Parsing a Secret History

Ann Cvetkovich’s “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”

Ann Cvetkovich situates Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home among extant criticism of other graphic memoirs—namely Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—in the way they all concern the relationship between historical and personal trauma. Like Spiegelman, Bechdel’s text concerns a kind of family archeology, in her case undertaken by a queer child attempting to trace her queerness back to her closeted father; like Satrapi, Bechdel was an actual witness to events, and is not merely responding to the “postmemory” experienced by the next generation (Cvetkovich 113). But Cvetkovich distinguishes Bechdel’s memoir from the others for its intimate scope and emphasis on queer concerns and problematics. Where Spiegelman and Satrapi pursue precision, Bechdel generates ambiguity; where Spiegelman and Satrapi situate their stories in moments of violent political rupture, Bechdel’s family drama feels deceptively small—one might even call it claustrophobic. All three texts dramatize the difference in scale between the individual caught within the machine of vast global events and the cultural memory that occludes the personal in such events. Bechdel’s cultural rupture is an invisible one, the very violence of which is in its suppression and secrecy. She seeks to be “the sympathetic witness who can make available the rich and contradictory story of [her father’s] life so that he is something more than a pedophile, suicide, or tragic homosexual” (Cvetkovich 113). Bechdel undertakes this task for the good of the queer community, excavating the violence to self and others that comes from living a closeted life: Such suppression, the text argues, is as silently dangerous as louder, more visible cataclysms.

Cvetkovich grounds her observations in a queer theoretical frame, linking queer theory to scholars of historical trauma like Marianne Hirsch, who coined the term “postmemory” to refer to the aftereffects that haunt the children of parents who have lived through trauma. Much of Cvetkovich’s evidence is built on the interplay between image and text: She observes that the combination of words and images in all three graphic novels demonstrate “the effects of growing up in the vicinity of powerful combinations of violence and secrecy, including forms of secrecy that in the interest of protecting children’s innocence seem only to harm them” (Cvetkovich 113). For Bechdel’s text especially, the images create a “visual archive” of what only existed in secret or as symptom—the way her father’s obsession with restoration is a symptom; or his fastidiousness about appearance that he projects onto his daughter in a way that violates her autonomy. Through recreating documents and photographs in a more detailed, photorealistic sketch style than the rest of the illustrations, Bechdel “draws the evidence” in a way that both concedes a subjective read of events—the drawings are not photographs or digital reproductions of documents like they are in Spiegelman—and rhetorically separates them from the rest of the art. Bechdel uses the art to “both enhance and trouble acts of witness” (Cvetkovich 114).

Cvetkovich takes as her prime exemplar the memoir’s “centerfold,” an image of the family babysitter taken during a trip the children took with their father. Bechdel painstakingly reproduces the photograph in detailed crosshatching, but also includes her cartoony style in the form of the narrator Alison’s hands holding the photograph. This produces overlays of reality that complicate rather than simplifying. The more realistic sketch gives the artifact a greater tie to the “real world” than the personal story of Alison’s interiority, while also nodding to her father’s more baroque artistic tastes in contrast to her simple line-art. But, as Cvetkovich notes, the fact that it is hand-drawn concedes that we are not seeing an “unmediated form of vision” (114). She bathes the photograph—which may have been innocent—in an erotic glow, trying to visually imagine her father’s desire when he took the photograph of the almost naked teen lying on the bed, in the hotel room next to his children. The drawn photograph’s “visual elements—its style, composition, layout, and sequencing—underscore its emotional significance” rather than its historical veracity (Cvetkovich 115). Indeed, Cvetkovich contends that the original photograph and the hand-drawn replica tell different stories, each critical to our understanding of a complex and secret history: “Despite their differences—the photograph instantaneous, the drawing laborious; the photograph apparently truthful, the drawing achieving other kinds of verisimilitude—both serve as technologies of memory” (118). This overlay of semantic systems is central to Bechdel’s project of cultural memory’s intersection with personal experience.

Bechdel’s archive interrupts the narrative of queerness in the United States. Her combination of images and text refuses to succumb to dominant trends in “queer witnessing” that idealize and simplify. The trauma of Bechdel’s illustrated world is repressed and compacted, cramped within her father’s need to sublimate and deny, and Bechdel “airs out” the family trauma by outing a parent for whom concealment was a way of life. The graphic form is appropriate to this project, comprising an “insurgent genre” that documents events in ways that hew closer to emotional than historical truth (Cvetkovich 112).  As Cvetkovich notes:

Fun Home's queer witnessing deserves to be part of its highly successful and well-deserved reception, since it provides such a compelling challenge to celebratory queer histories that threaten to erase more disturbing and unassimilable inheritances. (126)

Cvetkovich calls this challenge to the status quo a bold move. She notes that the current state of LGBTQ  rhetoric, at least in the mainstream, is “quite willing to disavow stigmatized identities that might disrupt the clean wholesome image of gay people who just want to get married and have families” (125). Queer theory itself pushes back on this recourse to normativity.

Cvetkovich draws interesting parallels and makes compelling points about Bechdel’s archive of memory and its relationship to the inherited trauma of the closet. Having read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, however, I can’t help but think she might have deepened her argument through an engagement with semiotics: Bechdel deliberately activates different sign systems in her visual and conceptual overlays. McCloud notes how variance along the continuum of realism/abstraction in comics affects reader’s experience of meaning in predictable ways:

By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts. Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without… and through the cartoon the world within. (41)

This insight deepens Cvetkovich’s observations about the Bechdel’s assorted “technologies of memory,” and could be fruitfully applied to her “centerfold,” which shows Alison’s hands (the world within) holding a photorealistic drawing of a photograph (the world without). McCloud notes that comics offer what other media can’t, in that the reader becomes, in a sense, a collaborator. He introduces the concept of the “gutter”—the space between the panels of a cartoon—as a space at once empty and pregnant with meaning. The gutter is the interstice where readers commit “closure”: “Comics panels fracture both time and space,” he says, “offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (McCloud 67). Bechdel’s medium of choice forces readers to collaborate with its author, closing the gaps in memory, both cultural and personal, that have no closure in the real world.

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. First Mariner Books, 2007.

Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly. Vol. 36, No. ½, Spring/Summer 2008, pp. 111-128.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Postmemory.” https://postmemory.net/, N.D., Accessed 20 Oct 2022.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993.

Shake the Frame

Racial Crosscurrents in Popular Culture

When we talk about race, the locus of our discourse matters. Not just who is doing the analysis or consuming it, but also its genre and exigence; not just what is being said, but what its invisible warrants and aftereffects are. Late-stage capitalism—a political and economic system designed to subsume emergent popular culture, repackage it, and sell it for profit—makes identifying the locus of political protest that much murkier. We must always cynically ask: is this political resistance or commercialism at play? As consumers of pop cultural discourses about race, we often find ourselves face to face with this cynicism; Che Guevara would likely be horrified that we make capitalists rich when we wear his steely-eyed countenance on T-shirts, to name just one example. But there are pop cultural genres that penetrate the mainstream, become subsumed by capitalism, and manage to continue on as symbols of resistance to dominant paradigms and hierarchies. While the film industry has in large part been hijacked by interests whose quest for profit make its content safe and unchallenging, there are still financially successful films that interrogate race in interesting ways, like 2017’s Get Out. Hip hop, too, is commercial, but is nevertheless still almost synonymous with resistance, being taken up by minority cultures the world over as a way to speak back to empire. “This is America” by Donald Glover’s alter ego, “Childish Gambino,” is a contemporary example of resistance music that manages, through sleight of hand, to be both commercial and subversive; meanwhile, Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino, is a metonymy for a kind of racial crosscurrent that appears to challenge the status quo while actually reinforcing it.

In the video for his hip hop opus, Glover’s character sings, dances, smokes a joint, and shoots guns, integrating several musical genres including rap, blues, South African protest music, and gospel into a mash-up with several narrative and musical threads. The track vies with fast-changing images that sometimes correspond with the singing and sometimes compete with it to accomplish two things: on the one hand to launch a searing critique of the commodification of and violence toward black bodies and, on the other, to entertain. Many of its messages are encoded, making the balance of these, as in Get Out, defy America’s racial status quo by pretending to conform to it. The apparent conformity is what gives the song its universal appeal, but, like the pearl in the oyster shell, the critique contained therein is its true exigence, and what might make the song endure well past a musical “sell-by” date. The video, set in a subterranean garage, superimposes dancing African Americans, many of them schoolchildren in uniform, against a backdrop of police violence, gun-toting vigilantes, blown out cars, prison yards, and a horseman of the apocalypse. The dancers’ faces vacillate between vapid grins and contorted rictuses that evoke Jim Crow-era minstrel art. Childish Gambino, presiding over the chaos, is sometimes victim, sometimes performing buffoon, sometimes detached observer, and sometimes aggressor. He shoots a man in cold blood in the video’s opening vignette (a man who had been playing a South African protest song on acoustic guitar), and later guns down an all-black church choir, a brief but obvious reference to the Charleston church shooting. The quickness of the video’s cuts, the way order and chaos vie across the scene, and the way the video is broken into vignettes, makes the meaning continuously slip between race violence and race commodification. In “Why the Dancing Makes ‘This Is America’ So Uncomfortable to Watch,” The Atlantic’s Aida Amoako calls Glover’s mugging, “a denunciation of the distractions that keep many Americans from noticing how the world around them is falling apart.” This analysis, she goes on to say, is “complicated” by the video’s multiple references to racial trauma, so the contrasts between representation and lived experience is where the video’s focus lies. An attentive viewer sees all this, but the catchy tune and surreal imagery also entertain enough so that a music lover of any political persuasion can tap their toes.

Contrast also saves the video from coming off as preachy or becoming too easy to interpret. Most enduring art endures because it is interpretable, and critics have read various messages into the minutest details of the track. The garage is America. Glover is America. A “Celly” as he mentions in the lines “This a celly (ha) / That's a tool (yeah) / On my Kodak (woo, Black)” accompanies a pan of what looks like a prison cell-block (a politically resonant sense of “celly”); but the prisoners are schoolchildren with the cameras running on their cellphones (an equally relevant suggestion that the only way African Americans might get justice in the face of police violence is if they have a camera). And then there is the dancing itself. As The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix notes in “The Carnage and Chaos of Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America,’” Glover manages to,

contort his body in a manner that induces memories of the grotesque theatre of jigging and cake-walking. Sometimes the movements and how they activate his muscles make him look sexy, at other times crazed. His manic elation erupts into violence at a speed that matches something of the media consumer’s daily experience.

Blink and you might miss it. Inherent in the song are the multiple personalities of the news and pop cultural cycles. Hip hop, with its collaborative sense (its creative framework fashions something new out of extant music samples and often includes dialogic elements), is particularly suited for this schizophrenia. All Americans live within our crazed news cycle, but the video suggests that the way African Americans inhabit it is unique to their experience and asks the dominant culture to live, for a few minutes, inside it. In “Close-Up: Hip Hop Cinema,” Regina N. Bradley comments on the way hip hop serves “as a mouthpiece for exploring the marginalized experiences of black and brown people in the United States and abroad” (141), for hip hop has spread throughout the world as symbolic of minority protest, and has proven remarkably robust in the face of commercial interests. In fact, its commercial appeal is in large part why its messages can be so widely disseminated, and why it tends to become a musical subgenre in parts of the world plagued by oppression. In “Arabic Hip Hop: Claims of Authenticity and Identity of a New Genre,” for instance, Usama Kahf notes hip hop’s power to mobilize marginalized groups:

Hip hop is a unique form of expression that has crossed social, cultural, and  national boundaries in the last couple of decades, from Europe and South America to Africa and the Middle East… While it was brought to life by the African-American community in the United States, hip hop's ruptures into different cultures around the world were not driven by any of the homogenizing… forces of western culture that usually seek to take over local and indigenous heritages… Instead, hip hop continues to locate its narrative space in the margins of each society (Kahf 359).

“This is America” deliberately leverages Glover’s fame and the burgeoning hip hop market (for as a genre it is by no means limited to African American consumers) to educate, illuminate, and enflame, and it does the deadly serious in a fun and pleasurable way. The song stands alone as a song, but combined with the video it becomes a tour de force. In “‘Reading’ Hip Hop Discourse in the Twenty-First Century,” Candace M. Jenkins notes that hip hop criticism is often logocentric, but that the genre’s power is its ability to create a connection between mind and body. The rapper implicates “his or her speaking body, but also quite possibly the body of the listener, which takes the artist’s voice in, often repeats it, and is (at least temporarily) transformed by that participatory performance” (Jenkins 4). Viewers live inside the frantic, violent, terrifying world of the video for a moment, singing along, feeling the pull to dance and join in, and that moment of empathy is where the song unifies commercialism and protest.

If “This is America” is a serious message packaged in a shiny wrapper, Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino is its fraternal inverse. It is a pill that slides down like a suppository while reassuring white people that they are OK and challenging nothing. In essence, Gran Torino is an exemplar of race exploration that reinforces the status quo while espousing to confront it. Unlike “This is America,” Eastwood’s ostensibly anti-racist film keeps tight (one could say “colonial”) control over its own racial narrative, effectively cauterizing any challenge to the white male privilege that is the beating heart at its center. Eastwood changes the focus from those who are oppressed to the ability of oppressors to “change their ways” without really changing. In fact, the Character Eastwood plays in the film, Walt Kowalski, has his racist utterances mildly critiqued, but the ultimate message appears to be “racist is as racist does,” denying that hate-speech is damaging to those at the other end of it. Only hate-acts, the film suggests, are truly hateful. Moreover, the film borrows the tired tropes of the “white savior” and the “model minority” as the basis of the story, undermining its anti-racist message. Kowalski, a Korean war veteran and retired Detroit autoworker, must overcome his racism toward Asians to help a Hmong family save their effeminate son from learning the “wrong” kind of masculinity from a Vietnamese street gang. Thao, the boy, attempts to steal Kowalski’s vintage Gran Torino, and the plot unfolds from there, privileging Eastwood’s rather myopic (and at this point outdated) view of masculinity, of which the car is emblematic. Kowalski manages, by film’s end, to assimilate the recalcitrant Thao into American culture by turning him into the same “dying breed” that he embodies. He leaves his car, at the final scene, to the boy, writing his even more effeminate children out of his will.

In “Gran Torino, white masculinity, and Racism,” Jessie Adia critiques some of the film’s warrants:

Setting the film in the context of the auto industry is not coincidental, and the fate of Kowalski’s character and his dying (or, at the very least, seriously troubled) industry are intertwined. Both appear to be on their way out, but the cherry perfect condition of the Gran Torino speaks of a past, muscular glory. Along with the car, Kowalski’s house stands out in the neighborhood, and his meticulous tending of his small, tidy lawn serves as a marker of his class (and moral) values.

The film assumes a rightness to Kowalski’s worldview and social mores—in fact, the film at times seems to critique political correctness more than racism. Meanwhile, the Hmong characters are bisected into two groups: the perversely masculine criminals, and the meek and vulnerable victims. “As such,” Adia comments, “the Hmong are represented in ways that are consistent with stereotypical images… passive, docile, and acquiescent, the ‘model minority,’ or dangerous criminals who constitute… a ‘yellow peril.’” In a similar vein, Louise Shein and Va-Megn Thoi, in “Gran Torino’s Boys and Men with Guns,” interrogate the film’s complicity with a national schizophrenia about the Hmong. At the same time, they became allies during the Vietnam war, and thus “synonymous with the anti-communist fight” but then, after a notorious case of Hmong violence in the United states, synonymous “with fighting in general” (Shein and Va-Megn). Thus the film’s view of its racial minority doesn’t take into account the plurality that always exists in any community, minority or not. Rather, it relies on preexisting Hmong stereotypes and layers general Asian stereotypes on top of them, for plurality “cannot make it into visibility under [an] American gaze so durably focused on the utility of Hmong to its war” (Shein and Va-Megn). While the film isn’t particularly regressive—Eastwood employed and consulted with Hmong-Americans for the film—neither is it truly advocating for tolerance and empathy of our cultural “others” in the way Childish Gambino is. It hardly asks us to reframe our thinking about race. It seems instead to ask why we condemn the racist. After all, he might decide to save the helpless minorities who are plagued not by racism but by other minorities. And directors like Eastwood might decide, in their beneficence, to represent a people who, the film suggests, cannot represent themselves. To many Hmong interviewed by Shein and Va-Megn, the film was an improvement over the invisibility and unidimensional cultural stereotyping that existed before it, but what if a Hmong had directed the film and located its heartbeat in the chest of a Hmong character? What if Eastwood had taken himself out of the film, leaving only Hmong characters? Both would be less commercially successful, I’d guess, but would have more to say about race.

 “This is America” reframes the disparate, contradictory national narratives of the black experience, wresting representation away from the dominant culture. The video literally employs the imperative: “Dance and shake the frame.” Gran Torino tries to pull our frame of reference back to a more conservative past, asking us to reframe the way we see aging racists. Since provenance is important when we examine the space where art that represents the dominant narratives meet the counternarratives generated from the margins, I can only imagine that a film made by a Hmong film director might look a little bit like Glover’s video—it might challenge and complicate rather than reassure. It would be a better film. I do not mean to suggest that strong messaging about race must emanate from minorities—it is possible to tell a challenging racial story about a group not one’s own—but it must also respect difference, and be willing to acknowledge privilege. The white person might need to step aside now and then and acknowledge his or her complicity in the racial trauma of others. Traditionally, art that supports commonly-held beliefs about race in dominant culture gets wider distribution and scrutiny since it comforts those in power and reinforces the “rightness” of that power. But conversely, pop cultural genres that get traction in the dominant culture, such as hip hop, can be leveraged to “reverse” the subject of scrutiny to the dominant culture, interrogating white attitudes toward and narratives about race in American culture. I can only imagine what would happen if Glover and his Japanese director Hiro Murai would have come up with if they took on the film Gran Torino (or indeed how Eastwood might have written and staged the video for “This is America”). For any work of art endeavoring to take on race in our fractious nation, we might ask ourselves three questions: does the work of art move us toward greater empathy and understanding, or does it in some way serve to oppress and justify oppression? Does this artwork reveal anything about minority identities or does it focus on and assume the normativity of a white protagonist who isn’t asked to change? And does it ask us to reframe our national narratives or reassert them? As a nation we need to get better at looking beyond comfort and commercialism to the art that challenges as much as it entertains.

Works Cited

Adia, Jessie. “‘Gran Torino,’ White Masculinity, and Racism.” Racism Review: Scholarship and Activism Toward Racial Justice, 17 Jan, 2009.

Amoako, Aida. “Why the Dancing Makes 'This Is America' So Uncomfortable to Watch.” The Atlantic Online, 8 May 2018.

Bradley, Regina N. “hip hop Cinema as a Lens of Contemporary Black Realities.” Black Camera, Vol. 8, No. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 141-5.

Eastwood, Clint. Gran Torino. Warner Brothers Pictures, 2008.

Glover, Donald. “This Is America by Childish Gambino.” Directed by Hiro Murai, Sony Music Entertainment for YouTube, 5 May 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddJqNY__9U8

Jenkins, Candace M. “‘Reading’ hip hop Discourse in the Twenty-First Century.” African American Review, Vol. 46, Vol. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 1-8.

Kahf, Usama. “Arabichip hop: Claims of Authenticity and Identity of a New Genre.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2007, pp. 359-385.

Maus, Derek C. and James J. Donahue. “Post-Soul Sartre: Black Identity after Civil Rights.” African American Review, Vol. 48, No. 2, Summer 2015, pp. 220-222.

Schein, Louisa and Va-Megn Thoi. “Gran Torino’s Boys and Men with Guns: Hmong Perspectives.” Hmong Studies Online, Vol. 1, 1 Jan 2009.

St. Félix, Doreen. “The Carnage and Chaos of Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America.’” The New Yorker Online, 7 May 2018.

Apologia for the Interpretable

Gender and Masculine Violence in Fight Club

I was recently asked what film would make for fruitful discussions about masculinity in a film and literature course. I submit that Fight Club is a perfect vehicle for analysis. First, unlike the usual gender-theory suspects, whose stances and problematics tend toward the polemical or obvious, David Fincher’s 1999 classic about disaffected capitalist ennui and the neutering of male energy is nuanced, self-conscious, and sufficiently complex to warrant an in-depth analysis as a class and individually. Its main benefit is its resistance to easy answers, and the slippery way the text weaves in and out of parody, making its thesis into a moving target. Viewers can see it as a vindication of violence; a condemnation of male violence; a vicious critique of capitalism; a commentary on prosperity; and a bewailing of our increasingly “feminized” American culture. Often the art that endures is art that invites multiple—even opposite—interpretations, and while more sententious works don’t require much penetration to understand (while certainly deserving their place in classroom discussion) the true meat of the discourse lies where are no easy answers.

The film’s messaging dances around a central question; what is masculinity; what are the consequences of repressing it; and how do we express it responsibly? The two central characters (the film ultimately reveals that they are the same character) are the multi-named/unnamed narrator and his alter ego Tyler Durden, and together they dance around various definitions of masculinity over the course of the film. The narrator, played by Ed Norton, is feminized and circumspect, emotionally dead, a cubicle-slave who travels for work and finds meaning going to various self-help groups for diseases he doesn’t have just to feel something (albeit something falsely “feminine”). By contrast, Durden, played by Brad Pitt, is a trickster figure of great masculine prowess who is, through most of the film, a “chaotic neutral” agent of disruption. He is amoral, a creature of instinct, a sower of anarchy, who, along with the narrator, starts a fight club where men beat the shit out of each other night after night in senseless acts of performative violence, thereby reclaiming their sense of selves as men. A straightforward-enough sounding plot summary—one that would trouble the most skeptical interrogator of gender theory, but the devil is in the film’s details. Just when the viewer gets a handle on a message, Fincher throws in a confounding factor. In “Fight Club: Historicizing the Rhetoric of Masculinity, Violence, and Sentimentality,” Suzanne Clark notes that one of the confounding factors of the film is that the viewer never quite knows whether the fight club itself is “the problem or the cure” (412). Is Fight Club a warning against male castration in contemporary culture? Is it rather a representation of a fascist group that gives reclaims its masculinity through ritualized violence? It appears as if the answer to both questions is, paradoxically, yes. This strange “yes” is what makes the film work so well for a film and lit class. As a feminist viewer, I can see the film as a condemnation of toxic masculinity, as a celebration of reclaimed agency, as a skewering of consumer culture, as a heady and fizzy romp through the reductio ad absurdam feminization of urban men, and the contradictions don’t rankle. I can disapprove of Durden’s antics and still find him attractive as a character; and I can condemn violence and still revel in the final scene when the buildings fall as the lovers clasp hands as a glorious expression of, at last, self-definition.

Helena Bonham-Carter’s character, Marla Singer, is what continually subverts the film’s otherwise single-minded goal. She is both an embodiment of the feminine and, in many ways, the embodiment of the ideal masculine. She is the film’s only truth-teller (not less so because she lies), and she is the only one who sees events and characters clearly. In one scene, Norton’s character is asked to find a “spirit animal,” and his is a penguin, a silly, feminine animal “dressed” like a servant, who nevertheless advises him to “slide” down an ice chute, with all the imperative’s associations of “letting things slide” and of freedom and deliverance, of liminality. The penguin later becomes Singer, who gives him the same imperative. Singer shares more traits with (and is the lover of) Tyler Durden, so in many ways she is the female counterpart of Durden’s chaos, the one to carry his message forward in a more tempered way. While the final scene is one of violence (especially in a post 9/11 world), the viewer sees it as a fusion, finally, of Durden’s manic agency and the narrator’s servile passivity, and it is Marla’s hand he takes, fusing the halves of his identity into a man who, the viewer has the sense, is finally made whole. Thus the film doesn’t advocate for either side of its binary. In a Hegelian flourish, it takes the masculine/feminine dialectic and offers a strange, ironic, and highly symbolic synthesis in its place. It appears, to this viewer, to advocate for finding the “middle way.”

In sum, the film is the perfect object of examination for questions about gender. There are few questions posed by the theoretical frame that can’t be interestingly answered in discussion, and these can be answered quite differently depending on the student. Such films and texts, I argue, are close to perfect for group analysis. It is the texts that challenge and provoke, ultimately—and the ones that refuse easy interpretation—that endure, and that can teach us most about ourselves, our priorities, and our world. As Clark notes, the film teaches us that one antidote to the “pleasures of illicit fighting” and toxic masculinity are the other kind of fight: the “more intellectual pleasures of rhetoric through critical argument” (419). That, I posit, is what a “Film and Literature” course is all about.

Works Cited

Clark, Suzanne. “Fight Club: Historicizing the Rhetoric of Masculinity, Violence, and Sentimentality.” JAC, Vol. 21, No. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 411-420.

Fincher, David. Fight Club. Performed by Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham-Carter, 20th Century Fox, 1999.

 

Art and the Void

As a student I wondered at it. As an English instructor I find it an indispensable font; a reminder I can dip into again and again that the goal is to practice empathy, not dogma. Empathy is a lesson one has to learn again and again, especially at a college with over half of its students from disadvantaged or marginalized backgrounds. "It" is “Sonny’s Blues,” in my opinion James Baldwin's opus. My students nod their heads—the lessons contained here are familiar to them. But I wonder anew with every rereading.

Baldwin's short story (publication date, 1957) is a tapestry, tightly woven of complementary motifs and themes, rich and dense. Not a word out of place. How to land on a single topic to discuss? Here is one obvious motif: on it’s surface, it’s a story of the prodigal’s return. A comfortable trope, certainly rife with cultural resonance, and still worthy of exploration. The unnamed narrator—the straight brother—has escaped his circumstances through stalwart moral rectitude: he fights for country, marries well, educates himself, and teaches at-risk boys in his old, ailing neighborhood of Harlem a few decades after its Renaissance and before the Civil Rights movement. He is circumspect in all things. Emotional distance is the cost of his prudence. He grapples with ungenerous feelings toward his dreamier, more inward-looking and self-destructive brother, Sonny. Even though his mother has entrusted our narrator to look after the wayward boy, he can’t bring himself to reach out. Sonny confounds him. The narrator commits the sin of silence, which, the story suggests, is complicity with the void. He doesn’t even write when Sonny, a heroin addict, goes to prison. Sonny, to the narrator, is merely a ghetto stereotype, is an affront to him, the escapee, and all the work he's done to elevate his people. But ultimately it is the narrator’s moral righteousness that the story questions, not Sonny’s transgressions, just as the bible story stacks our prejudices against the resentful brother, angered not to have been granted primacy in the family hierarchy as payment for his piety.

Baldwin carefully crafts a world of sinister, inhuman evils. In Harlem, unnamable malignancies bare their teeth from every tenement building. They poison the very air. They drag the inhabitants into darkness, even the ones that have escaped (through drugs or through education or through music). Against this evil, Baldwin’s people have only communication—art, music, stories—to fight with. It is Sonny, the narrator realizes, who has all along been battling these ominous forces. The narrator apprehends this while Sonny is playing his blues, and his moment of epiphany is heartbreaking. Over the course of the song he experiences a sudden dilation of perception. The chasm between himself and his brother is bridged a little, for a little while. It is, the story suggests, the best we can hope for: a rickety, temporary bridge between people.

“Sonny’s Blues” remains above cynicism, even though it suggests that life—not just life in economically depressed areas, but everywhere—is unbearable. This gives the story its power. As we face the abyss, we develop coping strategies. We escape however we can. The narrator escapes through what he deems proper channels. Sonny escapes with drugs and music. The narrator is surprised to find that his own strategies are not qualitatively better. His erudition is not superior to the strategies he condemns. Sonny, with music, talks back to the void. He tries to explain it. “There’s no way not to suffer,” Sonny tells the narrator. “But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it."

Image courtesy of enotes.com

The first relief from drowning in it occurs when the narrator hears, between the derisive cursing and laughing of adolescent boys, one boy whistling. He likens it to birdsong, barely holding its own through all the evil talk. The paragraph serves as a miniature of the structure of the story itself, in which a thin, futile good threads through all the reduplicated evil. Empathy breaks open in the narrator’s heart, if only for a moment, a break of sunlight through a crack in the blinds. This boy’s whistle initiates a metaphor carried through the story with remarkable consistency (because in Baldwin, not a single word is missing or extraneous). The whistle is a rebellion, and a refuge. Later, the narrator listens to the singing of a barmaid whose life is otherwise doomed. Another refuge. Sonny sends a condolence letter from prison, conferring sympathy for the death of the narrator’s daughter (both events precipitate a change in the narrator’s worldview: create the conditions for deepening empathy). Finally, in the ultimate scene, music provides temporary sanctuary from the darkness outside. These coping strategies are communiqués in both directions. They speak to the chaos that exists beyond our control, darkness beyond words, saying you will not have me yet. And of course, they talk to the living. The narrator’s tale, the reader realizes by the final paragraph, is the last of these communiqués, shared with us, and we are duly honored by it.

“Sonny’s Blues”, notably, has no human cruelty in it. The void, discrete from human agency, does have a metonymy within the story: it is silence. It is a formless, motiveless entity that does harm, but makes the communion between souls all the more precious for its inevitability. Death takes us; terror and loathing win in the end. The transcendence of the story is not mastery over the inevitable. There is, however, transcendence in the temporary staving off. The antidote to cruelty is not its eradication. Rather it is the creation of spheres of intimacy, patterns of survival. Silence is the story’s villain. Silence is redeemed through art, a sanctuary. A sanctity.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues." The Jazz Fiction Anthology. Edited by Sascha Feinstein and David Rife. Indiana UP, 2009. 17-48.

The Abyss Gazes Back

Madness, Blindness, and Armageddon in King Lear

“…nothing himself, [he] beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
— Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

The 20th century finally invited King Lear in off the heath. Its post-industrial bleakness found him apt company, bid him come out of long exile to rest his weary bones next to his spiritual brethren: “The Snow Man,” Endgame, Beyond Good and Evil, and all the other nihilistic works of existentialism, deconstruction, and Eastern ideas of “nothing” as a desirable state—much of the work to spring from the late Victorian era to the present. It took long enough. Early modern audiences found the play’s godless rejection of Christian eschatology unbearable; Nahum Tate produced a grotesque comedy out of it (which was what people read and produced for centuries); Samuel Johnson could stand to read it only once, after which he quickly edited it; even A. C. Bradley, who admired the play, called it “Shakespeare’s greatest work, but not… the best of his plays” (248). In “King Lear or Endgame,” Jan Kott remarks of Lear that “All that remains at the end of this gigantic pantomime is the earth—empty and bleeding” (112), and that, like the listener in “The Snow Man,” fits just fine in the 20th century. We can take it. God is dead, after, all; the world is brutal and uncaring and ruled by competition for survival; and we all know that, in Beckett’s words, “We give birth astride the grave.” The very fact that the word “nothing” appears 34 times in the play makes it a great fit within the worldview of late-stage capitalist meaning-making, where we watch the procession of simulacra with horror, but without recourse. In King Lear, Shakespeare presents an abyss that, when we gaze into it, truly gazes back into us.

One of the most powerful scenes in the play, for its raw, crazed energy, is Lear in his initial stages of madness on the heath, provoking the storm to do its worst:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned our cocks.
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Crack Nature’s molds, all germains spill at once
That makes ingrateful man. (III.ii.1-9).

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Lear’s rage at the storm is pointless… and admirable. Lear, abandoned by his children, fallen, in less than a month, from king to pauper, makes believe that he is controlling the weather, in a heartbreaking negotiation with the pathetic fallacy. He is at once child-like and god-like. On the one hand, he exercises a child’s omnipotence fantasy, imagining he has control of forces out of his control; on the other, the audience wonders if he is indeed controlling the weather—if the tempest in his own mind has actually been expressed outside himself. It is an act that inspired awe in the Romantic poets. This is a roiling I suspect we all feel at times: faced with the void, what are we to do but imagine we can control it? In King Lear in Our Own Time, Maynard Mack comments on the universal appeal, to 20th century man, of Lear: the “…abysses of the play,” he says, “are in fact wrapped in the enigma of our own ignorance of the meaning of existence, its peals echo with cries of triumph and despair so equivocal that we are never sure they are not ours” (84). One can see why the suggested meaninglessness in the cosmology of the play would have distressed early modern audiences (and Restoration audiences even more), leading to its exile. After all, the Medieval and Renaissance worldview was one of an ordered universe with a just and comprehensible God. Lear offers no such comfort. Mack goes on to opine that the play has no true hero in the traditional tragic sense. Moreover, the lack of a hero, he says, sits “…more easily with our present sensibility (which is pathologically mistrustful of heroism) than the heroic resonances of the usual Shakespearean close” (Mack 84). We don’t believe in heroes, and, as in Waiting for Godot, the play gives us none, just the all-too-human struggle of a man stripped bare and forced to confront the often-malign indifference of the universe.

Blindness, too, like frenzied madness, is a current that runs through the play, this time exemplified literally by the story’s secondary plotline. Blindness and madness seem to be the only clear paths to a rarified kind of sight: self-knowledge, true love of others, and freedom from the fear of death. They, metaphorically or literally (the play does not make it entirely clear), prepare the old for a peaceful—at least a resigned—death. Lear’s ally Gloucester, blinded and, like Lear, abandoned by his child, somehow finds the mad Lear on the heath, and there begins a journey of the blind truly leading the blind. The culmination of Gloucester’s plot is his “suicide” off the cliffs of Dover. Gloucester is with his disguised son, Edgar, but does not recognize him. Edgar describes the terror of the void below them:

Come on, sir; here’s the place: stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
…The murmuring surge
That on the unnumb’red idle pebble chafes
Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more,
Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong (IV.vi.11-24).

The problem? He is lying. They are not at the cliffs of Dover, but on a small rise near the cliffs, and he is not describing what is actually below them: he is describing a seascape to a blind man, in order that he might jump, and survive, and be metaphorically reborn. Gloucester does jump, and does survive, and is reborn in what Edgar (now pretending to be a fisherman down on the beach) labels a marvel: “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again,” he says (IV.vi.55). This prepares Gloucester for a loving reunion with the former king, and finally, his own actual death. A cold comfort, perhaps, but the only one afforded the old man, even though the audience feels more ambivalent about his ordeal. In our contemporary world, within the Weltanschauung of existentialism/deconstruction, we can hope for little more than a brief access to grace before we die. The play understands us—clearly more than it understood our antecedents.

Along with human disaster—blindness and madness—the entire world of the play seems to be careening toward eminent catastrophe, and the ending does not correct that trajectory. Everywhere are allusions to Armageddon. As Mack says, “Intimations of World’s End run through [the play] like a yeast. In the scenes on the heath, elements are at war as if it were indeed Armageddon” (85). Armageddon has agency and energy, unlike the passive depression of, say Hamlet, which presents a foul, stilted world in need of resurrection. The characters in Lear, in contrast to Hamlet, (and at times the weather and the environment are characters), all seem to be heading toward a precipice of non-being, but it is a place of creative action, not stasis. Says Mack:

Under [the play] run tides of doomsday passion that seem to use up and wear away people, codes, expectations, all stable points of reference, till only a profound sense remains that an epoch, in fact a whole dispensation, has forever closed… To this kind of situation, we of the mid-twentieth century are… sensitively attuned (86).

This apocalyptic rhetoric also includes, in Mack’s words, a “strong undertow of victory” (87). In Gloucester’s case this victory arrives with his rebirth on the false cliffs; for Lear in his erroneous belief that his daughter, after their heartrending reunion, has been resurrected. For both, the victory is illusory, but no less poignant—and no less real a triumph—for not being true. When he is reunited with Cordelia, Lear finally abandons his power and releases himself into the care of family, and to true grace:

…Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies (V.iii.8-13).

When Cordelia perishes, and Lear holds her in his arms, he says, “Do you see this? Look, her lips, / Look there, look there” (V.iii.312-13). He then expires. In all the “nothings,” this small hint of a “something” must suffice… a hint at redemption, or resurrection (though perhaps not in a Christian sense). Lear dies, perhaps, thinking that his child lives, and as such he dies happy. The world, at the end of Lear, is not restored to rights by a tragic death (for Mack is right: there is no hero here to sacrifice himself for the restoration of equilibrium). Rather, we are in a world still heading we know not where—a world of teleological uncertainty—that eerily resembles the world that we now know ourselves to inhabit. After revolutions in science, after World Wars and cosmological upheaval, after the invention of massive weapons of destruction, and the knowledge that we are the tiniest speck in an immense universe, after the knowledge that the universe will likely end with a whimper and we will not even be a footnote—in this world, the barren heath of Lear finally makes sense to us.

King Lear confronts the abyss, is chewed up by it, and finds a way to make meaning anyway. It finds a way to live with it. Finding a way to live with it is something we are all of us trying to do: existence is, by definition, uncertainty. We have left the garden of blissful ignorance, and no system of beliefs feels complete any longer: religion, once comprehensive and far-reaching, has been sufficiently contradicted by science for reasonable doubt to creep in (except in our most stalwart adherents to faith—and maybe even in them). If we need to deceive ourselves into surviving in all this uncertainty—whether through the pathetic fallacy, through intentional blindness, through madness, through (ideally) love and kindness, or through self-delusion—so be it. Welcome home, Lear.

Cited Sources

Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth.
2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1905.

Kott, Jan. “King Lear or Endgame.” Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Methuan, 1963, pp. 100-33.

Mack, Maynard. King Lear in Our Time. Routledge, 2005.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Tr. Helen Zimmern. Millennium Publications, 2014. 41.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Signet Classic, Published by New American Library, Penguin Group, 1972.

Die to Live

Tragic heroes have death to purify them. Death sets all to rights. Comedies have no such recourse: whatever transgressions have upset the social balance must be restored to rights by a wedding, a trope of the comic genre. But some comedies delve into waters too murky to fix with marriage alone. While no one can speak to authorial intent, it’s tempting to imagine Shakespeare’s interweaving of the two narratives into Much Ado About Nothing as an exploration of such murky waters, deliberately contrasting two different philosophies of love. In our sympathies, the text critiques one and exalts the other. One constellation of characters represents a Medieval template of chivalric love, wherein men of solid virtue (galvanized by war and homosocial bonds) woo women of blemishless honor—women who deign to step down from their pedestals only in acceptance of a decorous marriage proposal. Reputation weighs more, in this lofty love-trope, than human trust and respect. Don Pedro, Claudio, and Hero are of this category, and they are doomed to failure within the worldview of the play. In fact, their decisions go so terribly awry that a simple marriage isn’t enough to redeem them. A tragic death is necessary. Hero doesn’t really die, but her faked death, like the real death in a tragedy, restores the play’s moral equilibrium, and with it the play makes its main point: that the false ideal of courtly love should—indeed must—“die” to give room to more human-scale notions of sympathy, parity, and understanding in conjugal relationships.

To help us to this valuable lesson, we get the play’s other love prototype, Benedick and Beatrice. These lovers woo on equal footing to one another, and are well-matched in intelligence, agency, individuation, and humor. They are people, not abstractions. Their relationship is based not on any template of love, but on the true meeting of minds. The audience relishes their courtship, and the stilted relationship between Claudio and Hero becomes a low-fidelity shadow in comparison, moving to the back of the viewer’s mind. It is almost as if Beatrice and Benedick have been imported into Much Ado from a different play. To sweep out the cobwebs, perhaps?—to shine light into the dark corners of convention? They do to the language of the play what they do to its ethos—queer the pitch; lend their all-too-human wit and vitality to the tired rhetoric of courtship; fuel the drama with their inexhaustible, bawdy joy—and they do it with such panache that they are, for many viewers, the only memorable part of the play. See how, when Benedick is in the room, the language of the others changes. In Act I, when Claudio and Don Pedro speak, they follow the script of chivalric codes: Claudio asks of Hero, “Can the world buy such a jewel?” To which Benedick quips, “Yea, and a case to put it in” (I.i.175-6). Don Pedro attests to her “worthiness” as well, in a lordly dialect that matches Claudio’s (I.i.220). But within a few pages Benedick has them all talking with low-brow humor of sexual appetites, women’s infidelity, brothels and “horn-mad” husbands, making the mannered jargon of the previous pages feel stilted and out-of-date (I.i.250-60): he cannot help but replace ideals with life, real life, and this makes the audience his ally. This happens virtually any time Benedick is in the scene, and when he isn’t, the characters fall joylessly to their practiced scripts. Likewise, Beatrice runs circles around her dullard cousin with her wit until she fluffs Hero up into the same kind of boisterousness that keeps her real and lovable—and too large and human to fit into the two-dimensional “virginal maiden” schema.

It is unsurprising that masks and masquerades thread through this play, for the conflict between role-playing and authenticity lies at the crux of the drama. The scales fall from the eyes of our beloved hero and heroine when they trade in their sharp tongues—tongues that have insulated them from vulnerability—for self-knowledge and the authentic love of and for one another. For the characters still beholden to the Platonic shadows of the Romance genre, the transformation comes at a greater cost. The audience watches in horror as Claudio publicly shames Hero. We don’t cringe because he is wrong (though he is—on virtually every level), but because, the play suggests, this outcome is the inevitable result of holding a lover to unrealistic standards. The chivalric code forces us to be perfect, and to expect perfection from our potential spouse. That, Shakespeare suggests, isn’t tenable. We fall hard when we have that far to fall. Claudio becomes nearly irredeemable at his public humiliation of Hero, but Hero, for agreeing to play the part of the slandered maiden, is culpable as well. After all, if you play in a world where masks are more important than reality, a seeming betrayal, hid by the “sign and semblance of… honor” (IV.i.41) makes you as guilty as a real one: the seeming is everything. So she must be punished (it’s rather a shame that Claudio isn’t punished more, for his cruelty to a grieving father if not his unnecessary cruelty to a lover). She, like the de casibus hero (Hero?), must die. But her death is a kind of purgation, releasing the play from the stranglehold of the past, allowing her and her lover to be “re-born” into the more winsome world of Beatrice and Benedick.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing. Signet Classics, 1998.