Paper idea...

John Ames Mitchell

I'm thinking of writing a seminar paper on John Ames Mitchell, the founder of the magazine Life, in addition to being a novelist, artist, and architect. He's an interesting figure that I don't know much about, and he seems to be the type of conflicted figure that I enjoy writing about. He's both a product of victorian morality, and yet he's trying to reshape that morality through his writings. I wonder how much control he had over his magazine. The other day I read through several volumes of the magazine, but I couldn't develop a coherent sense of how the magazine works ideologically. 

Aesthetically, it is easy to get a sense of how the magazine works. It tries to be humorous, without pushing too many boundaries. Apparently a lot of Mitchell's friends and family didn't want him to stake his inheritance on middle-class entertainment, fearing that it was too far "low" for genteel readers. 

I just finished his novel The Last American, and I'm completely confused as to how to understand its political work. On one level, it seems quite misogynistic and nativist, yet the narrative's humor seems to disavow stable political stances and positions. There are a lot of descriptions of things that are "interesting," which made me think of Sianne Ngai's essay about the cute, the zany, and the interesting. She basically argues that we need to figure out how critique has created certain aesthetic categories. I'm fascinated with the idea of Mitchell--through Life--gesturing toward certain aesthetic categories that weren't entirely formed in the late nineteenth century. 

For one, the novel The Last American seems to be invested in understanding the cultural consumption of commodities as having a constitutive influence on subject-formation. In the novel, a group of Persians from the year 2951 journey by boat to America, discovering a decayed landscape with festering buildings and such. Everything from the sculptures to the literature are marked as being inferior artistic endeavors that malignantly affected Americans, destroying them. In this light, the Americans died because their culture was sick and inferior. 

Yet the irony of the story arises in the Persian's inability to understand the cultural objects they come across. They think a statue of a Native American is a god and wonder why it is in a commercial place and not a "Temple"; they find the remnants of the Brooklyn Bridge and can't understand its purpose. The bridge stands as a monument to the historical unknowable--the recognition that once one is in the past one cannot speak from the dead, nor with certainty expect the future to represent the dead as things were. 

The story ends with horrifying violence when the Persian man named Ja-khaz (yes, that's supposed to be funny) tries to kiss "the last American"'s apparent partner. A gruesome fight ensues, yet the violence of the moment is covered under the guise of humor. People's heads get hit with clubs and swords, causing a resounding sound of hollowness or woodness reverberating throughout the chamber. That's supposed to be humorous. To understand the novel, I'd need a good theory of late-nineteenth century humor--one that can account of doubleness, inconsistency, and whatnot.