Taps

Course is over. Blogs are closed. Online shutters are slapping in the breeze. By this point in the summer I've already seen a beach and given a senior speech (sorry, still used to rhyming). And yet here I am, hair dripping, palms sweaty, draping my Herff Jones robe around me like a towel. So I appreciate you stopping by, whoever you are -- Mr. Mitchell, wayward classmates, overcurious future comers-of-age. It's equally possible that I'm talking to no one here, because in a just world no one would bother to check a website long since closed down, but that also gives me a bit of license. The borders are blurring between blog and journal. I can see the haze in front of me as I type.

In theory what I came here to do is to cap off my final trio of blog posts. The deadline has long since passed (by which I mean even longer since passed than it usually has by my third post), but for some reason I feel like I shouldn't leave my last blog set of my last Mitchell class without a last blog post. It would be the first I've missed and I guess I'm feeling sentimental. Keeping these has been both a burden and a lot of fun -- they're the kind of thing that're a pain to start and a joy to finish. Have they improved my writing? It's hard to say -- maturation, as I've learned from this last semester, is mostly imperceptible as it happens, but looking back on my writings from two Septembers ago is fairly cringe-inducing. Although there is some nostalgia there -- I'm starry-eyed and emotionally invested, caring more about characters feeling good than what the author was actually thinking. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's what felt compelling at the time. Mostly I'm surprised I didn't notice the change.

Looking back on my 31 published posts (plus 11 unpublished), I can see that what I have is my own unintentional bildungsroman. One of the best things about writing is that it lets us look inside brains from the past, and that's no less true when it applies to our own past. Why else keep diaries, journals, old stories and poems? It's not that I plan to go through each and every post (or, god forbid, old paper), but having them around to peruse helps remind me who I used to be. Like a Tralfamadorian, I can see the change that's hidden in my sliding day-to-day. Not just in my more polished writing (although yes, it is cool for a coming-of-age novel to show growth through better prose. Joyce did it, why can't I?), but also in the things I look for and the ideas I play with. If nothing else I think I care more. The apathetic post-sophomore who stepped into his 20th Century Novel class definitely was not expecting books like The Stranger or Song of Solomon, or the way their ideas about self-definition and fully lived experience would shape the next two years of his life.

From my brief and stormy dalliance with moral relativism, to my near-obsessive, never-published speculations on family lines Housekeeping's, to all the other ideas about society and love and loneliness and responsibility that I picked up from books I would never have bothered to read if these classes hadn't first gotten me interested in reading, to even the way I've writing has become one of the things I care most about, I think it's fair to say that these three classes have been the most influential I've ever taken. Not that those are the only things that I've gotten from them. Here, I made a list.

Things I care more about than I used to, in descending order of pedantry:

5. Narrative Voice

4. Tense 

3. Basic formatting

2. Footnotes

1. Em dashes

And then, coming up again, like when movies zoom through bodies into atoms to reveal whole other universes:

1. The place of the narrator

2. Identity/the way we describe ourselves

3. The concept of telling stories

4. Writing

5. Maybe, consequentially, people. 

What I'm saying is it's been a ride, and I don't really know where I'd be without it. Even in the seminars of my fancy collegiate institution, I'll miss these classes in the dingy old attic. So the reason I'm really here probably has less to do with guilt over a few missed points, and more to do with writing something that feels important on its own. For one thing, the last chapter in this long, winding, often-rushed novel named after the last episode of television I'd seen before the naming paper was passed around in class. But also a letter of thanks. Here, I'll just say it: thank you, Mr. Mitchell, for two fun years and 32 great chapters.

Alright, blog. Let's send you off to that Belize. 

Turning to the camera

One of the elements that sets Sag Harbor apart from the other books we've read for this class is the place of Ben-the-narrator. He's more visibly "past" the events in his story than anyone we've seen, making it very clear that he's talking about who he used to be, not who he is now. There's even some confusion in how he talks about his past self, like in when he describes melting Martine's ice cream and says "I can't explain what happened. I can only tell you, the best that I am able, about how I used to live." It's a jarring moment, one of a few scattered throughout the story in which the narrator stops describing the summer of 1985, and turns to the audience to explain his own feelings on his role as the story teller.

These moments, in which the voice of the novel is brought briefly into the present day, come most frequently towards the ends of chapters, especially as the closing lines. They also seem to pick up in density as the book comes to a close. In fact, the very last line of the novel is one such turn: "Isn't it funny? The way the mind works?" It's not surprising that the most jarring lines come at the most significant times, but it does at least go some way to showing why Whitehead chooses to use this tense shift: he wants to put us next to him, as the storyteller, to converse with Benji-as-novelist. 

Why is Ben writing about his youth in Sag Harbor? It's fun for him to reminisce, but he also wants us to know about it -- to understand where he comes from, what he carries with him of his past. (This is especially interesting given that Sag Harbor was Colson Whitehead's fourth and supposedly most conventional novel, so it comes in conversation with this strange, preexisting career as an author.) He wants us to know where he is as an adult, and these asides are his attempt to either remind us that this "other kid" is him, or to get us to get the feeling of his memories, the images which briefly take over his present, like when he asks us if we can feel the music about to start. 

The authors we've read so far have been divided on the issue of adolescenct experience following you into adulthood. Stephen and Ruth, with their respective ideas of epiphanic development and transience seem not to see too much of themselves in the characters they write about -- they're interesting people who are known and important to the narrators, but they are also firmly past. By contrast, Esther and Jason both interact with their younger selves, both personally and as narrators. Esther inserts herself into the subtext of The Bell Jar when she mentions her baby, and when she later describes her illness threatening to "drop" again, while Jason both utilizes Whitehead-esque tense shifts in moments of strong feeling and reveals that many of his chapters are adapted from poems -- meaning that he has presumably gone back to his past writings and adapted them at some older age.

These two characters, along with Ben, represent a philosophy of aging that stands for permanence, the unchanging essence of a person. All three clearly develop, in ways both good and perplexing, but they see their past selves as more than just prior states -- there's a degree of memory there, an ongoing-ness of experience, that makes the person in their memories feel like them, just smaller. Compared to the disconnect of a Ruth or Stephen, this seems like both a scarier and slightly friendlier way to live -- maybe the best word is vulnerable. You're responsible for the things you used to do. 

Sympathy for the devil

(This post is about Black Swan Green and doesn't really apply to Sag Harbor. Sorry about that. I had this 90% written about three weeks ago but never had the time to finish until now.)

I have to admit I'm a sucker for the sad villain. There's something a bit crushing about seeing the person who's just been making our hero's life hell get too caught up in their own problems to bother. For one thing, if our hero is already feeling down, it nullifies any chance of getting out -- even the worst people in the world aren't any freer or more powerful (or whatever else it is we admire in the truly awful) than the rest of us schmucks. More positively there's the cliche of a villain revealed to be doing his evil in response to some sadness or loneliness or trauma that they aren't able to otherwise deal with. This is the one that always offers the possibility of the good guys and the bad guys making up once the heroes are able to fix whatever it is that ails the baddies.

The point is that it's an emotional affair whenever the facade slips from our bullies. We surge between disappointment, relief, and vindictiveness. Just think about when Jason finds Ross's wallet. At first he doesn't see anything wrong with it, because to him Ross is just this heartless monster. He's excited to be able to stick it to him like this. Then, he sees the argument with Dawn, where Ross stands like "a man in a movie." After that he hears about how violent Ross's dad is, and finds out why there's so much money in the wallet. With each step in this process, Jason starts to sympathize more and more with Ross, to the point where he gives the wallet back. But it's not because he wants to -- in fact, he spends the whole chapter trying to convince himself not to do it. "Why should I feel bad... After what Wilcox's done to me?", that kind of thing. When he finally does it, his only real explanation is to say "As usual, I didn't know how to reply to him. Poor kid." The confusion that Ross has always made Jason feel turns from something intimidating to something pitiful, because Jason has gotten a glimpse of what's underneath.

There's a Stephen Fry interview I saw once where he explains that the difference between American and British comedy is that Americans want to see the hero put himself above everyone else, and show the villain up, whereas the British want to see someone pathetic drag everyone else down with him. I actually don't think is entirely true anymore (the interview was fairly old), but it's definitely a trend I've noticed. Extending it to protagonists more generally, we can see Mitchell sitting firmly on the "British" side of the argument. Just compare the angles of attack from Holden and Jason: both are deeply insecure, but Holden deals with it by putting himself above all the "phonies" around him (at least to us; he talks big but it's made clear that he doesn't necessarily think he's much better than any of the people he criticizes, which is what makes Catcher very different from a John Wayne movie or whatever), whereas Jason tries to find what's actually similar between himself and the people he dislikes -- usually pretty successfully. He does have his one big moment where he smashes Neal Brose's calculator, but aside from that he's able to find sadness in everyone from Mr. Blake, to his dad, to Ross Wilcox.

What's scary about popular masculinity -- what ultimately bothers Jason about Margaret Thatcher, or Cousin Hugo -- is the show of limitless confidence. Its a wanting to know everything, to win every argument, to be wanted by everyone, to come out of every fight without a scratch, and beneath it all the belief that you deserve it. It means believing that you are the person on the top of the pyramid, and that no matter what other people do they'll never even be able to budge you. It means winning effortlessly. The problem with that is that Jason tries, from the very beginning. He wants to be the Pluto Noak or Tom Yew, but he knows that to get to their position he'll have to hide the parts of himself which don't measure up, and which will never measure up. If somehow he actually got to be where Ross Wilcox is in the middle of the novel, he'd be constantly paranoid about being found out for the maggot he is. He knows all of this already, which is why he mostly settles for the middle, but every time he has a chance to elevate himself he starts to play the part, telling off Dean and saying "bugger" in class.

What ultimately allows him to escape this hierarchy is his realization that self-hatred is implicit in "incomplete" masculinity, and that it'll never will never go away because you'll never reach a "final" masculinity. There's always someone smarter, there's always someone tougher (as Grant Burch discovers repeatedly), there's always someone to suck up to. It's a bleak world if you want to be a man. What ultimately lets him see this is the lapses of the two people who most threaten his masculinity, his dad and Ross Wilcox. If they can't do it, nobody can -- and maybe that means it's okay to be like Dean.

Time in Black Swan Green

Black Swan Green isn't a novel that parades its experimentation, the way you could maybe say Portrait does, but that doesn't mean there is none. Mitchell will occasionally throw in really surreal scenes, like the ghost on the lake in "january man," which come out of nowhere to break up an otherwise very realistic, almost mundane story about a normal kid in rural England. The effect is to make those rare moments seem just as ordinary as all the rest of it. All we get is Jason's reaction, and he pretty much takes everything equally. As tied up as he is in his own internal problems, there doesn't seem to be much difference between getting trapped in a house with a weird old magic woman and overhearing his mother talk about a potential affair. The normal adult world is just as confusing to him as any of the strange moments which his own mind (possibly) invents, and so events from both realities read the same way. It feels natural that they're there.

Another piece of seamless experimentation is Jason's occasional shift from past to present tense. Although the novel seems to be narrated by a near-future (maybe 14 years old?) version of Jason, he will occasionally throw in a sentence or paragraph talking about how something makes him feel, in a way that's clearly supposed to give us his reactions as they really happened. This especially happens in moments where Jason is very emotional, almost like remembering how strongly he felt at the time brings him back to it as a narrator. For example, from the latest chapter, "bridle path:" "For breakfast I ate McVitie's Jamaican Ginger Cake and a cocktail of milk, Coke, and Ovaltine. Not bad. Oh, better than not bad! Every single hour of today is a Black Magic chocolate, waiting in its box for me. I retuned the kitchen radio from Radio 4 to Radio 1." But this time shift also in very negative moments, for example when Jason vomits after his first cigarette: "I washed my puke-stained hand in the lake, then wiped away the tears from my puke-teared eyes. I'm so ashamed. Hugo's trying to teach me how to be a kid like him, but I can't even smoke a single cigarette." This one actually goes on much longer in the present tense, ending with "My cousin's sobbing with laughter," which might imply that it's a moment of particularly strong emotion.

Although this shift in tenses was jarring for me at first, by now it feels like a totally natural part of the novel. Not only does it read fine once you get used to it, it also feels like it has a good reason to be there. By mixing up the reactions of "present" Jason with those of "past" Jason, it both emphasizes how strongly felt and long-lasting childhood emotions can be, and makes us question just which version of Jason is narrating the story. Is it actually a present-tense "diary" type story, or is it all being written down at once shortly after the end of the novel, or is it being written by a fully adult Jason, who just makes a big deal out of inhabiting his past? It's too early to tell, which might actually be a good thing; by mixing up the timeline of Jason's progression as a person and a narrator, it makes it feel very true that he remains the same essential person throughout his entire process of development. That's something that doesn't always feel true in coming-of-age novels; sometimes the distance between the narrator and the character, or even the character in the beginning and end, feels so great that "coming-of-age" feels more like a set of checkpoints than a steady growth, which is probably more accurate to how we actually experience it. There's a line from the newest Noah Baumbach movie where one of the (middle-aged) main characters says something like "I finally feel like more than just a child pretending to be an adult," and his wife says "You feel that way too?" David Mitchell seems to really be in tune with the idea that adults are just bigger children, and so far I've been really impressed with the way he subverts my expectations of what it means to "grow" from your past.

Branches

Ruth's young life is defined by the people who leave her. She opens the novel by identifying herself, and then by describing her succession of caretakers. That list begins with her grandmother, she who "eschewed awakening," and fails to mention the loss that starts the process in the first place, that of Ruth's mother. From there we get the story of Ruth's grandfather: how his desire to live up in the mountains took him from a "grave" sunk in the ground to a town named after a bone, and how the success of his career ended in a "spectacular derailment" as he flew into the lake which defines his home. His body is never found, and we're aware of it staring out the lake for the rest of the novel.

Ruth's grandfather is an archetypal "dreamer," who lives his life following his romantic ambitions, shirking "success" as a painter or husband to express an individual vision. His death is felt by his wife as the last in a long line of disappointments -- he "walks off" into the lake, leaving his daughters to be raised by a single parent. Ruth's fascination with this story, however, expresses more than disappointment. She gives it a sense of romantic beauty, with the old man's slip into drowning seeming peaceful in its isolation. There's no sound to hear and no crash to see; it's black one moment and black the next. The idea that at one moment he's above water and at another he's below is just an abstraction, with no relation to how the fall is actually experienced. Trying to imagine how Edmund feels in his last moments is impossible, because Ruth makes it seem like there is nothing to feel. We never get his reaction to dying, only his thoughts on life. His wife's complaints about being left behind come off as trivial in comparison.

That peaceful view of death is dangerous, because it brings Ruth herself narrowly close to the water's edge. The way Edmund's violent derailment is presented makes it seem preferable to dealing with the responsibilities of this world. We see Ruth's own desire to shut off and ignore everything around her when she sleeps by the lake. The blackness she describes there calms her because it denies that anything is really changing when the animals move around outside, just like it doesn't matter to Sylvie if the plates she puts away in the darkness are sitting on top of dozens of others; as far as she can tell everything she puts away is the only thing that's put away. There's no such thing as "mess" if your things can't visually collect. What Ruth views so romantically in her grandfather and Sylvie, however, is harder to accept in Helen, whose suicide more directly affects Ruth. Helen's death feels to Ruth much like Edmund's death feels to Sylvia: like a shirking of responsibility and a leaving her behind. We can see this with her description of the "maternal" washing machine with which Helen leaves her, and when she says that she worries Sylvie will run away "because she looked like our mother." It's impossible to know what Helen was thinking when she drove into the lake, but it seems plausible to imagine that her views on darkness were similar to Ruth's.

An idea that is stated explicitly later in the novel, but which is present throughout, is that Ruth belongs to one of two branches of her family. On one side are Sylvia, Lily, Nona, and Lucille, and on the other are the "dreamers," Edmund, Sylvie, Helen, and Ruth. The split between these two branches and their lifestyles and philosophies is the major conflict of Housekeeping, because the two sides are presented as incompatible; the two sides can live with each other for a while, but sooner or later someone has to move. Usually it's the person in the vein of Edmund, but not necessarily; Lucille is the transient in Sylvie's household. The impression we get is that maybe Ruth and her kind are not necessarily transient, it's just that they disagree with the "common persuasion," and so therefore are forced to move to escape it. When allowed to make a life for themselves, as odd and idiosyncratic as Sylvie's household may seem, they seem to be able to find comfort. At the very least, we get the sense that they can be comfortable in who they're with. Ruth certainly doesn't show many signs of getting tired of Sylvie by the end of the novel. In Ruth's side of the family, once you've found your people, you don't want to leave them -- if anything, you just want to leave everyone else.

Preconceived Notions

I came into all three of the novels we've read so far this semester with significant ideas already formed about them, all of which turned out to be flawed. Probably the worst concerned Catcher, which I had seen since middle school as the book for pseudo-intellectual jerks who wanted an excuse to complain about other people -- without ever having actually read it. I mixed it up with Naked Lunch and the Sex Pistols as "phony" expressions of contrarianism, which might just be because everyone around me liked them and so I decided that I didn't want to. After all, what's worse than a contrarian? Anyway, by the time I actually read Catcher this year my mood had mellowed enough that I was only mildly apprehensive towards it, which was just enough for me to be extremely pleasantly surprised. I definitely was not expecting to relate to Holden as strongly as I did, especially because I had no idea that he would have such a nuanced and well-explored history. Ironically, the sense of surprise that I felt as I got to know Holden -- kind of like the feeling of disliking someone for years for some ill-formed reason, only to find that you really get along once you actually try to talk to them -- probably really enhanced my enjoyment of the novel, as it made me eager to learn more about him so that my old ideas could be completely replaced.

My idea of The Bell Jar was similar to that of Catcher, if a bit less intense. I knew that Bell Jar fans were basically equivalent to Catcher fans, except for a slightly different gender ratio, but I guess I never knew enough personally to get really worked up it. If I was at all anxious about The Bell Jar, that feeling vanished by the middle of the first page, and I've essentially forgotten whatever worries I had going on when I started reading. In that sense my opinions on starting weren't really significant enough to change my reading experience. However, I have known enough Bell Jar fans that I started the novel with an idea of her biography, and I do think that knowing about her suicide changed how I viewed the book. I tried to put it out of my head, but I can't totally rule out the possibility that, had I not known what happened to the real-life version of Esther, I would have been slower to accept the severity of her illness, and maybe even been less sympathetic towards her than I ultimately was. It's a tragic story no matter what, but knowing that the "bell jar" does come back down makes the novel's end just that little bit more scary. On the other hand, maybe knowing that Plath lived to be 30 also changed my reaction; it's possible that if I hadn't made the connection between Esther and her author, I would have been even more frightened by her suicide attempts, because I wouldn't have known for certain that she would live, even in the middle of the novel.

Speaking of biographical information changing my reading of a book: I hadn't read anything by Joyce before starting Portrait, but I did have a pretty strong sense of him as the kind of author you're supposed to respect, for writing big, experimental novels of impenetrable genius. If anything, Portrait was probably a little less challenging than I was expecting, and not because it was an easy read. But knowing a little about Joyce didn't just mean that I was relieved that his book was manageable; it also really changed my interpretation of Stephen. We've talked a lot in class about Joyce's active position as author, and especially the irony he uses in narrating his own past, but his story also has a passive effect on how we view Stephen. It's possible that if  we didn't know that Stephen actually would turn out to be one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, we would be less patient with his (at times) extreme arrogance and sense of "otherness." I know that a lot of people still found Stephen insufferable even knowing who he eventually becomes, but for me his behavior is acceptable for someone who actually is different somehow; after all, if Joyce hadn't been as self-centered and dismissive as he makes his younger self out to be, then he may never have been able to develop to the point where he could write something like Portrait. Of course, that doesn't mean his behavior is necessarily good, just that it's somewhat understandable.

It reminds me a little bit of how I reacted to Lady Lazarus today; the language feels hyperbolic in its intensity, but I was somehow able to forgive that having already read The Bell Jar. Somehow that text, along with the knowledge of Plath's suicide, gave me enough background knowledge about the nature of her illness that I believed her hyperbole, and accepted that her inner turmoil actually was as bad as she makes it out to be. I guess that's the third kind of preconceived notion: the background knowledge you have from simply having read a given author's work before. Having already read something by the author of whatever you're reading is an unavoidable familiarity; no matter how hard I try, I can't avoid drawing parallels between the two texts, to try and understand the author better. Every piece of writing is like a conversation, and as you go along you can end up feeling a familiarity (or even friendship) with the person whose stuff you've been reading for so long. This type of relationship might actually be the most "damaging" to the integrity of whatever you're reading, because you can't help but connect the opinions and experiences you already associate with the writer to the new work. The question is whether this is actually a bad thing; unlike the experience of disliking a book because of the people you associate it with, coming in with a pre-established relationship with the author probably helps you understand their actual thought process, and by extension the meaning of their book, better. I guess it just comes down to what the author wants of our their book: some people want their books to be a way to make themselves better understood, while others (like Salinger) may want to keep their novels as separate from their own lives as possible. If they seem to want the latter, then we owe it to them to at least try to forget about how much we loved their last book, or that juicy story we heard about their younger days, or how the people we didn't like in middle school wouldn't shut up about them.

Buddy Buddy

When I started this post a few days ago I was a little afraid that I'd waited to long to write about Buddy, given how far removed he seems from Esther's experience in the hospital, so I was weirdly pleased to see him return at the very end of the novel. Buddy strikes me as an extremely important character, if also a somewhat one-sided one. As the primary male figure in Esther's life, his failings seem to play into the specific form Esther's depression takes, even if she does assure him that he doesn't cause it. I'll get to that conversation and his return further down, but it's probably worth starting with his initial significance as the face of oblivious masculinity.

What Buddy represents is not just Esther's first love; he is the stand-in for men as they are meant to be, the husband promised by Reader's Digest. He appears to be everything that women in the 1950's were trained to want: kind and sexually innocent while still having the "masculine" traits of intelligence and physical fitness (as his beach push-ups are meant to indicate). His identity is wrapped up in being a caretaker, both of sick patients and the "weaker sex;" it's a role which he sees as loving and natural but which Esther comes to see as stiflingly authoritative. The "comes to" there is important, because at first Esther more than buys in to the Buddy Willard hype. She crushes on him from afar for years, and is absolutely thrilled when he asks her to the Junior Prom. This excitement quickly dissipates as he reveals himself to be an uninspiring kisser and less than engaging conversationalist. By the time Buddy reveals his "hypocrisy" while revealing himself, Esther seems bored by Buddy, to the point where his revelation may be a convenient dummy on which to blame her own flagging attraction.

The time during which Esther gets sick of Buddy also sees her begin to strain against the place of women in her society. While she still buys into the prescribed advice on things like dating and fashion, it is mostly because she fails to see any alternative. She commits minor acts of rebellion, such as refusing to learn shorthand or eating caviar the way she wants to, but is never able to remove herself fully from the fear of both marriage and spinsterhood. Sexuality is not the only expression of Esther's confinement by gender roles, but it is probably the starkest and (to Esther) most bewildering example. Trapped as she is between taboo sexual desire and the fear of childbirth, she not unfairly begins to blame men for their seemingly easy time navigating the sexual world without fear of repercussions. When Buddy admits his past sexual behavior, it doesn't just make him a hypocrite -- it confirms Esther's suspicion that men live totally different sexual lives than women, and therefore have no right to expect or prescribe anything. Men in this view keep women complacent through flattering lies about their own naivete, while giving them what amount to mind control drugs to make them think that childbirth is an acceptable consequence of sex. Buddy's carefully crafted identity as the friendly, knowledgeable doctor is shattered -- as is Esther's leg the last time she gives this character any leeway.

While much occurs between Esther's visit to Buddy's hospital and his visit to hers, whatever lessons she learns cohere and allow her to finally clear up her position with the "sick doctor." Having had significantly more experience with bad doctors by the time of this visit, she feels no respect for Buddy's position. Esther's time sick has, if nothing else, diminished Buddy's importance in her mind. His duplicity in dumping Joan as soon as Esther was available barely even registers as hypocrisy, the way this information would have if it had come earlier; Buddy just isn't that important any more. He's reduced to watching Esther shovel snow while needling her about if something is wrong with him; a significant role reversal in terms of both competence and authority. Now it is the patient reassuring the doctor, who can only sigh and dream of being taken to a Junior Prom.

(For what it's worth, I think this blog post is overly harsh on Buddy; I actually kind of feel for him as a character who's possibly even more dominated by his gendered place in society than Esther is, even if he does have a cushier position. But unfortunately this post is more about his role in Esther's mental journey, during which he kind of has to get thrown under the bus.)