Twenty-second (and last!) lecture for my students in English 140, UC Santa Barbara, Summer 2012. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/su12/index.html

1. Lecture 22: “Everything was on fire”
English 140
UC Santa Barbara
Summer 2012
12 September 2012
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
I've seen the future, brother: it is murder.
[…........................................................]
There’ll be the breaking of the ancient Western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There’ll be phantoms
There’ll be fires on the road
And a white man dancing.
—Leonard Cohen, “The Future” (1992)

2. An important reminder
Don’t forget to bring a
blue book to the final!

3. Some final comments about The
Road
● Questions or observations before we move into
our final review?

4. Our concern with time this term
● Time as …
● Grounding and structuring element of our being-in-
the-world.
● Having a past, out of which we gain an
understanding of who we are.
● Containing a fuzzily defined “present moment,” in
which we engage with the potential for action in the
world.
● Creating the expectation of a future, which we
project as a way of creating meaning in the present
moment.

5. The past ...
● As the ground for our (narrative) understanding
of our own identities. (Beloved, The Plot
Against America)
● As the source of regret (and pride) for things
done ill or well.
● As the site to which memories return and the
locus of trauma. (Beloved)
● As a site to which we are bound in our temporal
thought, preventing the achievement of
liberation. (The Quartets)

6. The present ...
● As intimately connected to both past and future.
(Beloved, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Road)
● As the moment in which we can engage with the
world directly. (The Road)
● As being structured around a world that may be
indifferent or hostile to us (The Plot Against
America, The Road)
● As being an arena in which varying degrees of
control are available to different people,
depending on their access to and complicity with
existing power structures. (The Lecturer’s Tale)

7. The future ...
● As containing the looming guarantee of death
(The Road; everyone’s mother in The Time
Traveler’s Wife)
● As the locus of intent when we act.
● As ground of meaning for our actions. (The
Road)
● As presenting a set of opportunities that is
determined by what we do, what other people
do, and a complex set of other factors.

8. (Psychic) Trauma
● Might be thought of primarily as:
● an emotional wound
● causing long-lasting effects
● because it cannot be assimilated into a person’s
sense of identity, or cannot be made to fit into the
signifying order that a person assigns to the world
and
● compels repetitive revisitations in memory until it
becomes integrated, or “worked out.”

9. ● In Beloved: Slavery, and the way that it warps networks
of signification that provide meaning and the potential
for real ethical choices.
● Denver’s re-integration into the community.
● In The Plot Against America: Lindbergh’s presidency
and anti-Semitism
● more specific events that are traumatic: Sandy’s complicity,
the D.C. hotel eviction, etc. etc. etc.
● In Lecturer’s Tale: Nelson’s (physical) trauma as
exposing (and exploiting) the traumatic structure of the
bureaucratic knowledge-factory.
● In Time Traveler’s Wife: Henry’s mother’s death as
compelling mandatory physical revisitations.
● In The Road: the apocalyptic trauma and the journey
toward the re-integration of meaning and value.

10. Magic and Politics
● The phantasmagorical nature of complex
contemporary political realities.
● External figurations of it:
● Henry’s Heideggerian “thrownness” in time.
● Beloved as the figuration of the trauma of slavery
and its repercussions
● Nelson’s finger as figure for the power of complicity
with power structures.
● The election of Lindberg as telling us who we are by
showing how plausible and nearly related to us the
might-have-been is.

11. Other thoughts? Questions?
Thank you for being such an excellent group of
students this term. I have greatly enjoyed working
with you.

12. A final thought…
She [Baby Suggs] did not tell them to clean
up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did
not tell them they were the blessed of the earth,
its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could
have was the grace they could imagine. That if
they could not see it, they would not have it.
(Beloved 103; ch. 9)