, but I loved Eileen herself, unsavory Eileen, every part a private part. It’s part of the reason I like serial-killer fiction more than I want to. Fiction only, not true crime, and the closer the story gets to the real victims or even the real killers the less I want it; but I “identify with” those killers, people who are intimately aware that they have thoughts they can never share. Their inner lives separate them from normal people. What is it like to walk around in the world knowing what you harbor inside? ...What is it like to experience distortions in your thinking, so that someone who should be merely a stranger becomes a pulsating nexus of private meaning? To feel compelled to do destructive things you can never explain to anyone? Well, I mean, replace “someone who should be merely a stranger” with “something that should be merely a bottle of scotch” and I do know that….
Music strengthens that division between the self and consensus reality. We use music the way an astronaut uses a spacesuit: Music builds up a persona which we can inhabit in a hostile environment. I think this is part of how real violence works, part of why every violent group comes up with songs (I used to listen to IRA songs over and over when I was very drunk and all alone). And of course it is a thing movies do well, to suggest the disconnection between a character’s private meanings and the moral world we the audience are presumed to inhabit. Play a baffling song while a guy kills and you can make us feel his isolation. The victim is no more a person to him than “Inna Gadda Da Vida” is. They are both just hieroglyphics.
Maybe this is the theme of this newsletter: wondering who we see as symbols, emptied of any meaning superfluous to our needs. We all know what it’s like to do it, we just disagree on who deserves it.
Fifty Years of Movie History (As Narrated by a Jackass)
every movie of the 1940s: the rich inner life of a woman and/or criminal
every movie of the 1950s: *is boring*
every movie of the 1960s: ooh pretty colors!
every movie of the 1970s: TRUST NO ONE. Also if there’s one thing women love it’s getting raped!
every movie of the 1980s is literally just that MST3K “Hobgoblins” song—“It’s the 80s! Do a lot of coke and vote for Ronald Reagan!”
[in the ’90s history ended, so you can’t expect me to have opinions.]
ICYMI
“Why Be Grateful to Be Gay?” (I didn’t even mention the free toaster.)
Now Playing
Jane Wiedlin, “The Song of the Factory”
And last…
“Had the 3,000-kilometer highway been halted just 5 kilometers north, black Miami might have had a different history. Instead the highway, touted as ‘slum clearance,’ bulldozed through black Miami’s main drags. Gone was much of Overtown’s commercial heart, with its three movie theaters, its public pool, grocery store, and businesses. Goodbye to clubs that had hosted Ella Fitzgerald, to the Sir John Hotel, which had offered their finest suites to black entertainers banned from staying in whites-only Miami Beach. But more important, goodbye to a neighborhood where parents knew which house every child belonged to. Goodbye to the nighttime games of Moonlight Baby, where kids would use the bottle caps of Cola Nibs to mark the edge of their bodies on the pavement. Goodbye to unarmed black patrolmen walking black streets.”
--Nicholas Griffin, The Year of Dangerous Days: Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami 1980