Taking it all in

It's strange tonight, I'm home from senior supper and it's starting to hit me that it's all ending.  There's the old literary cliche that high school is but a chapter in life.  I'm starting to see the truth behind it.  Even though I know there is going to be another page, there's still an empty feeling, like somehow the rest of the current page is going to be left blank.  It's been fun looking back in the spare moments I've had this week, though if I could lodge one complaint it's that it seems the school has collectively decided to push us out the door at full steam, as opposed to let us gradually glide into the exit.  There's something to be said for the ripping the band aid off approach, but it doesn't leave a lot of time or energy for reflection.  Here's my last ounce of reflection that I think I can spare.

It seems like so long ago that I walked into my first day of African-American Lit.  I really didn't know what to expect, our summer reading had been Native Son.  If you haven't read it, you should, but it's a hard read, Wright wasn't writing to make it an easy read.  I remember bits and pieces of discussions from that class, I remember my first poetry discussion was of a poem called "Liberty." I remember I liked it because it was so short.  Not that I was avoiding reading a long poem, but I admired the effort it took to get the point across in six short lines.  Besides that I think I probably talked at most ten times that entire semester.  I really focused on my blog, but I was never really happy with it.  Looking back on my first post makes me laugh and cringe, the level of insight there is pretty minimal, but it was a start, and starts are never perfect.

I was excited for Coming of Age.  The book list looked great, even higher expectations that the books I'd read (and enjoyed) the semester before.  Then Joyce hit me.  How could I expect a book that began "Once upon a time, and a very good time it was" to be such a challenging book.  It wasn't just that it was written with pre-1900 Irish slang, it was also the effects Joyce was going for.  Catcher was easier, I really like Holden, that was my first and probably favorite pastiche.  Black Swan Green was nearly equal on my favorite scale.  I started to talk a bit more that semester, though then I felt like, well I'm just a junior in a coming of age class, these senior who will be graduating in a few months must have more personal insights because of where they are in their life.  I think this was probably the highlight of my blogs.  It was the perfect timing of feeling more comfortable to share my thoughts, and also the drive to write well thought out and meaningful posts.

Over the summer, going into 20th Century Novels, I made it a goal that I was going to talk more.  I said to myself-you're a senior now, with two semesters of these types of classes under your belt, you gotta step up.  And in a lot of ways I think I did.  Not only did the number of comments I made increase, but I think the quality of them by and large did as well.  I still remember my favorite comment I made in the entire semester, it was second day of reading The Sun Also Rises, and I described my first impression of Brett Ashley that she was intoxicating.  Now I don't know if this was particularly original, but it still stands out, in large part because that was by far my favorite book of the semester, and the description of Brett as having "curves like the hull of a racing yacht" I still can't get out of my mind to be dreadfully honest.  I admit, I think my blogs went down a bit, not so much because I didn't have interesting things to say but more because I didn't have as much time or will power to work on them.

And then this semester? Well I don't really know if I have the perspective yet really for good reflection (though would you say any of this reflection has been good?).  I mean you were in class with me, you probably know how I was.  Talked a lot, even when I didn't really have something to say, kind of lazy on the blogs.  Now, if for some strange reason you did read my first blog post, and got all the way to here on this one, you may notice they have similar rigid structuring.  This was intentional, I figured, may as well end how you started, really tie this whole blog in one nice big digital literary bow of varying insight.  And here and now, forever closes my chapter.

Not as it Appears

As far as we, the students of history, know, Bobby Dupard is a fictional character of Don Delillo.  I was tossing around the idea in my head though, what if Bobby Dupard is fictional in the world of Nicholas Branch. What if he's in Lee's head like a childhood imaginary friend? I believe this idea isn't as far fetched as it initially may seem.  Bobby is first introduced as Lee's cellmate in Atsugi.  This I believe is the 'real' Bobby Dupard.  I can't see anyway that an image of Lee's mind could some how end up as fact on the report that Branch is compiling.  It is after that that I believe it veers away Bobby.  Lee has created a new identity for Bobby.  He is now a figment of Lee's imagination, his actions are a construction of Lee's mind.

Let's take when they reconnect at the laundromat.  Lee is in a tumultuous state, he's not thinking clearly.  I would argue it is him projecting Dupard as the anonymous worker.  He then visits nightly Dupard, only he's really just having a conversation with himself.  The discussion he has with Dupard about Walker then is him guessing what an African-American veteran forced into the ghetto would say about his experiences.  When Dupard is talking about not wanting to miss class to shoot Walker, I think it's part of Lee's mind challenging his planned assassination.  His argument about going in close for the kill or taking the distance shot then is also an internal, not external one.

I admit, the fact that Lee gets a vehicle from Dupard is a bit tricky in my new understanding of Dupard.  The case could be made that Lee has a mental break when he goes to steal the car and by the time he wakes up the next morning is back to himself, the car showing up without explanation equaling Dupard got it.  It's possible but it is sort of a stretch.  Lee does have a propensity for making up stories and people, alternate identities and personalities.  He does expect his cellmate to have wisdom for him like the great revolutionaries, but Dupard doesn't.  He is lonely and consistently abandoned so it would make sense for him to make up someone he expected so much from.  In his mind, history has put Dupard at the laundromat to push him over the edge to take action.  Really, I see it more as the two sides of his mind struggling with what he feels he must do to accomplish his goal of being a part of history.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades?

I think the underlying fundamental question that Delillo is asserting is, does Kennedy have to die for Cuba? At the midway point of the novel, there are two answers to this question.  Mackey believes that he does, Win Everett thinks he doesn't.  Win originally comes up with the conspiracy, with the stated outcome of a near miss of the President from a sniper's bullet.  It has to be close enough that it looks like Cuban intelligence sent someone to do the job, but not so close as to actually endanger the President.  Already there has been dramatic ironic tensions as Nicholas Branch has written that Raymo and Frank haven't been told to miss, andCarmine Lotta, the man unknowingly funding the conspiracy, has stated he wants to take the head off the snake (AKA JFK).  Essentially, the very thing Everett fears, his conspiracy growing legs of its own independent of him, is happening.  He's lost control from his suburban home in Texas, the plot is now moving without his impetus or knowledge.

But beyond the individual, personal motives for and against actually killing the President, is it objectively necessary?  Looking at this historically, granted with the benefits of hindsight the answer is a firm no.  U.S. policy has never been more directly counter the Castro government in Cuba than during the Kennedy administration.  When Johnson takes over in November '63, his attention turns towards his Great Society, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement.  Cuba effectively disappears from the political debate. Now granted, the Kennedy Assassination was not tied to the Cubans, and if it were I think certainly that would have made a difference, but no other President had as much at stake as Kennedy with regards to Cuba.  Cuba was his biggest embarrassment, and he already had a inferiority complex because of his lack of governmental experience, so he would've done anything to turn it into a win.

If Kennedy had survived that day in Dallas, he would have kept after Cuba.  Publicly the U.S. won the Cuban Missile Crisis, so there would be no reason for him not to keep pressing that advantage.  He was a pretty emotional president, so if he thought Castro had come after him, the threat of the Soviets probably wouldn't have been enough of a deterrent to invade Cuba.  Plus the American public's support for Kennedy would've been galvanized to the point they would have followed him anyway.  I guess then, my conclusion is that it would have been better for the pro-Cuban interventionists for Kennedy to have lived and that Everitt's plot in its original form would have been the best outcome for the whole movement.  In my thinking Mackey seems not only shortsighted but also selfish for letting his personal feelings get in the way of the larger interests he claims to be fighting for.

Cop Out

The ending to Kindred was bad.  Throughout the entire story Butler succeeded in creating something that was more than just a cliche slave narrative.  I really enjoyed it, both the scenes in 'modern' America and antebellum America.  But the ending ruined it for me.  Flat out, undeniably, ultimately.  There had to be a better way to wrap up Rufus' story than to have Dana kill him.  It's one thing to end a random novel by killing off the antagonist, but in a slavery based story? It's just unimaginative.  It seemed out of character for Dana, normally she worries more about how her actions will affect others than herself.  This isn't to say that I disagree with her choice to kill Rufus, I disagree with Butler ever putting her in that position.  Dana knew that Rufus' death would mean that all the slaves on the plantation would be scattered across the South with complete disregard for family and relationships, Carrie told her as much a few chapters before.

Now with the way that Dana's time travel is set up, one of the two of them has to die.  Otherwise there could be no finality to the story, and the first chapter could never be written with such a sense of recovery.  But it still doesn't have to be Rufus trying to rape Dana and Dana killing him in self defense.  I think it could have been a stronger ending to have Rufus kill himself.  He is such a rash person it would've fit with his personality, and it would have elicited a strong moral questioning in readers' minds about the feelings of slave owners. Maybe Kevin comes back with Dana and there's a standoff, redefining the classic plot of two men fighting over a woman.  But something, something that isn't male slave owner attempting to rape the female slave.  Perhaps Butler was doing something with this that I'm not getting?  It's possible, but at least in my current thinking all the ending elicits is a sense that the author was done with her characters and her story, or that she was on deadline from her publisher.  The problem is that it isn't a metafictional aside with Butler showing us that just like we're ready for the end to come, so is she.  Instead it comes across like a movie that ran out of money and ended on a weak note, fading into oblivion.       

O Captain, My Captain

When Tom Weylin dies in Dana's care, it's a very important turning point both for Rufus and for Dana.  All the times that Dana had come back to antebellum Maryland, she was always able to cure what was ailing Rufus or anyone else.  All of a sudden, she didn't cure someone, and it wasn't just anyone, it was Tom Weylin whom she'd had run-ins with before.  Now realistically there wasn't anything Dana could have done to save him, he had a heart attack, which even with modern medicine is often fatal.  Dana knows this, and deep down Rufus knows it too, but the mirage that she is this guardian angel figure is gone.

Rufus now is forced to see that Dana may not always be there to protect him and the plantation.  Even worse, she can now be seen as a threat.  If she didn't save Tom, why would she save Rufus?  Rufus doesn't know that she's a descendant of his, so seemingly the only thing making sure she saves him is that his father would have tortured and killed her if she hadn't--a thing Tom reminds Dana on multiple occasions.  He knows that when he's in danger of being killed she comes against her will, but once she's there there isn't anything stopping her from walking away from him now.  Rufus has to give in to Dana a little more, because unlike before, she now holds a lot of the cards.  While he's alive and lucid she is still his slave, but clearly he never knows when he'll be near death so he can't take the chance.

For Dana, she's now had someone die on her watch.  As traumatic as it must be, it's liberating too (irony fully intended).  Tom's death gives her the leverage to inspire fear in Rufus of what she's capable of.  It also proves to herself that she can survive in that time with someone's death.  Her parents died when she was young, so she knows what that loss is like, how debilitating it can be.  I think she was living still in a little bit of a fantasy world that nothing was ever going to change around the Weylin plantation and she would always just be getting Rufus out of jams and playing him against his father.  Now that fantasy is over and she's now gained an even stronger position in that time.  Going forward, things will be different, and the unspoken understanding between Rufus and Dana is going to be even more sensitive.    

Abandonment Issues

*Note:This is specifically about the latter half of "The Fear" so potential spoiler alert, though it isn't anything very surprising.

When Dana leaves 1819 at the end of Tom Weylin's whip, Kevin is left there.  He's alone, and worse yet, unlike Dana he doesn't have a way of getting home.  Now Kevin does have the advantage of being White, which in the antebellum South is probably the best 'trait' you can have.  Dana says she is gone for eight days, meaning that she's been gone for years in 1819 time.  Kevin waited and waited and then went North.  Dana is hurt by him not waiting for her.  Is it reasonable to expect him to though?

I would say no.  Rufus tells Dana that he waited around for a while at the plantation before finally deciding to go north.  Kevin couldn't have even be sure Dana was ever going to come back.  Even after he goes to the North, he still writes letters to Rufus providing his current address, so on the off chance Dana is there, she has some way of contacting him.  Yet the fact is, Dana abandoned him.  I realize she couldn't control it, but that is what happened.  I hope for him that he did move on and find someone else, or if not another person, at least something to put him at peace in his new life.

Now I know this seems like a pretty minor detail of the whole situation to focus on, but the way Butler sets it up, it is in direct contrast with Tom Weylin's current relationship status.  Tom's wife has left for Baltimore after the death of her twins, making him now twice left by women (Hannah, his first wife dying).  Unlike Kevin's relative flexibility, Tom can't move because all his wealth his tied up in his land.  He has to live in the same house, the same bed even.

I must admit, I haven't come up with anything to really draw from these parallel situations as of yet. However, if Kevin does come back, or if Dana somehow gets to the city he is in, it will be interesting to see how much Kevin may have changed.  This change could then lend insight into who Tom was before Margaret.  Perhaps when Hannah died he changed just as much as Kevin changed when Dana left.  The Tom we see in the present may be a different version of his true self, maybe the past isn't as different as we normally, or want to, believe?      

Why Three?

As I think I established with my last post, I really like war art.  That's why Vonnegut's one paragraph of military action, when the two scouts are killed, really intrigued me.  In class we talked about how the past perfect verb conjugation makes it less exciting, and the short declarative sentences almost innocent and childlike.  There is one thing we didn't talk about in class that hasn't left my head though.  Why is it "three inoffensive bangs" (54)?  Two scouts, three shots, the math doesn't add up.  From my understanding of military training, soldiers are taught to fire two shots at a target, "double-tapping" them.  It is few enough shots that the recoil of the gun doesn't throw off accuracy by very much, but enough that if both are hits the target won't be getting up.  For marksmen, for the range that they presumably got to behind the two scouts, one shot apiece would have been sufficient.  Depending on who the soldiers were, that's either four or two shots, so the question remains: where does the three come from?  

Vonnegut was in the Army, so he would've known what was standard operating procedure, which leads me to the conclusion that the three shots was chosen for a reason.  Perhaps it is suggesting that the Germans who kill the scouts aren't real soldiers and haven't had any military training, so that while one of them needs to fire twice (or chooses might be a better word) the other elects to fire only once.  This would fit with the makeup of the squad that captures Billy and Roland, with the young boys, Princess, and the old men.  Or perhaps the reason for the three shots is that they didn't have enough ammunition/one gun misfired and wasn't operable. This would fit with the description of the rest of Germany, Dresden essentially, being no longer militarily capable.   Either way really, it still supports Vonnegut's overall point about the war, that by the time Dresden was bombed the outcome of the war was already decided.  It adds to the utter stupidity of the war, that people who have no inclination toward violence are forced into it without even so much as the proper equipment or training, and still expected to succeed for their country.

The Makings of a War Hero

Slaughterhouse Five is an especially important book because I am one of those people who can't read enough war novels, or watch enough movies (in fact within ten feet sits a three volume set of books detailing American involvement in World War Two, and yes they were a gift for me).  Vonnegut is clearly not writing this book to glamorize war, or war art for that matter.  But how is he doing so?  To answer that question I want to explore a little bit of what makes movie war heroes into heroes.  One quick note, for the purposes of this post I will be referring to male heroes.  I just want to note now that there is no deeper meaning behind this except the majority of western art depicting war has focused on men.  A movie to take on the task of examining the response to a female heroine would be Courage Under Fire, which I highly recommend.

Personality:  As far as I can identify, there are two types of personalities that make war heroes.  There is the guy who everyone hates because he's a cocky jerk who doesn't play nice with others.  Yet, in the face of danger he routs the enemy and saves his fellow countrymen.  It is his belief that he is the best that allows him to be the hero, because he knows that not only his he the best, he is so much better than everyone else that they fear him.  Top Gun is a prime example, Maverick (Tom Cruise) is this man, no question about it.  The other type is the quiet unassuming man, hard working yet never a standout who in the face of battle finds his voice and successfully leads his men out.  Damian Lewis' portrayal of Dick Winters in Band of Brothers shows this type of hero.  He is catapulted during the war to higher and higher positions of authority, all the while still maintaining his unassuming personality.

Style: This may not seem as obvious, but since the beginning of action movies, style has played a big role in pointing out the hero and the villain.  In thirties movies it was the color of hats (white and black of course). As America became more militarily active, the color of the uniforms, even if they weren't actually Russian, German, Chinese, etc. was meant to show the audience who to cry over.  Even today in police movies, think about how the main character is normally dressed--he's probably wearing a suit but not a nice one, and doesn't look very comfortable in it.  Off duty he probably wears a hoodie while he still tries to solve the case.  The bad guys can be classified as gangsters or gangstas depending on the dress.  Big imposing men in suits belong to the gangster realm, while the typically young gangsta has more jewelry, more tattoos and baggier clothing.  Think of the famous Louis-David painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps, do you not get a sense of his power and strength by how is he dressed, and his flair while being perilously close to death?

Humanity and Self-Sacrifice:  What sets apart heroes from villains often is not the amount of people they kill but their reason and feelings behind it.  Villians kill for themselves, heroes kill because they have no choice. When James Bond kills Steven Obanno in Casino Royale it was because Bond was attacked and his kill is to save himself and Lynd.  You can see his pain in a later scene in the shower though, how much of a toll it takes on him to be constantly flying around the world and killing people.  Self-sacrifice is also important in the building of a hero.  In Air Force One a random F-14 pilot throws his plane in the way of a missile to stop hit from hitting Air Force One and killing the President.  Or in Captains of the Clouds, after a German pilot has destroyed two of the unarmed bombers, James Cagney steers his plane right at the German to bring him down.  In both movies, the pilots know that this action will result in their death, and yet they still do it, for the mission is more important than their own life.

In a nutshell, those things make a hero.  Billy Pilgrim doesn't fit any of those things specifically, Vonnegut goes to great lengths to make sure he clearly doesn't.  Roland Weary looks more like a gangster than a hero. The scouts leave men behind.  The British are closer, but their noble duty-bound attempts to escape look foolish because their in the middle or a Russian POW camp, and their cavorting with the Germans is not very heroic.  Edgar Derby is probably the closest thing to a hero in Slaughterhouse Five, but with repeated assurances that he will die over a teapot by the end of a novel, this undermines his budding heroism.  For what Vonnegut is trying to accomplish, it makes sense to not make a hero out of any character.  That way, people like me don't read it like an exciting, flag waving war novel.

Ownership of The Word

In African-American Lit last year I remember there being a discussion on the use of the n-word by African-American writers.  There has been a debate going on over it being used in the same sort of context by non African-Americans (namely Whites) and the appropriateness of it.  Essentially those in favor of its use being "decriminalized" believe that if they can say it why cant we?  I must admit I never agreed with this argument but I never really exerted much energy thinking about the issue.  Then as I was reading Mumbo Jumbo I ran across something that I interpreted as a similar thing to me.  Reed is telling the story of the Atonist rise to power in Ancient Egypt with a large section focusing on Moses.  He relates Moses saying to the Osirian Egyptians that, "I will unleash the Holocaust upon you this time if you persist in this action" (Reed 185).  Now I know that holocausts have happened to people all over the world throughout history up to the present, and that the Holocaust (which I grant you I am inferring to mean the one done by the Nazis under Hitler) happened to many more groups of people than just Jews, but this one short sentence out of the entire book offended me.

Earlier, Mr. Mitchell asked our feelings on the portrayal of Whites in Mumbo Jumbo, I didn't have any issue with it.  But because it is Moses saying this, it was just too far for me.  I shouldn't have been offended, and even when I first read this I realized that, yet I still was.  Even nearly seventy five years after it happened, the Holocaust is still such an open wound for Jews worldwide.  Perhaps because it is often misremembered in history as being something that only happened to Jews, or maybe for some reason that I can't think of but the Holocaust is something Jews seem to own now.  My first reaction was along the lines of "What right has Ishamel Reed have to make any kind of ironic joke out of the Holocaust?"  And to some extent I still feel that way, but I'm coming to see it now as less about it being Moses as a Jew and the Holocaust as something that happened in part to Jews, and more about history itself.  Reed is totally rewriting the common understanding of Ancient Egyptian history, so why can't he also make Moses into a Hitleresque figure?  Whose really to say that if you flip their lives that those two men would have been any different?  I think that is the point Reed is trying to get across, though I am still disconcerted by his choice of topic and the language he uses to accomplish it.      

Epigraphical Rebel?

Ishmael Reed is really breaking convention by starting his novel Mumbo Jumbo on the literal first page in the book.  This is so much of a convention, to start it later in the physical book, that when I heard where he put the first chapter, I wondered to myself if that was even legal (perhaps legal is the wrong word, but a violation of some agreement in the publishing world). This sets the tone for the book, as one that will not follow standard literary conventions. What this also does, is make those interim pages between the first and second chapter be seen.  The copyright pages really aren't important to authors I presume, that's in the realm of the publishers.  But the epigraphs really are.  Just like every word in the narrative is chosen by the author, so too are the epigraphs. Why would anyone spend time finding the perfect quotations to put in the epigraph if they didn't want their readers to read them.  

There are three quotes in the epigraph, though it is my understanding that the second and third are both James Weldon Johnson from his work The Book of American Negro Poetry.  Looking at the first one, attributed to Zora Neale Hurston, I couldn't help but feel that this is akin to how Ernest Hemingway put the Gertrude Stein quote "You are all a lost generation" as his first in The Sun Also Rises.  In it, Hemingway is not only describing one theme for his novel, dealing with the generation born out of war, but he is also paying tribute to Stein for being his mentor and helping get him to the place where his modernist novel could make it through publishing.  While I have no biographical knowledge of Reed and Hurston's relationship, if any, I do know that Hurston is one of the most well respected writers to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, helping to pave the way for African-American authors to be accepted by main stream (White) America. Perhaps Reed is not being as rebellious as the location of his first chapter may suggest.

The final two quotes from Johnson are integral, even more so than Hurston's.  Without them, the whole meaning of the first few chapters is unclear.  "jes' grew" doesn't mean much out of context, at least it didn't for me. After the first chapter I started suspecting it was the early forms of Jazz, but as "jes' grew" is a focus for the beginning of the novel, a suspicion of its meaning is hardly something to base your understanding of a novel on.  In the epigraph though, Johnson is telling us, if not explicitly, just what "jes' grew" is.  Reed put that in there so that readers of the epigraph would have a better understanding of his novel.  It would be out of rhythm for him to define it somewhere in the narrative itself, so the logical place is then in the epigraph.  How do you get a reader to read the epigraph?  Put it in the middle of the novel, not before it.  It doesn't look like Reed was being as much of a rebel after all, now does it?

Dropping the Gloves

Being a lifelong sports fan, and especially a baseball one, when I read that Father was going to take his son to a game I was very excited.  I expected none other than Honus Wagner or Ty Cobb to come marching in to the Polo Grounds, and just so happen to talk to Father and the boy.  Instead, we get a rivalry game between Boston (pre-Ruth) and the Giants.  Father only picks up on the ugliness of the sport, the fighting, the cursing, spitting, etc.  Attention is specially paid to the team "mascots," Boston's midget, and New York's fool.  Charlie Faust, the Giant who is mocking the game delusionally was actually a real member of the Giants in 1911 by the way.  Towards the end of the game Father thinks to himself that, "What he saw was not baseball but an elaborate representation of his own problems accounted, for his secret understanding, in the coded clarity of numbers that could be seen from a distance" (231).  And I think he is right, in part.

I too saw the connection of this game to Father's life, though more so in the events of the game than the numbers they created.  Essentially, the way Father describes it, fans are paying to watch the violent intensity of the game.  They egg on the players, cheer when one side draws the blood of the other, and will go home happy when a hard fought (literally) game was put on for their amusement.  Indeed sports have often been explained as a metaphor for war, only one more socially acceptable than say gladiators fighting to the death. Is this not what is happening in New Rochelle?  Coalhouse starts things off by attacking the Emerald Isle Fire Station.  After that the other side responds with a manhunt.  But things really start once the press gets involved.  Coalhouse saves one of the firemen in an attempt to extract Conklin's location.  But this also allows him to report the events in detail to the police, and the press.  Coalhouse also delivers two letters to the press within the hour of the attack.  He wants the public spectacle, he wants "the crowd" cheering him on like they do during the baseball game's fight.  After his second attack on Fire Station No. 2, the New York press come into town to cover the story.  Here the tale of the vengeful Coalhouse reaches national notoriety, much like say a big baseball game.

Ultimately the game serves as a tangible representation to Father of the two sides of the fight that he is watching unfold right in from of him.  There is Willie Conklin, the home team, who abuses his authority under the belief that the fans will "root, root, root for the home team."  Then we have Coalhouse as the away team interloper, upsetting the balance of New Rochelle.  When Conklin overplays his hand, the townspeople abandon him, and then only focus on the violence, locals living in fear of it, nonresidents watching in earnest.  It would seem Coalhouse defeats the home team, but then they both go to the New York for a continuation of The Series, this time on Coalhouse home field.  Who's going to win the pennant? I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

A Portrait of the Explorer as a Tourist Man

In Ragtime, Peary's journey to the pole is fictionalized with Father being our eyes and ears into that adventure.  Here is one of the canonical events of American exploration, right up there with Lewis and Clark and the Moon landing.  Doctorow is writing in the early 1970s, a very patriotic time because of the bicentennial, though with the Vietnam War still fresh in the American Conscience, triumphs like these, battles against nature not man were less divisive things to wave the flag over.  Yet Doctorow makes this triumph of American will and spirit into a scene from Apocalypse Now only older and colder.  I admit I don't really know what happened on the expedition, and that I'm not wholly discounting Doctorow's version, but I do think it's important that we recognize that Doctorow is trying to do something here beyond tell the story of the expedition.

This is really a story about Father, Doctorow could have chosen to set the chapter framed from Peary or even Henson's point of view, but instead it stays with Father.  This is to accomplish his goal of showing the 20th century man.  We've seen Tateh representing the immigrant man, we've seen Mother's Younger Brother as a Septimus Warren Smith-esque young man, but Father is the missing piece of manhood, the distinctly American part (so much so that he owns a patriotic supplies shop).  Father is our more stereotypical image of the American turn of the century man in his moral views and appearance.  In this chapter though, we see the Teddy Roosevelt image being shown as just a front.  Father isn't a Rough Rider, as Peary explains to him "This was from no lack of heart...but from the tendency of his extremities to freeze easily" (79).  His reason for being there is laughable, his society donated enough money so Father got to come along, as essentially a dressed up tourist.

The short talk between Henson and Father over who will go with Peary to the Pole is also telling.  Father admits to himself that Henson has a right to that honor probably more so than anyone else.  He relates his skill in building shelter and driving the dogs.  Yet he resents him for his confident nature, compounded by the fact that he is African-American.  He never says this as such, though it seems clear to me because in the same sentence that Father tells us of his resentment over "Henson's presumption" that he challenged "the Negro" over why he thought it would be him (77).  We knew Henson was African-American already so this isn't telling us something we didn't know, only something that clearly matters to Father.  Father's racism also carries over to the Eskimos, more so actually.  He treats them not as people but as animals.  They're used as unnamed assistants, indeed the Eskimos were always going accompany Peary to the Pole yet he still said he was going to do it alone.  Then there's Father watching two Eskimos have sex in the same way someone might at a zoo of two caged animals.  Later, when Father tells of his relations with an Eskimo woman he refers to her as "the stinking fish" (111).  This fills in our picture of the American man as Doctorow shows him--racist and fake.

Brand Loyalty

Magdalene called Lena tells Milkman that "When you got grown enough to know the difference between a woman and a two-toned Ford, everything in this house stopped for you" (215).  It got me thinking about Macon Dead II especially in light of the story Lena tells Milkman about going to the ice-house.  She sets it up as "You see, he took us there so they could see us, envy us, envy him...And when he talked to the men, he kept glancing at us, us and the car.  The car and us" (216).  What Lena interprets as a being more about making the poor Blacks jealous, I would say is really more about Macon.  He missed that maturation step where he could tell the difference between a woman and a two-toned Ford.  The reason that Macon is so domineering is because to him there is no difference.  Women (and really I would say men too) are just objects that he drives until a newer model comes out and then he either trades them in or leaves them sitting in the garage.  If you will indulge me with this metaphor...look at Ruth.  She was the big name import brand that made all the other guys stand in awe as he paraded around with in.  Soon though, the mouth agape factor wore off, and she needed a a lot more TLC than was expected.  Macon keeps her confined within the home, never really taking her out anymore, forcing her to sit and waste her life away.  Because Macon sees the people around him in near car-like roles, he just fills them up with gas every now and then and thinks they'll be fine.

Like a lot of gearheads, we see Macon try and pass this on to his son.  We see how intent he is that Milkman develop the same feelings towards other people as Macon feels himself.  He is insistent that Milkman work with him at Sonny's shop, even making him the guy to collect all the rents so he experiences that feeling of superiority.  Macon wants for his son to inherit everything, the business, his personality, and with that the "cars."  Where conceivably, are Lena and Corinthians going to live in Macon's mind? Probably in the house, like they have for the first forty five years of their life, making them Milkman's responsibility.  This really is just a spin off of the old slavery rooted idea that people can be property, only for Macon they aren't just generic property they are cars.  Look back throughout the book and there are a lot of cases where cars come into play along with the notion of Macon--and Milkman--being Black on the outside but really with the "heart of a White man" (266).  The literal cars are a status symbol for Macon, by making people into car-like figures he is further classifying them, and then Morrison is showing us then, that this takes on the added level of a racial pride aspect to go with class identification.  This could then be rooted down to "Brand Loyalty."  

The Goddess of Speed

*Note: This comes from a 1928 5th Series 528 Formal Sedan. Though the scene in Song of Solomon occurs sometime around 1936, from 1929-1942 Packard changed their logo to a more chiseled masculine hood ornament.

Toni Morrison doesn't add superfluous details, anything that makes it into the book is something worth noting.  So why then, is the one thing Milkman can see outside of the car this image of a woman shown above?  And then what is the importance of it being in front of him, while looking behind makes him uneasy?  Let's tackle the former first.  The most obvious reading is the freedom she represents.  Her wings allow her to fly away from anything she wants, nothing can hold her down.  This is of course very different from Milkman's life, true he is only six or seven, but even at this young age he recognizes the domineering nature of his father.  Macon Dead II lives his way, and makes sure his entire family does as well.  In the car, the time when Milkman sees this image of the goddess of speed, he is quite physically constrained between his mother and his father.  His father controls everything about Milkman in the car, even something as basic as when he can go to the bathroom.  When Milkman starts squirming his father is reluctant to stop the car, he only does so when Magdalene tells him he could stop (Morrison 33).  Then there is the independence that the goddess having a tire suggests.  Even if a tire ruptures, she can still keep the car moving because she has an extra tire.  It isn't next to her, she isn't standing on it, it is in her outstretched arms ready for use.  Milkman doesn't have anything to give him independence.  It isn't until later that he does anything against his father's wishes (visiting Pilate's house) and only much later that he asserts anything to his father by punching him.  

I would argue though, that it is the action pose the woman has that makes this small thing such an important detail.  Look at her, she's running (or flying).  In the first chapter Milkman doesn't do anything, everything happens to him.  In the start of the second chapter Milkman's first real action that we see is him having to go to the bathroom--notice how we don't actually see him pee on his sister--that is relayed to us back in the confined car.  Like I said earlier, Milkman is physically constrained at the time he sees this image, and I think we can all remember being a 6 year old kid and wanting to do anything rather than sit in the car (moving at a crawl no less!).  Later Guitar and Milkman talk about how Milkman doesn't fit in, he lives on Not Doctor Street, but he hangs around Southside (103).  He wants something to do but the big old house that his grandfather created confines him just as much as his father does.  He can't just go in the backyard or to the park to play, and it isn't like he can throw a ball around with his dad.  Milkman is stuck, physically and emotionally, and this hood ornament is the only "role model" he has for escaping his current state.

That idea of the goddess of speed being his role model I would propose as why that is the only thing he can see out the front.  Milkman can't actually see the wide open expanses of lakes or neighborhoods, but up on the hood the goddess of speed can.  She isn't constrained by anyone or anything, the world literally opens up to her as the car moves, she is the first to see the new land.  By being the first thing anyone sees as the car approaches she is the face of the car.  Contrast this to the scene at Feather's pool hall, where Milkman is denied entrance because of who his father his.  Even though Macon isn't there, his image is strong enough that it projects over that son, casting a shadow that everyone notices.  Out front the goddess is always traversing the new, virgin, frontier.  Macon assumes after Milkman works for him for many years that he will take over, even Milkman says that he kind of assumes it as well (107).  But Milkman from the very beginning wants to be different, he doesn't want to follow his father in to real estate.  It just doesn't interest him because it's what he's always grown up knowing.  Yet, unlike his sisters and mother he won't content himself to living statically, he needs change, and he wants somewhere that his father hasn't touched already, where he could be Macon Dead, not Milkman, and no one would mistake him for his father.  The goddess represents everything Milkman wants, and the fact that she's the one thing he can see out front, in his future, shows his determination to get what she has.

Native Stranger

There is perhaps no more harsh criticism of the society of this country, with a special focus on the societal structures around crimes than Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son of a poor Black man who finds himself waiting for the electric chair.  Bigger Thomas is 20 years old and lives in a one room apartment with his mother, brother, and sister.  He is constantly pushed by his mother to get a job to support his family, with the final impetus being their threatened eviction if he does not begin work.  He has a few "friends" that together form a gang, committing muggings and small time robberies, as well as Bessie, a girl that he really only keeps around for sex.  His job is to be the chauffeur for the rich Dalton family.  One night (actually his first night on the job) Mary Dalton, roughly the same age as Bigger, goes out with her boyfriend Jan.  She is so drunk by the end of the night that Bigger must carry her from the driveway up to her room.  As he gets Mary to her room, her blind mother walks in, and to keep Mary quiet he puts a pillow over her face.  She dies accidentally, but Bigger realizing how it will look, hides her body and goes on the run.  Along the way he picks up Bessie to assist in his fake ransom scheme before raping and killing her.  He is subsequently caught and put on trial.

Sound familiar? Camus writes a (relatively) similar story with The Stranger.  In both the trial and punishment phase take on an entire section of the novel.  Each trial is much more an indictment of the ideas Bigger and Meursault represent then the men themselves.  The trials are sensational on both sides, the prosecutors in each play the role of the keeper of righteousness, while the defense lawyers make impassioned speeches detailing the humanity of their clients (Wright spares us no detail in the closing argument of the lawyer, Mr. Max.  The argument lasts roughly 30 pages in total).  Both clients are sentenced to death, and in each we see what prison does to them, with special emphasis paid to their disbelief of religion.

Each author is arguing against the court systems, for they are killing someone just as much as Bigger or Meursault did.  For each of the men, the death by their hand was an accident of sorts, while the all powerful court is very deliberate in its murder.  The outcome seems decided before the trial really begins, with the witnesses serving more as stories for the press than the jury.  Bigger is tormented by everyone around him, Whites hate him for killing Mary Dalton, Blacks hate him for the negative attention he has brought their ghetto.  Meursault of course hopes for the hatred of the masses on the closing page.

Christianity also has a similar role in each novel.  Both Bigger and Meursault violently reject the religion that pervasively dominates their cultures.  For each, it is seen as a giving up of hope for the current life, and is tied very closely to the idea of escaping their prisons (for Bigger this extends earlier into his childhood prison of the Black Belt).  This rejection alienates them from everyone, though this is met with some level of appreciation that they no longer have to try to explain themselves to others.

Both authors are calling for people to start valuing the current life and stop shutting their eyes in prayer for the next one.  Many viewed Wright's story as a call to arms of sorts, to get Blacks up on their feet and push, physically if necessary, for more equal rights.  Camus is writing during the Nazi occupation of France, and as an active member of the Resistance, he too it can be argued is making a similar call to his compatriots.  Their anti-justice system views make sense, as the system only works if it goes along with whatever group is in charge, even if that means bastardizing the principles of its laws, and at that point the justice systems of the U.S. and Vichy France were seriously doing just that.

While certainly the philosophies of existentialism and naturalism that so greatly influenced these two works are different, the approach to a similar end can be to some extent disregarded.  These two novels were published within only a few years of each other, and in relatively similar social environments (though importantly Meursault comes from the ruling side, while Bigger is part of the exploited side) so the use of them in conjunction with each other I find is a compelling one.  That is not to say that they are sister novels, meant intentionally to compliment one another, but I certainly see that it works out that way.

The Sins of the father

In writing my response to The Metamorphosis, I became angry with one character that I had never really focused on.  In Good Night, and Good Luck. Edward R. Murrow's famous line "The sins of the fathers do not belong to the sons so long as we own them." is highlighted.  Of course this line was spoken in a much different climate than that of Gregor Samsa, but the idea remains the same.  Gregor's entire life is altered by having to return to work for the company to pay off his fathers debt to the bank.  This raises the question, is it fair to make Gregor change his life because of the mistake (i.e. sin) of his father?  My answer to this question is no, parents are supposed to be the supportive ones, it is not the role of the child to make up for the mistakes of its parents.  This is not to say that parents don't need support, or that children should not give it, but it should not be required by a third party or by any party for that matter.  

Gregor's father doesn't work while Gregor is working as a travelling salesman, he spends all day reading the papers out loud and enjoying his retirement.  Sure, he is an older man and presumably worked hard all his life, but once Gregor morphs, his father goes back to work.  He was not just living off the success of his son, which would be one thing, but he tied a harness to his son's neck and was forcing him to pull the plow.  It seems Gregor was having a successful career in the army, a rank of lieutenant is a big deal, but because of his father's mistake he is recalled home.  His father is being selfish, by screwing up his business and then forcing his son to work off his debt, he has potentially altered the course of the family.  Gregor could have very well risen up the ranks to become a respected and well paid high ranking officer, making the Samsa name famous.  Instead he is a middling employee who becomes an insect.

The most despicable thing about Gregor's father is that, besides the fact that he doesn't own his sins, he disowns his son instead.  Look at part one where for the majority of the time he believes Gregor to be still human.  He completely throws his son under the bus for being late, he doesn't stall the manager, he doesn't try to defend his son, he just capitulates to the boss.  We see later he defends his wife and daughter from the perceived threat of Gregor, yet he has no inclination whatsoever to defend his son who is keeping him out of debtor's prison and his entire family in a nice apartment.  The only actions that Gregor's father makes, that are described in any sort of depth in the entire novella, are the few times he attacks his son.  The apple assault helps lead to Gregor's death, yet he suffers no grief for his son's death (or at least disappearance if we want to quibble with how much of Gregor was left in his insect body by the end).   Gregor's father is the kind of man that Edward R. Murrow hated most.  He is a weak man who allows injustice to happen in front of him because he doesn't have the nerve to say anything, and relies on others to clean up his own mess.  

Copycat

There is something comforting about enveloping yourself in someone else's style.  People do it all the time with fashion, identifying with a certain group, sports, mimicking a touchdown dance or batting stance mannerisms, and it is really no different in writing.  When you imitate the style of someone else, it is relieving because your writing is less personal.  It isn't really your voice that is on the paper, at least it isn't if you did a good job.  Sure some of you will shine through, but the majority of your work is to make people forget that they aren't reading the author you're imitating.  Pastiches are a relatively new genre for me as a writer, I only discovered them last year in Coming of Age, but in the few that I've written, I've grown rather fond of them.  There is no doubt that they are challenging, some voices are more difficult than others, but they are a perfect mix of creative freedoms in the direction of the essay, while still providing structure of how to write it.  One of the hardest things authors say when you are just beginning to write, is finding your voice.  With a pastiche, that is taken care of, and all you are left to do is internalize the voice and produce a great story.

Looking back at both my  first pastiche, of J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, and the blog post I wrote on it, I realize that not a whole lot has changed in my approach to pastiches.  I often do write a paragraph or so and then delete it, just to get "warmed up" in the voice.  I would say it's nearly impossible to come into a pastiche cold and instantly get the voice and tone right.  Sure there are sentence examples you can use, certain words or phrases that evoke images of a character to include, but it's all the things not on the page that you have to really grasp.  Good books are more than just words on a page, and that has to be the goal in a pastiche of a good book, to get beyond the physical words and get to the next level.

This next level is the elusive part of writing pastiches that is also so enticing.  Sometimes you identify with a character and their voice just comes.  I felt that way about Holden I think, once I realized how to really write a pastiche.  With other voices, it hasn't been so easy.  I wrote a pastiche of Julia Taylor, a character most of you have probably never heard of (she's from Black Swan Green, a book I highly recommend).  She is an 18 year old girl in 1983, and British.  I was none of those things.  Trying to rebuild her voice was a more step by step process.  I had to first capture the British voice, then the female voice, and finally a dated one.  Thirty four pages later I had some parts where I think I really captured her voice, but in between I fear there were points where I only captured pieces of it.

The same can be said for my pastiches from this year, I believe I had flashes of brilliance in the pastiche, but stretches that many readers would find slightly off.  Of course my goal has always been, and will always be, to write perfect pastiches.  I would never create a dialogue with the intention of ruining narrative flow, but sometimes as the author, the tone in my head doesn't match with the tone on the page.  As a kind of added challenge to myself this year, and also to make a good study of the differences of authors' voices, I've decided that through all my pastiches I'm going to write "chapters" of the same story.  The final pastiche I do this year will end my story, and then I will put them all together and read them sequentially, in all the different voices.  It will be curious to see how much is consistent throughout them all, that would be my voice, and at that far removed point how much I associate each chapter with the influencing author.  This distance I will gain from my work will be important in the maturation of my writing, because I hope it will allow me to find my voice, ironically enough by reading my best imitations of other, more famous, voices.  I suppose ideally I won't find my voice through this exercise at all, though I do suspect my plan will work, but only time will tell.

The Best Fisherman

Brett is one of those characters, at least for me, that are so frustrating to look at because your opinion of them is so complicated.  I suppose most of the characters in The Sun Also Rises are like that (with the exception maybe of Mike).  Brett is first introduced to us very physically, "She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht" (30).  Throughout a lot of the scenes with Brett she is depicted very sexually, especially by Mike calling her things like "a lovely piece" (85).  She also lusts quite strongly, and more importantly openly, towards Romero.  Brett is about as promiscuous as they come, and in a sense I don't have a problem with it, but it's the men she chooses that I don't like as much.  She tells Jake that she didn't think Cohn would be like what he turns into-- that is, a mopey guy doggedly following Brett around-- but at least from our perspective filtered through Jake's, it seems pretty obvious that he would be so clingy.  With her fling with Romero, she seems surprised that Romero wants her to look more feminine and wants to actually marry her.  Though, as has been brought up multiple times in class, the man is the epitome of tradition in his dedication to the art of his craft, so it makes sense that he would want a traditional relationship.

It seems to me that Brett is looking for special notches in her belt.  It isn't satisfying for her just to say she's been with some number of guys, but that she's broken their hearts.  Notice how the only guy she doesn't pursue is Bill, probably the one guy who could have a casual relationship.  He wouldn't fall in love with her, so he really isn't interesting to Brett.  She is trying to play the masculine role in all her relationships.  Look at how Jake mocks Cohn for him being dominated by his two previous women, essentially that he isn't being masculine enough.  Men are expected to control relationships, so part of Brett's identity, as well as looking masculine (though maybe androgynous is a better descriptor) is to also "be the man" in the relationship.  It's not that I don't approve of Brett because she is upsetting traditional relationship roles, it is that she goes to the extreme end of the spectrum, hurting a lot of men in the process.

The one relationship that I don't really feel Brett does anything wrong with is her one with Jake.  They talk about how his injury keep them apart, but it is the only thing that brought them together.  They met in a hospital in London, so if he hadn't been injured specifically in that way they never would have even met. While maybe Brett takes Jake's devotion to her for granted, she clearly cares for him.  She's more emotionally vulnerable with him than any other character, and with the little we learn about her past, that is really hard for her.  I can't expect her to be with Jake and remain celibate, if their fortunes were reversed I don't see Jake giving up sex to be with Brett.

The first time we met Brett I described her as intoxicating, unknowingly ironic as she drives so many men to drink, but that description of her still fits even to the last page.  Maybe some of this is part of her subconscious character, maybe some of it is an act she puts on.  No matter what the split is, even knowing her behavior as well as we do, I still want to meet her, not to yell at her, certainly not with a blank slate, but she is still intoxicating to me, even living on the page.  As I'm writing this I'm saying to myself, "You don't really like her, why do you want to meet her so badly?"  The answer is that I don't know why, like I said at the beginning my feelings towards her are complicated, I can't condone who she is but I also can't condemn her, kind of like Jake I suppose, she ties me into knots.  

In The Beginning

The Hours is a very good film.  I really was engaged by it, so much so that my mood afterwords was acutely altered for the next half an hour or so.  The most interesting thing about the film from a stylistic sense for me was by opening with Virginia Woolf's suicide.  It is much in the tradition of Greek drama, telling the audience from the outset what the ending will be.  Yet it is such a dark mood for the film to take from the first seconds, here is the author of Mrs. Dalloway which gives birth to the "main" setting in New York, ending her life before the title placard has even come up.  It's not as if audiences would enter the film expecting to see a happy film, but such a beginning seems an odd choice all the same.  It shocks the viewer before they have even settled in their seat, so why did Stephen Daldry choose to do it this way?

I think the answer lies in the three heroines themselves.  The three of them know what is going on with themselves, and yet others don't accept that they know themselves.  This is most clearly shown with Virginia and Leonard at the train station.  It's clear that Leonard cares for his wife, and honestly wants the best for her, but he is convinced that the doctors know best, that Virginia is forgetting the bad times she went through.  Clarissa Vaughan finds herself to be the only one who can understand Richard, and also the only one who has a vision for the party and its guests.  Sally seems doubtful of everything coming together, and she clearly seems to resent Clarissa's near obsession with Richard.  Louis seems to make light of Clarissa's breakdown much like Leonard, again not out of a place of spite but more from taking things at face value, Clarissa said she's okay after a few minutes, so she's just okay in his mind.  Laura is confined to housewife status, clearly something she neither wants nor excels at, but everything around her is screaming that not only does she need to do it (housewife life) but that anyone can do it--the cake is very emblematic of this.

So by showing us that Virginia kills herself right away, and telling us that it isn't until 1941, viewers are stuck in the same place the heroines are.  We know what is going to happen, so when the other characters don't seem to recognize the severity of the matter it is frustrating to us.  Suicide for many viewers is probably a relatively foreign concept in that they themselves haven't seriously considered it.  This shared frustration helps viewers identity with Virginia and through her the other two main women.  And this connection is what ultimately drives the film, you don't want Clarissa's party to be spoiled, you want Laura to have a great birthday party for Dan, and probably most of all, you want to see Virginia happy.  Even though from the beginning it seems clear that nothing is really going to go well for any of them, you're still cheering for them because a piece of you deep inside probably has felt or feels like them.

Loving to Feel Hatred

Who do we want in life, friends or enemies?  Enemies inspire you to defeat them, friends support you when you need them.  Enemies are the antithesis to your life, friends are people to model.  Perhaps for those of us lucky enough to be able to motivate ourselves to action without an antagonist, an enemy isn't necessary.  For Clarissa Dalloway, it is.  "She hated her: she loved her" (170).  That her is Miss Doris Kilman, and her reasoning is simple, "Hot, hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power; Elizabeth's seducer; the woman who had crept in to steal and defile" (170).  Clearly the feeling is mutual, Miss Kilman certainly is no fan of Clarissa, which is unsurprising as they are both after the attention and affection of Elizabeth.  Maybe even more so is to leave an impression on Elizabeth, as they both fixate on whom Elizabeth's behavior resembles (or doesn't resemble).

It seems strange that Clarissa would ever say she loves Doris, really it seems strange for Clarissa to say she loves anyone, even Elizabeth or Richard (of course Richard can't say it at all).  But maybe that's just it, she makes Clarissa feel something—feel something in a way that her mind doesn't have to tell her how to feel, like when she straightens up as the car passes to feel more dignified, or when she feels her party isn't quite right because there isn't dancing.  This is an intense feeling, and really the only one I notice ever being described by Clarissa.  Put in this way this seems like a stark similarity to Septimus to follow from one of the panel presentations from my section today.  Septimus can't feel and he tries anything to feel, marrying Lucrezia hoping she can make him feel again.

So now comes the question: if Clarissa could, would she get rid of Doris, even though she "loves" her because she makes her feel something?  I would say the answer is no, because as Elizabeth is not independent, Clarissa really could stop Elizabeth from seeing her.  I think she chooses to allow her to stay, so as they can continue to have this war over Elizabeth.  To some extent I buy that the fear that if ever forced to choose, Elizabeth would pick Doris over Clarissa, does play a role in allowing Doris to stay.  Still though, I believe that Clarissa will do anything to keep the one feeling she has, even if it is hatred.