Macon's Hip-Hop Credentials

In the first chapter of the first part of Angry Black White Boy, 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 Straight Outta Compton," 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?

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.

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 All for One, 1990):

to this one, from 1998, featuring the Cash Money Millionaires and a tune aptly titled "Bling Bling":

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.

Jack as Utopian Social Critic

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.

Emma Donoghue uses Jack and his unique perspective to an analogous effect in Room (although I am emphatically not 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, he’s 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.

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 was 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 true “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 things that occupy space in our world and an implicit comment on all the stuff we surround ourselves with. In contrast, Ma and Jack’s starkly reduced way of life in Room might seem ideally simplified.

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).

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 ideal 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 he has never been to a mall before, has never even heard of one, and doesn’t even know how stores work. 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 drum 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.

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 be at the place you are.” Jack seems right, 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.

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 loving 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.

“The Limits of Jack’s World”

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 quite 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.”

Learning a language means learning a world. And watching a child learn language is a powerful illustration of this concept in practice—you can see as they file new information, new words and concepts, into their already existing picture of the world. A new word or concept needs to fit somehow, and that “somehow” is grammatical. 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.

In Room, 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 (a bed, a stove, a thermostat—or a 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 other doors of which “Door” is but one example would require explaining a lot 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 his world has only one Door.

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 Jack doesn’t experience it as such. 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 lot 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.

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 not normal, and that Jack’s development is stunted). Jack asks,  “What’s normal?” (13). He’s not asking what would 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 is “normal,” after all? Aren’t we all unique individuals?); he simply does not know what the word “normal” means. Now how would you define it for Jack? Ma “chews her mouth” as she tries to find a way out of this corner. “It means OK. No hay problema.” 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 normal) words: not only is nothing about Jack’s growth and development “normal” (hay problema, 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 other kids out there in the world, against whom he can be measured. His picture of the world would be altered. Ma can’t really 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.

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 will 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.

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. “Labeling is stickers on tomatoes, say, and labor law—” (35). Where can she go from here? How would you 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 wants an adult to explain labor law). But again, we see how impossible the fiction of Room will be for Ma to maintain.

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.

An Anti-Mentor for an Inverted Hero’s Journey

A Lesson Before Dying 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.

Rather than having to venture elsewhere in order to prove himself a hero, Grant must go inward, to the “belly of the beast” (or “innermost cave,” to borrow Campbell’s phrase) 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.

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.

In the annals of the “heroic teacher” paradigm, Grant would seem to be a poor candidate for the role: this isn’t Stand and Deliver or Dead Poets Society. 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.

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 away 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 has 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.”

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, anywhere 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.

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 all education in this underfunded, one-room church is futile and doomed to fail from the start, how much more 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.

“Yourself and Your Doings outen His Eyes”

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).

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.

It’s probably safe to say that, for most readers, all 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 thinking 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 doing 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.

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 feel Darl looking at them—through them. Almost as if they are being narrated 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 know things he maybe wishes he didn’t.

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 only one alive (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 scenes at which he isn’t even present.

The quintessential moments in As I Lay Dying 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.)

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 feels accurate. I’ll focus on two parallel moments, both involving Anse, to illustrate.

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 feels 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.

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.

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 feel right.

“American Mythology in the Coen Brothers' Odyssey”

The Odyssey is the most obvious source text for the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, with its invocation of the Muse and its opening-credits announcement that it is “Based on The Odyssey 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 Sullivan’s Travels, 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” Jimmie Davis 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).

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.

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 Robert Johnson, 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.

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”:

There was actually a blues musician named Tommy Johnson, who was also 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.)

By drawing on this American folk mythology as part of their riff on Homer’s Odyssey, 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 The Odyssey, 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.

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.

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. 

“Qualms about Odysseus and Revenge”

Many first-time readers remark that Book 22 of The Odyssey 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 enjoy this scene—if you get into this kind of thing, that is.

And of course many perfectly decent, well-behaved, nonviolent people enjoy scenes of righteous slaughter on movie screens. The climax of The Odyssey 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 feels like justice. Poetic justice.

Odysseus is a paradigm of the epic hero, but he emerges here as a more specific subset of the hero category: a revenger hero. 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 Kill Bill 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 The Odyssey, 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.

Odysseus is one of the earliest revenger heroes in Western literature, but we also hear (repeatedly, and pointedly) of another revenger story within The Odyssey—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.

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. Hamlet 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.

The Odyssey 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 his stepfather has killed his father and stolen the throne. 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 The Odyssey, 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 erasing all memories of those killed, essentially voiding the whole meaning of the revenge plot (if no one knows 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.

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 want 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.

My favorite example of a deconstruction of the revenge plot is Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento. 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.

The film opens 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 pretty 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.

The director, Christopher Nolan (known to many of you from the Dark Knight 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.

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 desire for revenge would create the illusion or expectation of closure that could never be satisfied by a stack of bodies.