Learning how to Fly

In this blogpost, I’m exploring a different interpretation of the Dedalus/Icarus dynamic in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

            Everything that Stephen is trying to escape in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can be boiled down to one word: monotony. He is very romantic, intellectual, and has an innate sense of being different from and superior to everyone else. Stephen (even if he doesn’t always recognize or admit it) feels he has to go soaring above and beyond what anyone else can do much like his namesake soars above the labyrinth designed to constrain him. Connected to this, Stephen is constantly on the look-out for mysterious, enlightening experiences and goes through several of what seem to be these transformative moments. However, in nearly every case, Stephen’s attempts to transcend end with him plunging back into the ocean of monotony.

            The first major example of this is Stephen’s desire for an encounter with a Mercedes-like woman in which “weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him” and how he goes about encountering such a woman. At the end of chapter two, Stephen “wander[s] into a maze of narrow and dirty streets” and a woman reaches out to stop him, much like in his fantasies.  If we ignore the identity of the woman and the reason she stopped Stephen, the scene in her room can be read as a beautiful, transformative experience for Stephen in which he briefly soars above the maze of dirty streets outside. However, this doesn’t last long. Even on the next page, Stephen’s “wanderings” to the neighborhood containing the brothels are no longer sugar-coated, and in addition have become simply part of his regular routine.

            Stephen experiences something similar when he confesses at the end of chapter three and turns back to the Church after fancying himself for some time to be the worst sinner who ever lived. Immediately following his confession, Stephen seems happier and more connected to something emotionally than we have ever seen him. “The muddy streets were gay. He strode homeward, conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs … His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy.” However, Stephen again immediately takes this religious epiphany and reduces it to routine. A page in a half later he has his prayers reduced to a list of tasks to be done at specific times, is completely detached from them emotionally, and sees religion more as a way to get out of going to hell than anything else.

            Although Stephen’s decision to leave Ireland and pursue art looked like it might end in the same way, it was instead what finally broke the pattern. We don’t know this from the book, but based on our discussion of Joyce’s life after he left Ireland this feels to me like a reasonable claim. Joyce creates art as Stephen defines it, and never reduces it to merely a routine. Throughout his career he was constantly pushing to do something new, and each of his four books was dramatically different from the others. Much as Dedalus used his art to escape from the labyrinth, it is art that finally frees Stephen from the monotony that had previously defined his life.

Flying too Close to the Sun?

One character trait that has appeared again and again in Stephen is his arrogance. Though present throughout what we have read so far, Stephen’s sense of superiority has seemed to build throughout the novel. In Chapter One, we barely see this side of Stephen. Though we do see moments where he sees himself as above his peers and the school system, he is so overwhelmed and isolated in nearly every scene that on the whole he comes across as innocent and meek.

Stephen’s arrogance and sense of superiority build and become more evident in chapters two and three. Over the course of Chapter Two, Stephen’s sense of self-importance increases as he begins to see his life through the lens of The Count of Monte Cristo with himself as the hero. Stephen builds up a brooding, mysterious persona, spends hours wandering the streets in search of a romantic encounter intended especially for him, and sees himself as far more sophisticated and intellectually advanced than his classmates.

In Chapter Three, Stephen’s arrogance becomes deeply intertwined with his feeling of having sinned beyond redemption. He sees himself as the worst sinner that ever lived, and takes a kind of pride in this. In his mind, he is superior for his act of rebellion (sinning and acknowledging his sin without taking action to stop and ask for forgiveness) than those who truly are, or pretend to be, virtuous.

A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night though he knew it was in God’s power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy . . . on Sunday mornings he glanced coldly at the worshippers who stood bareheaded, four deep, outside the church, morally present at the mass which they could neither see nor hear. (111)

To me, the most interesting thing about Stephen’s arrogance is the possible implications it might have in light of his name. Though Dedalus, Stephen’s last name, could be in reference to his developing identity as an artist, the fact that his father shares the same name makes it possible to think of Stephen in terms of Dedalus’s son Icarus. In Greek mythology, Dedalus invented wings out of feathers and wax to allow himself and his son to escape from the labyrinth containing the minotaur. Dedalus warned his son to be careful not to fly to close to the sun, but Icarus dismissed his father’s warnings, and flew increasingly higher. Eventually the wax holding his wings together began to melt and, no longer able to fly, he plummeted into the ocean.

Stephen’s pride and arrogance reflects Icarus flying higher and higher despite his father’s warnings, and throughout the first 3 chapters I have been waiting for Stephen too to figuratively fall out of the sky. So far, however, everything seems to be working out more-or-less ok for him. As we move forward in the novel, I am curious to see if this connection will continue to play out, and whether or not Stephen will meet a fate similar to that of Icarus. 

Sethe and Denver

            Denver and Sethe are in very different situations at the end of Beloved than they were at the beginning. From the beginning of the novel, Sethe is described as quietly strong and a fiercely loving mother. Paul D says that she has “iron eyes and a backbone to match”, and Denver describes her mother as “the one who never looked away” no matter what happened. However, despite her seemingly endless strength, Sethe is constantly haunted by her past, both in the form of sudden rememories that drag her back to Sweethome and the ghost of her dead daughter. To Sethe, “the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.” (51)

            Denver, though 18 years old, seems like a much younger child. She is isolated by her family’s past, afraid to leave the yard, and incredibly lonely. It seems like she is very attached to Sethe, but we learn later that she is actually terrified of her mother. Since she was very young, the ghost of her sister has been Denver’s only friend.

            By the end of the novel, these two characters’ roles have dramatically changed. Denver is thriving, and much more independent. She works and supports Sethe, has friends outside of her family, and talks to both Paul D and Nelson Lord, two people whom she had previously disliked, and who had caused her trauma.

            Sethe, on the other hand, seems to have retreated into herself. When Paul D comes to see her,

To the right of him, where the door to the keeping room is ajar he hears humming . . . Of course, he thinks. That’s where she is—and she is. Lying under a quilt of merry colors. Her hair, like the dark delicate roots of good plants, spreads and curves on the pillow. Her eyes, fixed on the window, are so expressionless he is not sure she will know who he is . . . “You got to get up from here, girl.” He is nervous. This reminds him of something. “I’m tired, Paul D. So tired. I have to rest a while.” Now he knows what he is reminded of and he shouts at her, “Don’t you die on me! This is Baby Suggs’ bed! Is that what you planning?” (319-20)

So why did these changes occur? The obvious answer is Beloved: the harm she caused Sethe through her refusal or inability to understand Sethe is what causes Sethe’s decline, and her and Sethe’s all-consuming attention for each other forced Denver out into the world. However, I think there’s more to it than that. As noticed by Paul D, Sethe at the end of the novel is acting almost exactly how Baby Suggs did near the end of her life. Both Sethe and Baby Suggs were born and grew up slaves, and though they escaped or were bought into freedom, they both lost their children as a result of slavery. Both survive this, but are deeply hurt and for both of them, Beloved is in some way the straw that broke the camel’s back. Baby Suggs, though she doesn’t judge Sethe, retreats to her bed to reflect on “harmless” colors after Sethe kills her young daughter. Sethe at the time sees her killing of her daughter as an act of protection and love, but when Beloved leaves her at the end of the novel without understanding or accepting what had happened in the shed, Sethe too can no longer go on.

Denver is not affected in this way by Beloved at all. Unlike her mother and grandmother, she was born not into slavery, but as her mother crossed into freedom. If we interpret Beloved’s haunting as a physical representation of the idea that nothing ever dies and how Sethe is never able to leave her past behind her, it makes sense that Denver is not at all affected. She represents the later generations who are not haunted by Sweethome. After all, repeated three times in the last chapter are variations on the words, “it was not a story to pass on” (323). 

A Surprising Ending to The White Boy Shuffle

The White Boy Shuffle ends with Gunnar giving his daughter Naomi a bath and telling her the Kaufman history. I’m not sure how I expected The White Boy Shuffle to end, but this definitely wasn’t it. One of the things that surprised me is that Gunnar is telling Naomi the Kaufman history at all. He proudly tells his family history in his Santa Monica elementary school, but later seems ashamed and disdainful of his ancestors. At the beginning of chapter one, he describes himself as “Preordained by a set of weak-kneed DNA to shuffle in the footsteps of a long cowardly queue of coons, Uncle Toms, and faithful boogedy-boogedy retainers” (Beatty 5). Gunnar continues to distance himself from “Kaufmanism” as he grows up, developing his own identity in Hillside as a poet, basketball star, Gun Totin’ Hooligan, and member and eventual leader of the African American community. Until the end of the book, I thought that Gunnar’s last connection to his Kaufman history had been severed on the day of the Rodney King verdict when while looting with Scoby and Psycho Loco, he is caught by the police and beaten by his father, who tells him “You are not a Kaufman. I refuse to let you embarrass me” (137).

Even more surprising, however, was that he begins the story with his father, Rölf Kaufman. Even as a child proud of his family history, Gunnar never mentioned his father. In his own words, “The schoolyard chronicles never included my father’s misdeeds. I could distance myself from the fuckups of the previous generations, but his weakness shadowed my shame from sun to sun. His history was my history” (Beatty 21).

So what changed? I think that a large part of it is that Rölf joins the movement influenced by Gunnar and commits suicide, leaving a poem.  

I begin with the end—Rölf Kaufman, her grandfather, my dad, who died last week. The only officer in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department to commit suicide by eating his gun, choking on the firing pin and leaving the following poem in his locker.

Like the good Reverend King
I too “have a dream”
but when I wake up
I forget it and
remember I’m running late for work. (Beatty 226)

I definitely don’t think that Gunnar forgives his father, but maybe his death and poem show Gunnar a side of Rölf he didn’t know was there. As we see in the poem, Rölf too had dreams that he was never able to realize. However, unlike Gunnar who is “abandoning this sinking ship America” (Beatty 225), Rölf allowed society to turn him into just another cog in the machine.

These are also the final words in the book, giving them additional significance. I think Beatty chooses to end the novel with Rölf’s suicide because it drives home yet again how deeply engrained racism is although the novel takes place after the Civil Rights Movement. Even Rölf, the embodiment of Kaufmanism and a police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, is driven to suicide just like the thousands who have either already mailed Gunnar their poems and committed suicide or are pouring into Hillside. 

A Different Kind of Protest Novel

One of Richard Wright’s complaints about Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was that “the sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought” (Wright). Having read Their Eyes Were Watching God, I have to disagree. The novel is definitely thoughtful and deliberate, it just doesn’t convey the message that Wright wanted to hear. Unlike in Wright’s later novel, Native Son, race and racial tensions do not play a key role in Their Eyes Were Watching God, or really much of a role at all. Wright and other critics used this to claim that Hurston’s novel was not “serious fiction” and that it was “not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy” (Wright). However, though Hurston is not protesting the same things as Wright, I think it would be a mistake to say that she is just passively telling a story.  

An idea that many people had at the time that Hurston was writing was that African American literature had to protest racial inequality. As we saw in the documentary, Hurston disagreed, saying she was tired of writing about race and of having people tell her what to write about. After watching the documentary, however, I began to see that Their Eyes Were Watching God can in fact be read as protest fiction and that although Hurston does not directly make race an issue in Their Eyes Were Watching God, she is still protesting racial inequality. The difference between her protest and the protest novel people wanted her to write is that Hurston addresses racism as she encounters it in her own profession instead of the wider systematic oppression of African Americans throughout the country. Instead of asking society to grapple with the issues of systematic racism and inequality, Hurston is simply asking why she should be confined to a specific genre because of her race when she has so many additional things to say. 

Literary Choices in Their Eyes Were Watching God

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston employs many tactics that make the story come to life around the reader and force them to more deeply engage with the novel. Though the list is extensive, two things that have stood out to me so far have been the figurative language used by Hurston and how she writes all of the dialogue between characters in a southern dialect.

One of the characteristics that forced me to more deeply engage in the novel was to have the characters speaking in a dialect of the deep south. One example of is when Pheoby and Janie are talking about the gossipers on the porch, Janie says, “‘Ah don’t mean to bother wid tellen’ ‘em nothin’ Pheoby. T’ain’t worth de trouble. You can tell ‘em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat’s just de same as me ‘cause mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf’” (6). Unlike a book written with “standard” spelling and grammar, I found it impossible to speed read or skim over any of the dialogue in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Because I was not used to reading the dialect the characters were speaking in, I had to really slow down and take the time to work out what was being said. The result of this was not only that I paid a lot of attention to what the characters were saying, but that I could almost hear their voices in my head as I went, and that reading the dialogue felt more like listening to a conversation than reading words on a page.

Another aspect of Their Eyes Were Watching God that I felt made the story come to life was the use of figurative language in the descriptions of characters. One example of this is when Nanny is telling Janie the story of her life and describes the wife of her former master. Instead of simply describing her as cold-hearted and bitter, Nanny says that she “Look lak she been livin’ through uh hundred years in January without one day of spring . . . Ah tried not to feel de breeze off her face, but it got so cold in dere dat Ah was freezin’ to death under the kivvers” (17). I found this to be an incredibly powerful metaphor because the reader can see the woman much more clearly, both physically and in terms of her personality and its effects on Nanny. The other metaphors and uses of figurative language have had the same results on me. They make it much easier to visualize the characters and the setting, and make the novel a lot of fun to read!

I’m curious to observe how these two literary devices develop throughout Their Eyes Were Watching God, and how they continue to affect my reading of the novel.  

Connecting With His Roots

Shortly before giving the speech that attracts the attention of the Brotherhood, the narrator stops and buys three yams from a street vendor. In this moment, we see the narrator briefly reconnect with his roots and realize that he’s been kept running his entire life before he joins the Brotherhood and has the veil lowered over his eyes once more.

When he sees the man selling yams, the narrator is overcome with nostalgia. This is an unusual emotion for the narrator; normally, he seems to be ashamed of his past and avoids talking or even thinking about it. Especially in Harlem, we have repeatedly seen the narrator try and cast off his past self, all connections to his former life, and move forward as a new person. For example, when the narrator first arrives in the north, he describes in depth how he plans to redo his wardrobe to create a new persona for himself. Later when he is having breakfast in a diner, he refuses to order the special consisting of foods he associates with the south, and instead chooses toast, something plain and generic.  

I also saw it as quite ironic that the moment where the narrator realizes “I yam what I am” directly precedes his being recruited by the Brotherhood where his identity is erased and sense of individuality is suppressed. Immediately upon his acceptance into the Brotherhood, the narrator is given a new name and persona, erasing the past he had just begun to connect to, and told that there is no “I” and that no one’s individual beliefs or history are significant in the bigger picture.

I also think that the narrator briefly realizes here that he has been kept running for his entire life. He says, “What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? . . . I had never formed a personal attitude towards so much. I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple…” However, though he has made this realization, he is still far from discovering invisibility. Instead of trying to appear as though he still believes in the accepted attitudes while secretly having his own opinions, he decides to just flat out believe and do whatever he wants. We can see, even by the end of this scene, that this isn’t going to work out for the narrator; “Yet the freedom to eat yams was far less than I had expected upon coming to the city. An unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth now as I bit the end of the yam and threw it into the street; it had been frost-bitten”.