Thoughts

Toni Morrison, Jazz

Morrison, Toni. Jazz. Vintage Books, 2004.

Summary of Work
A complex tale that goes over the relationships between Violet, Dorcas, and Joe while they are living in Harlem. The story starts out with Violet, the wife of Joe Trace, going to Dorcas’s funeral. Her husband had fallen in love with the 18-year-old girl and in his passion shot her. When Violet gets to the coffin, she slashes Dorcas’s face and has to be pulled down to the Church floor. That same evening, she lets all the birds in the house free, including the Parrot that says “I love you.” Joe had never been prosecuted for the murder because Dorcas’s aunt knew that it wouldn’t do any good to hire the cops when Joe was already grief stricken and Violet was too. The local women’s committee determine that after the scene Violet made at the funeral and her current attempt to get revenge on her husband by having a boyfriend, they will not give her financial aid.
Violet sees that the tactic isn’t working so she goes about trying to win her husband’s love again. But since Joe remains absolutely silent, Violet decides she needs to do something different. She tries to find out more about Dorcas, asking her teachers and friends about her, and learning how to dance her favorite dances. She even obtains a photo of Dorcas, and both her and her husband often stare at the photo.

It had been eight years since the WWI Armistice, when soldiers came home and the women’s group were always out making sure that people in the community had all they needed. It was a cold winter when Dorcas died, and despite the cold, Joe and Violet take turns staying up in the night to just stare at the photo of Dorcas. Joe does not have a job, and Violet keeps them afloat as a hairdresser. She goes to individual homes to do hair, and keeps her days as busy as possible so she doesn’t have to feel miserable. The community knows that Violet has tendencies to do crazy things, including when she sat in the middle of the street and wouldn’t move, when she kidnapped a baby she had been asked to watch for a minute, and when she would speak nonsense when she was a child. This current change in her has Joe annoyed and depressed.

Joe and Dorcas met in October and had a three month affair, and even after her death he can still remember all the love and sadness that came with that affair. He tries to think of Violet after the death, but he does not love her and cannot do anything but remember dates for the significant, loving events in their relationship. Joe had seen Dorcas before in a candy store, but sees her again as he is going to sell makeup to some women, and he whispered to her then. He met Violet working the fields in Virginia and moving to NYC together in the early 1900s, twenty years before Dorcas’s death. After twenty years of trying to make this marriage work, he decides to give up, and he rents another room for six hours a week so he can sleep with Dorcas and talk to her about his life. Dorcas understands him, particularly his stories about his mother and not knowing her: she had a violent relationship with her mother, constantly fighting. She also talks about her apartment catching on fire and losing her dolls, and about wanting to go to Mexico with Joe to dance and live a good life. Joe always gives Dorcas presents before they part.

Malvonne is the woman who rents the room to Joe for his affair. She is a woman who loves gossip, and she cleans offices of white businessmen every night. She has a grocery bag full of unsent letters from her neighbors that her nephew stashed away, and she reads them, taking action only when the information in the letters is urgent or has important information for the recipient. She had taken care of her nephew, Sweetness (AKA Little Caesar or William Younger), but when he moves out, his room is empty. Joe wants to rent it for a couple bucks a month and free repair work, but she at first refuses, not wanting to take part in an affair in any way, even though she dislikes Violet. Joe convinces her that he will just use the space for conversation, and that Violet won’t know because she’s always too busy with work, and so she allows them to use the space, but will not pass any messages.

Dorcas’s aunt Alice Manfred took care of her after her parents died in the East St. Louis riots. Alice took Dorcas to the Silent March protest over the riots, remembering how Dorcas’s father was trampled to death and her mother, in agony, ran home and her home was set ablaze, killing her. Dorcas, rather than deal with the grief of losing her parents, focused on her lost wooden dolls. Alice believes that jazz music was sinful and a cause of the violent riots, but Dorcas loves the sounds. Alice works as a seamstress, and Dorcas goes to the neighbors, the Millers, to be cared for. They are good friends with Alice and spend a lot of time talking about fashion and music. When she became a teenager, Dorcas started to rebel against her Aunt, and she goes to a dance party with her friend and they dress up to look older. They enjoy watching brothers who can dance well, and when the music goes from fast to slow pieces, Dorcas approaches the men to dance, but is deterred when she sees them whisper and their smiles disappear. However, when Dorcas meets Joe a year later at her home, Alice has a premonition that something bad is going to happen.

After the funeral, the community has renamed Violet “Violent,” but Alice is no longer surprised to see Violet show up at her home. Alice mistrusted cops and so never dealt with the law, and she grew withdrawn, becoming overly focused on newspaper stories about rape and murder and assaults of women. She feels that these women weren’t defenseless, and yet also feels betrayed over Joe’s corruption of her niece. Alice first received a note from Violet under her door a week after the funeral, and Alice was upset, scared, and confused. But Violet is looking for a place to rest, and Alice provides it. She can’t stop staring at the photo of Dorcas at Alice’s home. Alice asks if Joe was violent, and Violet said no, he’d never beaten her, and after that Alice feels the need to get to understand Joe and Violet. But as she learns more, she becomes uncomfortable, which is why she gives Violet the photo of her niece. But Violet keeps coming back every day, so Alice starts mending the woman’s clothing and Violet continues to wonder about Joe. After at first feeling exasperated about the visits, Alice comes to enjoy them, and the two women are able to speak honestly to one another. When Violet asks if Alice would ever fight for a man, she remembers back to when her husband was unfaithful and she was enraged for months, but didn’t do anything before he died, and his mistress came to the funeral dressed in white; she connects with Violet and realized she’d have done the same thing Violet did to her husband’s mistress if she’d have gotten the chance.

Violet thinks back first to her slashing Dorcas’s face and then to releasing the birds, and then to her life in Virginia with Joe. She remembers he family being robbed and losing everything, and how her mother, Rose Dear, stopped talking. True Belle, her grandmother, moved from Baltimore to help out, but Rose still committed suicide. Her husband came into town just days later with money and gifts. When Violet was a late teenager, True Belle sent her and her sisters to go pick cotton for a few weeks, and when she was sleeping under a tree, Joe fell out of it while he was sleeping. They talked all night, and by the end of the three weeks, she sent the money she earned with her sisters and moved to stay close to Joe. They determine to move to NYC together about a decade later. They didn’t want children, and Violet was plagued with miscarriages, but when Violet gets older she feels she wanted children and mourns her last child she miscarried. After all these musings, she asks Alice if she should stay with Joe, but Alice doesn’t give her a clear answer.

Joe was born at the end of the 19th century and grew up with an adoptive family, where he had a friend and brother in Victory Williams. Joe grew up helping hunters and he loved the woods. When he met Violet and married her and worked as a sharecropper to find himself in more and more debt, he changed his attitude and then decided to buy land, but found that he was being asked for too much money, so he moved with her to New York and they found a place in Harlem. He worked at hotels and sold cosmetics, and after the riots, he danced down the street with the soldiers returning from war. But all of a sudden, he loses Violet, who starts sleeping with a doll hugged to her at night, and he becomes lonely. He meets Dorcas, with long hair, bad skin, and all sorts of marks on her face from the blemishes. They remind him of the trails in the woods he used to walk on as he searched for Wild, his mother. He remembers the end of their relationship, with him following her to a dance, and then continuing looking for her in places each day. He finds her one last time, where she says awful things to him and he realizes that he’s not a young man, and that he is chasing a woman when young men don’t have to chase; women come their way. He continues to remember how Dorcas looked, with her worn shoes and the marks on her cheeks and the presents he bought her. He remembers taking Dorcas’s virginity.

True Belle had been a slave in Virginia before she left to Baltimore, although she returns to Virginia a free woman. Her family is in squalor because the state repossessed everything when Rose’s husband disappeared. True Belle was on an estate of a white man whose daughter got pregnant by a black man and was disowned, and True Belle moved with her after being disowned. She was forced to leave her daughters on the plantation. The daughter, Vera Louise, names her bastard child Golden Gray because of his golden curls. True and Vera spoil him, but when Vera reveals to him on his eighteenth birthday that his father is black, he wants to know more but Vera refuses to speak, leaving True to tell the story. When she tells him that his father is Henry LesTroy, Golden goes to meet his father, intending to kill him, and sees a naked black woman on the road in the rain and when she is falls unconscious, Golden is so revolted by her color that he considers leaving her, but because she is pregnant he decides to take her in the carriage. He worries that she will get his clothing dirty. Despite these feelings, he did love True because she took care of him, but he still can’t deal with having a black father because it changes his entire identity. When he comes upon a home he thinks is his father’s, he leaves the pregnant woman in it, waiting for Henry to return. He gets drunk waiting, and when someone comes in, it is a black boy. The boy mistakes Golden for a white man who is there to talk to Henry, and Golden has him first look after his horses and then he looks after the unconscious woman as Golden remembers his rage at realizing his father is black and True telling him that rather than destroy his mother’s clothing he should go see his father.

When Henry comes home and learns Golden is his son, he comes to realize why Vera left, but before they can start talking the pregnant woman on the table goes into labor. The woman bites Henry so he names her “Wild,” and she rejects the child. The black boy, Honor, is told to get his mother to come take the child. Wild never leaves the area, but haunts the fields. This child is Joe Trace. Joe always feels Wild is his mother, though he is never told so. He tries to find Wild three times, and the last time she says something to him to answer his question, but he cannot understand because he cannot see her with the fading daylight. After this, he works all the time to stop thinking about it, and that’s where he met Violet. After the fields are set afire, he never learns about what happened to Henry (AKA Hunter’s Hunter).

Joe thinks back to his hunt for Dorcas, and remembers he never meant to kill her, but didn’t expect to find her with a young slick man, either. He also thinks of his mother at this time and how it felt similar to hunt for her with no success.

Dorcas is dancing with a coveted man in a packed apartment, and she feels incandescently happy. She’s worried Joe will be looking for her, and that he’ll come to the party. She feels bad about her cruel words, but needed to get away from him. She had told him he made her sick even though she’d meant to talk about being uncomfortable with the affair. She didn’t mention about the young man, Acton. She remembers Felice frowning at her when she had mentioned Joe. The differences between Joe and Acton are stark, with Joe accepting her no matter what and Acton asking for her to look and be specific ways, and she loves that and loves dancing with him and how jealous it makes other women. She knows that Joe will see her with Acton and realize she is with him now. Dorcas narrates her death, talking about dancing with Acton and seeing Joe, getting shot, and falling into Acton’s arms and being put on a table. Acton is upset that her blood got on his coat. Everyone is asking who shot her, and Dorcas believes she tells Felice it was Joe. As she dies, she can only make out music and oranges on the dining room table.

Felice comes to Violet and Joe’s home one afternoon with sweetmeats and music. Felice was raised by her grandmother because her parents could only come home once every few weeks from work, and then her father liked to read and her mother liked to go out dancing and to church. When Dorcas started seeing Joe, she figured it out despite Dorcas trying to hide it. Felice doesn’t think Violet is crazy because when she went to visit her while looking for a missing opal ring after she had let Dorcas borrow it to impress Acton. Felice didn’t attend Dorcas’s funeral out of anger, but also wanted to see if she could find the opal ring, and so started going to Violet and Joe’s to see if she could get it and to talk about Dorcas to Joe. She says that Dorcas let herself die rather than get medical help, so it was her fault she died from the bullet wound. She cries as she talks about it, and Joe and Violet invite her to dinner and Violet says the ring was on Dorcas’s hand when she was buried. When Felice visits for dinner again, she gets to talk to Joe alone, and when music starts playing, Violet comes in and she and Joe start dancing while Felice watches, and before she leaves, she promises Violet she will come let her do her hair.

Discussion of Work
This narrative is structured much like a jazz song, with the main plot being the driving beat, but each person’s story being its own riff or solo in the song and the narrative, expanding upon the original story and adding unique information and tune to the narrative. Time is not linear in this narrative, with Dorcas sometimes being dead, sometimes alive, sometimes not even born as the narrative of Violet and Joe’s families are told. The story weaves a tale of tragedy and love through matriarchal lines across generations, showing how female love can heal, and irresponsible men often destroy what the women have built in their families. Infidelity destroys families, but it isn’t a death sentence to the family unit: with proper communication and time to grieve, the family can be rebuilt, showing a resiliency of these black women as they deal with trauma.

Miscegenation also makes a brief appearance, bringing front and center the issues of race and racism within their own family histories. Discovering his blackness completely rips Golden apart, who has been raised with a sense of racial superiority that, when turned upon him, he cannot deal with. The only way to deal with it for Golden is to destroy his own father, to commit patricide to erase evidence of his black heritage and make him white again. Readers never learn if, after the birth of Joe, Golden ever really speaks with his father or comes to terms with his blackness; Golden merely disappears from the narrative into the space of whiteness, away from the struggles that his black family faces.

Regarding my dissertation topic, dance plays a distinct role in this story, with faster jazz dances and slower blues idiom dances like the Slow Drag featuring. The dances, like the musical structure of the story, have a sense of temporality about them. The faster jazz dances are at first indicative of Dorcas’s age and inexperience: she is not invited to dance even the slower dances because it is apparent that the complexity of the fast dances is too much for her, and she doesn’t fully understand what she sees as men dance before her, even though she can appreciate it. With age and regular attendance at house parties, she becomes a better dancer. She is able to fully embrace her youth through dancing, as it arouses both her sensual feelings for young men and her excitement about her own body. For Joe, these dances allow him to relive a part of his life that he thought he had lost; it allows him to forget his loneliness for a time and feel young again, almost turning back time, or if not turning back time, then at least extending the moments he has. His affair with a woman half his age is another way of turning back time, and much as the new music confuses the older generation, his relationship confuses his understanding of his life, turning it to pieces as he tries to participate in a relationship with a woman from a different generation with different wants and trends. It is not until after Dorcas’s death and the introduction of Felice that he is again able to connect with and dance with Violet, representing a healed relationship. Felice fills a hole for both Violet and Joe: Felice can be Violet’s daughter she never had, and Joe can be a father figure rather than a lover to the girl, showing her that there is happiness amid all the sorrow.

by bluesyjune

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Harcourt, Inc, 1981.

Summary of Work
This is a work of stream of consciousness narrative split into three sections. The first section starts just before WWI. Mr. Ramsay and his wife and eight children go to their summer home in the Hebrides, and their home overlooks a lighthouse. Their son James wants to go to the lighthouse, and he is told they will if the weather is nice, but it looks not to be. James resents his father for not being able to go and thinks he says it just to be mean to the kids. The Ramsays host many guests including Charles Tansley, a fan of Ramsay’s philosophical work. Lily Briscoe is a young painter who also comes around to paint Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay wants Lily and her old friend William Bankes to fall in love and marry, but Lily wants to stay single. Despite this disappointment, Mrs. Ramsay does arrange the marriage of two other friends, Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle. Paul proposes the same day Lily starts painting Mrs. Ramsay. Mrs. Ramsay tries to reconcile her son James and Mr. Ramsay, who is fretting over his philosophical work.

The same evening, they give a dinner party that goes disastrous, with Paul and Minta returning late from a beach walk with two of the Ramsay children, Lily being upset that Tansley believes women can’t write or paint, and Ramsay being rude when Carmichael asks for seconds. Despite these issues, the dinner party is able to make a happy evening of it. But when Mrs. Ramsay leaves the room, the happiness of the party doesn’t last. She wants to sit in peace, but is unable to because her husband is in need of her comfort and assurances of her love. She cannot abide his needy attitude, but does talk to him about the weather being too bad for a trip to the lighthouse. One night passes into another night, and time starts passing quickly.

World War One starts, and the Ramseys’ oldest son is killed in the war. Another of their children dies in childbirth. Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly. The family doesn’t go to the summer home to vacation anymore, and the house is in shambles. It is a decade before the family goes back to the home, and it takes a handful of people to get the house back in good condition just as Lily returns to the place. This time, James and Cam and Mr. Ramsay decide to go to the lighthouse, but delays upset Ramsay. He goes to Lily to get sympathy, but Lily cannot give him the love and comfort he needs. The Ramsays start out to the lighthouse anyway, and Lily sits out in the yard to complete a painting she had started but left unfinished the last time she was at the house. James and Cam are embarrassed by their father’s needy nature and self-pity, but they get to the lighthouse, and they do feel a love for their father. James even has a connecting moment with him as he praises his sailing skills, despite his resentment for his father. While they are at the lighthouse, Lily finishes her canvas.

Discussion of Work
One of the big themes running through this work is the “Angel in the House.” Women at that time were expected to sacrifice everything for their family, taking the worst of everything and never thinking of themselves. With eight children and a husband who needs constant reassurance, Mrs. Ramsay is much more an object in use all the time than she is a person with talents and needs and a life. This is telling as she is largely the figure that the novel revolves around, but she is rarely thinking of herself: she is knitting for her son, looking through catalogues, thinking of friends and their needs as she meets them in town or invites them to her home, calming her husband’s irrational outbursts. When Carmichael, the failed poet, rejects her and her aid, she is hurt, largely because her whole identity or existence depends upon helping those she meets.

Lily represents another option for a woman: a self-fulfilled life outside of marriage. She doesn’t want marriage or children, wants to make a living on her own and to paint, and believes that she, like any man, can make her way in life with her skills and talents. She is offended by the idea that she cannot be a full and good woman without marriage and children. But despite her efforts, most do not take her seriously, as evidenced by when the painting of Mrs. Ramsay is nearly knocked over. Lily is also able to stay a stable person through the years, although the people who were so dependent on Mrs. Ramsay seem unable to do so.

There is also some Freudian influence in this work, with James loving his mother and being resentful of his father, wishing he would go away so he could spend more time with his mother. When his mother dies, he is no less resentful of his father, meaning he never moved past his Oedipal complex. The whole work, with the stream of consciousness narrative, remains subjective, giving us only brief visions of life as it passes the characters by, leaving many opportunities unexplored as the woman of the household can only do so much for them, and they are unable to do the rest for themselves.

by bluesyjune

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Penguin Books, 2003.

Summary of Work
An Englishman from York and youngest son of a merchant, Robinson Crusoe’s father wants him to study law. But to his family’s dismay, Crusoe desires a life at sea, and he sails to London with a friend against his family’s wishes. On the way to London, there is a terrible storm that nearly kills Crusoe and his friend, but undeterred, he signs himself up to sail from London. His first trip brings him some financial success, and that encourages him to take another voyage. As to not lose the profit from the first trip, he leaves the money with a widow he trusts. His second trip lands him enslaved to pirate Moors, and he is enslaved in North Africa. He escapes slavery while on a fishing expedition, where he and another boy are able to sail down the coast and meet the Portuguese; Crusoe sells the boy back into slavery and goes to Brazil, where he becomes a successful plantation owner. His success leaves him needing more slaves, and rather than purchase them from a slave trader, he determines he will sail to Africa and gather his own slaves, but as he travels he ends up shipwrecked, the sole survivor, off the coast of Trinidad.

He salvages what he can from the ship, mainly guns, gunpowder, some food, and other useful items. Then he surveys part of the island to see what he can find to help him survive, and he finds goats and finds a good spot to build shelter. He also takes the time to build a cross on which he engraves the date of his shipwreck, and he makes a notch in it every day to keep track of time. He has paper, so he keeps a journal in which he describes his successes and failures, including his candle making trials, his lucky chance of sprouting grain, building a cellar, and falling ill. When he is ill he hallucinates an angel appearance, where the angel comes to tell him to repent. He believes, in a religious reawakening, that God has thus far delivered him from his sins. After recovery, he determines to make a full survey of the area, finding that he is, in fact, on an island, and that the space has grapes in abundance. He starts feeling like he is king of the island, and he trains a parrot, makes a goat his pet, and starts learning skills of pottery, basketry, and bread making. He also builds a canoe from a cedar tree, but unthinkingly doesn’t put it near water so he cannot lift it to shore. So he tries again with a smaller tree that he can move by himself, and he decides to row around the island. While rowing, he gets caught in a current and nearly dies, but is able to get to shore. He hears his parrot, and is once again praising God for saving him. For several years after that, he stays on the island with no attempt to leave.

One afternoon, he discovers the footprints of another person, and he decides that there must be cannibals that live nearby, so he arms himself and builds an underground space to hide his goats at night as well as an underground space to cook. He hears gunshots on another evening, and he finds a shipwreck, but no one is there. As he walks, he finds the dead all along the shore, and he convinces himself that cannibals have feasted on these corpses, so he continues his high alert status. Crusoe, on watch, sees a group of cannibals taking victims to shore, and one victim breaks free and heads towards Crusoe. He kills one of the cannibals and injures another, who the prisoner kills in the end. He then defeats almost all of the other cannibals because he is heavily armed. The prisoner gives his life to Crusoe in exchange for the gift of life, and Crusoe makes him a servant and names him Friday. Crusoe goes about teaching his new servant English and basic Christian doctrines, and Friday explains the construction of the cannibal nations on the island to Crusoe. Friday desires to go back to the Spanish people he was shipwrecked with, which saddens Crusoe, but then they determine that perhaps they will go to the cannibals’ island to find the Spaniards. However, as they go to leave, a group of cannibals arrives with more prisoners, one who is distinctly European. Friday and Crusoe, with their guns, kill most of the cannibals and save the European, who turns out to be a Spaniard, and another victim who was saved is Friday’s father. The Spaniard, Crusoe, Friday, and Friday’s father go back to Crusoe’s dwelling, and they eat and rest. The next day the Spaniard and Friday’s father hop in a boat to explore the island.

While they are away, an English ship appears on the shore, and when Crusoe goes to see what’s goin on, he sees the ship’s captain and a few other men being forced ashore by mutineers. Crusoe and Friday start a maneuver to confuse and scare the mutineers, and they end up surrendering, and with the captain, they pretend that the land is English territory and that Crusoe is the magnanimous governor who spared their lives so they can face justice in England. It has been 27 years he has spent on the island when he is able to start on his return to England. All his family but his sisters are dead, but the widow he saved his money with is still alive, and she still has his money. He also learns that in the decades he was gone, his plantations have been very prosperous, and so he arranges to sell them, determining that he will not sail again, even to get to England; he will go by land. He has struggles traveling by land because of storms and wildlife, but finally gets back and is able to get his money from the sale of his plantations and the widow. He gives the widow and his sisters portions of his profits, and then considers taking another voyage to Brazil, but changes his mind because he does not want to have to convert to Catholicism to live there. He marries, but his wife dies, and he finally determines he will sail again, this time to the East Indies as a trader. He visits the island he was shipwrecked upon, and finds that Spain has turned it into a profitable and beautiful colony.

Discussion of Work
This is a castaway and travel narrative, with the themes of human ingenuity, survival instinct, and trust in God and Christianity running throughout. The book could be said to teach moral lessons, as it is the original sin of not following his father’s advice that Crusoe seems to atone for. He initially makes good money, but upon his continual sailing, he loses everything in order to have the opportunity, apparently, to come to God and realize his grace. The story here also focuses on human ingenuity, as Crusoe consistently makes himself prosperous in each situation he is in: first trading, then plantation-running, then building civilization out of wilderness (although for wilderness, the space as described is pretty domesticated, with goats, grape vineyards, and plenty of fertile land and easy building space). Crusoe’s state on the island gets better the more he focuses on God and his deliverance and less on his sorrows as a castaway. When he is finally returned to England after his trials, he finds himself as Job, with far more than he ever had before his disaster, able to live happily wherever he chooses as a gift from God.

Race also plays a large part in this book, first with the slave boy who he escapes from slavery with and then sells to the Portuguese. When Crusoe is a slave, he finds ways to be friendly with his fellow slave, but as soon as he finds a way to free himself, he is automatically forgetful of the humanity of his companion, and instead sees him as an object, chattel for labor. This is clear not only in his quick sale of the boy, but in his later lamentation that he sold him when he could have used him as a laborer in Brazil. His understanding of slavery never changes throughout the novel, as can be seen when the native who he names Friday comes to be with him: he teaches him English and about Christianity, but still looks at him as a servant, a lesser being. He finds that kindness will work best, and yet there is always a condescension in his speech that is different from kindness: it is the speech of a person who finds himself superior to all others.

The superior attitude that Crusoe displays regarding race also applies to his mastery of the land. Whatever Crusoe comes to, he proves the superiority of the white man in his ability to survive and master not just survival, but building a civilization from the ground up. When he travels again after having been restored to England, he finds his island prosperous, and it is almost as if his being there is what caused the Spaniards to have success with the space. The colonial mind is at work with the ideas about white superiority and Christian mastery of land. That mastery also applies to the self, as Crusoe learns not only that it is important to recognize one’s identity, but to be able to master it in order to do more than survive, but thrive.

by bluesyjune

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Dover Publications, Inc, 1994.

Summary of Work
This book starts off where Tom Sawyer ended: Huck has come into quite a bit of money after he and Tom discover a robber’s gold stash, and the money is put in the bank for him; he is adopted by the Widow Douglas, who is kind but overbearing and lives with her sister. Huck dislikes his situation, particularly because he has to stay clean, go to school and church, and have proper manners. Tom talks him into staying with Douglas, but then when Huck’s dad comes, drunk, into town and demands Huck’s money from the bank, things change. Judge Thatcher tries to help the widow get custody of Huck, but there is another, new judge in town who is slowing the process because he believes that Huck’s father has natural rights and shouldn’t lose those. The judge makes an effort to rehabilitate him, but those efforts fail and Huck’s dad goes around harassing him for months until one day, when the Widow Douglas tells him to stay away from her home and his son, he kidnaps Huck and hides him in a cabin across the river.

He locks Huck in, goes and gets drunk, and continually comes back to beat him. Huck plans his escape because he is worried that the beatings are going to just get worse: he fakes his own death by spreading pig blood all over the cabin and hiding on the island in the middle of the Mississippi. The whole town searches for his body in the river, and Huck watches; then he runs into Jim, a runaway slave owned by Widow Douglas’ sister. He ran because he had heard she was going to sell him downriver, and he did not want the horrible treatment he had heard of on those plantations, and he didn’t want to be separated from his family. Huck and Jim decide to team up, but Huck does have some misgivings about helping a runaway slave. There is a flood on the river while they are on the island, and they capture a loose raft, and loot the house that is also floating down the river. They come across a dead body, but Jim refuses to let Huck get a close look at it, especially not the face.

One day on the shore, Huck learns that people have seen smoke coming from their island and are pretty sure it is Jim, and they are coming to get him for the reward, so they decide they must leave the island and float downriver. They want to go down to the Ohio River and then get Jim up to the free States via a steamboat. They travel for several days and encounter a group of robbers on a steamboat that has wrecked, and they are able to steal goods from the robbers. But when a fog kicks up, they miss the mouth of the Ohio and encounter slave catchers, where Huck is again stricken with misgivings about aiding a runaway slave and calling Jim his property. Still, he makes up a lie about his father having smallpox on the raft, and the slave catchers are so worried about catching it that they stay away. But Jim and Huck are unable to get back to the mouth of the Ohio, so they continue downriver, where a steamboat hits their raft and they get separated.

Huck ends up with the Grangerfords, southern aristocrats feuding with another family, the Shepherdsons: a Grangerford daughter elopes with a Shepherdson, and it causes an all gunfight, where many of the family members die. Huck gets caught in this feud, but Jim shows up just in time and he takes him to his hiding place and shows him the repaired raft, and they again start out on the river. They then rescue men being chased by bandits; Jim and Huck quickly learn that these men are in fact con men posing as aristocrats, but they are unable to rid them from their company. The men pull off several cons as they stop at small towns on the river, among them pretending to have converted a man in the Indies to Christianity and taking up a collection to help get the “missionary” back in the field. They also pull off a con where they pretend to put on a large show for money but only put on a small one, which angers the town for being taken for nearly $500.

Then they try to pull off a large con: they pretend to be family to Peter Wilks, who just died and left his inheritance to them; they fool the nieces in town and they are able to get money, but people in the town are skeptical and Huck decides to let people know about the scam. He steals the gold that the con men have gotten and has to hide it in Peter Wilks’ coffin, and when he goes to tell the oldest niece, the real Wilks brothers enter town; the con men barely escape, and Huck and Jim think they are free of them, but just as they are about to leave, the con men come to the raft and force their way back on. They then sell Jim on the statement that there is a large reward offered for him that the farmer can cash in on, and Huck has to free him. As he enters the property, he is called after by the name of Tom, and he discovers that Jim has been sold to Tom Sawyer’s aunt and uncle. Tom had been on his way to visit them, and so they mistook Huck for Tom, and so Huck goes along with it, and when Tom comes, he pretends to be his younger brother, Sid.

When Huck tells Tom about the situation he and Jim are in, Tom concocts a plan to free Jim, and he, as is his usual, creates wild obstacles and fantasies surrounding the situation even though Jim could be easily freed. Tom planned on paying Jim for playing along with the game he created, but when Polly shows up and clears up Tom and Huck’s identities, all that changes. They learn that Jim’s owner had died and had felt so bad about possibly selling Jim that she stipulated he be set free in her will. Huck worries that his father has probably stolen all his money. Jim then reveals to Huck that the body they found in the floating house had been his father’s, and that Jim is worried about the body being found again. Tom’s Aunt Sally offers to adopt Huck, but Huck wants to move out West to get away from everyone who wants him to be civilized.

Discussion of Work
This story fits into the Bildungsroman category, as readers watch Huck develop from completely childish mindsets to more adult ones, particularly when it comes to race and moral issues. the way Huck views Jim is particularly telling of the attitudes of the day: Huck knows Jim is property, and therefore cannot be seen as a human being with rights who deserves freedom. Much of Huck’s moral misgivings come from this belief; he worries about the consequences of lying and thievery and yet allows Jim to remain free not only because he does not want to go back home, but because the longer he is with Jim, the harder time Huck has imagining him as property. The longer he is on the raft, largely free from society and its rules and structures, he is able to consider alternative modes of belief. However, when he reaches land and decides to help Jim escape, those same rules and societal structures are placed on Jim and Huck once again, and the sense of Jim as human begins to fade. Huck goes along with an elaborate concocted plan that wastes time when he could just easily go in at night and free Jim. Jim’s life becomes a prop or a bargaining chip with which he can impress his friend Tom. Jim’s beliefs are regularly made fun of in both the beginning and end of the book with his belief in witches and magic, and Jim as less intelligent even in comparison to the largely uneducated Huck is very apparent.

by bluesyjune

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. Signet Classics, 2009.

Summary of Work
This book opens at the Custom House, where the author discusses how the book came to be written. The narrator is a surveyor in Salem who came across a manuscript and a tattered, crimson gold cloth in the shape of the letter A in an attic. The surveyor reads the manuscript to find that it details the events from around 200 years previous about an adulterous woman and her life. He writes a fictional account of this story, which becomes the novel.

In the 17th century in puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is led from the prison to the town square, a scarlet A emblazoned on her chest, to be punished for committing adultery. She had been sent to Boston by her much older husband, who was a scholar, but her husband never arrived after her, presumably lost at sea. She had a child much later, having had an affair; when the minister Arthur asks her to reveal her lover so he may also be punished, she refuses, taking the punishment all herself. She is publicly shamed, and must always wear the scarlet A on her breast as her punishment for adultery.

A stranger watches this entire display, and he is later invited into the community as a doctor. Roger Chillingworth is in fact Hester’s husband, and she knows this, but she and he do not reveal that to the town. He is determined to find out who her lover was and to seek revenge. Hester supports herself as a seamstress, and Pearl grows into a beautiful young child, often described as a fairy, sprite, or imp in her otherworldliness and wilfullness. They are both shunned by the community, and the townspeople seek to take Pearl from Hester, believing that an adulterous woman should not be raising a child. However, the town minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, mediates and Hester is able to keep her child. Since Hester’s trial, Dimmesdale has struggled with his health, suffering from a mysterious heart condition. Chillingworth so regularly helps him that he ends up moving in with the minister to help him. He also moves in with the intention to investigate his suspicions that Dimmesdale is Hester’s lover. One day when the minister is asleep, he examines Dimmesdale and discovers a branded A on his chest, confirming Chillingworth’s suspicion.

Dimmesdale is unable to forgive himself, and finds new ways to punish himself for his sins. In contrast, as Hester has lived a life of charity and humility since her punishment was bestowed upon her, the community comes to almost admire her and forgive her for her previous sins. Pearl and Hester go to visit a townsperson on their deathbed, and on their way back in the evening, they see Dimmesdale standing on the scaffold where Hester had stood with Pearl in her arms nearly a decade earlier. He is trying to find a way to punish himself for his sins, and Hester and Pearl join him on the scaffold. The three of them join hands, and when Pearl asks Dimmesdale to greet her publicly when they are in town the next day, Dimmesdale says he cannot, and in response a meteor falls and creates a red A in the sky in its wake. Hester decides she cannot watch Dimmesdale get worse, and seeks to intervene with Chillingworth on his behalf. But despite her pleading with her husband, he refuses to stop tormenting Dimmesdale.

Later, Hester arranges for Dimmesdale to meet her and Pearl in the woods, and they go walking, with Pearl playing in the woods as Dimmesdale and Hester talk. She has guessed that Chillingworth is aware of her plan to tell Dimmesdale of his identity, and so she must act quickly. They determine that they will run away to Europe so they can live together as a family, since there is a ship scheduled to depart four days later. They feel relieved, and Hester briefly removes her scarlet letter and bonnet, letting her hair fall down her back, which scares Pearl, who does not recognize her mother without the letter emblazoned on her chest. The day before they are to set sail, Dimmesdale delivers the most eloquent sermon of his career, and after he leaves, he finds Hester and Pearl staring at the scaffold in the town square. He takes them both up onto the scaffold and tears away his shirt, revealing the A on his chest, and he confesses his sins and dies on the scaffold as Pearl kisses him.

Chillingworth is furious over the death that destroyed his plans for revenge, and he dies in that anger a year later. Hester and Pearl leave town, and no one knows where they went until Hester returns alone as an old woman many years later and resumes her charitable work, still wearing the scarlet A on her chest. Pearl has married a European and has a family of her own, and she sends Hester letters every now and then. When Hester dies, they bury her near Dimmesdale and they share a headstone with the letter A engraved upon it.

Discussion of Work
A work about Puritanism, one of the main themes in this work is a discussion of sin and the human condition. Hester and Arthur could be said to reenact the Adam and Eve story of Judeo-Christian beliefs, because they go from innocence to sin and knowledge, are punished for their sins, and must work and labor for forgiveness as they are separated from God and divinity. The A sewn on Hester’s garments allow her more knowledge of the human condition and sufferings of man than many members of the community because she is able to use it to travel into spaces and situations where other people would not be able to, allowing her to learn godly qualities of charity, humility, and long suffering. Both Dimmesdale and Hester are always contemplating sin and repentance, much as would be expected of the highly religious Puritans in Boston. They are always in search of ways to reconcile their lives with their religion, something that is a problem in a religion that focuses on predestination and punishment rather than lived experience. The Puritan city therefore becomes merely a stagnant backdrop to the personal growth and experience of Dimmesdale and Hester, with Chillingworth the only real member of the community outside of the small family that bears weight in the story because of his inability to grow and forgive leading to a regression. He is a representation of what happens when love and pure emotions are perverted and changed by envying and anger, leading to evil.

How identity is formed is also a theme in the novel, with Hester taking her punishment and using it to reconstruct her life rather than let it destroy her, while Dimmesdale, who never publicly acknowledges his sin until his death, even refusing to publicly acknowledge his own daughter, allows what others think about him to consume him. His false image of a pure and pious man warp his thinking and lead him to self-punishment and psychological pain that leads to physical illness, whereas Hester finds ways that she can show herself as a person capable of doing good despite what others may think of her, leading her to become a person full of compassion, knowledge, and kindness, able to engage in society without worry.

by bluesyjune

Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps

Carpentier, Alejo. The Lost Steps. 1953. University of Minnesota P, 2001.

Summary of Work
We find the unnamed narrator in this work living in NYC and working in the advertising industry even though his talents lie in his musicology background and college degree. He is married to an actress who is part of a wildly popular yet banal play. As he is wandering the city one day, he meets an old friend, a museum curator, who talks to him about going on an expedition to find and bring back primitive musical instruments in South America. At first he refuses, but after meeting with his mistress, Mouche, and some friends and watching a film he composed the music for and finding it worthless, he determines that he will go with Mouche to South America, but go on vacation and buy forgeries to satisfy the requirement of bringing back instruments. When they arrive in a coastal city (again unnamed), he feels suddenly more at home speaking his native tongue, Spanish. As he falls in love with the culture there, Mouche starts detaching from him. Still, he searches for antiques in shops. While he is shopping a revolution breaks out, and he, Mouche, and the other hotel guests have to stay in the hotel, where they worry about food and water supply, getting shot, and getting eaten by the insects that have invaded the place. Even after the revolution ends, he is held up by snipers in the grocers. As soon as the opportunity presents itself, Mouche and the narrator leave and go to the home of a Canadian painter and friend in another town. He becomes jealous of the relationship Mouche has with the woman, and after some time spent there, he determines that he will actually take the trip to look for primitive instruments.

Mouche decides to accompany him, and they take a bus across the Andes and also take on an Indian woman who seems to embody the culture there. One evening, he hears Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on the radio, and it brings him back to his musical heritage and European connections and his forced removal from the space by WWII. The native woman, Rosario, becomes better acquainted with them, and as they enter an oil town where prostitutes are the local entertainment, he begins to criticize Mouche for not being more like Rosario. They finally reach the City of Ruins, and when they reach Puerto Anunciacion he vehemently argues with Mouche. He also meets Adelantado, who tells him of the life of tribes in the jungle. He also witnesses the funeral of Rosario’s father and meets an herbalist who is seemingly insane but who tells of tales of El Dorado and other ancient myths. Mouche, meanwhile, tries a sexual advance on Rosario, and she beats her for it. Mouche then gets malaria, and she has to be sent back to Puerto Anunciacion for treatment. Rosario and the narrator become sexually involved. The remaining party take canoes upriver.

They head into the heart of the jungle by a hidden tributary which Adelantado finds, and they seem to start traveling back in time. The tropical atmosphere, the plant life, and the animal life in the jungle scare the narrator, and a thunderstorm nearly capsizes their canoes. However, they finally find a native village, and he is able to get some of the musical instruments he had been sent to find. He finds their customs and way of life primitive, almost Medieval, and he feels that he witnesses the birth of music while he is there watching a funereal rite. They travel further on to Santa Monica de las Venados, which is a village Adelantado settled. The narrator determines that he will live out his life there, but he is torn because he wants to write music and lacks paper, and he also has an obligation to deliver the instruments he has collected to the museum curator. He visits many primitive areas in the village, including a valley full of prehistoric plants. The rains come, and it seems they will never cease, and he comes up with a new musical composition based on The Odyssey. However, his lack of paper and ink poses problems. This whole time he stays with Rosario, and he asks her to marry him, but she refuses him. Not long after, an airplane stops in the village in search of a lost explorer, which turns out to be the narrator. Torn about going with them or staying, he finally determines that he must return to get paper and ink and deliver the instruments, and then he can come back to live in the village and with Rosario again.

When he flies back home, he is at first a celebrity, and he learns that his wife is pregnant. He sells his story, which he lies about, to a newspaper, but when Mouche sells her story, it creates a scandal, and Ruth also learns about Rosario and that he wants to leave and go back to her, but Ruth will not divorce him. NYC has lost all beauty to him and he finds it useless to him. He runs out of money while he is getting divorced, and he is forced into tiny and poor room accommodations. When he sees Mouche and spends the night with her, he is disgusted with himself about the decision. He decides to get back to writing music to earn some money, and once he sells a film score for enough money, he goes back to Puerto Anunciacion, but cannot find his way back to the tributary and the village. He meets Yannes, who was at the village, and he learns that Rosario has married Marcos, the son of Adelantado, and she is pregnant. The narrator then realizes that he can never go back and relive his previous experience.

Discussion of Work
This work could be considered a work of magical realism, in particular because of the unsurety of time and the magical regression from modernity to primitive life. The winding back of time is an important part of the novel, as it helps to display the tension between European and Latino cultures: the modernity of NYC and European culture evident there as valuable is called into question as the narrator finds his identity, culture, and home in the more “primitive” space of the village of Santa Monica de las Venados. Unlike the European image of primitive cultures, the culture of these villages is sophisticated and engaging and valuable, particularly because of how they live in harmony with the environment. That harmony is particularly tied together through music, moving from the poorly written but popular musical his wife stars in to the beauty of Beethoven, to finally the origins and harmonies of music in its usefulness for everyday life.

Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps puts readers in what feels like a dream state, leaving them to wonder if they read passages on previous pages correctly because the story jumps through six weeks so quickly. The main guidance tool readers have to navigate through the book are the musical performances, which cue readers to coming change and new settings for its main character. The surrealism in the novel, then, is in part created by the magical expectations that the music creates for the readers, as it guides the main character from city to jungle in search of not only music, but of himself.

We first become aware of music’s pull on the main character as he struggles to find any object that does not remind him of some musical composition he has neglected, and any music that does not remind him of pieces of his life he would rather stay buried and forgotten, and this is particularly true of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It drives him to disgust and out into the rainy weather, where he runs into an old friend, the organology curator of a museum. Forced to deal with his past and ashamed at his current state, which is much less than he had hoped it would be as a composer, the main character accepts the Curator’s job offer to obtain specific musical artifacts in the jungles of South America.

It is music, then, which sends the main character out into the unnamed, dreamlike land in the jungles of South America, where he stays in Puerto Anunciación until, at the cue of poorly played music, a revolution breaks out, and he moves on into the jungle in search of the musical artifacts he initially did not intend to find for the Curator. And as he is sitting in an inn in the jungle, he hears Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony over the radio again, this time succumbing to a dream state, remembering his past experience with his parents, and that music’s particular effect upon his father. His whole life is inherently tied to music and this symphony, ever guiding him back to song each time he comes across the composition. We see that music is inherently tied to his life and is leading his destiny, although we, as readers, are unsure of what that destiny is or how much reality is portrayed in such a fast-paced narrative, a narrative that from the second playing of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony onward feels as if it moves backward in time.

The music played becomes improvised, not written down, and then even more primitive, used for religious and funereal rites rather than for pure enjoyment or artistic, aesthetic ideals. As he moves back into what he feels could pass for the Middle Ages and primitive lifestyles, the narrator discovers that he believes every Westerner has misunderstood the origins of music: music is not imitation of animal calls, as he had previously believed, but instead a connection to life and death, created for practical purposes rather than aesthetic ones. The realization drives the narrator to abandon the Western lifestyle.

But he cannot stay away from it. Becoming obsessive over composing for the first time in years, he starts a musical rendition of portions of The Odyssey, feverishly composing through the rainy season and causing his woman, Rosario, and other villagers he lives with to worry about his sanity. For them, there was no reason to write down music when it could be played. He realizes that if he wants his music to be heard, he will have to find a way to connect to the Western world to have the work performed, which leads to the beginning of the end of the dream cycle in the South American jungle. If it were not for the hysteria in New York City over his disappearance and discovery in the jungle, readers would question if the experience had been real or if he had simply slept all day in his apartment and dreamt up the experience.[1]

And as the primitive music fades, no quality music reenters the narrator’s life, signaling the downturn from prosperity to poverty for our narrator. His composition from the jungle, Threnody, left with his love Rosario, he has no muse and no piece to work on even when he makes his way back to South America, unable to find Santa Mónica de los Venados and unable to find the motivation to work on previous compositions.

By the end of the novel, the narrator’s life destroyed and hopes of reuniting with his love Rosario dashed, both the readers and the narrator believe that for these characters, there is no free will, but rather destiny that fate will bring to pass regardless of personal desires: for our narrator, this destiny is to compose music, whether or not anyone will hear it and whether or not he will find success as a composer of classical music. Individuals, then, should strive to be more aware of the external forces that drive them and to learn to ride the wave of those forces or risk being swallowed and destroyed by them.

[1] It is even arguable that we wonder if this entire story is a dream, including the stay in New York City, given that both times the narrator is living there, the scenes pass in a dreamlike blur.

by bluesyjune

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Márquez, Gabriel García. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory

Rabassa. Harper Perennial, 2006.

Summary of Work
This novel gives an account of the fictional, isolated town of Macondo and the Buendias, who found the town. For a great period of time, the town has no contact with the outside world except for gypsies who visit and bring fascinating trinkets and technologies, like ice and a telescope, which Jose Arcadio Buendia likes to buy or investigate, as he is both curious and impulsive. He becomes obsessed with investigating the mysteries of life, particularly through alchemy, and even though he is a leader, he isolates himself from the people of the town. Jose and his wife Ursula were the great grandchildren of survivors of a massacre. They marry, but because they are related, Ursula refuses to consummate the marriage for fear of having genetically deformed children with tails, and this leads to Jose’s ridicule by the town; one day when he is ridiculed, he murders the man, Prudencio Aguilar, and he is haunted by Aguilar from then on, which causes him to leave and found a new town. His children and grandchildren and other descendants all inherit these traits in some form from him. His eldest, Jose Arcadio, inherits his recklessness and physical strength; his youngest, Aureliano, inherits his impenetrable focus.

Jose Arcadio disappears, and his partner Pilar Ternera gives birth to their son, Arcadio. An orphan girl who suddenly appears also joins the family, and her insomnia and pica and memory loss affects first the family, and then the town, as they suffer from both insomnia and memory loss, and must put up signs to help them remember what is important. When the gypsy Melquiades returns (supposedly from the dead), he brings a cure with him and other technology. He and Aureliano coop themselves up trying to use a daguerrotype to prove the existence of God.

The town starts to come in contact with Macondo as the world grows. The foreign government tries to take over, and when Aureliano falls in love with a magistrate’s daughter and is denied, he sleeps with Pilar, who then helps him to win Remedios. Meanwhile, Amaranta and Rebeca Buendia fall in love with a stranger who comes with a pianola for their home, and he decides he wants to marry Rebeca. Both Aureliano and Rebeca get their wishes to be married, but Amaranta wants to stop Rebeca’s marriage for jealousy’s sake. Melquiades passes away, and Jose Arcadio Buendia goes crazy and he has to be tied to a tree for the rest of his life. Remedios dies soon after her marriage to Aureliano, and Rebeca’s marriage is postponed because of that and the wait while the church is built. Pilar has Aureliano’s child, and he is named Aureliano Jose. Then Jose Arcadio returns, and he starts an affair with Rebeca, and Amaranta becomes close with Crespi, the stranger who Rebeca was to marry.

Meanwhile, violence comes to the town as civil wars break out and the Buendia sons become swept up in the action. Aureliano, worried about the government, achieves fame as the leader of the Liberal rebels, becoming the famous Colonel Buendia. Macondo’s government changes many times, and is eventually taken over by Arcadio, who becomes a cruel dictator and is eventually shot by firing squad. Arcadio does have three children: Remedios the Beauty, Aureliano Segundo, and Jose Arcadio Segundo. Amaranta gets her wish for Crespi to ask for her hand in marriage, but she rejects him and he commits suicide, and in her grief she burns her hand black, covering it with a black bandage she wears until her death. Aureliano is also condemned to die since the Liberals lose the war, but is saved at the last minute by his brother. He fights many more times, but realizes that it is fruitless and starts writing poetry. After another mayor is killed in Macondo during another civil uprising, the civil war ends and a peace treaty is signed. Colonel Buendia becomes so upset that he attempts suicide, but survives, and Ursula steps in to pick up the pieces and rebuild the family.

While all of this is going on, the Buendia family has many events in the individual family members’ lives. Some of the Buendia sons take lovers and regularly go to brothels, and others are solitary and take after Jose in that they like to experiment and review scholarly works. The women in the family have just as much breadth in their personality types, with some, like Meme, being socialites who regularly bring large groups home, and others, like Fernanda del Carpio, who are so conservative that they will not even undress for sex, allowing her husband to consummate their marriage only if she can wear a nightgown with a special hole in the crotch during the action. However, for the women, the grandest figure of all is Ursula Iguaran, the wife of Jose Arcadio Buendia and matriarch of the family who holds the entire family together no matter the differences. Her age is uncertain, but she remains alive through the entire book, which spans an indeterminate, but long period of time (perhaps over a century).

The Segundo brothers both look so much alike that Petra, the woman they sleep with, does not realize they are different men. When Jose Arcadio Segundo is scared off by venereal disease, Aureliano Segundo stays with Petra and becomes very wealthy as their farm becomes very fertile. He is very lavish and the whole village benefits from the prosperity. When Fernanda del Carpio enters town, Aureliano Segundo falls in love with and marries her, but he also still sleeps with Petra. Meanwhile, Fernanda tries to turn the Buendia home into the old aristocratic home she grew up in and refuses to deviate from a very formal structure, making the home miserable. During this time, Colonel Buendia’s seventeen illegitimate children, all named Aureliano, come to celebrate their father and the anniversary of the founding of Macondo. They participate in Ash Wednesday and all keep the ash crosses on their heads until their deaths. Some of the children stay and start an ice factory, and others leave, while others build a railroad to Macondo, making Macondo more connected with the outside world.

After the wars, capitalism comes in and takes its toll, with a banana plantation built near Macondo. Americans own the plantation and build a fenced off town, and they force the local workers to toil for pittance wages. The 17 Aurelianos are hunted down and murdered, causing Colonel Buendia to fall into depression. Ursula realizes that time is passing more quickly than it once did; she is going blind, but no one knows because she knows the home so well. Everyone in the house becomes more miserable since the children are gone. When Amaranta dies, Ursula goes to bed and will not get up for years. The banana workers, led by Jose Arcadio Segundo, strike because of the inhumane conditions, and the US Army comes and massacres them for the plantation owners. However, after the army dumps the bodies into the sea, a 5 year rain begins, destroying the plantation and Macondo in a flood. Ursula gets out of bed and tries to put the Buendia family back together. The town and the Buendia family wish for older days, and the village once again becomes solitary, but this time it is in decline rather than thriving. The Buendia family, what remains of it, try to keep their line going through incest, and they become alienated from the world. The last Buendia, Aureliano Segundo, translates a set of prophecies from Jose Arcadio Buendia’s library with the help of Melquiades’ ghost (gifted to him by Melquiades) and finds that they predicted the rise and fall of both Macondo and the Buendia family, showing that the town and its people have simply lived out a prophetic cycle of tragedy.

Discussion of Work
A work of magical realism, time does not seem to flow or function like it would in other novels. The names of the characters overlap enough that the children of the original family members blend with the past and the future genealogical lines. The past, present, and future become combined into one great entity. Language and interpretation play a great part in this, as both the characters and the readers experience the need to interpret the, things, actions, and general goings on in Macondo, leading to a creation of meaning amongst the long narrative that does not indicate a past, present, or future in any formal sense outside of technology and books of prophecy.

Another largely important part of this book is the discussion of progress, and if progress in the Western sense is always the best for every society. Macondo goes from what might be considered a state of innocence–they believe that they are completely isolated from the world by water on all sides until Ursula discovers a pathway into another town–into one of knowledge, first from contact with the gypsies who travel to the town with technology, and then with foreign people and their governments and conflicts. While the town may progress in terms of technology and interconnection with more people and towns, it is actually in decline as first war and then capitalism ravage the town, its people, and its land. This obsession with greatness, progress, and superiority are also present in the Buendia family, who may be said to represent the same questions of progress in human evolution at a more personal level: as the family grows, they become insistent on engaging in the world in ways that make them honored or remembered, either through war or through technology and learning and government. The women of the family do similarly through their beliefs about marriage, family, and running a household. As the Buendia family progresses into later generations, the house becomes more formal and technological, and yet more rigid and unloving, more degenerate in behavior. As the city is conquered and forced to conform to Western ideals, the Buendia family ends up destroying itself in its attempt to maintain some sort of original cultural identity.

 

by bluesyjune

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. 1877. Trans. Richard Pevear. Deckle Edge, 2004.

Summary of Work
The Oblonsky family is in tatters over adultery: Dolly caught her husband, Stiva, having an affair with their children’s former governess, and she is seriously considering leaving him. Stiva can’t comprehend quite why his wife is so upset, but he is sad that his actions have upset her this badly. He has his sister Anna come to mediate the situation, and she successfully convinces Dolly to stay with him. At the same time, Dolly’s youngest sister is being courted by two men: Konstantin Levin, a wealthy landowner in the country who is incredibly awkward in his manners, and Alexei Vronsky, a military man with great career potential. Kitty’s mother tells her that she must turn down Levin in order to accept Vronsky, but after she does so and they go to a ball, Vronsky falls in love with Anna. This leaves Kitty ill over the loss of both suitors, and Anna runs away to St. Petersburg.

Vronsky follows Anna there, and she ends up falling in love with him and starting an affair, and her husband, government official Karenin, does not seem to realize the situation he is in, which causes the entirety of their social society to gossip. Anna nearly abandons her old social circles and starts spending time with Betsy Tverskaya and her friends so she can be close to Vronsky more often. One evening when she has a particularly private and long conversation with Vronsky at Betsy’s home, Karenin takes notice. Vronsky, in that conversation, revealed his love for her. When Karenin confronts her about the conversation, she curtly responds and dismisses his concerns as silly.

The affair gets more heated, and on the day of the military officers’ horse race, Anna tells Vronsky that she is pregnant with his child. They are both uncertain as of what to do, and Anna loves her son too much to get a divorce and leave him. When Vronsky participates in the race, he makes a riding mistake that breaks his horse’s back, and the horse has to be shot. Anna is so visibly upset over the accident that Karenin notices, and when he takes her home, she tells him of her affair and her hatred for him and love for Vronsky.

Kitty, meanwhile, has taken a trip abroad to Germany to recover from her loss, and she meets a Russian woman and her ward and caretaker, Varenka. Kitty becomes enamored with her, and she tries to do good just like them, and this much revives her. She also meets Levin’s infamous and sick brother, Nikolai, who is trying to recover from illness at the same spa.

Levin, having gone home to the country to mourn his failure and recover and move on, is visited by his brother Sergei Koznyshev, who criticizes him for quitting his post in the local government and having no faith in the council there. Levin cannot find a way to explain to his brother how useless he finds the work, so instead he decides to work with the peasants on his estate to try and better the crops and the situation, but is continually frustrated by the lack of interest or even resistance to new agricultural technology that would increase yields. At this time, he also spends some time with Stiva, who has gone to the country to sell some of his wife’s land inheritance for money, since they are severely in debt. Dolly also takes a summer in the country with the children, and Levin goes to visit her at Stiva’s request. He offers his services, but when she suggests that he take another chance to have a relationship with Kitty, he never visits again. He also sees his brother Nikolai several times, and he struggles to know how to keep a relationship with him and help him through his sickness into death.

When Levin goes back to town to visit and to conduct some business, he is invited to the Oblonsky’s home for dinner, and he meets Kitty again and falls in love. They quickly become engaged, to everyone’s happiness. While all of this is occurring, Karenin does not know how to best handle the situation, knowing that it will be bad for him socially and politically to get a divorce. He determines to not allow a divorce, but to instead let Anna continue the affair as long as she does not bring Vronsky into his home. They must keep up appearances. She spends some time in the country, and sees Vronsky often. Vronsky is struggling to choose between his military career and Anna, and yet his opportunities are passed by for the military in his effort to be near her. When Karenin finds Vronsky at his home one day, he decides that they must get a divorce because he cannot take the insult.

However, when Anna goes into labor and nearly dies, he changes his mind. He runs home from town and cancels his beginning the divorce proceedings, and he stays by her side; Vronsky is there as well. Anna begs for Karenin’s forgiveness, and he gives it to her and tells her that she can decide if she wants the divorce or not. His generosity bothers Anna, and so she does not get a divorce, but instead leaves him and goes with her child and Vronsky to Italy, where they do essentially nothing, and Vronsky takes up painting. A famous Russian painter paints a gorgeously stunning portrait of her that Vronsky keeps with them and hangs wherever they stay. When they return to Russia, however, they are outcasts from society because of their position. Vronsky keeps begging Anna to get a divorce, but she will not. She visits Karenin’s home on her son’s birthday, and she is forced to see her husband. She does not return, and forgets to give her son his gifts. At this point, she has become jealous of Vronsky’s freedom because he can go out in society while she must stay in the house because of her social position.

Levin is surprised at the difficulties of married life and the lack of freedom he suddenly has, and this is even more apparent when he gets a message that Nikolai is dying and Kitty refuses to let him go alone. He is at first angry, but then lets her come along. He regrets it when they get to the hotel that Nikolai is staying in because of the poor accommodations, but then immediately changes his position when he sees how good Kitty is at helping the dying man and making him comfortable as possible during his final days of life. Soon after that, Kitty learns she is pregnant, and she is joined by Dolly and her children for the summer at Levin’s estate. While there, Dolly decides to go visit Anna in the country, and finds her happy but somewhat bipolar as she switches from happiness to worry over her situation and her isolation and position in society. She is particularly worried that Anna is using strong sedatives to sleep, and she is wholly dependent on them. Furthermore, she realizes that Anna does not love her baby daughter, and it is apparent by her not knowing anything about her, but rather leaving her to the nurses to take care of. Vronsky’s place in the country is extravagant, and despite the comforts, Dolly is glad for the excuse of her children to go back to Levin’s. Stiva comes to visit them and brings a young male friend who is a cousin to Kitty with him. The young man flirts with Kitty, making Levin jealous to the point that he is unkind to his wife, and together they determine that in order to solve the problem, Levin needs to ask the man to leave. This insults Stiva, but nothing can be done about it.

When Kitty is close to her due date, Dolly and her mother insist that Kitty give birth in the city, and so they move to Moscow temporarily. Levin can’t believe how expensive it is to live in the city, and even Kitty laments that she misses home and wishes she could have had the child in the country. Levin has to take a trip to the provinces to take care of some business, and he takes part in the local elections there, where the liberals are victorious. He meets Vronsky there, and he agrees to go with Stiva to see Anna, who enchants Levin with her charm and the portrait of her. And Levin’s adoration only serves to make Anna more unhappy with Vronsky. When he returns and tells Kitty about his trip, she becomes jealous, worried that Anna has again stolen away her lover. Levin realizes that he has hurt her, and he tries to comfort her. When Kitty goes into labor, he is worried she might die, and he has feelings of resentment toward the child and then doesn’t know quite how to feel about his son.

Stiva leaves and goes to meet Karenin, who has a woman who has helped him raise his child and essentially be a wife to him. Stiva tries to get Karenin to agree to a divorce, but the woman has such a hold on him that he doesn’t make a decision without her and their psychic. When Stiva sees his nephew, he talks to him and he learns that his father and the woman have told him that his mother is dead. When they finally are able to meet with the psychic, Stiva cannot believe what is going on and he leaves the room. The psychic tells Karenin not to get a divorce. Meanwhile, Anna has become more and more frantic, accusing Vronsky of not loving her and of cheating, and no matter how accommodating he is to Anna, she will have fits of rage and insensibility. When she says she wants to go to the country again, Vronsky agrees, but not at the date she wants to go, and suggests they wait a few more days when his business is finished in town. When Vronsky goes out to run an errand, Anna is tormented about her behavior and writes a letter apologizing and asking him to come back, but he replies that he cannot come home until the evening when his business is concluded. She runs to say goodbye to Dolly and then catches a carriage to the train station, where she throws herself under a train and dies (just like a man had when she came into Moscow and first met Vronsky).

Two months later, Levin’s brother Sergei’s book has been published, but it has gone unnoticed. Sergei tries to stifle disappointment by getting in on the patriotism for Russian involvement in the Turkish-Slavic war. When he and Levin talk of it, Levin is uncertain about the motives behind the Slavic cause and Russian support, again to Sergei’s exasperation. Sergei boards a train to Serbia to assist, and Vronsky is also going, having enlisted and paid for an entire regiment himself in order to go to die after the loss of Anna.

Kitty and Levin go back to the country, and Levin becomes depressed even to the point of thinking about suicide, because he is unable to discern the meaning of life and what he should be doing. He then receives advice from a peasant that serving God and being good are the points of life, and Levin has a revelatory experience about those points, determining he will change his life as he has found faith. Later, he, Kitty, Dolly, and the children go out in the woods for a walk and to see some of the buildings and the work going on, and they are caught in a thunderstorm on the way back. When they are hiding under a tree waiting for it to pass, Levin realizes Kitty is not with them, and he runs to find her in the woods, coming upon an oak tree struck by lightening. He worries for them, thinking they may be dead, but finds them safe, his wife having stopped to take care of the child and then getting caught in the storm. He realizes how much he loves them, especially his son, and this change of attitude pleases Kitty. He determines that his life is very good, and the meaning of his life will be the good he can do while he is alive.

Discussion of Work
This work reminded me very much of a novel of manners like Jane Austen’s work. It explores expectations based on social class and gender in Russia before the communist revolution there. Women’s situation as dependent upon marriage and family for respectability is very clear, especially in the contrast between Anna and Kitty. Anna is highly educated and seemingly has it all. She has a child and a husband, but is unhappy and unable to change her state even with her intelligence. Vronsky is regularly surprised by her knowledge and expertise in many fields, but she is unable to use those skills and that knowledge to better her position once she has chosen to leave her husband and become a social outcast. Kitty, on the other hand, is very focused on purely domestic issues–marriage, children, housekeeping, and religion. She stays in the domestic sphere, and this causes her to be solely dependent upon the men in her life: first her father, and then Levin. Her situation in comparison with Dolly’s and Nikolai’s lover show that women were lucky if they had a situation like Kitty’s with a caring and faithful and loving husband who did well by her materially as well as emotionally. Even Anna is bound by this situation, and it is largely what brings her misery. Even these situations, however, are in flux, as Tolstoy writes in his work of a large discussion about how marriages should be arranged and if marriage and God were even socially necessary.

However, unlike Jane Austen’s work, Tolstoy’s work deals heavily in the economic and social situations that men dealt with during the time period, especially with the contrast between Levin and Sergei: Levin is the traditional nobleman who owns land and expects to be able to help the peasants he hires by finding ways for them to invest (through a form of sharecropping) and ways for them to increase yields. He is unable to see the use of democracy for anyone, especially the peasants, and he also sees no need to formally educate them when it will do them no good in their work life. Sergei, on the other hand, is the philosopher who believes in the democratic process, even if it doesn’t at first seem to get things done. He has a set of ideals and deals with those ideals in the written word, believing that the way forward is to allow everyone the chance to participate in government and to have and education to gain more economic opportunities. The many arguments that they get into, and that others in their company also engage in, show the struggle between the old Russian nobility and the newly emerging system. Many of these men live constantly in debt, like Stiva, putting further pressure on an already struggling economic system.

Life philosophies are largely put in stark contrast of one another, with Sergei, Anna, Vronsky, and Nikolai representing “newer” philosophies and Dolly, Stiva, Levin, and Kitty representing older ones. Both have their problems: terminal illness, struggles with satisfaction, struggles with relationships (both romantic and general social relationships), and economic struggles. However, Kitty and Levin represent the ideal in this work, as they stick with the old system and try to make slight modifications to it as befits their situation, and ultimately the old system prevails when Levin turns from secularism to God to live his life in goodness and faith. Religion in this book seems to be the key in what is otherwise a rather godless society.

by bluesyjune

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! Random House, 1936.

Summary of Work
This work is a frame narrative, with Rosa, the sister-in-law to Thomas Sutpen, telling the story of the Sutpen family to the Compson boy because she hopes he will write the story down, and he believes that it will show why God let the South lose the war, because of the infamy of people like Thomas Sutpen. Quentin Compson, the grandson of Sutpen’s friend General Compson, is getting ready to go to Harvard when he is summoned to talk with Sutpen’s sister-in-law, and she tells him about how Sutpen destroyed his own family and hers as well.

In the mid 1800s, Thomas Sutpen buys a hundred square miles of land in the Jefferson, Mississippi area from an indian tribe and clears the land, builds a home, and plants cotton. Many see him as some sort of barbarian or demon, because Sutpen often holds fights between the slaves, and he often participated in them. He marries a local merchant’s daughter, Ellen, and soon he becomes a member of the planter aristocracy and has a son and daughter. The children do not change Sutpen, who still hosts fights and participates, and one evening the children view it, Henry in terror, and Judith in fascination. Judith is angry to have to leave the scene, and Ellen realizes that Judith has her father’s temperament. Upon her death bed, she asks her sister to look after Judith, even though Judith is older than Rosa.

Quentin’s father confirms this story, stating similar details, but including that upon deciding to marry, he went to church, left town, came back with a bunch of finery for his home, and then went to court Ellen. However, the men of the town, believing that Sutpen had gotten his money from criminal activity, found him after he had proposed to Ellen and arrested him, and Compson and another friend had to get him out of jail. Two months later he was married. Ellen was dismayed on her wedding day, and of a hundred people invited, only ten people attended the wedding, and on the way out of the church, the couple were hit with rubbish as they walked. When Quentin asks about why Rosa is telling this story, Compson tells him that she was raised by an aunt after her father killed himself in order to not go to the war, and she hated her father for her mother’s death. Rosa was the one who came back to try and save Judith from the Sutpin fate, and she sought to do that by perhaps marrying Sutpin, she just twenty years old at the time. According to Compson, she was taking care of Judith and Clytie, Sutpen’s daughter by a slave girl, when Sutpen came home from the war.

Compson also explains to his son that before Rosa moved to the Sutpen home, she went sporadically to the Sutpen home with family members, and as Sutpen became the richest planter in the country and therefore became socially accepted, her sister Ellen first started taking her on fancy shopping trips and hosting parties, and then slowly became estranged from Rosa. It was also at this time that Sutpen was taking off to new Orleans in search of Charles Bon, his son by a black woman, although at the time people did not know it. As Compson tells it, the word about Bon being Henry and Judith’s half brother came from Sutpen’s slaves rather than from a family member. Rosa was largely left in the dark, unaware of the blood relation of Judith’s fiancee Bon until much later, and after the war when the Sutpen plantation was largely ruined and they didn’t know who was alive and who was dead, she at first refused to come to the plantation because she was uncertain of the situation.

That evening, Compson continued the story, handing Quentin a letter that Bon had written many years previous to Judith. He then talks about how Henry, Sutpen’s son by Ellen, goes to college at the University of Mississippi and becomes friends with Charles Bon, bringing him home for Christmas one year. Charles falls in love with his sister Judith, and he asks her to marry him, but by this time, Sutpen has realized that Charles is his son, and Judith’s half brother, and so they cannot marry. This is particularly important because his wife from that time was an octoroon, and he had abandoned her and the child afterward. The situation was one that he became entangled with her when he was at an octoroon ball, a space for octoroon women to attract wealthy white men as either husbands or benefactors. Henry is outraged when his father tells him, refusing to believe that Charles could have known this and still decided to ask his sister to marry him. Henry, in that outrage, gives up his birthright and runs to New Orleans with Charles, where they enlist in the army to fight in the Civil War for the Confederacy. Bon quickly rises to the rank of lieutenant, and he is regularly talking to Henry about the situation; Henry tells him not to write to Judith because he hasn’t decided if it is okay for him to marry her yet, and he also has sexual feelings for Bon, and is conflicted about the incest. Sutpen also fights in the war as a colonel, and he finds his son to tell him again that Charles is his half brother and that he is also a black man. When Sutpen explains Charles’ race, Henry goes to find Charles and murder him before he marries Judith, and he does murder him at the gate of the Sutpen plantation.

Rosa tells Quentin that when Sutpen returned, he went right about rebuilding the plantation, not even surprised or upset about Bon’s death and Judith’s reaction. He hardly recognized Rosa, and she soon found herself engaged to him. However, when he found the plantation to be unsalvageable, he insulted her so badly that she left the plantation and lived off of stealing food from her neighbor’s gardens, refusing to accept help. She also says that she thinks that someone other than Clytie is living in the manor there at the plantation, although she is not sure whom it is.

When Quentin goes back to Harvard, he tells his roommate Shreve the story, including the later years of Sutpen’s life. Sutpen becomes an alcoholic and has an affair with a teenage girl, Milly. Milly gets pregnant, and after the birth of their daughter, who dies along with Milly, Wash Jones, Milly’s grandfather, murders Sutpen. Judith dies of yellow fever along with other members of the family, and Clytie raises the son of Charles Bon, found in New Orleans after he visited his father’s grave. His son is strange and works what is left of the Sutpen land.

Mr. Compson also told Quentin about how he learned Sutpen’s actual life story from him when they were hunting for a fugitive architect who had run away from Sutpen’s plantation. Sutpen was from a poor family and quickly learned he wanted money and land, and so set out for the Caribbean and made his name in the sugar plantation business, and he married a plantation owner’s daughter. It was only after they had a child together that he learned of her African blood, and so he left with twenty slaves and built the plantation. When Sutpen’s son came back to haunt him, he had a choice: remain quiet and let his dynasty continue on or speak out. He chose to speak to Henry, and when the word brother failed, he determined that the word race would not, and he was correct. After that, he could never rebuild his dying legacy. When he left Milly with her child in a stable, that was when Wash Jones lost his mind, killed his granddaughter and great granddaughter, killed Sutpen, and then went around killing others with a scythe until he was arrested.

Quentin Compson can’t stop thinking about the story, and he and Shreve speculate on the other people’s perspectives of the story, particularly Charles Bon’s. The evening after he and Shreve speculate, he can’t sleep as he remembers going back to the plantation with Sutpen’s sister-in-law, and there they unexpectedly meet Henry, who is an old man waiting to die. They go back to get an ambulance to go get Henry, but before they can get in, Clytie, the child of Sutpen and a slave woman who is now an old woman herself, burns the house down and kills them both before they can get him, which brings the Sutpen family legacy to an end. In the end, Quentin, obsessing, tries to tell himself that he doesn’t hate the South.

Discussion of Work
The plot line of this work, quickly summarized, would seem rather simple and make for a short story: man moves to the South, builds a plantation, marries and has children, his past comes back to haunt him, and it destroys the entire family. And yet, the story is not that straightforward, because we are not getting the narrative from the main character, Thomas Sutpen. Instead, we are getting the story through a pieced together history which includes plenty of speculation both from the people telling the story and the people it’s being told to. Narrative is obscured by its nonlinear telling, with certain pieces  of information being given either earlier or later in the story, leaving the reader to piece together the full tale both on their own and with Quentin, who is the most akin to the reader.

Miscegenation is the main issue of the work, of particular importance because of its placement in the US South. Sutpen seems less than human, dangerous, or animalistic throughout the work, more so as he ages. As the story is told of his strange relationship with his slaves, he occupies a liminal space between white and black, even though he is a white man. As the narrators detail it, Sutpen himself goes into decline the moment that he marries an octoroon, because he has been legally intimate with her and has a legitimate son by her; it is this miscegenation that leads to potential incest. Still, the issue of miscegenation is by far of greater importance not only to Sutpen and his son Henry, but to everyone who is telling the story. The obsession with race, even to the tracking of the “one drop” of black blood, makes clear to readers that Faulkner is showing them that the South’s racial prejudice and obsession is what leads to the Southern aristocracy’s downfall more than any other failing in their society. Even the black community members in the story feel this, as Clytie is the one who burns down the house, and Wash Jones is the one who goes on a killing spree after Sutpen leaves his granddaughter. Black people are still objects to Sutpen, as they are to all the white people in the community, and the inability to see them as human beings leads not only to their downfall, but to the destruction of the black people’s humanity: constantly treated as animals or subhuman, they can only tolerate the South for so long before they snap and destroy themselves or are destroyed by the white community surrounding them.

 

by bluesyjune

Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. U of

Massachusetts P, 1987.

Summary of Work
This work gives a critical analysis and historical overlook of the development of the African American novel from slave narratives to the novels written in the 1970s during Postmodernism. The work takes a mix of historical, anthropological, and cultural analysis as Bell analyzes the development of the African American novel. Bell determines that there are four unique qualities that run throughout the AfAm novel that separate it from the regular American novel: double-consciousness, referring to the biracial identity of black people as black and American; socialized ambivalance, meaning “the dancing attitudes of Americans of African ancestry between integration and separation, a shifting identification between the values of the dominant white and subordinate black cultural systems as a result of institutionalized racism” (xvi); double vision, which is the use of irony and parody in the art form in order to deal with the hardships of life; and folklore, or the artistic forms and communicative process which are unique to African American cultural communities.

For the purposes of my area of study, I have skipped over the chapters with a focus on nineteenth century writers and moved into the twentieth century writers. The beginning of the twentieth century into WWI was the era of naturalism for the novel, which kept some of the sensationalism of romanticism from the nineteenth century, but focused much more on social issues of the day and spoke more to reality. This is particularly true of African American novels, which “combine the themes of love, marriage, and success with the protagonist’s struggle for freedom from color and caste discrimination in a cyclical quest to fully realize his or her rights and potential for growth as a person of biracial and bicultural identity” (79). These ideals were further promoted by the idea of having a Talented Tenth, the New Negro movement, and a higher class of art from African American artists that harbored elitism even as white America was moving away from those ideals itself. Two authors representative of naturalism during this time period are W.E.B. Du Bois, who’s novels failed in being very enjoyable reads, but succeeded in providing a sociological take on current issues; James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was a psychological form of naturalism which enjoyed enough success to initially be considered an actual autobiography. They dealt with the same problems of existing in a white world and succeeding as a black man, especially the irony of interracial relations when one could pass as white. They deal with the cultural tensions and biases of the rising middle class of black people in America.

With the Harlem Renaissance came a new belief of what black art forms, especially written forms, should do: they should celebrate black life, achievement, and show the complexities of black cultural existence. It was an era where black men were still being lynched in large numbers each year, and race tensions were as high as ever, but expression without fear or shame was a driving theme of the Harlem Renaissance writers.

Jean Toomer represents poetic realism at this time period. Considering himself neither white nor black but an American, he often came into conflict with others over the labeling of his work and what he was doing. He termed himself an essentialist rather than a realist or classicist, particularly meaning that he believed in the transcendent nature of the soul and that he believed in truth through intuition, and that he was a believer in Eastern practices of mysticism. Cane, Toomer’s masterwork, is a mix of prose and poetry, creating a poetic novel that on the surface may seem pastoral, but is much deeper than that because there can be no return to the country life or pre-industrial life, and the characters are complex. Mystical visions of life combine with folklore and cultural history and knowledge to create an undercurrent of a metaphysical journey. His work modeled those of Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson, and he, like them, worked on experimenting with utilizing regional and local materials in high artistic works.

During the time of both nationalism and assimilationism, with the cry for a back-to-Africa movement in Garvey and a melting pot theory on the other hand, authors such as Nella Larsen began to explore what it meant to have dual identities as a response to both of these movements. Against both assimilationist beliefs and the nationalist formations, Larsen’s books explore what happens to people when they force themselves to accept one or the other of these options.

During this time in the Harlem Renaissance there was also a turn to Folk Romance, or more specifically forms of ancestralism or pastoralism and even at times primitivism within novelistic writing. The writing was meant “to express the historical struggle of black Americans to achieve a dynamic synthesis of their individual and collective double-consciousness” (113). Thus, the African American pastoral was different than the regular pastoral because it encompassed both rural and urban settings, utilizing the near past to discuss the African American psychological and social struggles. Zora Neale Hurston’s work is full of folk romance. This could be in part because of her lifetime refusal to relinquish her heritage and folk origins that made up her identity. Their Eyes Were Watching God is the pinnacle of her work, her best folk romance. The work explores the life of Janie and her dreams and hopes as she marries different men and those dreams either get taken away through violent means to herself or to the one she loves (Tea-Cake having to be shot because he attacks her after getting rabies). The narration switches from third person to first person and has a variety of different narrators (with mixed success), making Hurston better able to discuss the sacrifices that black women have made from slavery forward in order to survive and help their men, and what happens when black women refuse to sacrifice and instead pursue their own interests. The whole of the novel also centers the oral folk traditions of the black South.

Unlike Hurston and other folk romantics, authors like Langston Hughes stuck to a form of folk realism that looked narrowly at specific, everyday lives of black people, focusing on common social rituals rather than larger, more universal truths. While the stories in isolation do not tell all of the black experience, they do offer perhaps a successfully “realistic portrayal of the ways in which ordinary black folk used religion, music, humor, and language to cope with adversity than their counterparts” (129).

With the coming of the Great Depression and the rise of the ideas of socialism and communism in America with it, there was a greater realization of the disunity of the races than there had been in the 1920s, with as many as 60 percent more black people being unemployed than white people (152). While many black people and their leaders were wary of the Communist party because of their oversimplification of racial issues in favor of economic issues, Richard Wright became a party member because he felt it gave him and black people a chance to gain a unity that had been lacking, and that the unity would help solve many of the racial and economic problems of the time. The writers of this time also benefitted from the Federal Writer’s Project, and Hurston, Ellison, Wright, and many other black writers were able to get funding for their writing projects.

Wright was a naturalist writer, and he rejected “both the concept of black consciousness and the values of Afro-American culture,” which is evidenced in his writing, including Native Son (155). In Native Son, he looks closely at poor black life in the South Side of Chicago, and discusses fear and freedom as sources of weakness and strength: weakness in the bad things it leads to, strength in the power of action. While many critics see the work as part of black nationalism, the double-consciousness throughout the work would speak against that theory or belief. Instead, the work shows how racist beliefs that white people have consistently spoken and acted upon have become internalized in black people to the point that they may even go commit crimes like Bigger Thomas as an act of self-realization or freedom. The themes and issues Wright explores in Native Son make his work the “naturalistic vision of the social paradoxes that bind white and black Americans” (166). The work is a play between Marxism and Freudian psychology.

The 1950s saw a move from Naturalism to a revitalization of cultural discussions of myth, rituals, and double-consciousness of the black experience. At this point, black authors began writing and experimenting with non-racial themes as well. Authors such as Ralph Ellison discuss that they came to the realization that what T.S. Eliot was doing with cultural myth and ritual could be done in black culture as well, and that it could be done with different materials, their own cultural heritage. Ellison’s one novel, Invisible Man, solidifies this change in novel writing as Ellison creates a modern epic by utilizing African-American history and cultural traditions, particularly traditions of blues and jazz music. In Ellison’s work, African Americans become a metaphor for the human condition.

James Baldwin’s novels carry on a similar work, but through religious overtones and discussions, which he was better able to carry on because of his childhood religious background. Baldwin’s early interviews, writings, and discussions look very similar to Richard Wright’s beliefs outlined in Native Son, and indeed, Baldwin’s self-professed literary father was Wright. However, he grew as a novelist and became interested in focusing on more components of black life than the political, even though he still kept the narrow viewpoint of Wright by exploring specific narratives of specific characters rather than a more general search for a generalized black experience. His work is “spiritual and sexual,” exploring “not the terrifying possibilities of hatred, but the terrifying possibilities of love” (219). He relies on the social structures and myths given him in black churches and in black music as he writes his narrative, integrating more cultural discussions than were prevalent in naturalism. Specifically, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a story that exposes “the moral foundations of the institutional pillars of the black community” (224).

With the rise of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, and the rise of feminism and the Women’s Rights Movement, the African-American novel made a move toward Modernism and Neorealism as a response to the turbulent times. While Neorealism kept the forms of realism, it was “also a philosophical and political attitude toward the human condition” (246). Thus, there is far more hope for humanity in African American novels of this strain than of the novels written by other races of people. Alice Walker embodies this hope with her work, which seeks to uplift both men and women (leading her to call herself a womanist rather than feminist). Her work splits the line between realism and romance, and The Color Purple in particular utilizes the folk realism and romanticism embodied by the work of Zora Neale Hurston. Her work has a sexual egalitarianism to it that is unique in comparison to other novels written during the same time period.

Poetic realism, the act of realism including “imaginative power, compression, and lyricism of language,” moves toward the problematic reality of reality being largely shaped by consciousness (269). Thus, much like Jean Toomer, those writing in a Poetic Realist tradition are seeking to find the sensations or feelings of truth rather than to lay it out as reality. This form of realism is best embodied in the work of Toni Morrison, who’s Song of Solomon utilizes a nonlinear narrative and haunting tales of the Dead family and their surroundings to discuss the fact that no matter how terribly a race or group of people is treated, it seems like they are never turned into beasts. The poetic language in Sula explores the pain and suffering of African Americans while also exploring the topics of sexuality and freedom in newly-minted linguistic ways.

Finally, when it comes to Postmodernism, the African American novelists depart from the white novelist traditions of the work of art as meaningless and instead “are deeply concerned with fictive visions that focus on the truths of the perversity of American racism and the paradoxes of Afro-American double-consciousness” (284). They reaffirm the power of the folk tradition as a way of seeing and knowing important truths to navigate through the perversities of life. These features mix with fabulation, romance, fantasy, and satire to create the literature of the 1970s and into the 1980s, the time when this book was written. The work of John Edgar Wideman, particularly highlighted by the short story collection Damballah, blurs the distinctions between “history and fiction, novel and romance, orality and literariness” through his blending of “epistle, legend, myth, fable, biography, and autobiography” in his fiction (312). By doing this, he has a recurring theme of understanding that what we think we are is just as, if not more, important than what we actually are when it comes to identity. Ishmael Reed challenges his readers to break free of the idea of a monolithic narrative for the African American novel, and he uses a Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic in order to blend a variety of cultural writing techniques and challenge readers “to be as culturally egalitarian and imaginatively bold as the author” (331).

Discussion of Work
This book’s main strength is in its discussion of these authors and the evolution of the African American novel within the context of social and political happenings: by offering a brief historical overview in tandem with the development of new literary movements and returns to older movements, Bell is able to show how the African American novel is as tied to them as is the novel in general. The work provides much needed representation of black authorship in a scholarly field that for too long overlooked their additions and achievements and how they influenced the development of the novel. I largely agree with what is said in this work regarding the topics and critical discussions of the authors chosen for the work, and so I have little more to say about it than has been highlighted in the summary. However, I do believe that structurally, the book may be trying to do too much in that it tries to feature too many authors. While it is certainly necessary to offer up multiple authors’ works to show the breadth of the literature from each literary movement, the number of authors chosen leads to less of an in-depth discussion about many of them, and altogether excludes works that might be discussed from other authors.

by bluesyjune