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Looking back on my 31 published posts (plus 11 unpublished), I can see that what I have is my own unintentional bildungsroman.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.