Grim stories

When words connect worlds

Where do you go when you follow the words?

I was following the word willful, and I found a story, “The Willful Child.”

Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and would not do as her mother wished. For this reason, God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed. When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again. Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground.

It is a grim, Grimm story.

A word led me to a story. And that story led me to a body, to an arm that kept coming up, before it too was beaten down.

It is like a scene from a horror film.

Well Grimm stories, as moral fables, are horrifying. The morally wayward mostly end up dead.

Buried in a story. Or by one.

But that arm was just so full of life. Can we catch it when it is still rising?

That arm lent me a hand, helping me to notice other arms in the archives.

When I was following the word use, for instance, research that led to a book, What’s the Use, I kept noticing references to the blacksmith’s strong arm. Arms (and hands) often signified the labourer. I was reading about Lamarck’s law of use and disuse, which refers not only to how organs are strengthened by use, or weakened by disuse, but suggests that, if certain conditions are met, the effects of use are inherited as modification of form. When the blacksmith’s arm is used to exemplify Lamarck’s laws, it is implied that the sons of blacksmiths are born with stronger arms, inheriting what they need to do the work more easily.

The strong arm is not really how a work load is eased but acquired. That’s quite a load.

If the blacksmith’s strong arm was used to exemplify Lamarck’s law of use and disuse, it was not used by Lamarck. Hence I called that arm a phantom limb. When the references to the arm became substantial, the quality of substance was transferred to the thing itself. So, it was hard to notice that the arm was missing. Would I have noticed the arm, how it was used, how it was missing, if I had not been so struck by the arm in the Grimm story? Probably not.

And now, writing about commonsense, that striking arm has helped me to see what the philosopher G.E. Moore was doing with his hand when he made “a certain gesture,” to prove the existence of an external world, the proof being in the point.

I might make a case for calling his hand a phantom limb.

It is a work in progress.

Also a method.

When you follow the words you can end up with some odd juxtapositions, pulling together threads from works that are often assumed to belong to different worlds such as fairy tales and philosophy.

Fairy tales can be works of philosophy; works of philosophy, fairy tales.

What we know; how we know.

The arm, you know, inherits willfulness from the child.

How is she willful?

The willful child is the one who is disobedient, who will not do as her mother wishes. If authority assumes the right to turn a wish into a command, then willfulness is a diagnosis of the failure to comply with those whose authority is given. The costs of such a diagnosis are high: through a chain of command (the mother, God, the doctors) the child’s fate is sealed. It is ill-will that responds to willfulness; the child is allowed to become ill in such a way that no one can “do her any good.”

The arm inherits the willfulness of the child insofar as it will not be kept down, insofar as it keeps coming up, acquiring a life of its own, even after the death of the body of which it is a part.

Willfulness involves persistence in the face of having been brought down, where simply to “keep going” or to “keep coming up” is to be stubborn and obstinate.

Mere persistence can be an act of disobedience.

That’s why there is nothing mere about persistence.

In the story, will and willfulness are externalized, becoming property, what can be alienated into a part or thing. The different acts of willing are reduced to a battle between an arm and a rod. If the arm inherits the child’s willfulness, then what can we say about the rod? The rod is an externalization of the mother’s wish, but also of God’s command, which transforms a wish into fiat, a “let it be done,” thus determining what happens to the child.

The rod could be thought of as an embodiment of will given the form of a command.

And yet, the rod does not appear under the sign of willfulness; it becomes instead an instrument for its elimination. One form of will seems to involve the rendering of other wills as willful; one form of will assumes the right to eliminate the others.

What a story. The willful child: she has a story to tell.

So I kept telling it.

I used to read the story out in lectures, making use of my own arm to dramatize the point. Up it would go. Then down, waving around.

It forever changed how I gave lectures, using my arm to make the point.

I learnt from how the story was received.

One time, I was speaking at a conference on race and racism in Canada. I read out the Grimm story of the wilful child. Maria Campbell, an Indigenous writer, was in the audience. At the end of my talk, she stood up and told me that she had heard the story before because the nuns in her residential school used to tell it. It was the arm she remembered, how it kept coming up until it was beaten down. She had not known where the story came from.

Historian Caroline Elkins in Legacy of Violence reminds us that the violence of empire enacted on “bodies, minds, souls, cultures, landscapes, communities and histories,” was “intimately connected to the civilizing mission’s developmentalist dogma.” Elkins explains, “A Victorian-era parents disciplined their progeny, recalcitrant natives in the empire had to be punished.”

The story was a warning: obey!

Or be punished.

We can hear something else in that story, once we know how it travelled. When delivered to an Indigenous child, obedience, identification with the rod, the school, the nuns, with whiteness, the imperial project, meant giving up not just your own will but your hand, your language, your land, your people.

When Maria stood up to tell me she recognized the story from the arm, she thanked me for sharing it. If it helped her to know the origin of the story, it helped me to know it was helpful to know. It is a lesson that is repeated, one I keep learning: to know a history is to be given a handle.

That’s another hand, one we need.

Perhaps that is what we are doing, finding a way to handle histories, the violence of them, creating spaces to share our stories.

Or to tell us each other about stories used as rods.

In No is Not a Lonely Utterance, I share the story again, reading it as an institutional parable.

If you disobey an instruction by complaining, the institution will do what it can to stop you or to cast you out (that relay of authority from colleagues to administrators, to managers, who are willing to use the rods or to become them).

Or when institutions try to render certain viewpoints illegitimate (such as anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel or “critical race theory”), complaints can be how they stop those views from being expressed, with that relay of authority extended from colleagues, administrators and managers to media and government, who are willing to use rods or to become them.

But there’s a difficulty: the rods often pass themselves off as the arms.

This is another way of making the point from my post, The Cancellers.

Those who abuse the power given to them by institutions pass themselves off as the arms, as the one’s being beaten by a disciplinary regime. And when those who abuse the power given to them by institutions pass themselves off as the arms, the complainers become the rods, the managers, the police and the prison guards. This helps to explain why some people who complain formally about sexual harassment are called carceral feminists even though complaining within organizations does not involve calling the police or sending people to prison. That the complainer is called a carceral feminist can be a measure of how passing succeeds; the arm and rod have switched places.

That it can be hard to tell the difference between the arms and the rods is instrumentalised.

Nation-states too speak as if they are the arms, the persecuted, whilst acting as the rods, the persecutors.

Genocidal states. Israel.

Speak as an arm, act like a rod.

There are other grim stories. Present.

Keep telling it. Pull the threads.

In Willful Subjects, I juxtaposed the Grimm story with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic from Phenomenology of Spirit. They both use the same word, the German word, Eigensinn, which is also sometimes translated into English as stubborn or obstinate.

That’s enough of a connection! Enough!

When the same word is used in two different places, it becomes a connecting thread.

Follow the word and watch it unravel. But what?

In the conclusion to Willful Subjects, I offered a rereading of Hegel’s fable of the master-slave as a companion fable to the Grimm fable, calling it my final hand.

Of course, it wasn’t my hand nor a final one.

Reading Hegel’s fable as a story of will and willfulness is a refusal to read it on its own terms as the universal journey of consciousness.

It is a misreading, then.

Sometimes we have to misread a text to hear other histories.

For Hegel, the slave is the one who labours for the master. Labour can be thought in terms of becoming willing to be the master’s limbs (the master is freed from the necessity of supporting his own body). The slave is for. And in labouring the slave “fashions the thing.” In Hegel’s fable, even if this fashioning is frightening (the creation of an “alien, external reality”) in being confronted with the product of her own labour, the slave attains consciousness that would not otherwise be attained in relation to the master, “that he himself exists in its own right” as having “a mind of its own.” Or we could say the slave discovers a “will of her own.”

Even if the slave in labouring is on the way to freedom (more so than the master) that freedom is described as limited. That is how willfulness becomes the slave’s assignment: “Since the entire content of its natural consciousness has not tottered and shaken, it is still inherently a determinate mode of being; having a ‘mind of its own’ (der eigene Sinn) is simply stubbornness (Eigensinn), a type of freedom which does not get beyond the attitude of bondage.”

To become attuned to willfulness is to hear what is at stake in the Hegelian judgment: those who resist the will of the master in acquiring a will of their own (an acquisition is the resistance) are judged as self-willed or willful. The judgment is an expression of the threat of the slave’s independence to the master’s own freedom, which is and which remains, freedom from the necessity of toil.

Echoes from the Grimm story: the judgement of willfulness is also a justification of violence.

But also: the judgement is made because (or when) the arms are rising.

Another way of telling the story: the slave recognizes that she has a will of her own, a will that belongs to herself and not to the master. She recognizes will through her labouring body. The master in treating the slaves as arms ceases to use his own arms. They become flaccid organs. The arms confront the master who henceforth cannot mention them. It is the arms that are taken up in the rebellion of the slaves; arms that are not only involved in the creation of objects but are shaped by the labour of that creation.

Stubbornness or Eigensinn, which we can translate as willfulness if we follow a grim convention, is judged as bondage by those requiring the arms of others to complete the end of their own freedom (if they call this freedom universal, we learn again the uses of universalism in philosophy, the disappearance of labour).

Hence, we have to free the arms or be freed by them.

Of course, Frantz Fanon has been there.

Fanon recognized in Jean-Paul Sartre’s use of the dialectic how blackness can be dissolved as the “objective” phase passed through on the way to universal freedom. Fanon remarks “my effort was only a term in the dialectic,” an effort that becomes the loss of a hand, “every hand was a losing hand for me.”

We cannot let Fanon keep losing his hand.

Not just lost but stolen.

This history of stolen hands is a history we must keep in front of us.

The arms do not appear in the fable because they can smash it. And by it, I do not mean just the dialectic. They can bring the house down. After all, they built it.

Audre Lorde entitled an essay with a proclamation, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In that unflinching “will never” is a call to arms, do not become the master’s tool!