Future Posts will be for the class The 20th Century Novel

The BB

In the chapter “Gangsters”, Randy shoots Benji with a BB gun, leaving a BB stuck just above Benji’s eye. Benji decides not to see a doctor, but is then unable to remove the BB on his own. At the end of the chapter, Ben says,

It’s still there. Under the skin. It’s good for a story, something to shock people with after I’ve known them for years and feel a need to surprise them with the other boy… I asked a doctor about it once, about blood poisoning over time. He shook his head. Then he shrugged. “It hasn’t killed you yet” (159)

With Sag Harbor being semi-autobiographical, a natural thing to wonder after reading this section is whether or not the adult Colson Whitehead actually does have a BB stuck in his eye socket. In an interview for The New Yorker just before the publication of Sag Harbor, Whitehead was asked this very question. Although had he admitted earlier in the interview that the BB gun episode was real and “too stupid an escapade to leave out [of the novel]”, when asked specifically about the BB he says only, “don’t we all?” .

While frustratingly vague, this answer is in line with Benji’s transformation into Ben and how it ties to coming of age as a more general concept. The presence of the BB has no physical consequences for Benji. His parents don’t ever notice the scar, and his doctor seems pretty nonchalant about the whole thing. It’s only significance lies that it is physical proof for the older Ben that he and Benji (who he refers to as “the other boy”) are in fact the same person.

The gap between Ben and Benji is so wide that the reader, and in fact Ben himself, are unsure as to how Benji will grow up and become him. There is the sense that if Ben were somehow at the Labor Day Party at the end of the novel, Benji would never even consider him as a possibility when trying to spot his older self. We talked about this feeling as representative of coming of age in general. Someone mentioned that the amount of change that occurs makes it almost like the person you may be in ten years is someone else entirely who has just stolen your name and continued living as you. For Ben, who very much feels this way, the BB is a way to ground himself and realize that both selves are real--he can have been Benji, be Ben, and still become someone else entirely. Like Sag, the BB is simply a part of who he is, and at the same time something that forces him to acknowledge and embrace the paradox of his life.

If you want to read the full interview, here’s the URL: http://www.newyorker.com/the-new-yorker-blog/fiction-q-a-colson-whitehead

Hugo Lamb, Immortal Villain?

I didn’t like Hugo in Black Swan Green, but I also didn’t quite see him as the type who would grow up to join a league of super-villains who achieve immortality through drinking children’s blood. Something characteristic of David Mitchell’s works is that they take place in a single literary universe; characters introduced or featured one novel often turn up in others, but always in a way that is consistent with, or at least doesn’t contradict, previous descriptions of them. This is the case with Hugo, who in addition to appearing in Black Swan Green is one of the main characters in The Bone Clocks. I did not make this connection until Mr. Mitchell (the teacher, not the author) mentioned it in class today, but now thinking back on when I read The Bone Clocks about a year ago, Hugo’s childhood sheds a significant amount of light on why he eventually decides to join the evil Anchorites when offered the opportunity as a young adult.

The Hugo in The Bone Clocks is almost exactly how one would imagine a college-aged Hugo to be. He goes to Cambridge, and has the same elitist, amoral personality, and ability to use language as a tool and a weapon that he did in Black Swan Green. Hugo’s greatest fear as a teenager is that he’s going to end up being like his father. He tells Jason:

“I was you myself, Jace, once. Just the same. Always afraid. But there’s another reason why you must smoke this cigarette… If you don’t kill ‘Not Today’”--Hugo did a horror-movie-trailer voice-- “One day you’ll wake up, look in the mirror, and see Uncle Brian and Uncle Michael!” (65)

Most of what Hugo does seems to be in an attempt to differentiate himself from his father. He develops his own sense of style and what is cool, steals (“liberates”) when he feels like it, and takes up smoking. However, despite all of this, Jason still remarks that Hugo reminds him of Uncle Brian (61).

A similar dynamic exists in The Bone Clocks, although it is not explicitly mentioned. Hugo had maintained his amorality and various infuriating mannerisms, but much as Jason observed in Black Swan Green, it still seems like Uncle Brian has significant power over him. Hugo attends Cambridge, one of the schools Uncle Brian had pushed Julia to consider in Black Swan Green, and Hugo’s pretensions and elitism could also have increased in part due to his father’s influence. It is possible that when Hugo is offered immortality and a chance to join the Anchorites, he accepts it not because he is evil, but because he sees it as his one chance to finally eliminate the possibility of being like his father, and do something completely beyond the realm of what he can control, or even comprehend.

Fingerbone as a Landscape Painting

Something that I found interesting in Housekeeping is how the deeply personal stories of the characters are set against the background of geological time, where the whole of human existence is inconsequential and transpires in the blink of an eye. One example of this is the town of Fingerbone itself, a place “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere”. Fingerbone is a place of huge significance to Ruth’s family—it’s the site of the Great Derailment, the town where Sylvia raised her children, the place Helen returned to and left her children before she took her life, and where Ruth grows up under the care of Sylvia, Lily and Nona, and Sylvie. But despite the connections the main characters have to the town, the reader is constantly reminded that Fingerbone is just a temporary dot on the map that “flooded yearly, and had burned once…a diaspora threatened [it] always”. Even the name of the town reflects that it is a tiny and unessential component of something larger that will also eventually decay and disappear.

The realization that the things we often see as the most solid in our lives—civilization, history, our society—are impermanent and in the larger scheme of things irrelevant is a difficult one to accept, or even wrap one’s head around. Something that immediately came to mind while reading the early chapters of the novel that helped me better visualize Fingerbone against the backdrop of geological time was a Romantic landscape painting, such as the one below (painted by Simeon Marcus Larson).

            The river, trees, rocks, and sky dominate the landscape to such an extent that the village on the left-hand side is nearly invisible. Presumably there are people who live in these houses, each with their own important story, but when placed in the middle of the landscape portrayed in the painting, the entire village fades into the background until it is barely visible, much less significant. 

The Rosenbergs

One of the things that struck me as strange and a little morbid about the opening of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar was Esther’s obsession with the Rosenbergs. Reading more of the novel and doing some additional research has added more dimensions to this detail, with worrying implications.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were a married couple who lived in New York City and were executed on June 19, 1953 after being charged with conspiracy to commit espionage and transmit information regarding military technologies to the Soviet Union. The method used in their execution was the electric chair. It is not immediately clear why Esther is so empathetic, but throughout the following chapters we see her describe herself again and again as an imposter in New York City. She’s been presenting herself for years as the smart, hardworking student who aspires to go to graduate school and write poetry, and feels like she’s been exposed as a fake when she realizes in her conversation with Jay Cee that that’s not who she is anymore. She even says when thinking back on the conversation later “I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicious I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer” (29). Esther also describes herself as having an acute awareness of how to present herself as someone she’s not.

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and witty. (27)

It’s possible that Esther’s feelings of being an imposter and not belonging in New York City are connected to her empathy towards the Rosenbergs and fascination with their execution.

            There might also be some dark foreshadowing here. Knowing that The Bell Jar is semi-autobiographical, I learned a little bit about Sylvia Plath to see if that would provide any insights into this scene. Much like Esther, Plath was studious, excelled academically, and spent a month in New York City as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine after her junior year of college. It was during this experience that Plath first experienced the depression that would affect her for the rest of her life. She began electroconvulsive therapy to treat her depression, but would still make her first documented suicide attempt later that summer. I wonder if these events will be depicted in the novel, and if Esther’s fixation on what electrocution would feel like is connected to this treatment that the person her character is based on undergoes.

            I might be reading too much into this opening scene, but given how Esther is feeling like an imposter and that Plath, who was treated using electroconvulsive therapy is depicting Esther, a character based on herself, as obsessed with electrocution, it seemed like too much to ignore. The opening paragraphs were disturbing when we read them the first time. Rereading them with this new information, I am getting even more worried about Esther.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath 

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.