The Public Burning (1976)
Monday, June 03, 2002 | 0 Comments
By Robert Coover
In the opening pages of Robert Coover's The Public Burning, the narrator, Vice President Richard Nixon, insecure about his notoriously sinister jowls, thinks to himself, "isn't that a hell of a thing—that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?" Set during the days immediately preceding the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Coover's satire explodes the absurd ties that bind infotainment to politics, words to history, and images to morality. Nixon makes a suitable and surprisingly sympathetic anti-hero, then, for he was perhaps America's first politician to be publicly made, broken, reborn, then destroyed, each act broadcast live on television. Coover assumes our familiarity with those images and puts them to effective use, deliberately sounding echoes of Nixon's "I am not a crook" Watergate days while revisiting the glorious victory of his "Checkers" speech. Nixon is simultaneously the candidate on stage, sweat-soaked and scruffy beside Kennedy's sheen, and the President-elect with arms raised, victorious, finally, in '68.
"In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities—why did I keep forgetting that?" The fictional Nixon's question is at the heart of Coover's satire, and the heydays of the McCarthy Era give him ample fodder. It's as if Coover is attempting to embody all of the complicated contradictions of the '50s in a single novel, often to hilarious affect. Betty Crocker comes to life as the personification of idealized Eisenhower-era domesticity. Hollywood horror creatures walk the streets in 3D Technicolor, living projections of xenophobic hysteria. Walt Disney and Cecille B. DeMille elbow each other aside in their fight for marketing rights to the execution. Eisenhower morphs into Gary Cooper, strutting toward a potentially apocalyptic showdown at High Noon while uttering the lyric verse of Time Magazine (the nation's Poet Laureate). And, most prominently, the irrational demands of the American populace become a walking, talking, cursing, spitting caricature in the person of Uncle Sam, who wants only to defeat his nebulous arch-villain, The Phantom, an enemy that most closely resembles communism, but is actually anything that might be labeled "un-American," a loaded term, no doubt, in the early-'50s.
Knowing something of The Public Burning's infamous reputation, I picked it up expecting to read a didactic denouncement of conservative hate-mongering built upon an equally didactic eulogy to the Rosenbergs, those most tragic and useable icons of the Old Left. What I got, instead, was something much more ambivalent and cynical: a satire with targets across the political spectrum. In an onanistic fantasy that would make Portnoy blush, Nixon attacks Ethel's naïve devotion to an irrelevant idealism, voicing the questions that all on the Left have struggled to answer in post-WWII America: "What about Stalin's purges? The death camps in Siberia? The massacres in Poland? What about Rudolph Slansky just last fall in Prague? Eh?" Her response is typical of the impotent liberalism that has characterized so much of the New Left. Coover captures this beautifully in an image of Julius and Ethel exchanging letters of praise for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that they root for despite their complete ignorance of baseball. Edith writes: "It is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory."
The warden at Sing-Sing offers an interesting insight into the Rosenbergs: "the problem has been their habit of behaving in what they probably think of as, well, symbolic ways—you know, acting like they're establishing historical models or precedents or something." There's a strange irony to the line, given its context within a novel that, even in its title, treats their execution as a sacrificial rite. As with much postmodern fiction of the '70s, that irony is often so thick here that it becomes difficult to find a foundation. Are the Rosenbergs heroic martyrs or treasonous dupes? Both, Coover seems to say, and neither. Left and Right, right and wrong all collapse into an absurd political/social/moral quagmire that is put on ridiculous display in the novel's final pages. At the site of the execution—fantastically transposed from Sing Sing to the middle of Times Square—Nixon appears with his pants around his ankles, fully erect, then brings the crowd to a riotous frenzy as history dissolves around them. Abolitionists, comanches, and redcoats stand shoulder to shoulder with the members of the Supreme Court, who roll around in the piles of shit left there by the Republican elephant. Uncle Sam appears in a flash of light, then bends Nixon over, sodomizing him. "You're not the same as when I was a boy," is all the Vice President can muster in reply. It ain't a pretty scene, but neither is America, Coover screams.
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Benito Cereno (1855)
Saturday, January 05, 2002 | 0 Comments
By Herman Melville
Note: The following was written for a graduate seminar on the American Renaissance. It is an attempt to apply theories of cinema narrative to prose fiction.
"That First Comprehensive Glance": The Cinematic Suspense of Benito Cereno
But that first comprehensive glance . . . rested but an instant upon them.
— from Benito Cereno
Once the body had been rendered immobile and attention had become focused upon the face or gaze, the law, desire and perversion made their way into the cinema.
— Pascal Bonitzer (18)
Abstract
With the impressive body of literary scholarship generated by Formalist analysis and modern narratological studies at our disposal, the idea of applying film narrative theory to literature — particularly to a story like "Benito Cereno," written forty years before Thomas Edison first screened moving pictures for an American audience — might seem unfounded at best. The influence of the cinema on artists of the twentieth century has been obvious and well-documented, but, as Mike Frank has recently asked, "What might narratology look like if we were to take cinema — particularly 'classical Hollywood cinema' — as the paradigmatic instance of storytelling?" [1] In the strange, and often contentious, case of "Benito Cereno," film theory offers, I will argue, the ideal framework and vocabulary for explaining exactly how Melville's narrative functions. Mine is only the latest in the long line of such inquiries, but it will reveal that — as has often been the case for readers trapped in "Benito Cereno"'s world — previous scholars, hoping for answers, have been forced to look in the wrong direction.
Survey of Scholarship
In September 1856, a reviewer for Knickerbocker described "Benito Cereno" as "painfully interesting," concluding: "in reading it we became nervously anxious for the solution of the mystery it involves." This sentiment is echoed by many of Melville's contemporary reviewers, who frequently characterize The Piazza Tales as an enjoyable read and as a welcomed return to form after the "unfortunate" and "morbid" appearance of Pierre. [2] The appeal of "Benito Cereno" can be attributed largely to its much-discussed narrative structure, one that implicates the reader in its mysteries, forcing a suspense-filled and continuous process of mis- and re-interpretation. The form of "Benito Cereno" is, in fact, uniquely and inextricably bound to its content. In a story about ambiguously shifting perceptions, the manner by which we view the action is as significant as the action itself. Critics, both formalists and nonformalists alike, have been universally intrigued by Melville's precise manipulation of point of view, an interest piqued, no doubt, by the obvious fallibility of its "center of perception," Amaso Delano, and by the text's unusual moments of objective narration (Seelye 104). While much of "Benito Cereno" is viewed only as it is reflected through the unreliable and subjective gaze of the American captain, an objective narrator does occasionally intrude upon the narrative, revealing its self-reflexive frame: we are told that the text we are reading is, in fact, some unknown third party's written narrative and that the events depicted within have been confused by memory, told "retrospectively," and "irregularly given" (255). That "Benito Cereno" ends with an elided legal transcript — which ostensibly, at least, is intended to reveal the "whole truth" — has been of little comfort to those attempting to systematize Melville's narrative strategy.
Melville challenges astute readers of "Benito Cereno" to question the reliability of its sources from the opening paragraphs. In what is perhaps the story's most often-cited passage, Captain Delano is described as:
a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine. (162)
In the century and a half that have passed since the original publication of "Benito Cereno," "the wise" have consistently judged Delano's quickness and perception to be far less than ordinary. While some consensus has been reached concerning Delano's role in Melville's narrative structure — he is generally described as an "unreliable narrator" whose misperceptions drip with irony — critics have struggled to develop a vocabulary capable of explaining exactly how Delano's point of view interacts with other narrative voices in the story.
In one of the earliest formalist readings of "Benito Cereno," "The Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville" (1953), Charles Hoffman accounts for only two of the story's narrative voices: Delano's subjective point of view and the objective trial deposition that follows. Hoffman praises the former in Aristotelian terms, claiming, "for dramatic intensity, concentrated action, and structural unity, no better choice could have been made" (426). Delano serves, for Hoffman, as the reader's surrogate, the "innocent eye" who must make sense of the ambiguous impressions made upon him. This reading echoes through much of the scholarship that has followed. [3]Interestingly, Hoffman describes Delano as "brave and resourceful," a misinterpretation symptomatic of a highly problematic article. Along with his failure to mention the story's other narrative voice(s) in any terms, Hoffman skims too quickly over the deposition, calling it a simple rehash of the actual Delano's original document, an attempt to "gain in verisimilitude," and an aesthetic failure. "Melville," he writes, "did not choose or else did not know how to make use of Delano's point of view as an observer to reveal enough of the mystery so that he might dispense with the cumbersome method of the document" (428).
Guy Cardwell rejects Hoffman's overly-simplified reading, claiming that "Benito Cereno" is, ultimately, morally ambiguous, and that the complexity of Melville's narrative is central to that ambiguity. In "Melville's Gray Story" (1959), Cardwell criticizes those who have reduced "Benito Cereno" to the level of simple detective story, as if it were "a kind of television melodrama that divides its characters into unequivocally good guys and bad guys" (165). Instead, he sees the world of "Benito Cereno" as one where "optimism and despair are mixed in normal proportions" (164). Cardwell claims that Melville helps us toward this interpretation by "going behind" his characters on two (and only two) specific occasions: the first in the oft-cited description of Delano quoted above; the second just prior to the shaving scene, when Cereno's assumed affection for Babo is compared to that of Johnson and Byron for their servants. While strangely focused on only two scenes, Cardwell's discussion is the first to seriously consider a third narrative voice in the story. The consequence, he argues, is the temporary transport of the reader outside of the story, a jarring moment that forces the reader through irony to confront the moral implications of the events he or she is witnessing. "Captain Delano, then," Cardwell writes, "is not simply the obtuse observer, a detective-story character who watches the plot unfold. He is in a serious sense the perceiving center, . . . With Delano as our guide we see that the world is not neatly dichotomized, does not fall neatly into a simple Manichean dualism" (164). For Cardwell, the deposition serves a similar purpose, pulling us out of a suspense-filled mystery and grounding us in the "real world," where slavery, xenophobia, and economics are moral issues too complex to be described in black and white terms.
Cardwell's differentiation between Delano, as the "perceiving center," and a separate narrative voice that is able to "go behind" characters is further developed by John Douglas Seelye in Melville: The Ironic Diagram (1970). Echoing earlier scholars, Seelye calls Delano "well-meaning but obtuse," but then shifts his focus to the narrative voice who is actually directing our reading (104) [4]. "As in 'Bartleby, the Scrivener,'" Seelye writes:
the center of perception is inadequate, a seafaring version of the lawyer, but here detached from point of view by a delicate operation that allows a third "person" to interpose his wry perspective, shaping Delano's simple optimism into a vehicle of facetiousness. We see things through the American's eyes, but as through spectacles whose rose tints seem somehow discomforting. (104)
By attributing human characteristics to this "third person" — he is "wry" and able to "shape" our understanding of events — Seelye raises an important question: if the "third person" is deliberately manipulating our perception, then what is his motivation for doing so? [5]
In Melville's Short Fiction: 1853-1856 (1977), William B. Dillingham ascribes similar agency to Seelye's "third person." Dillingham intends to correct the "common misconception" that "Benito Cereno" is told from only two narrative perspectives, and does so by identifying four distinct voices, which he labels the official, the individual, the authorial, and the reportorial (243). The "official" voice is that of the deposition section, which serves as the "legal stamp" that officially settles the affair. However, like Cardwell, Dillingham identifies Melville's rhetorical use of irony here, claiming that he "transforms the deposition [into] . . . a commentary on the vanity and foolishness of ordinary mankind who cannot see or will not see the sameness of all"(244). The "individual" voice is Delano's, distinguished from the others by its literalness and by its simplistic figures of speech. According to Dillingham, because Delano is blunt-thinking and incapable of irony, his perception is likewise limited, provoking juvenile similes like his description of the negresses as "unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves" (198). Dillingham's is a subtle, but important, distinction, as it necessarily attributes all of "Benito Cereno"'s complex metaphoric language to the "authorial" voice. "Its style," Dillingham writes, "is a metaphor for its message. . . . Melville depicts what Delano sees, but the terms of that depiction, that is, the figures of speech that make the correspondences necessary for the idea of similitude, are usually not Delano's" (244-45). Instead, the story's trademark irony — which deliberately targets Delano and, therefore, could not represent his own point of view — is clearly "authorial." Finally, Dillingham identifies a fourth narrative voice, the "reportorial," which is distinguished from the "authorial" by its neutral tone and informational function. Dillingham cites the story's opening paragraph as an example of the "reportorial" voice: "It embodies no worldview or any character's viewpoint. It furnishes facts and is nonevaluative" (243). Dillingham's struggle to find (or, in fact, to create) a vocabulary for explaining Melville's narrative strategy is obviously by no means unique. It is also far from effective, leading him to unnecessarily divide one voice — the narrator's — into two, the "authorial" and "reportorial."
A New Vocabulary
In my summary of existing scholarship I have intentionally remained faithful to the original authors' language, a decision that has left this paper littered with sixteen different terms all used to describe the same thing. [6] I would like now to propose a terminology that will hopefully provide both a much-needed clarity and consistency and a better-suited entrance into film narrative theory. In forming this vocabulary I have relied heavily upon Seymour Chatman's Coming to Terms, a book that builds upon Wayne Booth's and David Bordwell's work by examining side-by-side the rhetoric of narrative in fiction and film.
Chatman would simply use the term narrator to describe Cardwell's "voice that goes behind," Seelye's "third person," and Dillingham's "authorial" and "reportorial" voices. For Chatman, the most important distinction is between those within and those outside of the story world, those able to see the action and those able only to narrate it. "The narrator's task," Chatman writes, "is not to go strolling with the characters but to narrate what happens to them, whether by telling or showing" (120). Therefore, the narrator of "Benito Cereno" is that unidentified person who has constructed the tale from outside of the story world, who comments ironically on Delano's "undistrustful good nature," and who admittedly elides the deposition.
Because of his distinction between the characters within the story world and the narrator who "tells" or "shows" them, Chatman finds fault with the overused term "point of view." The very term implies seeing, an act from which the narrator is necessarily excluded because of his/her/its location outside of the story. Instead, Chatman proposes a terminological distinction between the narrator's and a character's "points of view." Slant, for Chatman, captures the "psychological, sociological, and ideological ramifications of the narrator's attitudes, which may range from neutral to highly charged" (143). Much recent study of "Benito Cereno," then, has been concerned with uncovering those ramifications as they are revealed by the narrator's slant. Why, for instance, does the narrator elide the deposition, thereby further silencing Babo? To describe a character's "point of view," Chatman settles on filter, a term that captures:
something of the mediating function of a character's consciousness-perception, cognition, emotion, reverie-as events are experienced from a space within the story world. . . . [Slant] catches the nuance of the choice made by the implied author about which among the character's imaginable experiences would best enhance the narration-which areas of the story world the implied author wants to illuminate and which to keep obscure. (144)
Filter seems a particularly appropriate term for describing Delano's role in the narrative, as much of the story's action is "filtered" through the lens of his gaze for obvious dramatic and ironic effect. This metaphor will be examined more closely in the final section of the paper.
Finally, Chatman makes a useful distinction between the unreliable narrator — a term that for decades has been used interchangeably to describe the problematic "points of view" of both the narrator and characters — and the fallible filter, Chatman's own term for "a character's perceptions and conceptions of the story events, the traits of the other characters, and so on." Unreliable narrator, then, is used only to describe those instances when the narration itself is problematic, "since the word presupposes that there somewhere exists a 'reliable' account" (149). Whereas fallible filter describes a character's "inaccurate, misled, or self-serving perception" (150). For Chatman, "fallible" is a term preferable to "unreliable" because it attributes less culpability to the characters. Captain Delano, after all, does not ask to be a "perceiving center." He is merely living the story, not representing it.
Film Narrative and Cinematic Suspense
The distinctions made above, though subtle, are absolutely vital for explaining the workings of "Benito Cereno," a story that relies not only on a famously fallible filter, but also on a deceptively unreliable narrator. Simply fixing a single terminology and doing nothing more, however, does little but provide some much-needed clarity and consistency to the discussion (or add more unnecessary jargon to the pile, depending on your opinion). The real value of Chatman's work (and hopefully, by association, this paper) can be found, instead, in its analysis of the interrelations that exist between fiction and film narrative. In the case of "Benito Cereno," it is Chatman's discussion of the latter that, in fact, best explains Melville's strategy.
In the early chapters of Coming to Terms, Chatman differentiates between Narrative, Argument, and Description, examining closely how each interacts with the other. To Chatman, Description is the most interesting of the "other text-types" because of the complexity of its relation to Narrative. As Gérard Genette writes, "description might be conceived independently of narration, but in fact it is never found in a so to speak free state. . . . Description is quite naturally ancilla narrationis, the ever-necessary, ever-submissive, never-emancipated slave" (qtd. in Chatman 18). In classical Hollywood cinema, Description and Narrative interact in a different, though no less complex manner. [7] To aid in the discussion, Chatman differentiates between explicit and tacit Description, and offers a scene from Touch of Evil as an example. Detective Quinlan's first appearance has been described in the published cutting continuity as:
Very low angle M[edium]S[hot] of Quinlan slowly thrusting open the car door: a grossly corpulent figure in an overcoat, a huge cigar in the middle of his puffy face. (qtd. in Chatman 43)
Here, in this prose description, the compound adjective "grossly corpulent" explicitly describes Quinlan, fixing a particular trait on him. As readers, we are left with little choice but to imagine him as explicitly "corpulent," as opposed to "obese," "heavy," or only "slightly overweight." In Touch of Evil, however, Quinlan is described tacitly: we see him thrust open the car door, but our focus is directed toward his actions, rather than his appearance. As Chatman writes, "The film shows only features; it is up to the audience to interpret them — that is, to assign them adjectival names" (43). To Chatman, the cinematic description could only be called explicit if Welles then cut to an extreme close-up of the folds of fat in Quinlan's face. Even then, though, each viewer would still decide on his or her own if Quinlan were "grossly corpulent" or merely stout. The result, then, is an unavoidable ambiguity in cinematic Description. "Only words," Chatman writes, "can fix descriptions conclusively" (44).
That last statement, however, is repeatedly called into question by "Benito Cereno," a story that consistently frustrates readers by its absolute refusal — excepting a few notable instances — to fix descriptions conclusively. Seelye was one of the first, for instance, to notice how precisely Melville uses diction to obscure description, pointing to the 115 conjectural expressions — ambivalent uses of words like seem, appear, perhaps, possibly, evidently, might, presume, conjecture, imputed, and thought — that appear in the story's 97 pages. [8] "These phrases, instruments of style," writes Seelye, "reflect the lamination of false appearances and unanswerable paradoxes that confound perception and inquiry, a fiction in which things are never as the 'seem'" (105). A similar observation is made by Nancy Roundy in "Present Shadows: Epistemology in Melville's 'Benito Cereno.'" Roundy notes how the world of "Benito Cereno" becomes blurred by the story's abundant use of metaphoric language. "A metaphor does not assert that something is," she writes, "but only that it is like some other thing. Sharp boundaries, certainties, disappear and we are in a world of appearances" (347).
Another method used by Melville to avoid fixing descriptions conclusively is the double negative, a sentence construction that describes what something is not, thereby forcing the reader to assign his or her own unique adjectival name to that thing that is being described. Examples of this practice occur with astounding regularity throughout the first two-thirds of the story, most notably in the narrator's description of Delano's "undistrustful good nature, [he was] not liable . . . to indulge in personal alarms." But a particularly impressive display of double negatives describes (or, does not describe) Delano's first impressions of Benito Cereno and Babo:
But the good conduct of Babo, hardly more than the ill-behaviour of others, seemed to withdraw the half-lunatic Don Benito from his cloudy languor. Not that such precisely was the impression made by the Spaniard on the mind of his visitor. The Spaniard's individual unrest was, for the present, but noted as a conspicuous feature in the ship's general affliction. Still, Captain Delano was not a little concerned at what he could not help taking for the time to be Don Benito's unfriendly indifference toward himself. The Spaniard's manner, too, conveyed a sort of sour and gloomy disdain, which he seemed at no pains to disguise [my italics]. (169-70)
That second sentence, in particular, deliberately resists fixing an explicit description on the scene, showing us only the precise impression that was not made on our filter. From the opening of "Benito Cereno" until the point when the scales drop from Delano's eyes, the word "not" is used more than 170 times. In nearly half of those instances, it is used in a double-negative construction, such as, "not unlike," "not unwilling," or "not uncharacteristic." [9]
The cumulative effect of Melville"s diction is, as Roundy says, the creation of a "world of appearances." But it's a world where even appearance is blurred, a world almost completely devoid of explicit description. Chatman's discussion of film description again offers an appropriate analogy: as with the diction of "Benito Cereno," "Film gives us plenitude without specificity. Its descriptive offerings are at once visually rich and verbally impoverished" (39). Like film viewers forced to ascribe particular adjectival descriptions to Detective Quinlan, readers of "Benito Cereno" must actively create its story world with only confounding images as cues.
But "Benito Cereno" is not completely free of explicit description. Several scholars have pointed to the story's opening paragraphs as the work of an omniscient narrator who grounds the reader in a world of fact. [10] The narrator returns occasionally to this non-evaluative, non-ironic tone, notably in his description of the cuddy in the opening paragraphs of the shaving scene, and in those moments when we are shown things — such as the two black men who stare intently at Delano — that are "unperceived by the American" (224). There are countless examples of an equivalent narrative voice in film. The opening establishing shots of several Hitchcock films — Rear Window and Psycho, in particular — are frequently cited by narratologists, including Chatman. Rear Window, for instance, opens with a shot of window blinds being raised, followed by several complex extreme long shots, as the camera moves through the window and "randomly" examines the daily activities of the neighborhood. As Chatman notes, were the film to continue in this manner, it might be mistaken for a documentary on city life (46). We as viewers accept this nonhuman agent, this camera, and trust it in much the same way that we trust the narrator of "Benito Cereno." Just as we believe that Rear Window begins on a hot (94 degrees according to a close-up of a thermometer) morning (we see the composer shaving, the childless couple waking to the sound of an alarm clock), we trust that "Benito Cereno" begins in 1799 and that Delano is from Duxbury, Massachusetts.
But while many have examined the slant of "Benito Cereno"'s narrator, few have questioned his reliability much beyond brief mentions of his "retrospective" and "irregularly given" narrating of the story. However, in one passage that has been conspicuously overlooked by previous scholars, the narrator, making manipulative use of his established credibility, deliberately deceives us. In the opening pages of "Benito Cereno," Delano stands with Cereno and Babo, listening to the Spanish captain tell of his harrowing voyage. Overcome by coughing fits, Cereno has difficulty recounting his tale. Finally, the narrator steps in: "as this portion of the story was very brokenly delivered, the substance only will here be set down" (174). What follows is a long (321 words) paragraph written in the objective, nonironic style of the story's opening paragraphs. While the passage is clearly marked as Cereno's telling, the effect of the shift in diction and tone is unmistakable. Already immersed in a world of shifting visions and "modified" appearances, readers cling for stability to the explicit descriptions of the trusted narrator.
At the time of the publication of Coming to Terms, Chatman had only one famous example with which to illustrate unreliable narration in film. [11] It serves, however, as a helpful analogy to the deceptive shift of tone in "Benito Cereno." Stage Fright (1950) is another of Hitchcock's experiments with suspense and cinematic narrative, a film in which the supposedly objective camera serves complicity in the crime. Stage Fright opens as Johnny and Eve speed to Eve's father's house. Johnny is telling Eve of his discovery of a murder committed by his lover, Charlotte. "I had to help her," Johnny says. "Anybody would." As he begins narrating his story to Eve, the frame dissolves into a "lying flashback," in which we are shown Johnny's version of what "really" happened. It is only later, when we learn of his criminal tendencies, that we begin to doubt Johnny's story. What makes Stage Fright unique is that for the first half of the film, we are given absolutely no reason to question the validity of what the narrator is showing us. As film-goers, we have learned to accept the camera's rendering of the world as truth, as if it were a binding contract. However, as in "Benito Cereno," the narrator of Stage Fright has deliberately broken that contract, manipulating our trust for dramatic effect. Again, Chatman's insights into film are suitably applicable to "Benito Cereno": when the story's narrator takes over from Cereno in the telling of his tale, "seeing is precisely not believing" (131).
In "Benito Cereno," however, it is not only the narrator who misleads us, a fact that has hardly gone unnoticed. Delano's fallibility as a filter, as I've already shown, is the focus of many of the early analyses of the story. But the existing literature does little more than name Delano's "unreliability" as such. It is in explaining Melville's use of perceptual subjectivity that film theory offers its most useful insight into "Benito Cereno." For while the filter in film still emerges from the perceptual consciousness of a character (as in prose), it does so using different methods, most notably the eyeline match and close-up. Rear Window again serves as a classic (and well-worn) example. After surveying the courtyard outside of the window, the camera then tracks back, revealing the film's protagonist, Jimmy Stewart's L. B. Jeffries. He is, we assume, asleep: he is lying, with eyes closed, in a wheelchair, one leg elevated in a hard cast. Hitchcock then elides time by fading-in to a medium shot of Jeffries, who is now sitting up and reaching to answer a telephone. As he speaks to a friend, Jeffries lifts his gaze from the phone to something out of frame, presumably to something behind the camera. Hitchcock then cuts, in an eyeline match, to the familiar long shot of the courtyard. [12] Now, however, it is Jeffries's view of his neighbors that we see. Now, it is Jeffries who is watching Miss Torso stretch and the sun-bathers disrobe, not the objective narrator.
The impact of the eyeline match has been of interest to filmmakers and film theorists since D. W. Griffith first began to experiment with the use of close-ups in his early shorts. Soviet filmmakers of the late-1910s pushed the technique even further in their explorations of the emotional impact of montage. Hitchcock, in an interview with Francois Truffaut, described the most famous of the Soviet experiments— that conducted by Kuleshov — and its impact on his own filmmaking:
You see a close-up of the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine. This is followed immediately by a shot of a dead baby. Back to Mosjoukine again and you read compassion on his face. Then you take away the dead baby and you show a plate of soup, and now, when you go back to Mosjoukine, he looks hungry. Yet, in both cases, they used the same shot of the actor; his face was exactly the same.
In the same way, let's take a close-up of Stewart looking out of the window at a little dog that's being lowered in a basket. Back to Stewart, who has a kindly smile. But in the place of the little dog you show a half-naked girl exercising in front of her open window, and you go back to a smiling Stewart again, this time he's seen as a dirty old man! (215-16)
This concept, long accepted in film theory, seems equally applicable to fiction, assuming that the text resists fixing conclusive descriptions. The above example would obviously fail if it were transcribed as, "Stewart looks at the half-naked girl with complete indifference." But "Benito Cereno," as I've already shown, does resist explicit description, and operates in a manner remarkably similar to a classical Hollywood suspense film. In "Hitchcockian Suspense," Pascal Bonitzer writes, "The weight of death, murder and crime have meaning only though the proximity of a gaze. All Hitchcock has done in his films is to make the best possible use, where staging is concerned, of the function of the gaze laid bare by crime" (18). Just as Hitchcock filters our experience of Rear Window through Jeffries's neutral gaze, so does Melville through Delano's in "Benito Cereno."
Again, the opening pages of the story are a fitting example. After the narrator establishes several facts in the first three paragraphs, the narration shifts to Delano's filter with the first sentence of the fourth paragraph: "To Captain Delano's surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colors [my italics]" (161). While the similarities between Delano's "glass" and Jeffries's binoculars and telephoto lens are interesting to mention in passing, the significance of the sentence lies in the verb, viewed. Melville's method for establishing and maintaining his filter is atypical. He does not simply change the tone or syntax of the narration as Joyce does in Dubliners, nor does he create a stream-of-consciousness like Woolf or Faulkner. Instead, he quite cinematically "cuts" between close-ups of Delano's frustratingly neutral face and the mysterious images that bombard him.
There is an almost limitless supply of examples with which to illustrate this point. Upon first seeing Cereno's ship: "Captain Delano continued to watch her — a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, . . . It might have been but a deception of the vapors, but, the longer the stranger was watched the more singular appeared her manoeuvres [sic]" (162). Later, after being startled by something moving in the chains: "He rubbed his eyes, and looked hard" (200). Then, when he has become convinced of Cereno's guilt: "Captain Delano glanced towards Don Benito. As he saw his meagre [sic] form in the act of recovering itself from reclining in the servant's arms, . . . he could not but marvel at the panic by which himself had been surprised" (207).
It is in the shaving scene, though, that Melville's cinematic narrative is best illustrated. The cuddy is first glimpsed through the nonironic, nonevaluative lens of the narrator. The diction is simple and relatively free from metaphoric language. "The floor of the cuddy was matted," the narrator informs us. "Overhead, four or five old muskets were stuck into horizontal holes along the beams. On one side was a claw-footed old table lashed to the deck" (211). The description here is explicit: there are no conjectural expressions; seems and appears are replaced with was and were. The narrator simply shows us the room, "randomly" describing the setting like Hitchcock's camera randomly describes a New York neighborhood.
In the first four paragraphs of the shaving scene, only once does the narrator's tone shift. Two settees are described as "black with age, and uncomfortable to look at as inquisitors' racks, with a large, misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber's crotch at the back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque engine of torment" (211). This isolated sentence draws our attention both by the menacing nature of the similes employed and by the return of conjectural verbs. Again, this shift can be explained in cinematic terms. Bonitzer borrows Gilles Deleuze's term stain to describe the inexplicable element which creates disorder in an otherwise orderly, natural world. "Hitchcockian narrative," Bonitzer writes:
obeys the law that the more a situation is somewhat a priori, familiar, or conventional, the more it is liable to become disturbing or uncanny, once one of its constituent elements begins to "turn against the wind". . . . The staging and editing of the suspense serve to draw the audience's attention to the perverse element. The film's movement invariably proceeds from landscape to stain, from overall shot to close-up, and this movement invariably prepares the spectator for the event. (23)
And this is, in fact, exactly how the shaving scene operates. After describing the relatively natural furnishings of the cuddy (his familiarity with rooms like it put Delano "at ease"), the narrator draws our attention to the stain — the torturous-looking settees that will soon feature prominently in the story's most suspense-filled scene. After moving from landscape to stain, the narrator then cuts to a close-up of Delano, reestablishing his fallible filter: "Glancing towards the hammock as he entered, . . ." (211). The remainder of the scene, including the racist meditation on slavery and the terrifying shaving itself, is filtered through the "familiarly and humorously" benign nature of the American (213). Thus, as in Hitchcock's films, suspense is achieved in "Benito Cereno" through editing and staging, a process that is "sustained by the gaze, itself evoked by a third element, a perverse object or stain" (Bonitzer 28).
The penultimate instance of an eyeline match occurs at the emotional climax of "Benito Cereno," when Delano finally realizes the tragic truth of the episode: "Captain Delano, now with scales dropped from his eyes, saw the negroes, not in misrule, not in tumult, not as if frantically concerned for Don Benito, but with mask torn away, flourishing hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt" (233). Until this point (only 72 pages), verbs synonymous with "to see" are used an astounding 244 times. [13] As Rohrberger has noted, Delano's filter is necessary in order to fully involve the reader in the mystery of the story, but is quickly discarded once that mystery has been revealed. In the remainder of "Benito Cereno," see verbs are used only four times: "there is no equivocation, no use of suggestive metaphor. Gone are the shadows and the vapors and the air of unreality" (545). Instead, the narrator's objective slant returns to narrate the final events aboard the ships, to introduce and present the deposition, and to recount the final conversation between Delano and Cereno. [14]
In the final two paragraphs of "Benito Cereno," Melville cuts, for the first time, to close-ups of Cereno and Babo. In the former case, he deliberately avoids establishing the character as a filter. We are given one final shot of Cereno, but refused entrance into his subjectivity. Cereno steadfastly refuses to "look" at Babo, even fainting when pressed by the judges to do so. However, the final "gaze" we appropriate is that of Babo's decapitated head, "that hive of subtlety" (258). That "subtlety" is mirrored in the diction of the 84-word final sentence. Although it is through Babo's lifeless eyes that we meet the "gaze of the whites" and look upon St. Bartholomew's church, our vision is once again blurred, preventing us from finally and conclusively unveiling the mystery of 'The negro.'"
— Presented at Florida State Film & Literature Conference
January, 2002
Footnotes
[1] From Frank's call-for-papers for the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, MLA Newsletter 32.1 (2000): 33. I realize that citing a call-for-papers is unorthodox, but Frank's question has been very helpful as I've struggled to form my own position. [return]
[2] See Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, American Critical Archives 6 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995). Criterion recommends The Piazza Tales for "a companion under the broad branches of an old elm in the hot summer days" (472). Churchman claims that The Piazza Tales "are destined to be read in many a pleasant country house, at watering-places, by the seashores, and among the mountains, during the coming summer heats" (475). And Transcripts predicts the collection will "be a favorite book at the watering places and in the rural districts this season" (476). Reviewers from both the Southern Literary Journal (472) and the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (474) praise The Piazza Tales in comparison to Pierre. [return]
[3] See also Richard Harter Fogle, Melville's Shorter Tales, (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1960). Fogle, like Hoffman, mentions only Delano's point-of-view, which he describes as a "struggle to comprehend" (120), and the deposition. Fogle also echoes Hoffman's praise of the opening section's structure, which he calls "simply projected in the unities of time, place, and action"(122). [return]
[4] See also Robert Bruce Bickley, The Method of Melville's Short Fiction (Durham: Duke UP, 1975). Bickley makes a similar distinction between Delano's point-of-view and "a limited-omniscient narrator, one privileged to enter Delano's mind alone, but also permitted to draw partially aside the masks that conceal the identities of Babo and Cereno" (101). [return]
[5] This question is obviously too large to be adequately addressed here. Recently, the focus of narratological studies of "Benito Cereno," like that of much of Melville criticism, has turned to Post-Colonial and materialist readings. In "Narrative Self-Justification: Melville and Amasa Delano," Studies in American Fiction 23:1 (1995): 35-53, Richard McLamore argues that both Melville's and Amasa Delano's narratives are constructed so as to deflect the "naïve" reader's attention from the American captain's economic motivations. McLamore claims that by transforming Delano's travel narrative into a "fantastic pirate suspense-story" Melville is, in fact, covertly satirizing "Delano's evasive, contradictory, and greedily hypocritical narrative" (40, 35). [return]
[6] point of view, center of perception, objective narration, subjective gaze, unreliable narrator, narrative voice, innocent eye, Melville's narrative, going behind, perceiving center, third person, narrative perspective, the official, the individual, the reportorial, and the authorial. [return]
[7] Film does, however, offer the unique opportunity for Descriptive emancipation. Christian Metz, in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford university Press, 1974), offers the example of a landscape described by "a tree, followed by a shot of a stream running next to the tree, followed by a view of a hill in the distance" (127-28). Chatman responds, "The shot sequence forms a narrative pause. The sign of the pause is precisely the temporally unmotivated shifting from tree to stream to hill" (42). [return]
[8] See also Dillingham, 245, and Mary Rohrberger, "Point of View in 'Benito Cereno': Machinations and Deceptions," College English 27 (1965), 544. [return]
[9] With this knowledge, the "knot" of the story takes on an even greater symbolic significance. Some form of "knot" or "knotter" appears 29 times in the same span of pages. [return]
[10] See Rohrberger, 542-43. She counts twenty-five facts in the story's first eight sentences. [return]
[11] Along with the famous example of Robert Weine's Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995) operates in a similar manner. Verbal Kint, we learn at the end of the film, is a fallible filter. But the camera has also served as an unreliable narrator, describing the lying flashback from a supposedly objective and trustworthy distance. [return]
[12] The eyeline match is one of five standard techniques in continuity editing of the classical Hollywood cinema. The others are the 180 degree rule, establishing shot/breakdown, shot/reverse shot, and match on action. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). [return]
[13] "Benito Cereno," in this light, reads like a thesaurus: appear, eye, gaze, glance, glare, glimpse, image, impress, look, mark, notice, observe, peer, perceive, regard, remark, scrutinize, see, sight, spectacle, spy, stare, survey, turn, view, watch, witness. [return]
[14] Film theory might also offer a better explanation for the sudden drop of Delano's filter and the shift to an objective slant. While the analogy is not perfect, it seems that the conclusion of Psycho operates in a very similar manner. When Lillian Crane discovers Mrs. Bates' corpse in the fruit cellar and Norman emerges with the knife, the film suddenly drops Norman's filter, as the mystery it has obscured has been suddenly revealed. The switch to the deposition in "Benito Cereno" is likewise similar to the psychiatrist's analysis of Norman. See Christopher D. Morris, "Psycho's Allegory of Seeing," Literature Film Quarterly 24.1 (1996), 48. Finally, the return to Norman's/Mother's filter in the film's final images mirrors the momentary return to subjectivity in the final paragraph of "Benito Cereno." [return]
Works Cited
Bonitzer, Pascal. "Hitchcockian Suspense." Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Ed. Slavoj Zizek. London: Verso, 1992. 15-30.
Cardwell, Guy A. "Melville's Gray Story." Bucknell Review 8.3 (1959): 154-67.
Chatman, Syemour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Dillingham, William B. Melville's Short fiction: 1853-1856. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1977.
Hoffman, Charles G. "The Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville." South Atlantic Quarterly 52 (1953): 414-30.
Melville, Herman. "Benito Cereno." Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York, Penguin. 1986.
Rohrberger, Mary. "Point of View in 'Benito Cereno': Machinations and Deceptions." College English 27 (1965): 541-46.
Roundy, Nancy. "Present Shadows: Epistemology in Melville's 'Benito Cereno.'" Arizona Quarterly 34 (1978): 344-50.
Seelye, John Douglas. Melville: The Ironic Diagram. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1970. 104-11.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Rev. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.
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The Woman Warrior (1975)
Monday, December 03, 2001 | 1 Comments
By Maxine Hong Kingston
Reading The Woman Warrior now, twenty-five years after its original publication, I find it difficult to separate the actual text from the cultural milieu in which it was written. This is very much a book of the 1970s — a creative memoir that, even in its title, gives voice to feminist and multiculturalist concerns. It is equal parts bildungsroman, fable, journal, poem, and immigrant story. At times, it is also really, really good.
Kingston's main concern here is with language. Words and their power to construct meaning, history, and identity are at the heart of each of the five tales. Words become Kingston's weapon for writing a disgraced aunt back into the family history. Words of vengeance are carved into a warrior's back. Words of Chinese talk-stories serve as a bond between mother and daughter. And, finally, words become the means by which Kingston comes of age.
It's only fitting, then, that Kingston's own use of words is so impressive. I enjoyed the language of The Woman Warrior for the same reason that I'm so enamored of Tarkovsky's films: Kingston has a gift for capturing images that speak (quite poetically and eloquently) for themselves. In the first story, "No Name Woman," she imagines the struggle for individuality that her aunt and other women like her must have fought daily in the fields and small towns of China. "Still there must have been a marvelous freeing of beauty," she writes, "when a worker laid down her burden and stretched and arched." Then, in "Shaman," she recreates the moment when her mother first tasted independence. Her arrival at a medical school is like a scene straight from Virginia Woolf: "The women who had arrived early did not offer to help unpack, not wanting to interfere with the pleasure and the privacy of it. Not many women got to live out the daydream of women — to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself."
"No Name Woman" and "White Tigers" are the two sections most often anthologized and deservedly so. The third and fourth stories, which deal more specifically with Kingston's own family, are less effective. The Woman Warrior is redeemed, though, in its final pages when Kingston melds two beautiful stories. One is an ancient tale of a Chinese woman held captive, who finally returns to her village and brings with her the songs of her captors. The second is the story of Kingston's own coming of age. The juxtaposition of the two stories is handled brilliantly, reminding us of the value born from the fruitful blending of cultures.
No Name Woman — the story of Kingston's aunt, a woman who committed suicide after disgracing the family by having an illegitimate child (though she was likely raped). Kingston attempts to right the great tragedy of the story — the family's decision to erase her from their collective memory. Kingston gives the "no name woman" depth - love, emotion, shame, pride — by rewriting her into history.
White Tigers — The story of Fa Mu Lan, the famous Chinese swordswoman who was taken away as child to be trained as a warrior before returning home to take her father's place in battle and leading an army to victory. Again, Kingston places emphasis on the power of words — the words of vengeance carved into her back, the words casually used by Chinese to dehumanize their daughters, the words of her mother's talk-stories. Kingston then tries to imagine herself as a contemporary woman warrior in America.
Shaman — The story of the life of Kingston's mother, in both China and America. A nice portrait of that frustrating ambivalence we feel toward family, which makes us both proud and embarrassed, wanting to both cling to our heritage and to define ourselves apart from it.
At the Western Plaza — Brave Orchid' sister, Moon Orchid, arrives in America to confront the husband who never sent for her. When she does finally meet him, he refuses to allow her back into his life, having found a new life and a new wife in America. Moon Orchid is broken by the move and the betrayal, finally finding something like peace in an asylum.
A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe — The title of this section comes from the short story that ends the novel. It's the story of a Chinese woman captured by barbarians with whom she lives for twelve years. When she returns to the Chinese, she brings with her new songs that were formed from the blending of the two cultures. The story could likewise be applied to this entire novel. The final section is about Kingston's struggle to find her own voice. At one point, she torments another young Chinese girl who absolutely refuses to speak. Kingston finds her voice in a furious outburst at the dinner table.
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Another Country (1962)
Thursday, October 18, 2001 | 0 Comments
By James Baldwin
At its best, James Baldwin's fiction is lyrical, intense, poetic, outrageous, improvisatory, brutal, and transcendent. The first time I read his short story, "Sonny's Blues," I was sitting in one of those massive chain bookstores, drinking coffee and trying to block out the pabulum coming from the Muzak. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself choking back tears. The last three pages of "Sonny's Blues" are as good as it gets: Sonny breaks into a blistering piano solo, finally finding a voice for his repressed pain. Baldwin follows suit — capturing the rhythms, the longing, the give and take of the best jazz — in some of the most stunning prose I've encountered.
Unfortunately, Another Country is not Baldwin at his best. In fact, it's possibly the most frustrating novel I've ever read. Here, Baldwin is so determined to explode the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality — and judging by the variety of sexual relationships on display here, he must have plotted those intersections on graph paper before sitting down to write — that he makes a fatal mistake: instead of being particularly insightful or even shocking, Another Country is preachy, sentimental, and, worst of all, boring.
Rufus Scott is a young black man who makes his living playing drums in Harlem jazz clubs. When we first meet Rufus, he is wandering the streets, suffering from guilt over his treatment of Leona, a woman we later meet through flashbacks. Leona's and Rufus's relationship is based on a shared self-loathing: he feels unworthy of the love of a white woman; she has known only brutal relationships, having come to New York after escaping from an abusive marriage in the South. Rufus's brutality eventually sends her to an asylum, an event that plagues Rufus, leading him to jump from the George Washington bridge at the end of chapter one. The remainder of the novel charts the effects of Rufus's suicide on the lives of those closest to him.
The most interesting relationship is between Ida, Rufus's younger sister, and Vivaldo, his best friend. Both are struggling artists: she a singer, he a novelist. In Baldwin's hands, they become a platform for long discourses on the legacies of racism. Before meeting Ida, Vivaldo has known black women only as sexual objects — the cheap whores he frequented in Harlem. Ida has likewise known white men only as victimizers — the men who leered at her and who broke her brother's spirit. At moments, Vivaldo and Ida come alive in Baldwin's prose. The flashback to their first meeting, for instance, is handled gracefully. But too often they act as little more than mouthpieces, uttering sappy lines like, "How's one going to get through it all? How can you live if you can't love? And how can you live if you do?" Baldwin wisely leaves their relationship in limbo at the end of the novel, offering some hope for reconciliation between the races, but promising nothing.
Richard and Cass are another interesting couple. Married with children, they struggle to maintain their "traditional" roles amidst the sexual and social tumult (not to mention the heavy drinking) that surrounds them. Richard is also a novelist, but has "sold out," making him a failure in his wife's eyes. She escapes to an affair with Eric, an actor friend who has recently returned from Paris, but it brings her little comfort. "I'm beginning to think," she gushes, "that growing just means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet — you drink a little of it every day." It's perhaps in this relationship that Baldwin does the most moralizing. Near the very end of the novel he finally enters Richard's point of view, giving voice to the character who, until this point, had been little more than a personification of failed artistic ambition. Richard's pain, however, rings more true than that of others in the novel because Baldwin allows readers to experience it in the moment, instead of subjecting us to endless discussions of that pain.
My frustration with this novel is fueled largely by its obvious, unrealized potential. Baldwin populates Another Country with artists of all sorts and provides them with fabulously romanticized lives in Greenwich Village and Paris. He sets out to deliberately create another "lost generation," but never seems able to elevate his characters above the prescribed roles they play.
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Broom of the System (1987)
Tuesday, April 10, 2001 | 0 Comments
By David Foster Wallace
Lenore Beadsman's life is complicated. The 24 year old heir to the Beadsman baby food empire struggles to balance her career as a call center operator — where the lines of communication seem perpetually crossed — with her, um, complex relationship with her boss, Rick Vigorous, of Frequent and Vigorous Publishing. She also worries about her younger bother, who refers to himself as the Antichrist; her bird, Vlad the Impaler, which has a tendency to curse and prophesy; and her grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein who has suddenly gone missing from her retirement home.
The majority of Broom of the System, first published in 1987, takes place in the future (1990, actually), which allows Wallace the freedom to distort the otherwise recognizable landscape of his northern Ohio. Here, popular culture has literally shaped life: an entire city has, in fact, been designed to resemble Jayne Mansfield from above. College students meet to watch Bob Newhart and play drinking games; others gather at a bar built around a Gilligan's Island theme. Wallace, a former philosophy major, had obviously been reading Baudrillard, as he has great linguistic fun interrogating the simulacrum — the copies of copies of copies that have come to replace actual experience in contemporary American culture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a man-made blot intended to serve as "A point of reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love. A blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls. An Other for Ohio's Self."
Wallace's first novel, written as his MFA thesis, is obviously heavily indebted to (but not entirely derivative of) Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Both are detective stories of a Post-Modern, epistemological bent, more concerned with the language that constructs meaning — both in their stories and in the world — than with the literal "truth" that their heroines pursue. And both authors push the conceit to hilariously absurd ends. Wallace even one-ups Pynchon's famous final scene — Oedipa Maas sits, waiting like we do, for the mystery to be revealed — by actually ending Broom of the System mid-sentence. It's perhaps too easy of a trick, and one that must surely make the more mature Wallace cringe, but it feels perfectly appropriate here.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Thursday, January 11, 2001 | 0 Comments
Zora Neale Hurston
In the opening chapters of Their Eyes Were Watching God, an elderly African-American woman sits down with her granddaughter and explains the main lesson she has learned during her difficult life, one that has spanned from the final years of slavery to the more promising days of the twentieth century:
Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nuthin' but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don't tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.
When Zora Neale Hurston's greatest novel was rediscovered in the mid-1970s, readers once again heard voices that for years had been silenced by neglect. Hurston, a college educated anthropologist, spent the early years of her adult life collecting stories from the South, "folklore" that she would then transform and elevate into art. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has written, Hurston has a "Negro way of saying." By writing in the dialect of rural and often poor African-Americans, a device that for decades had been employed famously by white writers such as Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hurston took ownership of that voice, made it authentic, and gave it poetry.
Through the course of the novel, we watch that little girl, who once listened so attentively to her grandmother's advice, grow into a woman capable of ideas and feelings beyond the elder's realm of experience. Janie Crawford is a beautiful young woman of mixed race, who was startled to discover as a child that she was different from the white children with whom she was raised. Hurston frequently emphasizes Janie’s light skin and her long, soft hair that make her a constant object of desire by men, both black and white. And it’s through her relationships with those men that Hurston charts Janie’s coming of age.
As a teen, Janie is married off to Logan Killicks, a much older white man who cares for his wife (in his own way), but realizes that he will never keep her. Their marriage is arranged by Janie’s grandmother, a former slave whose notions of happiness revolve around wealth and security. If the black woman is “de mule uh de world,” then the best she can hope for is some comfort among the toil. For Janie, who at first assumes that love is the inevitable product of marriage, her life with Killicks provides a brutal awakening. Hurston writes: “Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”
Janie leaves Killick to follow Jody Starks, a boisterous and ambitious young man, to Eatonville, where he plans to become mayor of the all black town. The couple spend twenty years together there, watching distantly as Jody’s dreams come to fruition. But despite their superficial success, Janie fails to find either love or contentment with Jodie, whose condescending treatment of her and the other townsfolk leave little distinction between himself and her first husband. Hurston transforms Janie’s dreams of a fuller life into a pear tree and a cool breeze: “Then one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes. Somebody near about making summertime out of lonesomeness.”
After Jody’s death, Janie once again leaves, this time with a younger man named Vergible Woods. “Tea Cake” takes his new bride to the swamps of Florida, where they work the fields as migrant farmers. As some critics have noted, Janie’s path is, in some ways, a journey into “blackness,” a gradual move from white to black community. With Tea Cake and the other workers, Janie finally finds love, fellowship, and self-realization. Hurston’s description of their love-making — the only such description in the book — is passionate and beautiful: “He drifted into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.” Janie’s awakening is so wonderfully rendered that even Tea Cake’s sudden death, though undeniably moving, feels less tragic than would be expected. Janie returns to Eatonville, to its staring eyes and gossiping mouths, with remarkable grace.
Of course, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a landmark novel because of its unsentimental exposure of a black woman's inner life — and it's probably the first and still the best American novel to do so — but what most amazes me about it is the beauty of it all. Hurston's prose at times is awesome (I hesitate to use that adjective only because it has been tarnished by misuse). She writes:
There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.
And later, when describing a hurricane:
The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.
For obvious reasons, I will never be able to fully understand the experience of an African-American woman. I can, however touch something of our shared experience through art like Hurston's. What better reason do you need?
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O Pioneers (1913)
Thursday, January 11, 2001 | 0 Comments
By Willa Cather
Willa Cather was nearly 40 years old in 1913 when she published O Pioneers!, her second novel. It's difficult, then, to overlook the obvious similarities between her own life and that of her heroine, Alexandra Bergson. At this point, both women had devoted their lives to a single pursuit, sacrificing personal relationships — or, at least those of a romantic nature — for the cause. As she left no autobiography, no memoir, and few letters, we can only speculate about Cather's personal life. Some have postulated that she was a closeted lesbian, but, as with all such claims, it is only that: speculation. What we do know is that she never married or had children, and that she devoted the majority of her energies during her adult life to writing and to seeing those writings published. It was quite a feat: she left a legacy of 13 novels and more than 60 short stories, which have helped to secure her place now in the company of her more famous contemporaries: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.
O Pioneers! is a wonderful novel and one that, I must admit, I have put off reading for years simply because its title has always reminded me of those sentimental prairie novels that twelve year old girls seem so fond of. That excuse, as unforgivably lame as it sounds, is not completely unjustified. Like much of Cather's work, O Pioneers! is inspired by the years that she and her family spent in Nebraska, where she lived among Scandinavian, French, and Bohemain immigrants and where she witnessed first hand the back-breaking work of plains farming. What separates this novel from the pack, though, is Cather's remarkable blend of lyricism and honest insight. O Pioneers! is an interesting transition piece, a novel caught between the Midwest naturalism of Hamlin Garland and the epistemological experiments of the modernists. While the fate of many of Cather's characters are determined by forces beyond their control, the novelist holds on to some hope — a hope for real personal happiness and a more perfect future.
The Bergsons are typical of the immigrant families Cather had known in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The mother and father are first-generation Americans who settled with the hope of owning land and of securing better lives for their children. John Bergson dies young, too soon to experience the fruits of his labors, but soon enough, for "he would not have had it again if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became." His children, however, personify the American Dream. Alexandra, through hard work and ingenuity, breaks the land and watches it flourish. Lou and Oscar enjoy their wealth, marry well, and find success in business and politics. The youngest, Emil, graduates from college, sees the world, and welcomes opportunity and freedom, the dreams of every immigrant.
Their lives, however, do not completely escape the suffering and alienation that so preoccupied artists at the turn of the century. Like Cather, Alexandra chooses to sacrifice her own love and happiness to a single-minded pursuit, in her case the education and unrealized potential of her brother, Emil. It is a "choice," Cather argues, that many women are forced to make. She captures this plight in a beautiful image of Marie, the Berson's young neighbor, whose loveless marriage and hopeless pining for Emil slowly destroys her vitality. The passage is typical of Cather's preoccupation with the connection between her characters and the land they work:
The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain, until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.
It's an ominous passage that prepares us for the tragic end to Emil's and Marie's love. Separated by the laws of their land and their churches, they die too soon, killed by Marie's jealous husband. Cather describes their deaths in brutal detail, but refuses to cast blame. Here, Alexandra becomes a naturalist heroine and Cather's surrogate: "Being what he was, she felt, [Marie's husband] could not have acted otherwise."
But despite the novel's tragedy, Cather distinguishes herself from Norris, Dreiser, and Crane by painting the conclusion of O Pioneers! with a tint of optimism. Broken and beaten by Emil's death, whose fate seems to make her life's efforts futile, Alexandra is restored by the return of Carl, the man she has loved since childhood. What I find most interesting about this turn is that their saving relationship is built on selfless love, a conceit that her more cynical and disillusioned contemporaries would have likely scoffed as a romantic fiction. It works here, though, saving the novel from the reductive determinism of so much naturalist fiction.
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Nervous Conditions (1988)
Monday, January 03, 2000 | 0 Comments
By Tsitsi Dangarembga
I can't seem to get an image from Michelle Cliff's "If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire" out of my mind. She tells a story from her school days of classmate who had a grand mal seizure during the morning singing of hymns. "While she flailed on the stone floor," writes Cliff, "I wondered what the mistresses would do. We sang 'Faith of Our Father,' and watched our classmate as her eyes rolled back in her head." The white mistresses offered only their typical response as aid: "keep singing." The grotesque hypocrisy of these missionaries leaves me, as a Christian, frustrated and angry. Reading Nervous Conditions only makes me madder.
Early in the novel, Tambu tells the story of her Uncle Babamukuru's rise to success. In doing so, she makes her message clear: "endure and obey, for there is no other way." By twisting the words of the popular Christian hymn, Dangarembga gives the reader a glimpse of the colonized view of faith. Christian love is replaced with obedience, hope is abandoned for endurance, and redemption is more like punishment. In Postcolonial Representations, Francoise Lionnet writes of how the Christian era transformed traditional representations of the body (the Greco-Roman emphasis on health and beauty) to those that emphasize suffering and death (Christ being the ideal representation). "The body," writes Lionnet, "thereby becomes a text on which pain can be read as a necessary physical step on the road to a moral state, a destiny, or a way of being" (88). Necessary? It repulses me to think so.
Yet throughout Nervous Conditions Lionnet's thoughts are exemplified as Tambu, Babamukuru, and the other African characters are dehumanized by the whites. Baba is called a "good boy, cultivatable in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator" (such a beautifully detestable metaphor). He is forced to take his family to England so that his position might not be given to "another promising young African." And he is taught to breed "good African children." Similarly, when Tambu receives the great honor of attending Sacred Heart (the Roman Catholic Church being the one which creates the most virtue), she is quickly relegated to a cramped room with the other Africans. Those professing to be servants of God, charitable workers, treat the Other collectively. There is no Tambu, Nyasha, Baba, or even Zimbabwean. There is only African.
The other snapshots of religion offered in Nervous Conditions are equally disturbing. Through Tambu we see a child's image of God. She speaks of being caned on Monday mornings for not attending the previous day's Sunday School class. She waits in line as she and the other Africans are inspected for missing buttons and dirty socks. She sees her beloved uncle chastise his daughter for the embarrassment she causes him at church. And worst of all, she accepts it.
Tambu (representative, obviously, of all colonized) is a character fighting to find her place in two worlds. She struggles to reconcile the traditional beliefs of the homestead with the teachings of the missionaries (and their contradictions). Her family says grace to begin a celebration then offers "much clapping of hands" and "praising of the gods for their providence." When Tambu eats dinner with her aunt and cousin she only knows that their prayer has ended when she hears "Amen." This white God, it appears, only hears the white language.
The results, unfortunately for the colonizer and colonized, are miscommunication, confusion, and damage. For Tambu, this means that she mistakes the message of the whites for the message of the Bible. (Actions, they say, speak louder than words.) It's no wonder that she is unable to comprehend the stories of the Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene. Undeserved forgiveness is as alien to her as physical resurrection.
Trinh T. Minh-ha redefines anthropology as "gossiping,"—us talking about them. She criticizes anthropologists for their "prejudices as well as scientifical-professional-scholarly-careerist hypocrisy" and recommends that they(we) write "close to the other." In my discussion of religion, this means (I think) that it is ridiculous for whites to plan ways of converting the natives (to use a cliché). They(we) should instead examine critically what they believe and live accordingly. It seems that this is what Tambu begins to do at the close of Nervous Conditions. A dramatic change occurs when Baba decides that Jeremiah and Mainini must marry: Tambu disagrees. She struggles with her opinions of Baba and her understanding of sin ("It had to be avoided because it was deadly, I could see it. It was definitely black, we were taught"—wow). She struggles with the notions of witch doctors and marriages. But she is persuaded by her family pride, by the thought of her parents made comic relief, by the absurdity of the idea. In one passage, Tambu examines her beliefs and begins to grow:
Babamukuru did not know how I had suffered over the question of that wedding. He did not know how my mind had raced and spun and ended up splitting into two disconnected entities that had long, frightening arguments with each other, very vocally, in my head, about what ought to be done, the one half maniacally insisting on going, the other half equally maniacally refusing to consider it. I knew it was not evil to have endured all that terror in order to be sure of my decision, so when Nyasha asked whether I would go, I was able to tell her clamly, 'No.' But I accepted that I had forfeited my right to Babamukuru's charity.
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In the Time of Butterflies (1994)
Sunday, January 02, 2000 | 0 Comments
By Julia Alvarez
The film Heavenly Creatures begins with a terrifying scene of two young girls, both covered in scratches and blood, running through the woods screaming. "Help! It's Mama!" one of the girls cries. I'm reminded of the film because, like In the Time of Butterflies, it manipulates its audience by introducing them to the tragedy of the story before developing its characters. As I sat, on the verge of tears, in the library finishing Alvarez's novel, I was struck by how powerfully these two works had affected me. It would seem that by preparing the reader, or viewer, for the inevitable violence, that the blow would somehow be softened. "I saw the marks on Minerva's throat," recounts Dede, "fingerprints sure as day on Mate's pale neck. They also clubbed them, I could see that when I went to cut their hair." Only one paragraph is reserved for the murder. So why was I crying?
Heavenly Creatures cuts directly from the young girls screams to a typical day in a 1950s New Zealand school. We instantly recognize one of the students, although she is now combed and cleaned and properly attired in her school uniform. She (we learn her name is Pauline) is then introduced to a new student. Juliet is the daughter of a noted Oxford professor and, like Pauline, has a penchant for story telling and trouble making. The remainder of the film is a disturbing look at the development of their friendship. We are told the story through Pauline's diaries, which we are informed are not only true but were also the most damning evidence in the trial against the two girls. Knowing their fate, knowing that they would be convicted of killing Pauline's mother, changes our perceptions as viewers. Instead of laughing at the bizarre, imaginary world of their childish games, we are repulsed by the dysfunctional homes that drove them to it. Instead of being charmed by the innocent love shared by the two girls, we are disgusted by its overt sexuality. The film's ultimate and inevitable violence rivals that of A Clockwork Orange for its abhorrent realism. We have been expecting it for 90 minutes, but we're still unprepared.
"Why, they inevitably ask in one form or another, why are you the one who survived?" (page 5). Before meeting the sisters of In the Time of Butterflies, before even learning their names, we know that they have lived lives and died deaths worth telling. Then, through Dede's stories and Mate's journals, through Patria's and Minerva's voices, the women begin to take form. We see their home, their family. We hear them laugh and watch them play games. Each woman develops a unique personality, becomes an individual. There are jealousies and rivalries. There are volleyball games and graduations. Each woman loves and begins a family of her own, but their stories are tainted — "the one who survived."
Anxiously awaiting their tragic deaths, I became much more aware of the injustices in the Mirabal sisters' lives. Lina Lovaton's fall seemed their destiny. History books with "you-know-who's" face on them and the mandatory portraits of him in every home made me claustrophobic, made their plight seem inescapable. The SIM smoking cigarettes outside the Mirabal home. The political sermons in local churches. The black Volkswagens around every corner. Even Lio and Manolo troubled me. "Stay away from them," I kept thinking to myself. "Why must you kill them with your revolutionary ideas?"
As an undergraduate, I took only the required Western Civ and geography classes. My interests rarely strayed from my own small world. Apathy, I guess. Boredom and comfort, as well. But I do believe that I was also driven away from world events by the lifelessness with which they were presented. Perhaps I've been desensitized to suffering (as many sociologists and politicians, I'm sure, would agree). But there seems to be a power in story telling which conquers that apathy. Though the Mirabal sisters are fictionalized, Alvarez's one paragraph account of their brutal murders affected me more than countless hours of evening news coverage have. The piles of bodies and the weeping mothers become broadcast images from another world completely disconnected from my own. But Dede's worry and hysteria and guilt become mine. Alvarez's stories force me to confront the lives and deaths rather than switch the channel.
Trinh, T. Minh-ha mentions a tale by Leslie Marmon Silko of a witch who, while at a contest of witches, frightens her audience by simply telling a story. "It isn't so funny. . . Take it back," they ask. "It's already turned loose / It's already coming / It can't be called back," she answers. Trinh writes that a story is not just a story. "Once the forces have been aroused and set into motion, they can't simply be stopped at someone's request. Once told, the story is bound to circulate; humanized, it may have a temporary end, but its effects linger on and its end is never truly an end." Humanized. The answer. The power to know someone, "to revive. . . the forgotten, dead-ended, turned-into-stone parts of ourselves." The Mirabals have become friends lost to a struggle that I know nothing about. Their story is a voice that I had never heard. And they've left me asking questions.