I'm not sure why it startled me to find Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem set so close to home -- not just L.A. or Southern California, but the east-of-Eastside 2nd generation Okie and southwestern folks I grew up with -- and in the 50's and 60's, while I was there.
The inanity of murder in the sort of bilgewater sameness of everything rings just true.
The rest continues as a sort of collage of half-essays in response to popular culture. Didion takes her title, of course, from famous end of Yeat's poem. The 60's was of course a time when many felt that various centers "could not hold," perhaps because certain central facts were finally under some little examination by a portion of the populace.
Didion gives a desultory view of all this, always entertaining. But in some places it seems she wanders from critical points. John Wayne is heroic in his battle with cancer, it seems, but we hear no mention that he and almost all the cast and crew most likely got it from shooting a movie too near the Dirty Harry H-Bomb blast. Likewise there's no comparison of Wayne's nonservice in WWII and his hawkline politics and screen persona.
But maybe this is part of what we pay to allow her to skip blithely to Joan Baez and her school for activists, followed by a glimpse into the apparent chaos of the Haight-Ashbury drug scene in which she manages to render the disorder, but not the order.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Ernest J. Gaines
Gaines, Ernest J. Bloodline. NY: Dial, 1968.
If "A Long Day in November" is a short story, "Heart of Darkness" might as well be.
Gaines is a competent author in a conventional sense, writing a style that comes out of 19th century realism moderated by 20th century consciousness of perspectives. Perspectives are arranged for easy identification. It's an easy read altogether. Long Day makes a statement, then: about values.
Basically Hapless Hubby gets a car, probably for the first time. He gads about, leaving his wife alone until she gets fed up and leaves him -- that's where we enter the narrative, seen through the POV of their early gradeschool-aged child. HH is probably messing around on her, though that's not altogether clear. She takes off to Grandma's; he follows within a few hours; Granny strews some buckshot over his head to discourage him.
He borrows money to pay a soothsayer. The cagey old lady tells him he has to burn his car. He goes to his wife and burns it, and she does indeed return to him.
If "A Long Day in November" is a short story, "Heart of Darkness" might as well be.
Gaines is a competent author in a conventional sense, writing a style that comes out of 19th century realism moderated by 20th century consciousness of perspectives. Perspectives are arranged for easy identification. It's an easy read altogether. Long Day makes a statement, then: about values.
Basically Hapless Hubby gets a car, probably for the first time. He gads about, leaving his wife alone until she gets fed up and leaves him -- that's where we enter the narrative, seen through the POV of their early gradeschool-aged child. HH is probably messing around on her, though that's not altogether clear. She takes off to Grandma's; he follows within a few hours; Granny strews some buckshot over his head to discourage him.
He borrows money to pay a soothsayer. The cagey old lady tells him he has to burn his car. He goes to his wife and burns it, and she does indeed return to him.
Pauline Hopkins and Langston Hughes
Hopkins, Pauline. Contending Forces NY:AMS,1999.
The novel Contending Forces seems fairly episodic. Hopkins' intentions involve discussing differences between Southern and Northern blacks in the Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction era. Her comments display her intents: "I have presented both sides of the dark picture -- lynching and concubinage -- truthfully and without vituperation" (15).
The first tale involves a slave-owning planter who decides to move from the Bahamas to North Carolina when the Brits outlaw slavery. Mysteriously, the man makes this move despite his intention to free these same slaves in a few years, though this cannot possibly be reasonable economically.
In NC, skanky white neighbors displeased with his too-noble ways and covetous of his wife make up a story that she's black, lynch him for freeing slaves, whip her with scarce-hidden sexual overtones to their pleasure, auction off his property and take his sons into slavery. If any irony suggests that such practices were unusual, I missed it.
In the next story, a romance is contrived between northern and southern African-Americans. Hopkin's characters go on and on and on with various ideas about various difference between different combinations of black and white genes. In places, it's unclear just how much of this Hopkins herself buys. Passages like the following are not clearly attributable to one character or another:
One of the more durable curses slavery seems to have put on African-Americans is this business of analyzing their responses in terms of their whiteness or blackness.
Come to think of it, this endures even in such a talent as Langston Hughes. In the last story of The Ways of White Folk, Hughes describes the homecoming of a prodigal son of interracial concubinage. In the only scene detailed from the boy's childhood, the white father beat the "black" son horribly for calling him "Papa" in public, though no one stood in much doubt as to his parentage. The boy has predominantly white features, and on several occasions is described as having inherited much of his father's obnoxious character. The boy stands up to his father, expecting to be shot, but the father fails to shoot him and dies in the scuffle, as though from a heart attack.
Part of the point for Hughes appears to be that there's a balance in that the old man's evil has reproduced itself in his son, and the final point, that the man "left no heirs," is of course deeply ironic. For Hughes, the violence has occurred because the boy has inherited a white character and white attitudes.
At the same time, many's the time these narratives go out of their way to describe how close to white certain black protagonists are. It always is done as a way of making them appear more attractive and even more deserving -- which represents an appalling degree of acceptance of the value system of the slaveowners. The same kind of thing operates to this day among the population of Mexico, where a woman is called "guera," or fair, as a compliment.
...
Going on, Hopkins describes an African-American politician, sucked deep into compromises in which the majority of the African-Americans gain little if anything despite promises.
. . . . As a continuation of the previous imminent lynching issue,
The ending brings the threads together in true soap-opera serial style. Will, who wishes to marry Sappho, the girl who flees rather than admit she has born a child to a rapist,
As a whole, it's written with fair competence, but remains unexciting fiction because the author's aims are almost strictly polemic and present themselves as mostly obvious to anyone not beset by the peculiar brand of racism that she writes against.
Thumbnail plot:
It's interesting to see that the recurrent themes of slave narratives constantly involve family matters. There are always relatives lost -- sold, escaped, or transplanted by violence. But also the black children of white slavers or bosses are also a constant fixture. Interestingly, the authors invariably take the white features to be good-looking, but generally consider white ancestry to be bad blood otherwise -- that is, contributing to violence, unnatural pride, and even insanity.
The novel Contending Forces seems fairly episodic. Hopkins' intentions involve discussing differences between Southern and Northern blacks in the Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction era. Her comments display her intents: "I have presented both sides of the dark picture -- lynching and concubinage -- truthfully and without vituperation" (15).
The first tale involves a slave-owning planter who decides to move from the Bahamas to North Carolina when the Brits outlaw slavery. Mysteriously, the man makes this move despite his intention to free these same slaves in a few years, though this cannot possibly be reasonable economically.
In NC, skanky white neighbors displeased with his too-noble ways and covetous of his wife make up a story that she's black, lynch him for freeing slaves, whip her with scarce-hidden sexual overtones to their pleasure, auction off his property and take his sons into slavery. If any irony suggests that such practices were unusual, I missed it.
In the next story, a romance is contrived between northern and southern African-Americans. Hopkin's characters go on and on and on with various ideas about various difference between different combinations of black and white genes. In places, it's unclear just how much of this Hopkins herself buys. Passages like the following are not clearly attributable to one character or another:
"Langley's nature was the natural product of such an institution as slavery. Natural instinct for good had been perverted by a mixture of 'cracker' blood of the lowest type on his father's side with whatever God-saving quality that might have been loaned the Negro by pitying nature. This blood, while it gave him the pleasant features of the Causasian race, vitiated his moral nat ure and left it stranded high and dry on the shore of blind ignorance . . . " (221).
One of the more durable curses slavery seems to have put on African-Americans is this business of analyzing their responses in terms of their whiteness or blackness.
Come to think of it, this endures even in such a talent as Langston Hughes. In the last story of The Ways of White Folk, Hughes describes the homecoming of a prodigal son of interracial concubinage. In the only scene detailed from the boy's childhood, the white father beat the "black" son horribly for calling him "Papa" in public, though no one stood in much doubt as to his parentage. The boy has predominantly white features, and on several occasions is described as having inherited much of his father's obnoxious character. The boy stands up to his father, expecting to be shot, but the father fails to shoot him and dies in the scuffle, as though from a heart attack.
Part of the point for Hughes appears to be that there's a balance in that the old man's evil has reproduced itself in his son, and the final point, that the man "left no heirs," is of course deeply ironic. For Hughes, the violence has occurred because the boy has inherited a white character and white attitudes.
At the same time, many's the time these narratives go out of their way to describe how close to white certain black protagonists are. It always is done as a way of making them appear more attractive and even more deserving -- which represents an appalling degree of acceptance of the value system of the slaveowners. The same kind of thing operates to this day among the population of Mexico, where a woman is called "guera," or fair, as a compliment.
...
Going on, Hopkins describes an African-American politician, sucked deep into compromises in which the majority of the African-Americans gain little if anything despite promises.
. . . . As a continuation of the previous imminent lynching issue,
The ending brings the threads together in true soap-opera serial style. Will, who wishes to marry Sappho, the girl who flees rather than admit she has born a child to a rapist,
As a whole, it's written with fair competence, but remains unexciting fiction because the author's aims are almost strictly polemic and present themselves as mostly obvious to anyone not beset by the peculiar brand of racism that she writes against.
Thumbnail plot:
- Engand would outlaw slavery.
- Slaver Montfort, in English protectorate, flees to N. Caroline with his brown-eyed wife.
- Jealous cartoon southerners make up a story that his wife is black. They kill him, rape and beat her, and enslave their kids.
- A man buys one kid to liberate him, probably because he's white.
- The other kid remains a slave and eventually marries a slave; they have children, one of whom has children Will and Dora.
- Will has trouble with Sappho because she has been violated by descendents of the men who ruined the Montforts. She runs away rather than reveal her misfortune
- Everybody meets up and lives happily ever after
It's interesting to see that the recurrent themes of slave narratives constantly involve family matters. There are always relatives lost -- sold, escaped, or transplanted by violence. But also the black children of white slavers or bosses are also a constant fixture. Interestingly, the authors invariably take the white features to be good-looking, but generally consider white ancestry to be bad blood otherwise -- that is, contributing to violence, unnatural pride, and even insanity.
Langston Hughes
Hughes, Langston. The Ways of White Folks. NY: Vintage, 1990.
Hughes' white folks are seen, of course, in terms of their dealings with African Americans. He's sympathetic with individuals, but unsparing with systemic problems. There are several stories.
As follows:
"Cora Unashamed." Black servant Cora Jenkins sympathizes with the young white lady she has raised when the latter gets pregnant out of wedlock. The white parents, her bosses, feel only horror and fear. The girl gets a back-alley abortion, then dies of the complications. Cora finally busts out and criticizes the whole lot of them, breaking up the deeply hypocritical funeral, and is fired.
"Slave on the Block." A bohemian artist couple with some mysterious source of income have some kind of romantic notions about African-Americans which comes out in their art. They pay their servants to pose for them and so forth. They're kind in some ways, but remarkably thick-headed, and deeply patronizing. When a more aggressively racist friend comes over and they back the friend, the servants get fed up, tell them off, and leave.
"Home." A musician comes home from Europe to the American South because he may be dying of tuberculosis. He attracts the attention of a local music teacher, who arranges that he play concerts and so forth, though most of the population don't get the classical numbers that have become part of his repetoire. She hails him in public somewhere, and he's beaten to death by passing whites for talking to her.
"A Good Job Gone." The narrator has lost his job because his white employer has gotten himself into trouble chasing after the black women he dictates to. One of them rejects him, and over the course of a few weeks he goes nuts.
"Rejuvenation Through Joy." A preacher who's passing for white sets up a cult exploiting some fantasy of African "naturalness" and spontaneity and joy as a healing procedure for nutsy whites. It finally falls through, of course.
"The Blues I'm Playing." A white female philanthropist underwrites a young black female musician for some time, but demurs when the girl intends to get married. Also, the philanthropist seems to think she can dictate how her charge plays. Hughes makes a neat finish. The girl plays "O, if I could holler / Like a mountaing jack, / I'd go up on de mountain / And call my baby back" -- to which Mrs. E answers "And I would stand looking at the stars." This is clearly intended as a cultural observation, with white folks as somehow apart from life.
"Red-Headed Baby." Here Hughes stays close to the white, red-headed sailor who is the focalizer throughout. After several years, he's revisiting an African American woman whom he pays for sex; his thoughts are shot through with racism. When he arrives, he's welcomed. But his amours are interrupted by a little red-headed African-American baby. Though no one accuses him of being the father or asks him for anything, he has no stomach for the procedure, and he leaves, with no real perspective on his own behavior at any point.
"Poor Little Black Fellow." When a servant dies, the son is adopted by the rich white folks. They raise him in apparent kindness, though he doesn't fit into their white neighborhood nor with the African-Americans raised in lower-class circumstances. They take him to Europe, where he meets people for whom his blackness just isn't very important. His adoptive parents react bizarrely, suddenly becoming very strict and not allowing him to socialize at all, though no explanation is given for their unprecedented behavior. So the boy leaves, deciding to stay on in Paris.
"Little Dog." A severely depressed woman has the building janitors bring bones for her dog. She falls in love with the married African-American who brings the bones. To avoid responding to this, she moves out, eventually dying with no friends.
"Berry." A corrupt home for crippled children fire their African-American help at the first opportunity. He leaves without his wages, glad to be gone.
"Mother and Child." A married white woman gives birth to a black child, and the father's family gets prepared for the onslaught and probable lynchings.
"One Christmas Eve." The white family arrives late on Xmas eve and underpays their African-American servant, who leaves to try to shop for her family. She brings her kids to the stores, where the youngest is frightened by the storefront Santa. To make him feel better, she tells him it isn't really Santa, just a "theater for white folks."
"Father and Son" is dealt with in the Pauline Hopkins entry.
Hughes' white folks are seen, of course, in terms of their dealings with African Americans. He's sympathetic with individuals, but unsparing with systemic problems. There are several stories.
As follows:
"Cora Unashamed." Black servant Cora Jenkins sympathizes with the young white lady she has raised when the latter gets pregnant out of wedlock. The white parents, her bosses, feel only horror and fear. The girl gets a back-alley abortion, then dies of the complications. Cora finally busts out and criticizes the whole lot of them, breaking up the deeply hypocritical funeral, and is fired.
"Slave on the Block." A bohemian artist couple with some mysterious source of income have some kind of romantic notions about African-Americans which comes out in their art. They pay their servants to pose for them and so forth. They're kind in some ways, but remarkably thick-headed, and deeply patronizing. When a more aggressively racist friend comes over and they back the friend, the servants get fed up, tell them off, and leave.
"Home." A musician comes home from Europe to the American South because he may be dying of tuberculosis. He attracts the attention of a local music teacher, who arranges that he play concerts and so forth, though most of the population don't get the classical numbers that have become part of his repetoire. She hails him in public somewhere, and he's beaten to death by passing whites for talking to her.
"A Good Job Gone." The narrator has lost his job because his white employer has gotten himself into trouble chasing after the black women he dictates to. One of them rejects him, and over the course of a few weeks he goes nuts.
"Rejuvenation Through Joy." A preacher who's passing for white sets up a cult exploiting some fantasy of African "naturalness" and spontaneity and joy as a healing procedure for nutsy whites. It finally falls through, of course.
"The Blues I'm Playing." A white female philanthropist underwrites a young black female musician for some time, but demurs when the girl intends to get married. Also, the philanthropist seems to think she can dictate how her charge plays. Hughes makes a neat finish. The girl plays "O, if I could holler / Like a mountaing jack, / I'd go up on de mountain / And call my baby back" -- to which Mrs. E answers "And I would stand looking at the stars." This is clearly intended as a cultural observation, with white folks as somehow apart from life.
"Red-Headed Baby." Here Hughes stays close to the white, red-headed sailor who is the focalizer throughout. After several years, he's revisiting an African American woman whom he pays for sex; his thoughts are shot through with racism. When he arrives, he's welcomed. But his amours are interrupted by a little red-headed African-American baby. Though no one accuses him of being the father or asks him for anything, he has no stomach for the procedure, and he leaves, with no real perspective on his own behavior at any point.
"Poor Little Black Fellow." When a servant dies, the son is adopted by the rich white folks. They raise him in apparent kindness, though he doesn't fit into their white neighborhood nor with the African-Americans raised in lower-class circumstances. They take him to Europe, where he meets people for whom his blackness just isn't very important. His adoptive parents react bizarrely, suddenly becoming very strict and not allowing him to socialize at all, though no explanation is given for their unprecedented behavior. So the boy leaves, deciding to stay on in Paris.
"Little Dog." A severely depressed woman has the building janitors bring bones for her dog. She falls in love with the married African-American who brings the bones. To avoid responding to this, she moves out, eventually dying with no friends.
"Berry." A corrupt home for crippled children fire their African-American help at the first opportunity. He leaves without his wages, glad to be gone.
"Mother and Child." A married white woman gives birth to a black child, and the father's family gets prepared for the onslaught and probable lynchings.
"One Christmas Eve." The white family arrives late on Xmas eve and underpays their African-American servant, who leaves to try to shop for her family. She brings her kids to the stores, where the youngest is frightened by the storefront Santa. To make him feel better, she tells him it isn't really Santa, just a "theater for white folks."
"Father and Son" is dealt with in the Pauline Hopkins entry.
Jamaica Kincaid
Kincaid, Jamaica. At the Bottom of the River. NY: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1983.
-----------A Small Place
A Small Place gives a fairly straightforward impression of a St. Thomas idea of the British and American tourism and imperialism that forms the island's history and economy. She does little theorizing, and gives fairly full vent to her understandable rancor. If someone doesn't get why oppressed peoples in tourist traps resent tourists, this is a pretty straightforward version.
At the Bottom of the River is a collection of little tales that seem half prose poem, and kind of between magic realism and surrealism. Giving a synopsis of plots doesn't convey why their active. "Girl," for instance, just recounts the directives a little girl receives, as though she were going over them in her head -- which I suppose she is, years later. In "In the Night," a little girl dreams of marrying a motherly woman who will tell her stories.
This is typical in its performative sentimentality, its strongly parallel cadence, its lush description, its acceptance of metaphor as little distinguished from what passes for literal.
-----------A Small Place
A Small Place gives a fairly straightforward impression of a St. Thomas idea of the British and American tourism and imperialism that forms the island's history and economy. She does little theorizing, and gives fairly full vent to her understandable rancor. If someone doesn't get why oppressed peoples in tourist traps resent tourists, this is a pretty straightforward version.
At the Bottom of the River is a collection of little tales that seem half prose poem, and kind of between magic realism and surrealism. Giving a synopsis of plots doesn't convey why their active. "Girl," for instance, just recounts the directives a little girl receives, as though she were going over them in her head -- which I suppose she is, years later. In "In the Night," a little girl dreams of marrying a motherly woman who will tell her stories.
The lyricism lasts more than the plot or, for me, the sense. Check this:
"In the night, way into the middle of the night, when the night isn't divided like a sweet drink into little sips, when there is no just before midnight, midnight, or just after midnight, when the night is round in some places, flat in some places, and in some places like a deep hole, blue at the edge, black inside, the night-soil men come" (6).
This is typical in its performative sentimentality, its strongly parallel cadence, its lush description, its acceptance of metaphor as little distinguished from what passes for literal.
Tillie Olsen
Olsen, Tillie. Tell Me a Riddle. Labor organizer Tillie Olsen recounts an old woman's death by cancer. The principles resemble her parents demographically, and the narrative feels recalled more than invented. The ethnic dialog gives some nice rhythms. The unsettled nature of the woman and her life, the systemic privation, is clear throughout.
The plot's simple. She'd live hither, her husband yon. They fight and snipe over old wounds. She's diagnosed with cancer. They go to a 3rd place, for medical reasons that don't make sense or help. No one supports or cares well or has more than a few good memories. She and her husband say they have taken advantage of each other all their lives. She won't budge. He finally caves in a bit when he finds she's dying. The characters seem uninterested in the social fountains of their misery. Olsen sees it, but she's above preaching, and one wants to cry with it.
The plot's simple. She'd live hither, her husband yon. They fight and snipe over old wounds. She's diagnosed with cancer. They go to a 3rd place, for medical reasons that don't make sense or help. No one supports or cares well or has more than a few good memories. She and her husband say they have taken advantage of each other all their lives. She won't budge. He finally caves in a bit when he finds she's dying. The characters seem uninterested in the social fountains of their misery. Olsen sees it, but she's above preaching, and one wants to cry with it.
Michael Herr
Even including O'Brien, Dispatches is still the most striking book on Nam I know of. It reads even stronger than it did nearly 30 years ago when it first came out. Herr catches the rush of detail, of tragedy that's too too too too too fast and thick to present as tragedy -- just pointless lethal ongoing murderous misery.
Herr is credited as a co-writer on the Apocalypse Now filmscript. My understanding is that John Milious wrote a script, Coppola made some changes, then shot a movie that was at least as much based on Heart of Darkness as his script. Apparently Herr wrote the VO narration spoken by Martin "Captain Willard" Sheen, apparently in a hotel in the Bay area sometime after most of the filming. However, there's no doubt that parts of Herr's book map to Coppola's movie too directly to be coincidental.
Herr lets one feel the soldiers' heroism without pretending that they're doing anything that makes sense or that they are not regularly committing atrocities -- torture, genocide, infanticide, you name it.
I wonder whether anyone has ever written anything like this for the Vietnamese. If so, I hope it gets translated.
Herr is credited as a co-writer on the Apocalypse Now filmscript. My understanding is that John Milious wrote a script, Coppola made some changes, then shot a movie that was at least as much based on Heart of Darkness as his script. Apparently Herr wrote the VO narration spoken by Martin "Captain Willard" Sheen, apparently in a hotel in the Bay area sometime after most of the filming. However, there's no doubt that parts of Herr's book map to Coppola's movie too directly to be coincidental.
Herr lets one feel the soldiers' heroism without pretending that they're doing anything that makes sense or that they are not regularly committing atrocities -- torture, genocide, infanticide, you name it.
I wonder whether anyone has ever written anything like this for the Vietnamese. If so, I hope it gets translated.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)