tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11353919735204247792024-03-13T23:13:10.106-05:00ProtagonismThe Instructor's musings and observations on heroism, literary and otherwise.Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1135391973520424779.post-33275643920407441202019-05-17T08:33:00.001-05:002019-05-17T08:33:04.757-05:00Rate Your ExperienceHere at the Uni High English Department, we value customer satisfaction above all. Please take a few minutes to answer a few short questions about your experiences this semester. And thank you for your many contributions to this class every day!<br />
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<br />Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1135391973520424779.post-16499235285089981802019-05-06T11:33:00.000-05:002019-05-06T11:33:55.327-05:00A Walking, Talking, Ranting Contradiction<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">No
one knows what to make of Macon Detornay. As the novel’s paradoxical title
indicates, he embodies contradictions—an “angry black white boy” who is capable
of astounding arrogance and a hyperbolic sense of his own importance,
relentless in his criticism of white people and the privileges they blithely
enjoy, but just as relentless in his self-scrutiny, which lies at the heart of
his critique: “I’m here to tell the white man in the mirror the truth to his
face.” When we’re annoyed with Macon, it’s usually because he seems to exempt
himself from the vast swath of “whiteness” that is the target of his attacks:
he aspires to “transcendent status,” the one rare white person who might fully
escape his birthright as a privileged American and commit himself to the radical
struggle for racial justice. Readers may want to ask, with Nique, “What’s up
with all this ‘white people’ shit? You like an undercover brother or something?”
(49).</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Macon
is capable of astonishing chutzpah, as when he attends a meeting of the Black
Student Union, in the recently rechristened Malcolm X lounge, the only white
person in the room (needless to say), and immediately starts challenging their
suggestions for a guest speaker: “He was blacker than each and every one of
these bourgeois motherfuckers” (123). He models himself after Malcolm X—a pretty
high standard in terms of integrity and commitment to the cause. He smugly dismisses
the 1960s feminist militant Angela Davis as “irrelevant,” the blaxploitation
icon Pam Grier as “sagging,” the politically militant rapper Chuck D of Public
Enemy as “finished,” and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison as “Oprahfied.”
Most contemporary black icons don’t meet his standards. He’s also quick to
distinguish himself from other white boys who are into hip-hop (don’t even
mention the Beastie Boys to him), other white writers who aspired to take part
in black culture (“corny greyboy Jack Kerouac and his one-sided love affair
with jazz” [26]), and other white revolutionaries (even throwing shade on John
Brown—who led a raid on a federal armory in an effort to inspire a widespread
slave uprising across the South and was executed for his efforts, a couple
years before the federal government did the same thing). Who does this guy
think he is?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
novel opens in Macon’s first-person voice, in a monologue that seems to be set
at the end of his story, on a “Birmingham bus,” “broadcasting live and direct
from the getaway ride as the scene of the crime fades away” (1). We are
confronted with Macon’s beguiling tangle of contradictions from the very start
as he tries to establish himself as “one good white person” when he laments
that no news outlet ever called him “the white Bigger Thomas” (2)—readers of
Richard Wright’s 1940 protest novel <i>Native
Son</i> will laugh incredulously at such an audacious and nonsensical
statement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">But
by chapter 1, a third-person omniscient narrator has taken over. This narrator
is sometimes closely aligned with Macon’s perspective, representing his
interior thoughts and memories, and relentlessly cataloging his acute
self-consciousness, the insecure, nervously sweating, self-doubting kid
underneath this bold and cocky exterior. The scene in chapter 2 of book 1, when
Macon meets Andre for the first time, is remarkable as a portrayal of painful
awkwardness and racially inflected self-consciousness. We learn that Macon has
been anticipating this moment all summer—not only did he request a black
roommate, he’s requested Andre Walker specifically because he’s a descendant of
Fleet Walker, the last African American baseball player to play in the major
leagues before segregation in 1889. Macon is aware that his scheme will sound
crazy to Andre, and he’s right. But even beyond his revelation of their
historical connection, which wigs Andre out (“Wow. What am I supposed to do
with that?” [29]), there’s a relentless self-consciousness to their interaction
throughout. Macon is so proud of his purported degree of comfort around black
people, his deep knowledge of hip-hop culture and black history, that he’s
sharply attuned to the racial subtext of every single turn in the conversation.
Even when he leans back on his bed, a seemingly innocuous and even commonplace
posture for a dorm-mate to assume while shooting the breeze, he scrutinizes
himself for how such a posture might be interpreted by Andre: “He threw a leg
over his half-unpacked suitcase and leaned back, then wondered if the posture
was too comfortable too quick, a typical
cavalier-whiteboy-lounging-cuz-the-world-is-my-domain move” (32). This
self-consciousness is a big part of Macon’s point: he wants to shake white
people out of their complacent stupor, to get them to recognize all the small
ways that privilege underwrites their lives, how they simply occupy space with
a sense of entitlement. We should all be stopping to think before we throw our
legs casually over the half-unpacked suitcase, so to speak. Every movement of
his body and every word he says in this first interaction with Andre is
potentially charged with meaning. Macon wants to make a good first impression,
and he knows that he’ll come across as something of an enigma to Andre (which
he does).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It’s
important, I think, that Mansbach gives us such thorough access to Macon’s
self-doubting interior monologue in this scene, as it’s a vital counterweight
to his verbal bombast elsewhere. We have a would-be “race traitor” who thinks
of himself as more radical than John Brown and on par with Malcolm X in terms
of black militant street cred who is <i>also</i>
very much putting on a front, trying desperately to make his behavior and words
display his commitments—renouncing his whiteness doesn’t mean tinting his skin;
it means presenting a certain face (and voice) to the world, advertising his
abdication of white privilege with every word and gesture. He’s constantly
worried that he’ll be revealed as just another poseur or wannabe, another in a
long line of blackface-minstrel appropriations of blackness, and Andre’s
acceptance of him and his ideological commitments is vital to his sense of his own
legitimacy. It must be exhausting to be Macon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">But
this scene would read quite differently if we only had Macon’s point of view.
We would see the would-be white-antiracist superhero as he sees himself, and
this would reveal a profound degree of self-consciousness and self-doubt under
his bold façade. But Andre would remain an enigma, seen only through Macon’s
eager-to-please eyes: a symbolic black roommate against which he can gauge how “down”
he is. But Mansbach’s narrator has access to Andre’s point of view as well, and
throughout this dialogic scene we see him <i>reacting
to</i> Macon and his performance, and that reaction is full of skepticism.
Andre emerges as a three-dimensional and complex character with his own
complicated relationship to whiteness. As an alumnus of a prestigious,
predominantly white prep school in Los Angeles, Andre has some context for
Macon’s sales pitch: “Andre didn’t feel like listening to his roommate relieve
himself [of white guilt]. He’d already served his time in prep school as a
cardboard self-affirmation cutout. . . . A stoic, amiable receptacle into which
fake-empathetic whiteboys dumped their views, a priest who heard confessions
and smoked joints with the sinners to absolve them” (31). Andre is fully alert
to the ways Macon seems to be making a “token” out of him, treating their
conversation as a “confession” for which he expects “absolution,” and he’s not
having it. To a significant extent, his qualms are justified—Macon is quite
literally aiming for some kind of “cosmic,” historical reconciliation between
the descendants of Fleet Walker and Cap Anson, after all. But we do hear some
grudging props from Andre as well: “Macon might be a lunatic, and his
bloodlines were certainly polluted, but at least he was hip hop enough not to
view black people as an alien species” (34).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">We
get Nique’s perspective, too, and in the scene in chapter 3, in Nique’s dorm
room, Macon’s interior monologue is outnumbered by the perspectives of the
African American men he’s so eager to impress. Mansbach even ends the chapter
with Nique and Andre alone in the room after Macon has left. Like Andre
earlier, Nique gives Macon some grudging respect: “[A]t least your boy there’s
trying. More than you can say for most of them” (54). We see that Macon’s
performance hasn’t met with unqualified success, however, as Andre and Nique
compare him to Harley Koon (a former classmate and the son of one of the cops
who was acquitted for the beating of Rodney King, whose story is told in detail
in the next chapter, background characterization for Andre and Nique and the
personal significance of the LA Riots of 1992 that Macon is not privy to—we know
more about their background than he does).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Even
as they take on the role of managers for Macon’s “career” as a white antiracist
activist and provocateur, booking him media appearances and managing his public
image, Andre and Nique make it clear that the jury remains out. Andre says, “I’ve
decided to believe in you until you give me reason not to” (149), and Nique is
even more blunt: “Personally, I still think you’re full of shit, but hell, go ’head
and keep proving me wrong” (163).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Angry Black White Boy</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> is a much more
interesting book, in my view, because it doesn’t offer a single, uncritical
perspective on its would-be hero. It’s clear that Macon and Adam Mansbach have
a lot in common: Mansbach himself is deeply literate in the history of hip-hop
culture; he didn’t have to do research to put together his riffs on the
commercialization of the genre in the 1990s, or why <i>The Low-End Theory</i> by A Tribe Called Quest is such a “good choice”
as the warmup track to his poetry reading (162). The author knows his black
history and black literature, and his book seems to aim to achieve something
like what Macon himself wants to achieve—to get white readers to look
critically at themselves and their own privilege, and to challenge them to live
in such a way that not only doesn’t take advantage of white supremacy but
actively seeks to undermine it. We can tell that the author endorses Macon’s
ideas to a considerable extent, but he also presents a deeply flawed,
self-contradicting, often delusional hero whose sincerity and commitment (and,
indeed, sanity) is under question from the very start. There’s a remarkable
moral courage in Macon’s willingness to scrutinize and try to transcend his own
whiteness, and his arrogance is tempered by a genuine self-critical gaze. But
it’s never clear to what extent we’re supposed to affirm and admire Macon, and
as the story gets increasingly outlandish, it’s not always easy to tell where
the author is in relation to his creation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">No
one knows what to make of Macon Detornay. Least of all the author himself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1135391973520424779.post-44232149287526376952019-04-29T14:04:00.004-05:002019-04-29T15:20:14.014-05:00Macon's Hip-Hop CredentialsIn the first chapter of the first part of <i>Angry Black White Boy,</i> we get a pretty detailed picture of Macon Detornay's cultural immersion in hip-hop and how this has led to a much deeper exploration of African American history and culture. He is proud of the depth and breadth of his hip-hop knowledge, as when he makes sure Andre (who is from L.A.) knows that Macon is "the only kid from the Bean [a.k.a. Boston] who was up on L.A. hip hop before <i>Straight Outta Compton,</i>" namedropping KDAY tapes that he got "from [his] man's cousin." Andre acknowledges that "that's some O.G. shit," and seems duly impressed. Macon is eager to impress the reader with the depth of his knowledge of Five Percenter terminology and cosmology, as he reviews his notes "with idle pride" while piloting his cab through Manhattan. Indeed, he is correct in assuming that there aren't too many white boys out there who know this stuff as well as he does, and "he could scarcely remember a time when he hadn't known this shit." So how did he gain access to this privileged knowledge and alternative education?<br />
<br />
Macon got into hip-hop during what is known as the "Golden Age," from about 1988 to about 1992, when it was still relatively rare for a white kid to listen, and even more rare for a white kid to listen as closely and deeply as Macon does, right before the genre crossed over into mainstream acceptance and, many critics would say, a watered-down and more commercialized style and content. The New York-based rappers who dominated this period--Brand Nubian, A Tribe Called Quest, X-Clan, Eric B. and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, and others--all hail from the generation after Black Power, and many of them were raised with Five Percenter philosophy and youth programs in their communities, which is reflected in their work. The music and lyrics are explicitly Afrocentric, and the imagery explicitly alludes to Five Percent Nation and Nation of Islam iconography and specific locations in Harlem, where the movement began. References to "the Asiatic Black Man," "Gods," "Earths," "Knowledge of Self," and other Five Percenter terms abound. Rappers address issues like economic nationalism and self-reliance, Afrocentric pride, the whitewashing of Eurocentric history, and a host of related topics that undergird Macon's alternative education.<br />
<br />
To get a quick sense of the historical progression between the Golden Age and the commercialized era in which the novel is set, which Macon despises, compare this video by Brand Nubian ("Wake Up," from the album <i>All for One,</i> 1990):<br />
<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TE0J4Ewc1kA/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TE0J4Ewc1kA?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<br />
to this one, from 1998, featuring the Cash Money Millionaires and a tune aptly titled "Bling Bling":<br />
<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/N2aMPVIVlgI/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/N2aMPVIVlgI?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
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In the Brand Nubian video, the locations and images are specific and significant--street corners and storefront mosques in Harlem, Five Percenter iconography, Afrocentric fashion (beads, Africa medallions, dashikis and kufis)--and the lyrics are all about raising the listener's spiritual and political consciousness (i.e. "wake up!"). By 1998, we see how fully the aesthetic of rap videos has been transformed by commercial viability and MTV: the Africa medallions have been supplanted by a gold-and-diamond-encrusted dollar sign, and the lyrics and imagery are an unabashed celebration of the trappings of wealth and luxury. Social and political consciousness is out, bling is in, and if Macon has a chip on his shoulder about the current state of hip-hop at the time the novel takes place, developments like these have a lot to do with it.Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1135391973520424779.post-30367439009255037762019-04-24T10:56:00.000-05:002019-04-24T10:57:14.304-05:00Jack as Utopian Social Critic<br />
It’s a common trope of utopian literature to feature an outsider’s
perspective to comment on our flawed civilization. The traveler from another
planet, or some distant imaginary realm, or the future, will be led on a
walking tour of earth’s poor houses, prisons, and mental institutions, and the
outsider will comment repeatedly on how shocking, confusing, and unnecessary
all these social ills truly are. “In our advanced civilization, you see, there
is no sickness and no poverty. We’ve solved the problem of crime, and we have
no jails. Why is it that people in your world go hungry, when there is more
than enough food to go around?” The effect, of course, is to lead the reader to
compare his or her familiar society with the radically unfamiliar (and, in many
cases, depressingly implausible) idealized civilization the outsider
represents.<br />
<br />
Emma Donoghue uses Jack and his unique perspective to an analogous
effect in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Room</i> (although I am
emphatically <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> suggesting that she
posits Ma and Jack’s experience in Room as some kind of Utopia). One of Jack’s
earliest interactions with a medical professional, soon after his and Ma’s escape/rescue, entails the doctor telling Jack he’s “some kind of hero” and asking
him, “How’re you liking the world so far?” (177). Jack is bewildered, of course,
and remains silent on “the world so far.” He can only nod once the doctor loads
the dice and prompts him with, “Pretty nice?” At this early point, not much is “nice”
about being in the world for Jack. He does end up finding much about the
world to be “pretty nice”—bacon, ice cream, Legos—but he also finds the world
bewilderingly complex and often ambivalent. For Jack, we all exist in an
increasingly vast realm he calls Outside, but from our perspective, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">he’s</i> the outsider, and Donoghue uses
Jack’s sharp, intelligent, perceptive narration repeatedly to shine a critical
light on aspects of our world we take for granted, much like the Utopian
novelist.<br />
<br />
Noreen describes Jack as “like a visitor from another planet” (225),
and while he corrects her (“We’re not visitors, Ma says we have to stay
forever till we’re dead”), his observations about early twenty-first century
American society often serve a kind of social-critical function, akin to the visitor from another planet in Utopian fiction. Jack returns
repeatedly to the idea that he and Ma are not fundamentally the same as these
other people he’s seeing everywhere, and he has trouble getting his head around
the fact that Ma once <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> one of
them. He accepts Dr. Clay’s insistence that he’s “one of us,” part of “humankind,”
but Jack privately wonders, “maybe I’m a human but I’m a me-and-Ma as well. I
don’t know a word for us two. Roomers?” (274). But Jack is really the only <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">true</i> “Roomer,” as Ma is not forming her
impressions of our planet for the first time, the way Jack is. When he makes
offhanded comments like, “Outsiders are not like us, they’ve got a million of
things and different kinds of each thing, like all different chocolate bars and
machines and shoes. Their things are all for different doing, like nailbrush
and toothbrush and sweeping brush and toilet brush and clothes brush and yard
brush and hairbrush” (264), this serves both as a representation of his genuine
disorientation at the endless variety of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">things</i>
that occupy space in our world and an implicit comment on all the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">stuff</i> we surround ourselves with. In
contrast, Ma and Jack’s starkly reduced way of life in Room might seem ideally
simplified.<br />
<br />
Plenty of Jack’s observations, wherein he defamiliarizes our world in a
way that allows us to see it fresh, are simply funny—like when he alludes to
the book about “mutant turtles who say no to drugs” (224). Or he points out
totally familiar habits of speech, often involving the weird ways adults relate
to children, because he hasn’t heard these things thousands of times, as other
kids have (like when he bangs his head on the faucet in the bath and Grandma
says “Careful”: “Why do persons only say that after the hurt?” [283]—good question,
Jack!). At times he offers a kind of social-critical commentary, but it seems
like he must be repeating an explanation Grandma or Steppa or Ma has given him,
as when he describes the lottery: “The little cards with numbers all over are
called a lottery, idiots buy them hoping to get magicked into millionaires”
(285). This passage begins as Jack making his own observations about the sheer
amount of trash our profligate civilization generates—“There’s lots of every
kind of thing in the world but it all costs money, even stuff to throw away,
like the man in the line ahead of us in the convenience store buys a something
in a box and rips the box and puts it in the trash right away”—but “idiots” is
not a word Jack typically uses, and when he describes the lottery, we imagine
him parroting something Grandma must have said (as kids will do). <br />
<br />
But some of his comments veer closer to social commentary, especially
when he’s making observations about parenting. Again, I’m not suggesting that
there’s anything <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ideal</i> about Jack and
Ma’s arrangement (like the book-club member who compares their imprisonment to
her “peaceful” week spent at a monastery in Scotland, easily one of the dumbest
comments made in this book [280]). But compared to Bronwyn and her parents—who
I’m sure are fine people, and Bronwyn is going to grow up to be a fine, if
somewhat entitled and overindulged, young woman—Jack and Ma seem to be doing
pretty well. Jack is struggling to adjust to Outside, naturally, but his
disorientation at the mall has everything to do with the fact that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">he has never been to a mall before, has
never even </i>heard<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> of one, and doesn’t
even know how stores work.</i> If Jack behaves “badly” in the scene where Paul
and Deana take him to the mall, it’s because he has no idea what’s going on.
Bronwyn’s behavior, we surmise, is par for the course. She is accustomed to throwing a tantrum when she doesn’t get her way, and
her parents are all too ready to indulge her. Paul and Deana’s take on
parenting is very familiar to me as a contemporary American parent—and far be
it from any of us to judge a fellow parent’s efforts too harshly. But
dismissing a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">drum</i> as a gift for a
child as a “concussion hazard” seems like an especially ludicrous example of
the modern-day obsession with helmets and safety seats and protecting children
from every possible risk that might befall them. I’m not saying Bronwyn is
turning into a little monster (though you’re certainly free to draw that
conclusion yourself), but it’s clearly not a case of Paul and Deana’s parenting
looking obviously so much better than Ma’s.<br />
<br />
Some of Jack’s observations sound almost too pat, too perceptive and
pointed and critically astute for even an exceptionally verbal five-year-old. “In
the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. [Uni
students: Holla!] Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don’t have
jobs, so I don’t know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as
well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything” (286). Paul and Deana, of course,
are balancing child-rearing with jobs (so Bronwyn gets to go to a high-end
daycare facility to study sign language and hip-hop!), and this maybe has
something to do with their Starbucks-fueled state of perpetual anxiety at the
mall. But this passage also calls to mind the Utopian-fiction dynamic I
described above: “You earthlings seem to always be in a hurry, but you never
truly allow yourselves to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">be</i> at the
place you are.” Jack seems <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">right,</i> of
course, and the reader is intended to glimpse something about the way we all
live these days—to see contemporary culture mirrored back to us through the
eyes of an innocent.<br />
<br />
In the next paragraph, Jack nails a scenario that I
certainly recognize as a parent: “Also everywhere I’m looking at kids, adults
mostly don’t seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids
gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they
can take a photo, but they don’t want to actually play with them, they’d rather
drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there’s a small kid crying and
the Ma of it doesn’t even hear” (287). We might update this playground scenario
a year or two and describe the parents filming the kids’ reenactment of the “cute”
thing, and then ignoring the kid while posting the footage to Facebook on their phone. I find this passage extremely sad—which is saying something in
such a sad novel. It’s the impression that the parents “mostly don’t seem to
like” their kids, even as they photograph them and share their “accomplishments.”
Jack’s mother has no photos of his early years, but she doesn’t see this as “terrible”
the way her mother does: “I don’t forget a day of it” (299). But Jack has no
doubt in his mind that Ma “likes” him (in addition to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">loving</i> him—not necessarily the same thing). It’s partly a result of
their perverse living arrangements that creates this closeness, and again,
Donoghue is not endorsing the situation that led to this special closeness. But as with the Utopian outsider commenting on the ways of our world, we
might feel indicted in this visitor from another planet’s description of what
we look like when we’re supposed to be playing with our kids.Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1135391973520424779.post-44225717481332652802019-04-12T11:09:00.000-05:002019-04-12T11:09:14.430-05:00“The Limits of Jack’s World”<br />
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein summed up his conclusions
about the relationship between language and the world in an oft-cited aphorism: “The limits of my language mean the limits
of my world.” The implications of this statement are profound: Wittgenstein is
not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">quite</i> saying that “all we have is
language,” that there “is no objective reality” apart from language, but he
does insist that we have no meaningful experience of the world without the
language in which to conceive and express that experience. Our reality is shaped
by our language, and not the other way around. “Objective reality” is not
something we have unmediated access to, and so to that extent it does not
meaningfully exist. Our picture of reality is entirely determined—and limited—by
our capacity to say (or think) something coherent about and within it. “The world,” in
this formulation, is not a material thing or place “out there” but rather a
reflection and projection of our language itself. Elsewhere in the same volume,
Wittgenstein observes, “The world is everything that is the case”—when we say
“the world,” we basically mean “everything it makes sense to say.”<br />
<br />
Learning a language means learning a world. And watching a child
learn language is a powerful illustration of this concept in practice—you can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">see</i> as they file new information, new <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">words</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">concepts</i>, into their already existing picture of the world. A new
word or concept needs to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fit</i> somehow,
and that “somehow” is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">grammatical.</i>
When I learn that the earth revolves around the sun, a picture of the universe and
my place within it takes hold. If I were living before Copernicus, I would have
inherited a different picture of the cosmos, and different sentences would make
sense to me: my language would be in many ways incompatible with the language I
now speak. A whole bunch of statements that would be true and reasonable in my
language would make me sound ignorant, superstitious, or even blasphemous in a
pre-Copernican context. I haven’t gone out and independently investigated and
confirmed the orbit of the earth around the sun; it simply makes grammatical
sense within my inherited language to talk this way. Statements about the
earth’s movements are “held in place” by the larger linguistic context within
which these statements make sense. This is true for everything we know. Our
minds are circumscribed to a profound degree by our language.<br />
<br />
In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Room,</i> by creating a
narrative voice for Jack and engaging us intimately with his point of view as
he tries to make sense of his profoundly circumscribed world, Donoghue
illustrates Wittgenstein’s insights into the nature of language and our
perception and experience of reality. We surmise, from the earliest pages, that
Jack’s strange way of speaking is an accurate reflection of the reality he is forced to inhabit. He doesn’t feel constrained by the
narrow dimensions of Room because he doesn’t know anything else. Jack’s “Room”
seems to require only a limited number of words—the objects he needs nouns for
are much more limited than for the average child. Jack has no need for generic
nouns (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a </i>bed, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a </i>stove,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> a </i>thermostat—or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a </i>mother, for that matter). So instead
his world is populated by proper nouns: Bed, Door, Thermostat, Ma, and so on.
These are literally one of a kind for him, as simply explaining that there are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other doors</i> of which “Door” is but one
example would require explaining a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lot</i>
to Jack, and Ma hasn’t been up to the task. He can see that doors are
represented on TV, and that these resemble his Door in their form and
operations, but this is explained by his dichotomy of “real” versus
“TV”—TV represents another “planet,” another “world,” and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">his</i> world has only one Door.<br />
<br />
Ma is doing a heroic job of attempting to educate Jack,
to exercise his mind and to teach him to read and do math and to learn things
about science. And when it comes to language, the endeavor is full of dangerous
territory. Jack’s world is profoundly, artificially, and criminally limited by
Old Nick—but it’s crucial to grasp that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jack
doesn’t experience it as such.</i> His language makes his experience of Room
incredibly rich; as we’ve talked about in class, it’s the setting for all these
fun games Ma has invented, it’s populated by furniture and items that reflect
his personal history (and he knows these stories by heart), and which Ma has
“personified” by giving them proper names and genders. But the process of
learning language, as anyone who has spent time around five-year-olds can
attest, means asking a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lot</i> of
questions, usually questions about what is real and what isn’t, and how one
thing relates to another. Kids at this age have this insatiable hunger to learn
about their world, and it’s no coincidence that this is the point at which
their linguistic capacity has developed to the extent that they can frame such
questions independently: a certain “bedrock” needs to be established before questions
can even be formed. This is precisely the dilemma Ma faces as the novel
opens—we can see that it’s becoming more and more difficult for her to maintain
the bedrock fiction of “Room” as the entire universe in an 11x11 space. Jack’s
questions, the new words and concepts he’s constantly learning, inevitably bump
him up against the limits of his world. Jack’s language seems to be starting to
outgrow his narrowly circumscribed world. Or, to stick with Wittgenstein’s
formulation, as his language expands, his world inevitably does, too. And Ma
will need to find a way to deal with this.<br />
<br />
In the scenes before Ma decides to finally tell Jack her “story”—to “unlie”
and strip him of his innocence—we repeatedly see how Jack’s questions press
against the limits of what Ma is willing to tell him. She’s beginning to see
that he cannot fully learn language without requiring her to explain a whole host of things that she has tried to
keep him innocent of. When they measure Jack’s height on his fifth birthday, Ma remarks that it’s “normal” for him not to have grown more than an inch
or two over the previous year (even as she’s clearly worried that it’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> normal, and that Jack’s development
is stunted). Jack asks,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“What’s normal?”
(13). He’s not asking what <i>would</i> have been a more typical amount of growth in a year, and he is not intending to make some broader point here about diversity (What <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> “normal,” after all? Aren’t we all
unique individuals?); he simply does not know what the word “normal” means. Now
how would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i> define it for Jack? Ma “chews
her mouth” as she tries to find a way out of this corner. “It means OK. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">No hay problema</i>.” Jack accepts this
explanation and moves on, but we get a glimpse here of the minefield Ma must
step through with even the most ordinary (or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">normal</i>) words: not only is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nothing</i>
about Jack’s growth and development “normal” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hay problema,</i> in other words), but even trying to explain the
concept of normativity, of Jack’s growth being more or less in line with how
kids “typically” grow, would mean introducing him to the idea of a vast mass of
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other kids</i> out there in the world,
against whom he can be measured. His <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">picture
of the world</i> would be altered. Ma can’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really</i>
define the word without sharing the picture of the world (that it is inhabited
by billions of other people, and that we can generalize about the way they grow
up) that it reflects. Jack’s world is limited by his language.<br />
<br />
Later in the same scene, Jack says that he wants to “grow to a giant,
but a nice one, up to here” (13), and Ma replies, “Sounds great,” but Jack
notices that “Her face is gone flat, that means I said a wrong thing but I don’t
know which” (14). What has Jack said “wrong” here? Well, he seems to believe
that sometime around when he turns ten he’ll transform into a woman and have a
baby boy growing in his belly—his mother has had to resort to more than the
usual prevarications parents use to avoid answering tough questions about where
babies come from. But it’s clear to us that Ma is hanging up on Jack’s simple
claim about what he wants to be when he “grows [up]”—he hasn’t said anything
wrong, and he is learning what phrases like “grow up” mean and that this will
happen to him in some form. But for Ma this phrase calls up a world of trouble
Jack is not privy to: what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">will</i> he be
when he “grows”? How much longer can this situation persist? Jack’s familiar
and amiable fantasy about wanting to grow into a “giant” (kids say stuff like
this all the time) evokes near panic in Ma, one that’s growing throughout these
early pages, as she sees his language starting to expand beyond the walls of
Room.<br />
<br />
The game of Parrot, where Jack has to memorize a string of spoken words
from the TV and repeat them verbatim, is a brilliant way to exercise his mind
and develop his vocabulary—one more example of Ma’s heroic improvisational
skills as a parent and educator. But this also provides an exceptionally risky
venture, in terms of maintaining Jack’s limited language to reflect his limited
world: Jack misconstrues “labor law” as “labeling” when he repeats a phrase
from a guest on a political talk show. Ma corrects him, like a good
teacher, and when he asks “What’s the difference?” she makes an effort to
answer. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Labeling</i> is stickers on
tomatoes, say, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">labor law—</i>” (35).
Where can she go from here? How would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i>
define “labor law” in a way Jack could understand? Ma is visibly relieved when
Jack lets her off the hook with his “huge yawn” (really, no five-year-old
actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wants</i> an adult to explain
labor law). But again, we see how impossible the fiction of Room will be for Ma
to maintain. <br />
<br />
To her credit, Ma does not allow Jack’s world to stay limited by Room’s
four walls. She could have done so, perhaps—banishing TV entirely, and sticking
to the fiction that they are the only two “real” people in the universe, with
Old Nick occupying a position somewhere between God and jailer (or Santa and Satan). But Ma wants to
educate her son, to raise him to be a “human,” intelligent and self-aware and
maybe even “normal,” and we’ll see, in “Dying,” how relieved she is to finally
abandon the ruse and let him in on her secrets. She now has a co-conspirator,
and Jack’s intelligence will be vital to their escape plan. Jack is devastated
when his picture of his tiny world is suddenly blown wide open, but he’s better
equipped to handle it because Ma has educated him so well. He has an
exceptional vocabulary for a boy his age, and in his circumstances, and this
means that he can accommodate all this new space, all these new people.Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1135391973520424779.post-85235078010778485582019-03-28T12:00:00.000-05:002019-03-28T12:00:24.480-05:00An Anti-Mentor for an Inverted Hero’s Journey<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">A Lesson Before Dying</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"> takes an
unconventional approach to the paradigm of the hero’s journey. Grant’s “mission” does not entail a physical or geographical
journey. He merely has to drive the thirteen miles from “the Quarters” to the
town of Bayonne, repeatedly, where Jefferson sits in a jail cell awaiting his
execution. Unlike the Bundrens, he has a nice, new 1946 Ford to get him there
and back, and the travel itself is not rigorous. There are familiar elements
from the hero’s journey paradigm, however—he must pass through a series of
obstacles in order to take this trip, from “humiliating” himself by imploring
Henri Pichot to talk the sheriff into authorizing these visits to having his
pockets and Miss Emma’s picnic basket thoroughly searched each time he takes
that long walk down the corridor, “as if I’m some kind of common criminal” (63)—and
when we first encounter Jefferson in his cell he seems very far away indeed.
Grant’s task—to make Jefferson “a man” before he meets his death—seems astronomically
difficult, under the circumstances, and Grant’s been trying to “refuse the call”
from the moment he’s first enlisted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Rather
than having to venture elsewhere in order to prove himself a hero, Grant must
go inward, to the “belly of the beast” (or </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">“innermost cave,</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">” to borrow Campbell</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">’</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">s phrase)</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">in the segregated South. Although
Bayonne is all-too-familiar to Grant, as he grew up in the Quarters, there’s a
potent sense of him entering hostile, enemy territory as he goes into Bayonne:
the courthouse proudly sports the “national, state, and Confederate flags,” and
Grant must walk past a “statue of a Confederate soldier” to enter the seat of
state power over black lives (69). We see a jail populated by a hostile white sheriff
and deputy, and black inmates who look like children. It’s a journey he really would
rather not make, and we see Grant exhibit a range of quasi-adolescent efforts
to avoid it, sulking, dragging his feet, and fantasizing about running away and
leaving it all behind.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">We
see an ironic inversion of the hero’s journey paradigm here, where “staying
home” and confronting the legacies of slavery and institutional racism by
trying to “reach” this doomed young man requires more heroic courage than
leaving home for the unknown. Grant had viewed college as his ticket out of the
Quarters—a chance to “not be one of the others” (63), as his aunt puts it—and he
seems disappointed in himself for coming back home afterward. The humiliation
he endures in order to gain the “privilege” of visiting Jefferson “strips” him
of “everything [Tante Lou] sent [him] to school for” (79). We know his parents
have left Louisiana for California, following the route of many African Americans in the 1940s, who fled the South for West Coast war-industry
jobs. Grant visited them once, but as Vivian says, “‘You couldn’t stay. You had
to come back’” (30). It’s not only the Jefferson dilemma that generates this
restlessness in Grant—he’s felt this way for a long time. Staying home and
working as a teacher in this impoverished, sharecropper community is itself
cast as an exercise in futility, with Grant perpetuating the cycle of racism and poverty.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
the annals of the “heroic teacher” paradigm, Grant would seem to be a poor
candidate for the role: this isn’t <i>Stand
and Deliver</i> or <i>Dead Poets Society.</i>
Grant is a teacher with deep-seated doubts about whether teaching even matters,
a member of his community who sees himself as an outsider, with his education a
“burden” that makes him aware of the futility and the “cycle,” but unable to do
anything to change it. He’d be better off without his education, perhaps—he could
unload wood like these other guys, joke around, not worry so much. Nothing
about Grant’s teaching seems “inspirational”—he thwacks students with a
yardstick for writing sentences crooked or counting on their fingers, and he’s
compelled to drill them like military enlistees in important skills like
pledging allegiance to the flag that flies outside the jail where Jefferson
will be executed, “hating himself” for doing it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In a
flashback in chapter 8, we learn that Grant didn’t come up with this whole “run
away and be free of all this” motif on his own. He’s had a “mentor,” of sorts—and
again, we see a familiar paradigm inverted. Grant’s own former teacher, Matthew
Antoine, serves the structural role of the mentor in this journey—he’s the one
who gives this young teacher his “knowledge,” his ostensible power to change
lives through the magic of education, the eager student who would follow in the
teacher’s footsteps. We’ve seen this montage in movies before: the fiery,
bright student whose love for knowledge and justice is ignited by his own
teacher, and we see the student rise to be a master himself, to heroically
throw in with the good fight in the classroom. But Gaines pitches a curveball
in the form of Grant’s mentor, and Antoine is maybe the least inspirational
teacher-figure in American literature (with Addie Bundren running a close
second, perhaps). He not only doesn’t inspire Grant, he vehemently warns Grant <i>away</i> from pursuing knowledge and
education. Grant’s persistence doesn’t impress the old grouch, as in the
familiar paradigm; it only irritates him further. “There was no love there for
each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything at all. He
hated me, and I knew it” (64). But Grant <i>has</i>
learned some lessons from Antoine, and we see his anti-mentor’s legacy popping
up throughout the novel, every time Grant speaks of the futility of his
enterprise and his desire to run away and leave it all behind. If the “journey”
in this novel requires staying home and facing Jefferson and his fate head-on,
in the belly of the beast, with Vivian serving as an ally to encourage Grant at every
turn, Antoine represents the most prominent voice urging him to give up, to
flee, to not even bother. He would seem to agree with Jefferson’s initial
assessment: “It don’t matter.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Despite
calling himself a coward for not having run away himself—“‘I was afraid to run
away. What am I? Look at me. Where else could I have felt superior to so many
but here?’” (65)—Antoine generally depicts flight as a bid for freedom, a
sensible ducking of any responsibility to try and contribute to the community
in favor of going elsewhere, <i>anywhere</i>
else. Grant’s teacher is not flattered by his student’s newfound desire to
learn (“When he saw that I wanted to learn, he hated me even more than he did
the others”) and depicts knowledge as a “burden” (63). He has no faith in the
power of education to affect change: “When you see that those five and a half
months you spend in that church each year are just a waste of time . . . [y]ou’ll
see that it’ll take more than five and a half months to wipe away—peel—scrape away
the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those
brains in the past three hundred years. You’ll see” (64). We are confronted
with the curious prospect of a mentor who begs his mentee to not follow his
footsteps. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Early
in the novel, before the “journey” of encounters with Jefferson in his cell
begins, Gaines includes a powerful, authoritative voice that seems to undermine
the value of the journey itself. If <i>all</i>
education in this underfunded, one-room church is futile and doomed to fail
from the start, how much <i>more</i> doomed
is Grant’s attempt to “make Jefferson a man?” Grant is thoroughly pessimistic
about his prospects from the beginning, telling his aunt and Miss Emma, “Jefferson
is dead. It is only a matter of weeks, maybe a couple of months—but he’s
already dead. The past twenty-one years, we’ve done all we could for Jefferson.
He’s dead now. And I can’t raise the dead” (14). Antoine couldn’t have said it
better himself. Perhaps he’d be proud of his mentee after all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1135391973520424779.post-84911828248235047312019-03-04T16:55:00.000-06:002019-03-04T16:55:26.875-06:00“Yourself and Your Doings outen His Eyes”<br />
There’s something about Darl that just weirds people out. And I’m not just talking about readers. I’m talking about the other people in his life. Darl has a reputation as
a strange young man whose spacey, dreamy demeanor unnerves others. The outside
perspectives on the Bundren clan seem to agree in portraying Darl as “the queer
one,” “the one folks talk about,” with his “eyes full of the land” all the time.
Tull breaks it down this way: “I have said and I say again, that’s ever living
thing the matter with Darl: he just thinks by himself too much” (71). Anse is painfully
aware of his son’s reputation, as he winces at Darl laughing hysterically at
Jewel following the wagon on his horse: “How many times I told him it’s doing
such things as that that makes folks talk about him” (105). <br />
<br />
Cora (not the most reliable judge) is the only one who seems inclined to defend Darl, distancing
herself from the prevailing view of his “queerness” and framing him instead as
a kind of religious visionary. She describes Darl approaching his mother’s
deathbed before leaving on his three-dollar errand with Jewel as “the sweetest
thing I ever saw,” something that restores her “faith in human nature”: “It was
Darl, the one that folks say is queer, lazy, pottering about the place no
better than Anse” (24). She agrees that Darl is not like the rest of the
family (except maybe Anse, not too flattering a comparison), but she frames this as a good thing: “I always said Darl was different
from those others. I always said he was the only one of them that had his
mother’s nature, had any natural affection” (21). Of course, once we’ve read
Addie’s chapter, we might question this appraisal of Addie as embodying “natural
affection.” But Cora’s narrative
introduces the idea that Darl’s strangeness can be interpreted variously, that
his extreme sensitivity might actually be a kind of special intelligence. Yes,
he may act “queer,” but look who he’s surrounded by! Cora goes so far as to
call Darl “touched by God Himself and considered queer by us mortals” (168). If
he weirds us out, maybe the shortcoming, the failure of understanding, is our
own, mere mortals that we be.<br />
<br />
It’s probably safe to say that, for most readers, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> of the Bundrens seem pretty eccentric in one way or another.
But it’s notable that Darl is the only one who seems to strike the people
around him as strange. Anse’s eccentricity can be understood—it might be
criticized, it might exasperate people, but ultimately it makes sense to them
as “Anse just being Anse,” “doing the best he can”—whereas Darl’s just doesn’t
make sense. What’s he always <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thinking</i>
about? Why do his eyes always look so far away, “full of the land”? It’s worth
noting that, as readers of his chapters—he is the most frequent narrator, and
his chapters tend to be longer and more developed—our picture of
Darl is quite different from how he appears to those around him. He doesn’t
seem spacey to us; he seems hyperperceptive, with a ridiculous vocabulary, and
we almost don’t notice that he rarely seems to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doing</i> much of anything in most of these scenes. He’s the quiet
observer, taking it all in, and for some reason, this makes everyone a little
uneasy in his presence.<br />
<br />
Tull describes “the Darl effect” memorably: “He dont say nothing; just
looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk. I always say it
aint never been what he done so much or said or anything so much as how he
looks at you. It’s like he had got inside you someway. Like somehow you was
looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes” (125). It’s as if people
can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feel</i> Darl looking at them—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">through</i> them. Almost as if they are being <i>narrated</i> by him. And readers notice some of
Darl’s uncanny perceptiveness as well, when his narrative point of view departs
from his body and views himself from a distance, seeing Jewel’s head bobbing
along behind him from somewhere distant in front of him in the opening chapter,
or when he narrates in great detail scenes he did not witness firsthand. Some critics have straight-up described Darl as “clairvoyant,”
and the novel does seem to grant him a form of extrasensory perception. Dewey
Dell describes the disturbing awareness that Darl somehow knows her secret—“I
saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma
is going to die without the words” (27)—in terms that recall Tull’s discomfort
with “how he looks at you.” And Darl himself describes how he became aware of
his mother’s infidelity, without actually “knowing” firsthand, as he observes
her sitting vigil next to Jewel’s bed: “And then I knew that I knew. I knew
that as plain on that day as I knew about Dewey Dell on that day” (136). He
seems a little freaked out by his own ability to just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">know</i> things he maybe wishes he didn’t.<br />
<br />
But for the reader, while some of this might make Darl seem “queer” or
strange, paradoxically he is the most reliable anchor we’ve got in this
fictional world. The very “clairvoyance” that gives others the creeps makes him
able to narrate with a striking degree of perceptiveness. The “knowledge”—he’s
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only one alive</i> (aside from
Whitfield, who doesn’t appear to be talking) who knows about Addie’s infidelity
and Jewel’s real father—is largely what makes him a good narrator. The other
characters, for the most part, don’t seem like they’re telling a story so much
as spilling their unconnected stream of consciousness onto the page. Vardaman
is the most extreme of these highly subjective narrators—his private language
is almost impenetrable—but Dewey Dell too is (understandably) immersed in her
own world and her own private troubles. Cash’s narration keeps getting cut off
mid-sentence, as he goes on about “making it on the bevel” and setting the
coffin “on the balance,” creating the impression that he is too eager to get back to work to waste time narrating. Anse is immersed in lamenting his own suffering
and bad luck. But Darl almost never talks about himself. It’s ironic that the
one everyone else sees as so self-absorbed and dreamy is the least subjective
of the narrators. He’s so non-subjective, he’s even able to narrate in detail <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">scenes at which he isn’t even present.</i> <br />
<br />
The quintessential moments in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">As
I Lay Dying</i> are mostly narrated by Darl, and two of these
he’s not present for. In a chapter in the middle of the novel
(128-36), Darl gives us the full, linear story of Jewel at age fifteen sneaking
off to work at night and earn money to buy the horse. Darl himself is mostly
absent from the story, included in the “we” who react to Jewel riding up on his
horse, but mostly focusing on his mother, father, brother, and sister. He seems
like a reliable narrator precisely because he doesn’t reveal a strong opinion
about the horse (as opposed to how Anse might narrate this episode, for
example). He doesn’t put himself into the story, but merely records the words
and actions of others. We can imagine him throughout these events, with “the
land in his eyes,” acting “queer”—but the detailed narrative he delivers shows
that he’s paying attention, and that he’s both intelligent and perceptive. (He’d
make a good novelist, actually.)<br />
<br />
Two scenes he narrates that are central to the novel and that he isn’t
even present for likewise reflect Darl’s remarkable literary abilities. We
could get hung up on the question of how he even “knows” all this stuff is
happening back home when he’s stuck in a stranger’s barn hiding from the rain
with Jewel. But we don’t, I think, because his narrative is so plausible in its
rendering of character. The stuff he tells us <i>feels </i>accurate. I’ll focus on two parallel moments, both involving
Anse, to illustrate.<br />
<br />
Just after Addie has died, Darl portrays Anse as having been left alone
with her in the room. He “stands over the bed, dangle-armed, humped,
motionless. He raises his hand to his head, scouring his hair, listening to the
saw” (51-52). He awkwardly rubs his hand on his thigh (we recognize the classic
Anse gesture) and “lays it on her face and then on the hump of quilt where her
hands are. He touches the quilt as he saw Dewey Dell do, trying to smooth it up
to the chin, but disarranging it instead. He tries to smooth it again,
clumsily, his hand awkward as a claw smoothing at the wrinkles which he made
and which continue to emerge beneath his hand with perverse ubiquity, so that
at last he desists, his hand falling to his side” (52). Questions of “reliability”
do not arise here—there’s little point in wondering if Anse “really did” all
this. It <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feels</i> so right, it so
compactly captures his awkwardness, his confusion, his inarticulable grief and his
bewilderment as to how to express it. He’s left to clumsily imitate Dewey Dell’s
simple gesture of raising the quilt to her mother’s chin, but all he does is
screw it up, and then his efforts to fix it screw it up even worse. He finally
gives up, mute and perplexed. And then he says, out loud, “God’s will be done.
. . . Now I can get them teeth” (52). We have Anse in a nutshell here—that infuriating
combination of poignant grief, dedication to his wife’s memory and his vow to
return her to her people’s land, and his self-serving desire to finally get
them teeth.<br />
<br />
There’s a similar moment in Darl’s next chapter, where he narrates, in
similar detail, the scene where everyone sits around in the rain while Cash
finishes the coffin. Cash tells his father to “go on in. . . . Me and Vernon
can finish it” (78). (He hasn’t been all that much help anyway.) “Pa looks at
them. The sleeves of Jewel’s coat are too short for him. Upon his face the rain
streams, slow as cold glycerin. ‘I dont begrudge her the wetting,’ he says. He
moves again and falls to shifting the planks, picking them up, laying them down
again carefully, as though they are glass. He goes to the lantern and pulls at
the propped raincoat until he knocks it down and Cash comes and fixes it back”
(78). Not only is he not helping, going through this meaningless gesture of
picking up and setting down the planks; he’s making a mess (like with Addie’s
quilt), and Cash has to stop working and come over to clean up after him. It
would be better if Anse just didn’t touch anything, or do anything. “You go in
the house,” Cash tells him (78). But there’s a poignance to Darl’s portrait of
his father here, an awareness of an emotional depth that may not be evident to
everyone else, and often isn’t evident to readers. He literally doesn’t know
what to do with himself. He’s beside himself with grief. And he maybe doesn’t
relish the idea of going in the house and sitting with his wife’s body. He
wants to be out here, among the men. But he’s just getting wet and getting in
the way, knocking stuff over, in a coat that doesn’t fit.<br />
<br />
Perhaps this does reflect Darl’s subjective view of his father. Perhaps
he’s making this all up, or imagining it. But for readers of the novel, these scenes are as
vivid and detailed as anything else in the book, and I for one am not at all
troubled by the fact that Darl seems to be imagining them. Like good fiction,
they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feel</i> right.Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1135391973520424779.post-80599800420221996662019-02-14T11:43:00.000-06:002019-02-14T14:35:20.250-06:00“American Mythology in the Coen Brothers' Odyssey”<br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Odyssey</i> is the most
obvious source text for the Coen brothers’ <em>O Brother, Where Art Thou?</em>, with its invocation of the Muse
and its opening-credits announcement that it is “Based on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Odyssey</i> by Homer” (the Coens’ claims that they have never read Homer
notwithstanding). But the film draws on a number of other source texts as well. The scene in which the chain gang visits the movie theater alludes to a pivotal moment in the 1941 Preston Sturges film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034240/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Sullivan’s Travels,</a></i> which includes a fictional film-within-the-film
called “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Pappy O’Daniel
is loosely based on the historical “Singing Governor” <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmie_Davis">Jimmie Davis</a>
of Louisiana, who is mostly known today as the composer of “You Are My
Sunshine,” which he used to sing on the campaign trail (just as Pappy requests it on stage with the Soggy Bottom Boys, to seal the sudden change of fortune his campaign has just experienced).<br />
<br />
The Coens cast a distinctively “mythical” air over the familiar setting
of the Depression-era American South throughout the film, on a
visual and audible level. The otherworldly folk and spiritual music that
permeates the film draws on American folk and gospel traditions to depict the South as a
place where sweet tunes emerge from the mist, and Roger Deakins’s Oscar-nominated cinematography creates a look that evokes sepia-toned photographs but also includes startling and magical flashes of color. The atmosphere evokes a land of mystery
that our heroes must navigate, a land populated by beguiling Sirens, Lotus
Eaters, and Cyclops.<br />
<br />
But one conspicuously mythical element of the film has no clear origin
in Homer. When the Soggy Bottom Boys encounter a black man with a guitar case
standing alone at a crossroads, we enter a distinctively American mythology. Tommy Johnson
tells the boys a story about meeting the devil at the crossroads, and selling
his soul in exchange for supernatural talent on the guitar. Many viewers will
recognize here the legend of the hugely influential Delta blues guitarist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson">Robert Johnson</a>, whose haunting and haunted songs have been covered by the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, and pretty much everyone else. Very little
is known for certain about Robert Johnson—he only recorded twenty-nine songs in his short life (he
was killed in ambiguous circumstances at age twenty-seven), and there are only
three known photographs of him (see one of them below). His polyrhythmic finger-picking technique was so radical and
so widely influential that stories began to circulate that he had met the devil
at the crossroads one night, and the devil retuned his guitar and demonstrated
new techniques, in return for which Johnson sold his soul in a Faustian bargain—as
if the only way to account for his otherworldly talent were to invoke
supernatural intervention. This story of the devil at the crossroads has enhanced the Robert Johnson mystique
to the point that it’s difficult to separate straight biography from legend. With scant hard facts to go on, the sensational story fills the gaps.<br />
<br />
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<br />
The crossroads legend has been bolstered in part by some of Johnson’s
spooky recordings, which evoke the crossroads as a setting, and refer to a
tormented soul with a “hellhound on his trail.” Johnson’s early death, shrouded
in mystery, only further supports the idea of a moment of reckoning, when the
devil comes and collects his due. Take a listen to “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Cross Roads Blues”:<br />
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<br />
There was actually a blues musician named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Johnson_(musician)">Tommy Johnson</a>,
who was <em>also</em> reputed to have made a deal with the devil. (The devil took quite an active interest in the development of American secular roots music, apparently, which certainly helped enhance the reputation of the blues and its descendant, rock-n-roll, as “devil’s music.” An instance of an almost Greek degree of gods intervening in human affairs?) The Coens have
acknowledged that their Tommy Johnson represents a mashup of these two
mythical figures in American music. (Robert Johnson’s legend is more prominent,
probably due to his early death—it better fits the hellhound-on-my-trail
narrative.)<br />
<br />
By drawing on this American folk mythology as part of their riff on Homer’s
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Odyssey,</i> the Coens portray the South
as a place where supernatural forces hold sway in human life. And this animates
the metaphysical debate that pervades the film, with Everett insisting
(verbosely) on a rational, scientific, non-superstitious view of the world—the “only
one who remains unaffiliated” in a car with his two companions, who’ve recently
been “saved” among the Lotus Eaters and their river baptism, and Tommy, who’s
sold his soul to the devil. Like in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Odyssey,</i> we have the sense that our heroes’ story is being shaped and
guided by supernatural forces, and that their “affiliations,” like Odysseus’s
affiliation with Athena and his lack of affiliation with Poseidon, have grave
consequences. Tommy Johnson’s story has no specific analog in Homer, although
his is the most overtly “mythical” story in the film. The Coens draw on the American
myth of the crossroads and the blues, and the idea of great talent in the “devil’s
music” as a kind of magical, transformative power, as Tommy’s guitar playing
propels “Man of Constant Sorrow” and the Soggy Bottom Boys’ burgeoning music
career (the parallel to legendary fame among the bards’ repertoire in Homer is
a popular single on the radio that everyone wants to hear). Their story is
profoundly redirected by this supernatural intervention, despite Everett’s
doubts, and the devil-inspired recording of Everett’s Odyssean theme song ends
up saving them in the end.<br />
<br />
The Coens also draw on a more historically grounded element of American
mythology in the Tommy Johnson thread, by depicting the Ku Klux Klan as both a
form of American “monster” and agents of the devil (with ties to electoral
politics, too). Tommy believes that “nothing can save him now”—this is the
moment of reckoning for selling his soul—but the heroes save him and evade the
devil, killing the Cyclops with a burning cross (another “mythical” artifact
of American history). The “sheriff” who trails the boys (and Tommy), complete
with his “hellhound,” is a supernatural figure who doesn’t answer to man-made
laws. In the Robert Johnson legend, the devil is a black man and a
guitarist, and according to Everett he is “red and scaly with a bifurcated tail,” but in Tommy’s version he’s “white, white as you folks, with empty eyes
and a big, hollow voice.” This sure fits the profile of the sheriff, with his
mirror-empty sunglasses reflecting flames and his terrifying, gruff voice of
condemnation.<br />
<br />
Poseidon doesn’t hold sway in the landlocked Delta where this film is
set, and the Greek gods are mostly alien to American shores (outside of the work
of Rick Riordan and Neil Gaiman, that is). The Coens animate their story with
more familiar elements of American mythology: the Klan is scarier to us than a
Cyclops would be, in large part because these are monsters with a real historical
basis, and the hollow-eyed white devil/sheriff is a more terrifying hellhound
to contend with, even if he does leave Tommy with some wicked chops.
Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1135391973520424779.post-57230779063317480612019-02-12T11:23:00.000-06:002019-02-12T11:23:33.081-06:00“Qualms about Odysseus and Revenge”<br />
Many first-time readers remark that Book 22 of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Odyssey</i> has a strikingly modern
or contemporary feel. Maybe this has to do with the relentless graphic
violence, and the way that Homer’s speaker at times seems to revel in the gory
or sadistic details. The killing of Antinous—although surprising that it comes
first, and so quickly—has an especially cinematic quality to it. Homer’s “camera”
moves in slow motion, cutting from Odysseus aiming his bow to Antinous raising
his goblet to drink, tilting it back, just about to taste it . . . when an arrow
pierces his throat and he falls dead, spilling the wine (and plenty of blood)
and kicking over the table. We can imagine this book as a sequence near the conclusion of a Quentin Tarantino
film. It’s not just that it’s violent; it’s the way that the violence is
fetishized as a kind of art, an aesthetic display that serves a cathartic
function for the reader, a release of pent-up tension and a sense of
culmination. We are meant to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">enjoy</i>
this scene—if you get into this kind of thing, that is.<br />
<br />
And of course many perfectly decent, well-behaved, nonviolent people
enjoy scenes of righteous slaughter on movie screens. The climax of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Odyssey</i> feels so modern in part because contemporary cinema has acclimated us to representations of
rough justice. There’s a bit of the vigilante in Odysseus—he doesn’t invoke the law of the land to evict the suitors from the
palace and to exact some kind of fine or community service for their crimes, and after the slaughter he fears persecution and exile.
The man whose honor, home, and family have been violated is the one who
gets to administer justice himself (ably assisted by his recently come-of-age
son, a loyal swineherd and cowherd, and the more-or-less righteous goddess Athena). And he shows no mercy.
There’s an aesthetic symmetry to the arrangement. However horrified we’d be to
learn of such an event in real life, within the confines of fiction, our
aesthetic pleasure in reading of the suitors’ violent comeuppance blurs with a
kind of moral or ethical satisfaction. It <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feels
like justice.</i> Poetic justice.<br />
<br />
Odysseus is a paradigm of the epic hero, but he emerges here as a more
specific subset of the hero category: a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">revenger
hero.</i> The revenge structure has been recycled many times over the years;
audiences clearly respond to it. The narrative arc virtually writes itself, and
only the details change: the protagonist is wronged in some way at the start of
the story (convicted of a crime he didn’t commit; his wife and children harmed;
his career ruined; his palace overrun by swaggering suitors), and he spends the
bulk of the narrative tracking down the perpetrators and plotting his revenge. (And there are a few woman-centered iterations of a revenger plot: see Tarantino’s <i>Kill Bill</i> vols. 1 and 2 for a good example.) The final act depicts the culmination of the revenger-hero’s plot—part of the appeal, I think,
has to do with the pleasure of watching a plot being formed, and then seeing it
come to fruition. We see the author’s and the hero’s plots come together—as in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Odyssey,</i> where Homer’s plot, Athena’s
plot, and Odysseus’s plot all converge with the slaughter in the hall. It’s not
chaotic and random; it’s a well-planned tactical maneuver. The revenger is a
kind of author of his own story, and we take pleasure in seeing a plan come together.<br />
<br />
Odysseus is one of the earliest revenger heroes in Western literature,
but we also hear (repeatedly, and pointedly) of another revenger story within <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Odyssey</i>—the story of Agamemnon’s murder being avenged by his
son, Orestes, which Zeus cites in book 1 as a paradigm of justice served
(1.34-44). When Agamemnon hears about Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors from
Amphimedon, down in the Kingdom of the Dead, he gives his enthusiastic approval (24.193-224). The
Homeric vision of justice entails the wronged (or someone working on behalf of the
wronged) returning and taking vengeance, repaying a grave wrong and punishing
those who have wronged him. Athena’s eyes flash with approval throughout the
slaughter in book 22. She likes what she sees.<br />
<br />
But stories of revenge always leave me a little cold. The sense of
catharsis, and of poetic justice, is fleeting, and a sense of pointlessness and
futility often overshadows any sense of justice restored. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i> is another classic example of a revenge story—with the young
prince feeling pressure to avenge the death of his father at the hands of the
man who has just married his mother (a version of the Agamemnon story)—but my
favorite parts of that play are when Hamlet is unsure how to proceed, doubting
the point of revenge even as he’s aware that it’s expected of him, his duty as
the prince. Hamlet is miscast in the role of avenger, and that’s what makes the
play so good. We see a guy trying to talk himself into the role, to work
himself up to the task, even as his doubts persist. The play ends in a
bloodbath, with Hamlet dying along with pretty much everyone else (it is a
tragedy, after all), and there’s little sense of comfort or resolution in the prodigious
body count. The king’s death has been avenged. And now everyone is dead.<br />
<br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Odyssey</i> seems not
entirely sure about its own revenge structure. Odysseus’s “berserker” mode renders our sense of him as a righteous judge
rather ambiguous. He kills everyone involved, with no distinction and no mercy,
and by the end of book 22, we’re seeing gratuitous dismemberment and torture in
addition to mass slaughter. It all seems a bit much—especially in light of the
suitors’ crimes. Hamlet dithers and delays, even when he’s pretty sure <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">his stepfather has killed his father and
stolen the throne.</i> He has a much more valid motive for revenge than
Odysseus, and he still has to talk himself into it. In the final book of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Odyssey,</i> some dissenting voices
emerge to question the hero’s triumph: we hear reference to the families of the
suitors mourning outside the gates; we see Odysseus’s indiscriminate slaughter
denounced by the ghost of Amphimedon and by the grieving father of Antinous,
Eupeithes (who is then promptly killed by Laertes, Odysseus’s father—in what seems
like a gift, or generous gesture, on his son’s part. Talk about poetic
justice!). Eupeithes’s grievances are legitimate enough to resonate with the
populace of Ithaca, stirring up a civil war, which Athena is only able to
thwart by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">erasing all memories of those
killed</i>, essentially voiding the whole meaning of the revenge plot (if no
one <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">knows</i> there’s been revenge, has
there really been revenge?). All of this suggests that the poet feels a little
uneasy about the outcome of the plot.<br />
<br />
The grief of the suitors’ families—and their outrage at Odysseus’s
extremely violent form of justice—draws our attention to the moral bankruptcy
of revenge as an ethos. It feels good, even in vicarious fictional form. We <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">want</i> to see these swaggering punks get what’s
coming to them. But slaughter only goes so far, and once the catharsis takes
place, we still just have a bunch of dead bodies. Nothing has been restored; the revenger has still been wronged.
It’s not quite as satisfying as it should be.<br />
<br />
My favorite example of a deconstruction of the revenge plot is Christopher Nolan’s 2000
film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/">Memento</a>.</i> It’s one of the most
inventive narrative structures ever attempted in cinema, and a fascinating,
mind-bending experience to watch, with a story that mostly moves backward
chronologically. It features a classic revenge plot—a man whose wife has
(ostensibly) been raped and murdered, and he’s singlemindedly tracking down
the perpetrator to kill him. But Leonard, the protagonist, also is afflicted
with a post-traumatic neurological condition that means he can’t form permanent
new memories, or hold on to memories for more than ten minutes. He comes up
with some creative ways to try to combat this condition, to turn his experience
into some kind of coherent narrative even though his own mind keeps slipping
the details of the story. He writes himself cryptic notes, and tattoos certain “facts”
about the case onto his body, so he’ll never forget. And he struggles to pursue
a kind of detective story, identifying and tracking down his wife’s killer, in
the absence of short-term memory. It is all that he does. He’s a single-minded
revenger with literally nothing and no one else in his life.<br />
<br />
The film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">opens</i> with the
ostensible moment of revenge: the protagonist shoots and kills a man. But we
have no idea who these two people are, or what their relation to one another is, so the moment
is drained of significance. The film’s plot then moves backward in
time, reconstructing the story (as Leonard has had to reconstruct it himself),
filling in how he’s determined that the guy he shoots is the guy he’s after. And
we’re <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pretty</i> sure it’s the right guy.
But we have our doubts, and the possibility that Leonard has been projecting
rather than uncovering a plot is present throughout. He is extremely vulnerable
to others’ manipulation, of his actions and his understanding of the facts. The
more we see, the less we seem to know for certain. At one point, it is
suggested to Leonard that his quest for revenge is pointless because he won’t
really know he’s gotten revenge—he’ll forget about it right away, it won’t fit
into a larger narrative framework that gives revenge its meaning.<br />
<br />
The director, Christopher Nolan (known to many of you from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dark Knight</i> films), unravels the idea of
revenge at a fundamental level by compelling us to see how it depends upon a
surrounding narrative to give it meaning—and if we can’t be sure about that
narrative, we can’t take the proper aesthetic and moral pleasure in the act of
revenge. Leonard is a sympathetic character, but his status as a righteous hero
is in question. His extreme single-mindedness is as much tragic evidence of his
victimhood and trauma as his neurological condition. He becomes oriented
entirely around his revenge plot—his life literally has no other storyline. His
whole meaning is entangled in his role as revenger, but that role is premised
on uncertain facts and incomplete knowledge. The revenger is a little crazy
(like Hamlet), thoroughly obsessed to the point of mania, but also very sad. He
can kill the guy he thinks probably killed his wife, and nothing will be
restored to him, he will gain no “closure”—in fact, the tenuous meaning that
shapes his life will then, ironically, disappear. He’ll be a revenger without a
cause.<br />
<br />
I’ve never been in a position where I’ve felt I’ve had to take revenge
on anyone, and I’ve been fortunate never to have had a loved one taken from me
by someone else’s violence, so perhaps I’d feel differently if I were in Hamlet’s
or Leonard’s position. Maybe the revenge would bring some satisfaction or
closure. But my sense is that the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">desire</i>
for revenge would create the illusion or expectation of closure that could
never be satisfied by a stack of bodies.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i><br />
<br />
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Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1135391973520424779.post-50747030423214146042019-01-29T12:12:00.000-06:002019-01-29T12:12:01.153-06:00“Bards within Bards”<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">For
a poem that was first put into writing almost three thousand years ago—and performed
orally for a couple hundred years prior to that—<i>The Odyssey</i> features a number of surprisingly modern aspects. The
domestic drama at the heart of the story is one example: Telemachus’s heavily
fraught coming of age, the question of Penelope’s devoted or foolhardy
faithfulness to her departed husband, and a hero who spends so much time
weeping because he just wants to go home and be with his family (even giving up
eternal youth in the company of Calypso to do so). Although the family
dynamics, gender roles, and many details of life in Ancient Greece are foreign
to us, the fundamental story of simply trying to make it back home amid a host
of obstacles is universal, and this “domestic” framework at the core of the
story has a lot to do with its enduring appeal. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
tightly structured and rather complex plotting of the story is another
seemingly “modern” feature of the poem: the “gods’ eye view” with which it
opens, allowing us to place both Odysseus and Telemachus in context as the
story begins, and the dramatic structure of the Telemachiad, ending with a
classic cliffhanger, as the suitors head out to ambush an unsuspecting
Telemachus. The narrative structure itself is
also rather complex, for a poem that was originally delivered orally—the Greek
audience was clearly sophisticated when it came to following a multilayered
narrative. We open with Telemachus in Ithaca and on his travels, in the “present
tense” of the story, and then cut back to Odysseus being freed from Calypso’s
island at around the same time (both in response to the plans established in
the opening council of the gods), from which point the action moves forward until the two strands come together in the last twelve books of the poem. Within this forward-moving present-tense narrative, we have both flashbacks and
prophecies, or literal foreshadowing of the story to come, and a number of references to other stories of
other heroes. And we have a whole bunch of embedded narratives within this main
story. Homer’s story is full of other people telling stories, their own
or stories of myth and legend. Reading <i>The
Odyssey</i> is like reading a bunch of different books all at once.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">How
many times has Agamemnon’s story come up so far? Zeus mentions it early in
book 1, during the council of the gods (1.34-44), and
then Athena mentions it to Telemachus later in the same book (1.298-300), trying
to get him to see himself as a potential Orestes, avenger of his wronged
father. And then Nestor brings it up again in book 3 (302-12), just in case
Telemachus still doesn’t get it. Menelaus tells it yet again, this time in
greater detail, within his own frame narrative in which he is ostensibly
answering Telemachus’s question about his father—he takes his sweet time
answering the question, going into the whole story of being stranded down in
Egypt, getting the tip about how to pin down Proteus and make him tell the
truth, which is how he first learns what happened to his brother (Agamemnon),
and which also yields some limited information on Odysseus, which he finally
shares when he gets to the point at long last. This isn’t even an exhaustive
list, as Agamemnon tells his own story to Odysseus in book 11, when his “ghost”
warns Odysseus to be careful when homecoming after a long journey.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">So
partly this is to drive home the potential parallels between Odysseus’s story
of being taken advantage of during an absence from home and that of Agamemnon
and Orestes—the story is designed to be an inspiration for Telemachus, to rouse
him to heroic action on the model of Orestes. But it also nicely illustrates
just how many little stories are buried throughout this big story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Remember
that the whole thing is ostensibly narrated by “Homer,” a blind bard, as
a written rendition of an oral narrative. Within this wide frame, we also get a
number of other bards telling stories—at the court of Menelaus, for example, or
Demodocus the famous blind bard (a figure for Homer himself in his own poem?)
repeatedly telling stories in Alcinous’s palace. This self-reflexive quality
also strikes me as rather postmodern—we not only have frame narratives, but our
attention is drawn to the very medium we’re currently consuming, when we have
the blind bard Homer portraying another blind bard doing the things bards did: entertaining
guests of honor with epic stories.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">This
story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure reaches its most extreme and
dizzying point when Odysseus himself takes over the bardic duties (after
another pretty “meta” moment, when Odysseus requests that Demodocus tell the
story of the Trojan Horse, in which he himself features prominently—and then
breaks down crying under the strong emotions it, rather predictably, evokes in
him). Alcinous invites him to self-narrate—“But come now, tell me / about your wanderings” (8.571-72)—but this is more than simply
saying, “Identify yourself, introduce yourself.” He wants <i>the story,</i> and Odysseus delivers, narrating the next four books of
the poem and keeping the Phaeacian court up all night listening to him. This structure was clear throughout the</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> “Wanderings of Odysseus” presentations: the present-tense story of Odysseus trying to make it back from Calypso’s
island is interrupted for a long interlude in which first Demodocus tells a
few epic stories from the Trojan campaigns (already becoming legendary, we can
see), and then Odysseus narrates everything that happened to him since the end
of the war, for our benefit as well as that of Alcinous and his court.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
part, this gives the “Wanderings” a personal, lyrical quality—Odysseus laments
his own bad fortune and establishes his identity as the “long-suffering man of
sorrows.” He begins by praising the skills of the bard who preceded him, but
Homer gives Odysseus himself the previously unheard epithet “the lord of lies”
(9.1), which is translated by Fagles as </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">“the great teller of tales</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">” It is clear from the context that this guy can tell a good story, and his audience seems spellbound as he delves into these fantastical stories of mythic monsters and a visit to the Underworld.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> He tells of the Cyclops, and of the adventure on Circe’s island, before
launching into what must have been a pretty intense first-person tale, his
extremely rare experiences in the Kingdom of the Dead (which isn’t typically
visited by living mortals, for obvious reasons). Here’s where the
stories-within-stories dynamic starts to induce vertigo, or to evoke the image of
infinitely receding mirrors: Odysseus’s story entails him recounting in detail
the stories told to him by various of the ghosts that emerge from the
Underworld, and at times he tells his story to them. Remember that all of this
is being told <i>by</i> Odysseus himself to
Alcinous. And <i>Homer</i> is telling <i>us</i> about Odysseus telling Alcinous about
Agamemnon telling <i>him</i> about what happened
with Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Are you losing track of all the internal
quotation marks this would require? And these narratives in the Kingdom of the
Dead don’t only reflect past events—we also get a forward-looking prophetic
narrative from Tiresias (as reported by Odysseus to Alcinous via Homer), which basically telegraphs the end of the story, and Agamemnon</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">’s story is not yet complete, as Orestes has not yet had his revenge at the time of this telling (although he has by the time of the present action of the poem)</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It’s
easy to forget that Odysseus is narrating these sections—the frame begins to
recede, and we get lost in the story itself. But Homer reminds us of the frame,
doesn’t let us lose sight of the story <i>he’s
</i>telling—that of Odysseus telling his story to Alcinous. At one point in
his exhaustive (and somewhat exhausting) litany of encounters with
ghosts, Odysseus seems to sense that his audience might be getting bored. He
pauses, and we’re snapped back to the present tense. “There is a time for many tales, but also / a time for sleep,” Odysseus avers (11.380-81). He stops the story, and the audience is “silent, spellbound, / listening in the shadowy hall” (11.334-35). Alcinous
breaks the silence with a spirited praise of Odysseus, as a man and a
storyteller, promising to transport him safely to Ithaca. But he’s not off the
hook just yet. Although our hero has given a pretty strong hint that he’s tired
and wants to go to bed, the king insists that he keep talking—“The night is long; / it is not time to sleep yet. Tell me more / Amazing deeds! I would keep listening / until bright daybreak, if you kept on telling / the dangers you have passed" (11.422-25). So after snapping us
briefly back into the frame, Odysseus dutifully resumes his story, narrating
the rest of book 11 and all of book 12. At the end of book 12, he sounds
exhausted and even a little irritable, having brought them (and us) up to the point where he arrives on
Calypso’s island: “Why should I tell / the story that I told you and your wife / yesterday in your house? It is annoying, / repeating tales that have been told before” (450-54). Just as in <i>The Odyssey</i> as a whole, Odysseus’s narrative to the Phaeacians is
fragmented in structure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">While
<i>The Odyssey</i> does feature a good deal
of action and, by the end, its share of bloodletting, much of it simply
depicts people sitting around telling stories. We get a picture of
Ancient Greek culture where such stories were valued—there’s a strong sense of
formality to the storytelling, whether it’s a bard performing a narrative to
music or an honored guest being asked to tell “the whole story.” And in
addition to his noted exploits in battle and his great tactical wits, it’s
worth noting that our hero is something of a bard himself, a “great teller of
stories” (which, as Wilson</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 16px;">’s translation reminds us, is a skill that is very close to telling <i>lies</i>).</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Maybe this is why Homer likes him so much.</span></div>
Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1135391973520424779.post-34903674679388617402019-01-17T12:47:00.000-06:002019-01-17T12:47:00.788-06:00“Holden Out for a Hero?” <div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
I don’t
tend to reach for heroic narratives in my own personal reading. My favorite
movies don’t typically involve costumed avengers or caped crusaders. I’ve read
all three<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Lord of the Rings</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>volumes and <i>The Hobbit </i>to my son as our bedtime reading a few years ago, and
parts of them were really cool, but I admit to zoning out for large portions of
the story. As a kid, I had only gotten about halfway through the second book
before I gave it up, but that may reflect my general laziness as a young reader
more than my interest in heroic quests. I never did get around to seeing the
third movie, although I mostly enjoyed the first two. They do make it back from
that big mountain where he chucks the ring, and the world is saved—I remember
that much from volume 3. It’s just that some of the twists and turns along the
way—the close brushes with death, the cliffhangers—might have lost me.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
For your
inaugural writing assignment, I am asking you to contemplate the significance
of heroism as a part of your general consumption of literature, television, and
film. I’m approaching this course, based in part on what I’ve gleaned from my
students in the past, with the assumption that many of you are more actively
conversant in the heroic genre, in your day-to-day recreational reading and
viewing, than I am. And I look forward to reading your writing this semester,
as you unpack those interests and bring to light something fundamental about
why and how heroic narratives continue to appeal to and inspire you. I feel
like I<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>get</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>the hero thing, even if I don’t fully
feel it myself. But I also have a lot to learn.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
I
understand that the concept of the hero is still alive and well, at the movies
and in the news, but my own ambivalence reflects what’s maybe an unfortunate
tendency in our contemporary culture—toward irony and cynicism over idealism
and sincerity. Does the concept of a “hero” seem outdated or quaint, a relic of
a simpler and more credulous time? We’re hesitant to speak seriously about some
public or historical figure as our hero because we expect some killjoy to
interject and remind us of their flaws and shortcomings (“Oh, you admire
President Obama? What about all those drone strikes against innocent civilians?
Some hero!”). To admit to having a hero is, in a way, to make yourself
vulnerable to disappointment or disillusionment. We don’t want to seem too
credulous, easily duped. We want to seem like we’re already over it,
unimpressed, devoid of wonder. It’s somehow safer<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>not</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>to have heroes. Some airline attendant
is caught on video resigning from his job in a dramatic and made-for-YouTube
kind of way, and we all repost the clip, with a knowing smirk, captioned with
stuff like, “This guy is totally my hero LOL.” But we don’t<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>really mean</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>“hero” in the wholly unironic way
Joseph Campbell uses the term.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
I did a
lot of thinking, in my initial preparation for teaching this course, about the
role of heroes throughout my life. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>had</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>a hero. I was heavy into<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Star Wars,</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>but it was the whole imagined-world
aspect that compelled me, more than Skywalker’s quest. I always preferred Han
Solo, the reluctant, mercenary hero who gradually does develop a sense of
social and moral responsibility but never loses his trademark sneer, over Luke
Skywalker. I was a sucker for the sarcastic riposte over sincere idealism. I
went through some phases where I was into superhero narratives as a kid—a
faithful viewer of the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Superfriends<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>every Saturday morning, and I did
see the original Christopher Reeve<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Superman<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>in the theater—but it didn’t
really stick. By the time the first<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Batman<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i><span class="apple-converted-space">movie </span>(dir. Burton;
1988) came out, I was in high school, I went to see it mainly because
Prince did the soundtrack, and I was (and am) a huge Prince fan. I've listened to the album way more than I've watched the movie.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
There are
people I admire—in history, in culture, even in sports—and it’s hard to unpack
how much they may or may not have shaped my development as a person. I can name
names of people whose actions and experiences impress me deeply, and whose life
stories and the values they represent have made a strong impression on me. At various times in my life, I
have thought about them a lot, and maybe in some distant capacity modeled my
behavior on their example. But it doesn’t sit right with me to
call them my “heroes”—it feels like I’m fronting, like I’m expected to cite
heroes, so I have a few I could name. But really, there are no shrines in
my bedroom or office. On my desk here at school I do have a religious-style candle depicting Virginia Woolf as a secular/literary saint, and I admit that I do think of her lifelong struggle to produce profoundly beautiful and insightful art in the face of sometimes debilitating mental illness as genuinely heroic and inspirational--but the candle is a bit of an ironic joke, the kind of thing English teachers are given as gifts by friends.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
I do
follow some professional sports on occasion, but the concept of “hero” as applied to elite athletes has always seemed
a little shaky to me. Professional athletes often do admirable things, on
and off the field, in a heavily scrutinized public forum. I’m inspired by
Muhammad Ali’s refusal to submit to the draft, or Tommie Jones and John Carlos
protesting American racism at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, or Colin Kaepernick
taking a knee during the national anthem. I admire the courage it took for
Michael Sam to come out as gay on the eve of the NFL draft. And as a Yankee fan
by birth, of course I believed for a long time that Derek Jeter might well be immortal. But
still . . . it seems false to claim any of these guys as my own personal<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>heroes.</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m not denying that they play this
role for others. It’s just that I don’t necessarily relate.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
There
have been literary protagonists who have made a profound impression on me, and
who have indeed shaped my development as a person. Among the most significant
of these—and this is such a cliché, it’s a little embarrassing to admit—I would
have to count Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J. D. Salinger’s <i>The Catcher in the Rye</i> (1951). I came to
<i>Catcher</i> later than many readers, who
had the book thrust upon them by a parent or older sibling, usually with the
insistence that they “have to” read it, that it will “change your life.”
Happily, no one told me the book was going to change my life. I was under the
impression, based solely on the title, that it was about baseball. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
It was
assigned in my senior-year AP English class in high school. I had just started
to enjoy reading and analyzing literature in a scholarly context—a development
that would have obvious consequences for the course of my life, although I
never would have anticipated it at the time. We had read a few books already in
that class that had made a strong impact on me; I had never really gotten into
English before this year. I wasn’t aware of <i>Catcher’s</i> reputation as a landmark representation of American
adolescent disenchantment, but I was a rather disenchanted American adolescent,
and when I first encountered Holden Caulfield’s distinctive narrative voice—sarcastic,
irreverent, occasionally profane, funny as hell—it blew my mind. I couldn’t
believe the book was being assigned in school. I felt like I was encountering a
kindred spirit: Holden’s academic record was a lot worse than mine, but his
impatience with all the things a high-school kid is “supposed to” be impressed
by and interested in really struck a chord with me. It was my first experience
of a narrator in a novel who seemed to be speaking to and for me alone, against what I perceived to be the madness and stupidity that was all around me. In an
utterly unprecedented event, I ended up staying in on a Friday night and
reading the entire novel in one sitting. I’d never even done
homework of any kind on a Friday night before.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
Holden
Caulfield isn’t a classical example of a hero—although he does take a journey
through the streets of Manhattan, slowly wandering his way back home on the
Upper East Side. His general attitude toward adulthood and mainstream American
society is disaffected and cynical—and this negativity was indeed a big part
of what appealed to me about the novel, the way it seemed to articulate my own
unspoken feelings about the world into which I was coming of age. But there is a kind
of “heroic” aspect to Holden, in the way he stubbornly affirms youth and
innocence in the face of the seemingly inevitable corruption of adulthood. And he
gets beaten up a couple of times over the course of a few days—something else I
could, unfortunately, relate to all too well. In one memorable scene, Holden is beaten up by
his roommate at his boarding school, a guy named Stradlater, for no good reason
at all. Holden refuses to take it back when he calls Stradlater a “moron” (“all
morons hate it when you call them a moron”), and he takes a beating. The crazy
logic of Holden’s behavior—which sort of “proves” Stradlater <i>is</i> a “moron” by making him get all
violent and worked up over Holden calling him one—made sense to me. I could
recount way too many such stories, but one time I was skateboarding at the
beachfront in the early spring (so it was pretty desolate) with a large crew of
associates when a carload of wrestlers from a nearby town drove up and started
harassing us. My so-called crew scattered, but I, stupidly, refused to run
away. I was skating here, and I’m going to keep skating here, whatever these morons
have to say about it. The episode ended badly, with a giant kid named Artie
getting out of the car and beating me down, at one point slamming my skateboard
against my head. Like Holden, I didn't even try to fight back. My humble protest accomplished very little. And I couldn’t quite explain why
I had refused to flee with the rest of them. There was a doomed, futile, stupid
pride and protest in my refusal, and I took a serious beating for it. So while
some readers are perplexed by some of Holden’s seemingly incoherent,
self-destructive behavior, I could kind of see myself in him and his pointless
efforts at heroism.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
Holden
Caulfield is probably closer to an antihero than a traditional hero, and it’s
not clear how much the novel ultimately affirms his doomed rebellion. There’s a
<i>lot </i>of irony in Salinger’s depiction
that I entirely failed to see at the time—which is one reason it’s been so
interesting for me to keep teaching this novel in my fiction classes at the
University of Illinois when I first started teaching, and in my Coming-of-Age
Novel course at Uni. Every time I reread <i>Catcher
in the Rye,</i> I view Holden (and my younger self) with a little more distance
and critical detachment. But I still also see, and affirm, the aspects of his
character that resonated with me as a young man, and I still hold many of those
same values today. As a reader of fiction and a filmgoer, I continue to be drawn
to antiheroes—lonely, often morally confused outsider figures, or those who
operate outside the law or the bounds of conventional society. I admit that I grow
bored as a larger-than-life action hero cheats death in scene after scene.
There’s no drama, no recognizably human fear of death or personal insecurity,
for me to latch onto. And yet, sitting in a theater crowded with people who
clearly love this stuff, I realize I am likely in the minority.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com1