FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W2506261054> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W2506261054 endingPage "E209" @default.
• W2506261054 startingPage "E204" @default.
• W2506261054 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewBruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. Bruce Robbins . Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii+304.John BrenkmanJohn BrenkmanCUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College Search for more articles by this author CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch CollegePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBruce Robbins classifies a wide swath of modern narratives as upward mobility stories, discerning common patterns and recurrent themes in works ranging from Rousseau's Confessions (1770) to Silence of the Lambs (1991), from Ragged Dick (1867) to Never Let Me Go (2005), from Grub Street (1891) to Billy Bathgate (1991), from L'éducation sentimentale (1869) to Pygmalion (1912). The upwardly mobile protagonist, whether expectant and ambitious like Stendhal's Julien Sorel or hapless and unsuspecting like Dickens's Pip, always requires a benefactor's helping hand. The narrative device formalistically known as the “donor” is an indispensable element of upward mobility stories, although it is often disguised on account of the self-reliant individualism associated with the protagonist's very project of leaving his native milieu on a path to something better. Moreover, the benefactor can range from a criminal (Vautrin in Père Goriot [1835]) to a therapist (the Robin Williams character in Good Will Hunting [1997]), from the Older Woman of nineteenth-century French novels to the Rich Old Man needed to put Dick on his way to success in Horatio Alger, the archadvocate of self-made manhood. The emotional, often erotic attachment of protagonist and donor further complicates the basic narrative pattern: Clarice, the upwardly mobile young female professional trying to make her own way in the FBI against a recalcitrant boss in Silence of the Lambs, finds her donor in the cannibal Hannibal Lecter, to whom she urgently turns for help in locating a woman hostage and who is himself enticed into helping her only when he succeeds, therapist-like, in extracting from her the underlying motivation of all her career ambitions—namely, to save from slaughter those who are as helpless as the lambs that haunted her childhood. A final, especially complex element in the narrative matrix of upward mobility is the protagonist's necessary separation or distancing from family and community as he or she rises, a psychic rent that the protagonist can experience as uncertainty, liberation, melancholy, or guilt and that novelists represent figuratively through abandoned peers, lost parents, even dead siblings. Layer upon layer of such interpretations give Robbins's book its ambitious scope, and the result is a rich commentary on dozens of British, American, and French novels and several films.The pattern that Robbins delineates, and that I have just tried to summarize, includes several thematic nodes: upward mobility and the helping hand, the eros of mentoring, the moral ambiguities of ambition, the blurry boundary between autonomy and alienation. As such, it is open to many possible interpretations. Robbins links this whole narrative pattern and these varied thematics to a very specific referent, claiming that upward mobility narratives do the cultural work of creating the sensibility of the welfare state. It is a large claim. Does it hold up?Its plausibility derives from the idea that these narratives take the story of individual striving, which evokes individualism, self-sufficiency, and competitiveness, and place it within a larger frame that affirms benevolence, care, and mutuality. The resulting doubleness, conveyed in Robbins's title Upward Mobility and the Common Good, is the requisite mentality of the welfare state. Making this argument go from plausible to persuasive, however, puts considerable strain on the three pillars that support it, specifically, the interpretive strategy, the concept of cultural work, and the view of the welfare state.Robbins's style and strategy of interpretation are epitomized by his commentary on the film Good Will Hunting, whose protagonist “lacks the desire to leave behind his working-class life in South Boston and take up the sort of white-collar position that his talent puts within his grasp,” until a therapist breaks through this psychological deadlock by repeating to him over and over, “It's not your fault” (88):It does not seem haphazard that…the upward mobility story should place this rejection of individual responsibility at its decisive turning point. Nothing underlines more precisely the cultural work that the upward mobility genre seems appointed to accomplish. “It's not your fault” is a proposition that a society of rugged individualists will resist. The genre seems intent on breaking down that resistance. To do so is not merely to release the individual from misguided guilt, but to win agreement to a counterposition: that, because society is interdependent, what the individual is and does is neither entirely his fault nor—as the doctrine of self-reliance had insisted—his achievement. As I've suggested, this dispersal of responsibility is just what citizens had to be convinced of in order to divert their resources into rescuing society's less fortunate members from what had previously been seen as the results of their own actions and inactions. It is by trading in his heroic self-reliance for this less heroic view of society, which no longer claims that anyone fully deserves their rewards and punishments, that Will Hunting becomes able to rise within his society. He is allowed to rise when he acknowledges that the rise is not really his. His story recapitulates the passage from “self-reliance” to the mentality of the welfare state, for which “it's not your fault” might seem to serve as a motto. (89)What precisely is Will Hunting not responsible for? His talents? Or the fact that the exercise of his talents will separate him from the life and world he knows? Or that he might want something other than what he already has? Or that society (or genetics or chance or God) does not guarantee that he and his pals will always have the same? The commentary leaves many unanswered questions. Nor does Robbins really justify his suggestion that the therapist's intervention aims at something more than “merely releas[ing] the individual from misguided guilt.” In the story, that is all the therapist does, as he makes Will face the abuse he suffered as a child in an effort to release him from his record of delinquency and misdemeanors. Robbins takes wing from the realm of psychological verisimilitude and finds the figure of Will's socially reconciling future in the therapist himself: “We do not see the work Will eventually takes up; what we have continually before our eyes is the work of the Robin Williams figure, a man who is making use of his talents and yet doing something ‘honorable,’ to use Will's terms. He is also part of the state” (93). The film's story excretes all the salient elements—talent, upward mobility through love and therapy, guilt over social separation, reconciliation through expertise—but only the allegorical interpretation reassembles them into a cogent narrative of upward mobility and the common good.Even if one accepts the allegory, what will verify that the “upward mobility genre” does the cultural work attributed to it? If these narratives fill gaps in the sensibility, perception, and values of the public, then a “literary history of the welfare state” ought to correlate, even roughly, with the specific mental or ideological blockages and impediments that prevented the emergence or flourishing of the welfare state at historically crucial moments. Lacking such an account, one is left having to accept that the role of Madame de Warens in Rousseau's Confessions and that of Kathy, the clone narrator who cares for the other clones who are having their organs harvested in Kenzuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, are not only structurally homologous from a narratological viewpoint but are actually doing the same cultural work. This implication of Robbins's argument is not only unpersuasive but also implausible.Let us look more closely at the Ishiguro reading. The clones attend a special school; its functioning is sanctioned if not actually run by the state; the clones, who have been created solely for the purpose of harvesting their organs when they are mature, are led to believe that the artworks they make in the school may lead them to lives and careers beyond the narrow world they know; some clones, like the narrator Kathy, are chosen to be “carers” and pride themselves on their special role and the value of their care for their peers as they are harvested unto death. Now, various elements of the welfare state are discernable here. But is there any overriding reason to conclude that therefore “Ishiguro would seem to be querying both the institution of the welfare state and the ideology of upward mobility” (199–200)? Far more pertinent would be to probe how Ishiguro's dark novel illuminates the looming ethical and political dangers of a civilization so prodigious in scientific knowledge that it offers seemingly unlimited medical miracles and so adrift in moral reflection that it might utterly dehumanize humans at the very moment it figures out how to manufacture them. The implications are dizzying, and the futuristic speculations of the novel certainly reflect back on more immediate moral and political questions. But the procrustean demands of allegoresis lead Robbins to propositions like the following:“The organ-donation gulag, tucked away from public view and yet not kept fully secret, has its obvious real-world counterpart in what we call class” (200). (To make such an analogy “obvious” is to lose sight of both its terms.) “What difference does it make that in our society class origin does not define an official identity, a box to be checked on the census form, grounds for compulsory segregation during childhood?” (201) (An immense difference: class origin is not the same as segregation, any more than it is the same as having to wear a yellow star or getting sent to a Soviet gulag in the name of overcoming class differences.) “How much does it matter that in the novel the split between those who have a future and those who don't results from the biological facts of one's birth, which in turn result from a deliberate decision by the authorities, while in our society it is the effect without originary legislation or identity, with no ‘they’ visibly making the decisions, an outcome that can merely be predicted with high statistical reliability?” (201) (It matters absolutely. If we lose the ability to tell the difference between the chance circumstances of birth and the legislated use of human beings, or the difference between state authority and the open-ended history of society, or the difference between political dictatorship and sociological statistical regularities, we will become blind to the very danger that Ishiguro warns against—namely, forgetting the bond between human freedom and human dignity.)From a literary standpoint, the excesses in Robbins's reading have the effect of eclipsing Ishiguro's own powerful social and cultural criticism. From a political standpoint, Robbins dials up the hyperbole regarding social inequality to such an extent that his stated commitment to the difficult compromises of welfare capitalism suddenly gives way to the equation of social class with segregation, gulag, and socially administered death!There is considerable ambivalence and conceptual uncertainty in Robbins's perspective on the welfare state. He regrets at the outset that we must address inequality through welfare capitalism rather than socialism without clarifying exactly what sort of real or imagined socialism he has in mind. Elsewhere he deftly overthrows the historian Perry Anderson's adherence to the idea that the British working class failed in its revolutionary calling by letting itself be deflected into the cultivation of class identity and the embrace of mere well-being under welfare capitalism, but it remains unclear whether Robbins rejects the premise that the working class was ever destined to revolution or, instead, simply accepts that the new social compacts and historic compromises are sufficiently just or, perhaps, merely inescapable. Robbins's reflection skirts the whole question of the (capitalist) productivity without which compensatory (social-democratic, welfare state) redistributions would be impossible. Instead, he sticks to a latter-day immiseration thesis according to which the production of wealth under capitalism does not simply generate inequalities but creates poverty. This is why he treats the trope of the misery or even death of those whom the “upwardly mobile” protagonist leaves behind as an emblem of zero-sum capitalism. Such ideologico-metaphorical simplifications in turn lead Robbins to an oversimplified paradigm of raw capitalism versus “ideal democracy,” presumably the undefined socialism referred to above; the welfare state lies in between, a more or less (un)just temporary solution.The problem is that there is no such thing as the welfare state. The French état providence little resembles British or American welfare; universal in orientation, it is centered on the principle that the state should assure that all citizens have broadly equal access to health care, education, child care, and retirement security as well as adequate food, shelter, and transportation. Even the idea of “social citizenship” or “social rights” does not quite capture the French model, which has a strongly civic-republican sensibility behind it. In France the citizens demand that their state provide certain essentials for them all. The Anglo-American vocabulary of entitlement, benefit, welfare, dole, and the disadvantaged is largely irrelevant. The British and American systems differ from the French but also from one another, not so much administratively as in sensibility and value. Whereas Britain thinks in terms of compensating class inequalities, America believes it is mitigating individual failure or misfortune.My point is not to launch a debate on the comparative study of welfare systems but to question Robbins's cultural-work claim. For while the cultural framing of social policy varies so markedly among France, Britain, and the United States, Robbins's examination of various French, British, and American novels suggests no such differences. How can the works be said to be doing the cultural work of creating the ethical sensibility and social perception of the welfare state when, in his readings, the works themselves do not shape distinguishable ethical sensibilities and social perceptions or indeed—which would be crucial—distinctive meanings of the common good?Robbins is most lucid about his conception of the welfare state when rejecting more radical postures against welfare capitalism (Anderson) or against the state and its institutions (D. A. Miller). Since the welfare state arose as a “cross-class project” joining popular pressures and technocratic expertise, “it is the closest thing we have had,” he argues, “to an ideological synthesis, a defensible common program in which the glaringly different interests of the poor and needy, on the one hand, and the elite experts, on the other, can even appear to be resolved” (10). The elements at work in this perspective are a moral imperative to rescue the unfortunate and the tension within the experts themselves between their own upward mobility—competing for grades, jobs, status, and salaries—and their guilt-tinged desire to apply their expertise to correct social inequalities and injustices. Robbins teases out many of the existential and methodological problems of expertise in his discussion of critical sociologists like Paul Willis, Richard Sennett, and Pierre Bourdieu. How does the social critic square the aspiration to criticize and undo social hierarchies with his or her own professional striving? Facing that question may well be the animating motive of Upward Mobility and the Common Good. The pitfall is that the socially committed literary critic can easily slide from reflexivity to projection, as though the whole of literature's striving protagonists, helping hands, and dramas of autonomy and alienation mirrors the inner strife of the successful professional's social conscience, which in turn mirrors a society of the poor and the expert. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 3February 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659008 Views: 275Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
• W2506261054 created "2016-08-23" @default.
• W2506261054 creator A5086992682 @default.
• W2506261054 date "2011-02-01" @default.
• W2506261054 modified "2023-09-26" @default.
• W2506261054 title "Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare StateUpward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. Bruce Robbins . Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii+304." @default.
• W2506261054 doi "https://doi.org/10.1086/659008" @default.
• W2506261054 hasPublicationYear "2011" @default.
• W2506261054 type Work @default.
• W2506261054 sameAs 2506261054 @default.
• W2506261054 citedByCount "0" @default.
• W2506261054 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W2506261054 hasAuthorship W2506261054A5086992682 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C100243477 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C11413529 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C124952713 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C129603779 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C142362112 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C144024400 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C171533372 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C17744445 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C199539241 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C41008148 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C48103436 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C94625758 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C100243477 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C11413529 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C124952713 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C129603779 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C142362112 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C144024400 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C171533372 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C17744445 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C199539241 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C41008148 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C48103436 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C94625758 @default.
• W2506261054 hasConceptScore W2506261054C95457728 @default.
• W2506261054 hasIssue "3" @default.
• W2506261054 hasLocation W25062610541 @default.
• W2506261054 hasOpenAccess W2506261054 @default.
• W2506261054 hasPrimaryLocation W25062610541 @default.
• W2506261054 hasRelatedWork W1990957925 @default.
• W2506261054 hasRelatedWork W2088061631 @default.
• W2506261054 hasRelatedWork W2124994546 @default.
• W2506261054 hasRelatedWork W2273295998 @default.
• W2506261054 hasRelatedWork W2784184792 @default.
• W2506261054 hasRelatedWork W3014157121 @default.
• W2506261054 hasRelatedWork W3217710729 @default.
• W2506261054 hasRelatedWork W393831998 @default.
• W2506261054 hasRelatedWork W4252561846 @default.
• W2506261054 hasRelatedWork W87444009 @default.
• W2506261054 hasVolume "108" @default.
• W2506261054 isParatext "false" @default.
• W2506261054 isRetracted "false" @default.
• W2506261054 magId "2506261054" @default.
• W2506261054 workType "article" @default.