Families – Chelsea June Adams

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.

September 25, 2018September 25, 2018 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.

September 24, 2018September 25, 2018 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.

September 22, 2018September 25, 2018 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.

September 17, 2018September 21, 2018 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.

September 14, 2018September 21, 2018 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.

September 13, 2018September 13, 2018 by bluesyjune

Susan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog

Parks, Susan-Lori. Topdog/Underdog. Theater Communications Group, Inc, 2001.

Summary of Work
Lincoln has just come home from work to see his brother, Booth, practicing a poor 3-card monte. Lincoln works at an arcade, dressed up as Abraham Lincoln, whiteface and all. He takes a lower pay rate because he is a black man, but is happy for the work. His wife, Cookie, left him, and he is living with his brother now. The home has no electricity or plumbing, but it is a place to sleep. He is the sole support to pay the rent. His brother steals things to live on.

Booth tells Lincoln that he wants to go by a new name, and Lincoln asks what, but at first Booth won’t tell him. Lincoln says whatever it is to make sure he can pronounce it or he won’t ever be able to get a job. This prompts Booth to tell him that his new name is 3-card, because he’s going to be the best 3-card monte dealer in town. Lincoln tells him that he had better practice more and start small and learn one thing at a time. Booth responds that he would learn faster if Lincoln would teach him.

Lincoln used to be the best 3-card monte dealer in town, bringing in thousands each month, but one day when he ignored a feeling that he was going to get shot and then his friend got shot during a hustle, he determined to never touch the cards again, believing that if he did it would lead to his death. He may have lost everything, but now he has the chance to be a new man. He tries to get Booth to see that there is that same opportunity for him. Booth, however, is intent on getting his woman, Grace, back. He tells Lincoln that he stole a diamond ring and that he’s going to get her to forgive him for his infidelity and marry him. He also tells Lincoln that he needs to move on because the lodging for him was only supposed to be temporary.

The next day, Lincoln comes home upset; the arcade is looking at cutting jobs, and since Lincoln has only worked there for eight months, he knows that he’ll be among the first to be fired. Booth has stolen a set of suits and gives Lincoln one in an attempt to cheer him. He also tells him to practice his act and build it up some so that he can’t be replaced by a wax doll. He needs to practice falling and jolting around a little when he gets shot in the arcade game to liven things up so he’s indispensable. Lincoln asks Booth to help him practice, but Booth says that he’ll help him when he gets home if Lincoln waits up, and that he should get into his costume to practice while he’s away. Lincoln does so, and practices once or twice, but then gets drunk and passes out in the chair he sleeps in.

When Booth gets home from his date, he tells Lincoln that he had sex with Grace and she didn’t make him use a condom. He also says he gave her the ring and she begged him to marry her. Lincoln calls him out on it and says that he knows he didn’t have sex with her because Booth went in the other room to look at dirty magazines. Booth gets angry at him and just says that he has an insatiable sex drive and that it’s too expensive to hire whores. He does try to help Lincoln a little, but then Lincoln accuses him of being a saboteur rather than an aid. Booth again tries to convince him to start running the 3-card monte hustle and to help him learn to run it so they can make more money together. Lincoln again asserts that he’s done with that life. Still, the cards call to him.

Later in the week Booth has stolen a whole apartment’s worth of things in order to impress Grace for a dinner, and he tells Lincoln to get out of the house and that he’ll have to move out because Grace will be moving in when they get married. Lincoln says he’ll get out tomorrow, but that he wants to sit in the house. He’s lost his job. He was let go and replaced by the wax dummy of Lincoln. It is 3 AM and Booth is trying to convince himself that he hasn’t been stood up, but Lincoln finally gets him to realize it. They talk about their childhoods as they look through the photographs they have in an album, and they wonder if their parents had it all planned out to leave them. Both of their parents slept around, and Booth saw his mother’s infidelity and Lincoln saw his father’s, even sleeping with one of his mistresses. They talk about how their mother, when she left, gave Booth five hundred dollars, and when their father left, he gave Lincoln five hundred dollars. Each of them were told not to tell the other that they had that money. Both of them are miserable, and after Booth and Lincoln eat, they remove everything off the makeshift table, revealing the cardboard card playing surface. As Booth goes to bed, Lincoln again picks up the cards.

The next morning, Booth sees Lincoln with the cards, and Lincoln tries to teach him about the game and the process of the hustle. When they go out again, Lincoln goes and starts hustling again, earning five hundred dollars in a day and feeling like himself again for the first time rather than a man in another man’s clothes. He comes in the home to tell Booth, but he doesn’t see him so he sits and counts his money time and time again. But Booth is there and comes out and tells him first that it had been a mistake and that Grace thought their date was the day after, not last night, so it was a misunderstanding. He gets Lincoln to admit what he did, and he tells Lincoln to try it on him again. Lincoln lets him win the first time, and then Booth says that it’s not real because there’s no money bet. So Lincoln puts his money down, but Booth says it’s still not real because he hasn’t matched the money. He goes and gets the money his mother had given him all those years ago. Lincoln is genuinely surprised Booth still has that money. He asks him if he’s sure he wants to play it, and Booth insists. He lets Booth win the first round, but then he loses the second, and Lincoln gets all the money.

Lincoln laughs but consistently insists he is not laughing at Booth. He tells him how the first rule is the rule that Booth never learned: that a competitor is beat the moment they step up to the table in a hustle. Booth, furious that Lincoln is trying to open his money and take it from the knotted nylon, tells Lincoln that he actually killed Grace. Lincoln, surprised and now worried, offers the money back to Booth, but he won’t take it. He keeps talking to Lincoln, telling him that he’s lost everything, and how dare he laugh at him and try to steal his inheritance from him when he squandered his. He pins Lincoln in the chair and puts a gun to his head. Lincoln tries to tell him to calm down and that he can have his money and it’s okay, he didn’t mean it. But Booth shoots him and kills him. He then realizes what he’s done, and he cries, holding Lincoln in his arms, realizing he has now lost everything.

Discussion of Work
The setup for this play is interesting, particularly because of the way the script itself is written: there is very little stage direction, the setting and time is labeled “here” and “now,” and there is direction on how to speak specific lines and how to add pauses in the space of time (the pauses are marked by the characters’ names in bold with no text underneath them). Much of the language is written in dialect form and hyphenated during the 3-card monte speaking sequences. I am unsure why it is written this way, other than to perhaps first ensure that this play is timeless—that it could happen anywhere and to any set of black men—and to second more firmly place the work within a black literary tradition.

The play explores the limited opportunities for black men in the cities, or anywhere, and what they end up resorting to in order to survive. Even the family unit that they very briefly experience first in childhood and then in adulthood falls apart due to the inability for them to meet societal and personal expectations. From stress from broken families to lack of opportunity for a career to poor living conditions, these men may never have a chance. And the ones who try to change their situation are drowned out by the actions of those around them who feel that they cannot change and that the only option in life is criminality to survive. Consequently, they all hoard what is most important to them, whether that is memories of love or if it is money. All of these issues also inevitably lead to violence, which bursts in Booth when he loses what he finds most precious, not just his money, but his memories of his mother that are tied to that money.

The brothers also act as a symbol of America: Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth and what they stood for. Lincoln stands for hope and a push toward progress for all in America, not just white people. The fact that Lincoln “whites up” to play the role of Abraham Lincoln speaks to Abraham Lincoln representing all men, not just white men. Lincoln inhabits a dual identity. Then, Booth is the frustrated man who feels that his world is falling down around him and that the only way to beat the system is to destroy anyone who gets in his way to having money or opportunity. His killing of his brother, then, is a re-enactment of the shooting, but also a re-enactment that indicates the failed hopes of Abraham Lincoln: while he had good intentions, it was just too naive to believe that white people would ever let black people have an equal footing in America.

September 6, 2018September 5, 2018 by bluesyjune

Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God

Erdrich, Louise. Future Home of the Living God. HarperCollins, 2017.

Summary of Work
Cedar is insistent that she is going to go meet her birth mother on the reservation for the Ojibwe people, but her adoptive mother and father, Sarah and Glen, are worried about her going. There is social unrest, and it may collapse the nation. Still, she insists on going, and she meets her family and tells them that she’s four months pregnant. She met a man at her Church and they unexpectedly fell in love and slept with each other in the basement of the church after a performance of the nativity. Everyone is happy for her, but also worried.

Evolution has started running backwards, and there are rumors that pregnant women have children who are primitive versions of humans. Soon, the government mandates through a new addition to the Patriot Act that all women are to turn themselves in and if they do so voluntarily, they will be given the best rooms and care in the hospitals. Cedar locks herself in her house with provisions and tradable goods, mainly cigarettes and booze, and does not leave the house. She notices that all of a sudden, there are no brown skinned people in the news or on TV anymore, and she wonders if there are any left outside either. Her partner, Mike, keeps calling but she won’t answer, so he comes over and pounds on the door until she lets him in. They talk, and he tells her that he wants to stay with her and protect her because the government is now offering rewards for turning in pregnant women. Cedar goes nearly insane being forced to stay inside, and she convinces Mike to let her go with him to get Subway sandwiches. While she is sitting in the car, she watches the cops take a pregnant woman off the street and beat her husband while their daughter looks on and bystanders hide her. It traumatizes Cedar, and she stays inside. She accidentally lets herself be seen by the mailman Hero, but he hides her and tells her to stay inside because the government officials will catch her.

By this time the US proper has dissolved and all governments are regionally run; all street signs are renamed biblical verses. Mike forges marriage papers for them so he can register their home. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman who calls herself Mother keeps popping up on Cedar’s computer screen, even after they unplug the internet, bury their cell phones, and break the computer. One day, Mike leaves, and a woman forcibly enters the home and steals Cedar away. She is forced into a hospital, where they drug her. When her roommate Agnes tells her to stop taking her “vitamins,” she comes to and realizes how terrible her condition is. She watches Agnes try to break out and fail, and then she is whisked away to an operating room to have her child, and no one will tell Cedar what happened. She gets a new Asian roommate, who never speaks and spends her time unraveling blankets to create yarn and then a rope so they can escape out the window. Cedar helps her do this, and in the process, she learns from her mother Sarah, who is undercover trying to save pregnant women, that Mike is the one who turned her in after he was captured and tortured. Sarah helps them escape, but not before they have to murder a nurse to save themselves. Tia, the Asian roommate, has her baby in a cave, but it is stillborn. When they emerge from the cave, Tia insists that she go back with her husband because she is no longer pregnant and not a target, and Sarah takes Cedar to the reservation, where Eddie, Cedar’s stepfather, is now government head.

She is happy there, despite her confinement, and she feels safe. Sarah is upset over her daughter’s pregnancy, and also reveals that Glen is actually her biological father; it was one of his short-livid dalliances. Eddie gets Cedar forged tribal papers and gives her back her birth name: Mary Potts. Then, one night when she is sleeping on her half-sister’s floor, she hears someone come in. She hides in the mess of clothes on the floor, and is hidden so well that when the woman, who sounds just like the woman from the computer screen, comes in the room search for her, she cannot find her. Soon after that, things spiral downward. She has been going out now and again with tribal family members because Eddie has guaranteed that the government is not taking the tribal women because they are protected. In fact, Eddie has been reclaiming original tribal lands with success. But one night Mike comes and gets her and asks her to go with him. He explains that she is highly valued because she is carrying one of the originals, an untainted genetic child, and if she goes with him they can start their own following and government. She says he is crazy, and he leaves without her. Then, when she and her biological mother are praying at the statue of a saint, Cedar is again kidnapped, this time by poor travelers who are in need of money and want to turn her in for the reward.

Cedar is placed in a prison facility in Stillwater, which serves as an insemination facility. She learns that women are being picked up for minor or imagined infractions if they are of childbearing age and being forcibly inseminated. They are all required to have their pictures taken, and Cedar comes to learn that is because when they die, which they all do from pregnancy complications caused by the reverse evolution, their pictures are put up on a wall in the commons area. During one of her appointments she meets a woman who had helped her to escape the first time, but she realizes that this time there will be no escape. Instead, she asks Jesse to look after her baby, which she promises to do. Cedar gives birth successfully, but she barely gets to see her child, and her heart is damaged from the delivery and she barely survives. When she recovers, she is not released from the facility, as was originally promised, but forcibly inseminated. The story ends with her still writing her story to her child, who she hopes will someday read her story.

Discussion of Work
While largely considered a failure of a novel for Louise Erdrich, the novel does pose some intriguing questions about female reproductive rights. A dystopic science fiction novel, the narrative explores the personhood of women at a time when the species is endangered. Women become objects rather than people, first promised some sort of decent care for turning themselves in if pregnant, and then having the tables turned on them as the situation worsens. One of the important points which is subtly noted throughout the novel is that the majority of the women who are taken are people of color: white people are largely exempt from the government mandates, although white people who find a problem with the forcible detainment and insemination of women are eliminated or forced into the system.

While it is not fully pursued, the issue of dual identity is broached. It is only when Cedar decides that she wants to embrace her full identity that, that identity is stripped from her, as she is stripped of the chance to learn more than she does. The novel is an experiment with female identity: is it motherhood, fertility, sex, or something altogether different? This is also a set of questions asked about the children these women are forced to have: what will their status be? Will they be treated similarly to how we treat endangered animal species? Global warming and how humans change nature is another subtle theme, with a discussion of how the situation came to be. The change started when there was no more winter and the glaciers were gone, the continental ice and permafrost releasing bacteria or some sort of toxin into the air which causes the reverse evolution.

This is also a discussion of how the world ends, which, as Cedar keeps being surprised over, is not very chaotic. People keep going about their daily lives and adapting to the biological changes to their food and the environment around them. Essentially, the world does not go out violently, but quietly, with only one specific group of people, women of childbearing age, affected by the reproduction issue.

September 3, 2018September 3, 2018 by bluesyjune

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. Ecco, 2005.

Summary of Work
For the purposes of time for studying for my comprehensive exams, I have elected to only read the first part of Don Quixote for my studies. What follows is a summary of the first part.

Cervantes begins his novel by having a conversation with a friend who tells Cervantes that he should write the tale (completely true!) of Don Quixote as he will, and then add all the proper embellishments in later, since that seems the easiest way to get things started. Cervantes agrees and begins the tale, urging readers to simply enjoy what he’s written in its simple format.

Don Quixote started out as an eccentric minor nobleman in the village of La Mancha. He had a great estate, but he did not care for it and kept selling pieces of it off in order to buy more books about chivalry and knights errant, since he loved to read the tales in them. By his late middle age, he decides he will become a knight-errant like the men he read about in his books, and he prepares armor and his horse, an old nag who he names Rocinante, and gives himself the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He also decides he needs a lady to perform the deeds for, so he renames a farm girl he cares for Dulcinea del Toboso to dedicate his deeds to.

He sets off and stops at an inn for the evening, and believes that the inn is a castle and the innkeeper a king who has been enchanted to look like an innkeeper. He also mistakes prostitutes for princesses, and he recites poetry to them. He struggles and is unable to remove his helmet he has made for himself, so he eats dinner through the opening in the helmet, all the while believing he is being entertained in a castle. While he is there, he realizes he has not been knighted, and so he asks the innkeeper to knight him. The innkeeper talks to him about it and when he asks for payment, he discovers Don Quixote has no money, and so the innkeeper tells him he must carry money. Don Quixote said that the knights of old never carried any and were always provided for, and so he saw no need to carry money, which is why he had none on him.

That night he keeps vigil in the stables because he believes that will allow him to be knighted in the morning. While he is speaking of Dulcinea and keeping watch, more guests arrive. In trying to get water for their animals, they move Don Quixote’s armor, and it infuriates him so that he kills one of the guests and knocks another unconscious. Mortified, the innkeeper quickly performs a bizarre knighting ceremony and sends him on his way. Don Quixote determines to go home to get more clothing and some money, and he encounters a master whipping his young servant. He stops the farmer and asks what is going on, and the farmer boy says that he is being whipped because he complained about not getting the wages promised him. Don Quixote tells the farmer to pay him and makes him swear he will by the name of knighthood, and Don Quixote continues on, disregarding the farm boy’s plea to go back to the house with them to ensure that he was paid before he left. When Don Quixote leaves, the farmer goes back to whipping the boy even harder than he had previously been doing.

Later on the journey, Don Quixote meets a group of merchants, and he tries to order them to claim that Dulcinea is the most beautiful woman alive. When they ask for a picture so they can see her before they say she is the most beautiful, they insult him and he starts to attack, but Rocinante stumbles and the merchants beat him. He is left lying in the road. A laborer from his village finds him and carries him on his mule back to La Mancha, Rocinante in tow. Don Quixote is busy discussing how his trials are like those of knights of old, and the villager realizes that he is insane. He takes Don Quixote back to his own house, where the barber and priest are visiting at the behest of family members who are worried that the books in the home have driven Don Quixote to madness.

The priest and barber work together to go through Quixote’s books and burn the ones on chivalry that they find inappropriate. His niece wants them to burn all the books there. Still, the priest goes through the titles, saving some because of rarity or virtue, and wants to keep the poetry, but the niece persuades them not to because then her uncle may become a poet, which would be even worse than he is now. He also finds a novel by Cervantes, which he keeps in hopes that there will be a sequel to the novel.

Don Quixote wakes, delusional, and wants to get to the library, but he finds it walled off. He believes an enchanter has done it to keep him from his books and has carried off the books on a dragon, as per what his niece told him. Quixote believes the enchanter to be his nemesis, and believes he will defeat him. he determines to sally forth again, this time with a squire, Sancho Panza.

They first come to a field of windmills, which Quixote believes are giants, and he charges them, injuring himself as he finds that they “become windmills” as he goes to attack because the enchanter changed them to windmills. He finds a replacement for his lance by breaking off a tree limb, and when Sancho complains about hunger, Quixote explains that often they may go without food and have to weather the elements, and that knights do not complain about these things. A few days later, they encounter monks taking a lady and attendants on a journey, and Quixote insists that the lady is a damsel in distress, and he attacks the monks, knocking one down. Sancho tries to steal that monk’s clothing as spoils of war, but is soundly beaten for it. The monks ride off, and Quixote tells the ladies they must go to Toboso to tell Dulcinea of his grand deed. One of her attendants gets angry at him, and they do battle, but mid-battle the narrative cuts off due to a supposed end in the manuscript at hand.

Next Cervantes describes the process of finding the rest of the tale, finding the tale written on Arabic parchment. He hires a Moor to read and translate the stories, and the narrative continues.

The attendant cuts Quixote’s ear, and he knocks the man down in return, threatening to kill him. He spares him only because the ladies promise they all will present themselves to Dulcinea. After the battle, Sancho asks his master for an island to be governor of, believing he has earned it. He also worries that they might go to jail for what they have done, but Don Quixote ensures him that knights-errant and their squires never go to jail.

That evening, they join a group of goatherds for the night and learn the tale of the woman Marcela, who was the cause of Chrysostom’s death, for he loved her and she rejected him. As they go to the funeral, Marcela appears and makes her case for her not being at fault for his death, for she told him that she was not interested in marriage when they first met. Afterward, they go to an inn for the evening, which he mistakes again for another castle. There, the women attend to Don Quixote’s wounds, and he believes that the innkeeper’s daughter has fallen in love with him and will come to try and tempt him to sleep with her, when in actuality, Maritornes, the servant woman, is coming in to share a bed with a carrier, who also happens to be sleeping in the same space as Sancho and Don Quixote. She accidentally goes to the wrong bed, and Don Quixote mistakes her for the daughter, and he tries to woo her, causing the carrier to be angry and attack. Everyone is fighting when the innkeeper comes to see what is going on. Don Quixote is passed out but believing he is dead, the officer in the inn starts an investigation.

From that moment on, Don Quixote believes the inn is enchanted, and tells Sancho so. When the officer comes in the room, Don Quixote insults him, and the officer beats him again. Don Quixote promises to heal Sancho with a potion or balsam, which calms Sancho’s anger, but after they make it and drink it, they are immediately very sick. Sancho is upset again, but then Don Quixote claims it doesn’t work on squires. They leave the inn, and refuse to pay because knights don’t pay at castles, and he rides away, but Sancho is captured and thrown and tossed in a blanket. Too hurt to get off his horse, Don Quixote watches, believing it all an enchantment, and while all the commotion is going on, the innkeeper steals Sancho’s saddle bags as payment for their stay.

They soon encounter clouds of dust, which Don Quixote thinks is two great armies, but which is actually herds of sheep, and he rides off, killing many sheep before the shepherds are able to unseat him from his horse. His explanation for the sudden change is again the sorcerer. That evening as they discuss their misfortunes, they come across mourning priests escorting a dead body; they refuse to identify themselves, and Quixote knocks one off of his horse, causing all of them to flee. Sancho, meanwhile, steals goods from the mule the priest was riding, and when the priest leaves, Sancho yells after him that this was the work of Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. Don Quixote loves the title, and when he asks why he chose that, Sancho tells him that after his teeth had been badly damaged in battle, he always looks sad without them. Rather than give Sancho credit for the name, he tells him that the name was the idea of the Sage writing his life story, and that he gave it to Sancho.

Next, they see a barber travelling with a glittering basin, and Quixote believes it is the mythic Mambrino’s helmet, and he charges the barber, who runs away, leaving his mule and the basin. Sancho gets the mule’s saddle and saddle packs. He is also promised that he will have a lot of money when Don Quixote marries a rich princess.

Next, they encounter galley slaves being taken to work for their crimes, and although Sancho warns him about who they are and that the government is taking them, Don Quixote frees them and justifies it by saying that sometimes criminal actions are justified and necessary. When he tells the men to present themselves to Dulcinea, they beat him and run away with all of Sancho’s and Don Quixote’s belongings. At this point, Sancho is very concerned that the Holy Brotherhood will come after them for their misdeeds.

They next ride into the woods of the Sierra Morena, and one of the slaves accosts them again and steals Sancho’s donkey. However, they then find a saddle bag with money and clothing and a notebook, and Don Quixote gives Sancho that money to make up for the losses he’s incurred. They then see a naked man running through the woods, and they find him and hear his tale. His name is Cardenio, and he had a friend by the name of Ferdinant wooed a farmer’s daughter in secret, only he is afraid of what his father might say, so he, at the advice of Cardenio, his friend Ferdinand, asks his father for some money to go to buy some horses at Cardenio’s parents’ home. There he meets Lucinda, who is unparalleled in beauty. When he mentions that Lucinda loved books about chivalry, it gets Don Quixote talking about them, and he and Cardenio start to fight, and Cardenio runs away.

In order to do penance for what he has done, he goes deep into the woods. He also send Sancho with a dictated letter that he is to have written out and to take to Dulcinea while he is in the mountains. While Sancho is gone, Don Quixote determines that he will be like Amadis and pray in Dulcinea’s name, wandering the valley and writing poetry on the trees, going mad and rending his clothing as well. Sancho, meanwhile, runs into the priest and barber from his village and they ask him what is going on. He tells them everything, and they concoct a plan to get Quixote down from the mountains and back to the village. As they speak with Sancho, they realize that Don Quixote’s delusions have also infected Sancho, who believes Don Quixote will end up an emperor or archbishop, although he hopes not a clergyman because that will limit Sancho’s rewards.

The priest and barber borrow clothing from the innkeeper’s wife and they set out. The barber is dressed as a woman, who they are hoping Don Quixote will perform a favor for. They send Sancho ahead, telling him that he will tell Don Quixote some story about having seen Dulcinea and her response. While they wait for Sancho to bring him down the mountain a little ways, they run into Cardenio, who tells the rest of his story, explaining that Ferdinand, claiming he was wooing in Cardenio’s name, stole away Lucinda because her parents found his riches appealing. Lucinda ends up accepting his proposal, and Cardenio ran to the wilderness in grief and hatred.

While they are together, they meet a young woman named Dorothea, who tells her story of being wooed but resisting until he tricked her and she succumbed, afraid of being raped if she refused his marriage offer. Then he abandoned her, and she has been out chasing him; the party learns that the man was Ferdinand, the very man who had stolen away Lucinda. Cardenio, thrilled, learns that Ferdinand had found a letter revealing Lucinda’s love for Cardenio, and he vows to help avenge Dorothea. Dorothea then accepts the role of the damsel in distress to help the priest and barber get Don Quixote down from the mountain.

She tells Don Quixote of a giant who attacked and won her kingdom away from her and about how her father, a sorcerer, had told her that Don Quixote would be her avenger. She has him swear that he will undertake no other errand until he has helped her save her kingdom. As they all head down the mountain, Sancho gives more details of his trip to Toboso, and Don Quixote states that a sorcerer must have given him wings to fly there, because it is some distance to Toboso and he was back far too quickly for it to have been anything else. Then the young farm boy who Don Quixote thought he saved from the whip appears and tells him of his misfortunes, and he steals food and runs off, telling Don Quixote the world would be better off without interfering knights-errant.

They get back to the inn that Sancho and Don Quixote believe is enchanted, and that evening the priest reads some tales to them that came from the innkeeper’s collection. The tale he reads aloud tells of a man who had the most beautiful wife and a best friend, but he is dissatisfied because he does not know if his wife will always be faithful. He forces his friend to try to woo away his wife, which at first the friend tries not to do, but then, when his friend discovers the deception, has to do. He falls in love with the wife, and she with him, and the concoct a plan to prove her virtue to the him so that she can sleep with the friend whenever she wishes. The lady in waiting is also in on this, and she helps the scheme, but in return brings her lover to the castle whenever she pleases. This bothers the wife, but she cannot say anything about it.

Just then, Sancho bursts in and says that Don Quixote has slain the giant holding the princess’s kingdom, and he has his head. But instead, Don Quixote has been sleepwalking and has slashed the nice, full wineskins in the room he was sleeping in. Sancho, still believing it was the giant, is devastated that he cannot find the head and believes now he has lost his chance at a governorship. The priest continues the story after this interruption. One night, the husband finds that the lady-in-waiting is bringing her lover to the house, and in exchange for her life, she says she will tell him an important secret. But his wife, worried about the potential discovery, flees with his friend, and he dies of grief.

Ferdinand and Lucinda arrive in disguise to the inn, and he tells all present that he has kidnapped the girl after she tried to hide in a convent after running away from their marriage. They all reunite, and Dorothea gets Ferdinand and Cardenio receives Lucinda. At this point, Sancho is devastated that Dorothea is not a princess and he will not be rich. When Sancho tells Don Quixote, he gets angry at him and says that this is further evidence that the place is enchanted. Ferdinand agrees that Dorothea needs to keep up the act to help the priest and barber get Don Quixote home, so she does. At this point, a traveler arrives with a woman named Zoraida, and they learn that she is a Moor who is looking to be baptized after saving many Spanish men from imprisonment and falling in love with the man she is with.

All the people present, when they hear Don Quixote speak, are amazed at his intelligence, especially considering that he is so mad. That evening, they awake to the singing of a boy, and they discover that he is a lord who was in love with Clara, the daughter of a judge (who is the brother of the captive Spanish man Zoraida saved). She has never spoken with him, but she also loves him. Also that evening, Maritornes and the innkeeper’s daughter trick Don Quixote and get him hanging from the barn window by having him try and grab a harness through the window while standing atop Rocinante. He stays there all night until he falls in the morning as four horsemen arrive at the inn.

When the horsemen, servants of the young singer, discover him and try to bring him back, he refuses and the judge intervenes, asking him why he refuses to return home. The young man tells him of his love for his daughter. And as this is happening, two guests try to sneak out without paying, and a fight ensues. Don Quixote refuses to help the innkeeper because of his promise to Dorothea, angering the innkeeper, his wife, and daughter. About that time, the barber who was accosted by Sancho and Don Quixote arrives, sees his basin and the saddle pack, and demands it back. Sancho refuses, saying it is the spoils of war. Another fight breaks out, and the priest settles it by financially compensating all involved and hurt by the antics of Don Quixote and Sancho.

At this time, the Holy Brotherhood have arrived, and the recognize Don Quixote. They have a warrant for his arrest, and the priest convinces the Holy Brotherhood that Don Quixote is insane and it would be best to not arrest him but let him come home with them, because he cannot be held accountable for what he has done in madness. They determine that in order to get him back to the village, they need to build a cage on an ox cart to get him home. The barber pretends to be a sage dictating Don Quixote’s return to the village and his marriage to Dulcinea, and this prompts Don Quixote to accept he is enchanted and needs to experience affliction of this kinds. Still, he wonders why he travels slowly if he is enchanted.

They meet more people on the road, who speak together about Don Quixote. Sancho threatens the barber and priest and accuses them of being jailers, and the barber threatens to lock up Sancho too, so Sancho stays silent. He goes to talk to his master about the reality of the situation, and to prove that Don Quixote is not enchanted, he asks him if he needs to go to the bathroom, and when Don Quixote replies he does, Sancho tells him that it means he is not enchanted, for enchanted people have no such needs. He tells Sancho that there are many types of new enchantments.

The canon traveling with them starts talking to Don Quixote, and he is astounded at how easily Don Quixote mingles fact and fiction. As they talk, a goatherd is chastising a female goat. They go ask what is going on, and he talks about how he was a friend of Anselmo, the man in the story the priest read to them, and that he and his friends have been driven to a simple life because of the unfaithfulness of Leandra, a beautiful woman who ran away with a soldier to the woods and was then abandoned. She was put in a convent to recover her honor.

The goatherd, in his tale, insults Don Quixote, and they start to fight. Then Don Quixote mounts his horse, seeing an icon of the Virgin Mary which he believes to be a living, sorrowful woman. He attacks penitents on the road and ends up beaten again. Sancho believes him dead and mourns over his body, which wakes Don Quixote. They decide to go home since he is having such bad luck, and they will hopefully be able to go out again. They get home and Sancho’s wife asks what he has brought, and he promises her that he will have land and be a governor soon. Don Quixote is driven in the cart to his home, to the amazement of all in the village, and his niece and housekeeper care for him, worried that he will disappear again.

Discussion of Work
Don Quixote, considered the first, and quite often the best ever, novel, is of the picaresque genre. The work itself is very episodic: almost any scene could be taken out of the novel and read as its own short story about the knight errant. The work is also a frame narrative, with Cervantes as the main narrator, but with his narration coming from manuscripts written by other people, who have either listened to the tales firsthand or pieced it together from other sources. The obsession the author has with proving the reality of the narrative through such documentation speaks of the outward importance of the frame for readers, who enjoy this as a fictional history not unlike the books of chivalry that Don Quixote reads and becomes delusional over. The frame is made even further complex with the priest reading stories and there being fanciful romance stories like those of Cardenio’s and Zoraida’s.

The work itself raises questions about the powers of the written word and about how much access people should have to them or what people should be allowed to write. The blending of fact and fiction also becomes a concern, as the people note that Don Quixote and then Sancho, who seems to be a very rational and realistic man, cannot tell fiction and real life apart, even bringing fictional beliefs into real world situations with them.

The work itself speaks to the fact that many storytelling devices were in existence long before the novel, and the things we may consider innovations of later periods, like the frame narrative, were in fact well-developed early on in other forms of storytelling. This novel is also a great example of how a roguish character who causes all sorts of mischief can be both likable and hilarious while doing misdeeds in good spirit. Even far into the novel, readers don’t get tired of his adventures, even in their similarity, because there are always new people he encounters with interesting stories and interesting reactions to Don Quixote’s madness.

August 30, 2018August 29, 2018 by bluesyjune

Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 1940. U of Missouri P, 2001.

Summary of Work
This autobiography of Langston Hughes’s life details some of his life experiences from his early twenties into the end of his twenties and the beginning of the Great Depression. When he was a child, his parents split, and he lived with his mother for a time. He remembers having his parents try to get back together in Mexico, but that was the year of the great earthquake in Mexico City, and so his mother got scared and they went back. He was sent to live with his grandmother in Kansas and to go to school, and she was a proud woman who would never do service jobs for white people to earn a living. When she died when he was just before his teenage years, he went to go live with his Aunt. During this time his Aunt took him to a Christian church, where they were praying over people to be saved. Everyone had gone up but him, because he believed he would get to see Jesus in the flesh, and he did not want to be dishonest about coming to Jesus. Finally, filled with guilt that he is the only one who hasn’t been saved, he comes to the front at the alter, and his Aunt is overjoyed. That night, he cries over having lied. His mother remarried, and he liked the man. Hughes was elected the poet for his school (it was integrated) because people made assumptions that all black people had rhythm and could dance, so they must be able to write poetry. He wrote his first poems there. He admits that his entire life, he rarely majorly edited poetry once it was down on the page. He also admits that most of his poetry and other work was written when he was miserable or unhappy rather than when he was happy.

In his late teenage years, his biological father wrote to him that he wanted him to come down to Mexico. His mother was upset about it, but he went anyway. There, he found out that his father was considered very American because all he cared about was money, but he was wiser than other Americans that came to Mexico because he was interested in keeping and saving his money. He hated Mexicans and many black people, and all poor people. Hughes was fairly miserable his first year there, because his father was always trying to force him to hurry places, and because he had to do bookkeeping and was no good with numbers. He got so angry at his father that it made him physically ill and he couldn’t eat for weeks, which landed him in a hospital that cost his father $20 a day to keep him there. After he was feeling better, his father sent him back to the US. But the next time he went down to stay with his father, he spent more time to learn Spanish and became better friends with the Mexicans in town. A German woman also stayed with them (she later became his father’s wife), and she made the space more pleasant. His father expressed that he wanted to send him to college somewhere in Europe and have him come back to Mexico to be an engineer, but Hughes said he wanted to be a writer and did not want to go learn things he was no good at. His father told him that writers made no money and that if he was going to pay for college, Hughes would go where he wanted him to. He would also not be allowed to leave Mexico until he agreed to his father’s wishes.

So in order to escape, Hughes started tutoring Mexican children so they could speak English. Word spread that he was good at his job, and soon he was able to raise his rates and take on as much work as he wanted. He also got offered two jobs at colleges to teach English, and he took both jobs because scheduling worked for him. While working these jobs, he is lucky to narrowly escape death because a man who the German woman’s relation was working for thought that the German girl was sleeping with Hughes, and he, enraged, came to the house, shot the girl in the head three times, and went in search of Hughes to kill him, but couldn’t find him because he wasn’t home. The girl miraculously survived, and the man was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Hughes had made quite a bit of money, and he started thinking that he did want to go to college, but in NYC at Columbia. He and his father fought about it, but eventually his father agreed to send him there. On the train to New York City, he was mistaken as Mexican and when he said he was black, white people in the South would not serve him. He remembered the struggles of living as a black man in the US, and contemplated why it was so difficult for white people to interact with black people in the US when it was so easy for them to do so in other countries. He spent a year at Columbia, only to find he really disliked college, and so he quit and started looking for a job. But his father at that point had cut him off, his mother was looking for work and struggling, and he could not find a job that would take him, even if it were available, because he was a black man. He finally found a job working at a shipyard, and in the meantime he was having some of his poetry published by Crisis magazine. Alain Locke wanted to meet him and he had met several major figures of the New Negro movement, but he told Locke no because he was nervous and because he knew that Locke wouldn’t be able to get his way around the docks very easily and it could kill him if he weren’t careful. Before Hughes sets off to sea on his first voyage, he tosses all his books from college into the ocean, ridding himself of their weight both literally and figuratively.

Hughes set sail to Africa eventually and landed in many ports to find that the Africans did not consider him a black man because his skin was more brown than black. This astonished him, and he also saw the terrible effects of colonialization. He recalls having to watch a prostitute and a young girl coming on board in hopes of receiving money, and receiving no money but being forced to have sex with all the men on board who were interested, which was a group of about 30 men. He tired of this type of exploitation as well as the economic exploitation. As they were about to leave, he bought a red monkey, and many of the other soldiers did as well. There were adventures on the ship with those monkeys getting loose and winding up drowned or in missionaries’ beds or in the masts, but eventually all were caught. There were also many more antics and debauchery, and all the men were fired upon returning to the US. Hughes made his way to Cleveland, where his family was staying, and found himself penniless in order to make it there with the monkey, named Jocko, who he had bought for his younger brother. His mother was very upset to have it in the home, but his stepfather and brother liked it, so the monkey stayed. Then his stepfather’s mother came to town, and his mother had an ally to protest about the monkey. Then when his stepfather had the monkey out on the town one night and it got scared and destroyed the carpeting of a pool table, it cost them 25 dollars to have it replaced, and his mother was furious. Not long after Hughes left to go back to sea, she sold the monkey.

His second voyage, he got off to stay in Paris, but found himself unable to get a job because he was not a musician, dancer, or performer. He makes friends with a Russian dancer who got sick and whose company had dissolved, and who had no money. They share a cheap room, and she finds a job before he does. He finally gets a job as a doorman and then, through someone who liked his poetry, found a job as a dishwasher and then a cook. When the club he is working at goes nearly bust, they tried to fire the head cook, and he brought out a knife and threatened everyone, and they let him stay. And when they tried to fire Hughes, he threatened them again, so he got a job as a waiter. During his time there, he saw many fights and other antics. The Russian lady got a job at La Havre, and she leaves him, very sad. He then falls in love with a girl named Mary, who is very well-to-do. But when her father finds out what she’s been doing, first she is very chaperoned, and then she is forced to leave. Soon after that, he spends some time with Alain Locke, who is in town, and then when one day he is waiting on a famous poet, he shares his work. The poet “discovers” Hughes, and then he became wildly popular and many people came to the club looking to get a photo with the poet. He has more poems published but is never paid for them.

When the club had to close down for refurbishment and because of lack of business, he goes with some Italians to see Italy. He has enough money to enjoy his time, and Locke is also there and takes him to Venice and they enjoy their time. However, while in Genoa, he has his passport and all his money stolen, and the US embassy and consulate refuse to help him, so he lives homeless and in poverty, unable to get a job that will pay him enough to either get back to France or to find safe passage to America. He finally gets passage as a workman on a ship bound for NYC, and he is nearly kicked off in Spain for being late back to the ship, but he makes it back to the US with a quarter more than he had in France when he first landed. He makes his way to Washington, where his relatives are, and they want him to work in the Library of Congress, but it has too many needed qualifications and Hughes needed work, so he started working doing wet wash laundry for twelve dollars a week. His mother and the relatives had a dispute, and so he found them different accommodations, and they struggled to make ends meet. Carl Van Vechten contacted him and helped him publish a book of poetry at this point, but the elitist community would not welcome him or his mother because they were poor.

He makes his way back to Harlem in hopes of going to college, but he can’t get a scholarship. He talks of meeting Van Vechten and Jean Toomer, who could pass as white and refused to be labeled a “Negro Artist” much to critics’ dismay. He also met Zora Neale Hurston, who he had a good relationship for years until a dispute over a co-writing project. He speaks of Vechten and his parties, the decadence of the Harlem Renaissance and how the area was a victim of its own image. Hughes finally makes a bit of money off of some poetry, works as a personal assistant for a time, gets patronage to go to college at Lincoln, and visits and explores the South and takes a short voyage to Cuba and Jamaica, which he liked very much and would have kept doing if he hadn’t had to go back to college. During his final college years, he wrote a survey of the issues of the color line at Lincoln college, where all white professors taught a nearly all black student body. The founder of the college came up to him at graduation to tell him that as time passed, he would see that there was no way for him to do what he did in founding the school unless he could have had white patronage and made concessions. Hughes disagreed with him.

Around this time, he also received patronage to write and finish his novel Not Without Laughter, which he wishes would have been better because it is about the best of his family members. He receives a major literary award for it. He tries to write other things, but the white patron dislikes his work, and finally they part ways, and it makes him sick like he was with his father. He remembers all the decadence and security he experienced and remembers seeing the other people in the street starving because of the depression, and he remembers the disgust the white chauffeur had over being forced to drive a black man places. He went to the doctor to see what was wrong and spent a lot of money doing it, was told first he had a Japanese tape worm, and then told by a white doctor that he had no such thing. Then he got tonsillitis and had to have them out, using up the last of his money from the Park Street patron. After that, he immediately got better from his illness brought on by anger over the patron. It is during this time that he had his dispute with Hurston over the play they had been working on, and while it had been in production, it had to be shut down over the dispute. After that he went to Haiti and decided that he would make money writing for a living, and at the time of writing the autobiography, that is what he had done successfully.

Discussion of Work
This book gives an adventurous story about Langston Hughes’s life during his twenties. Its major dealings in terms of themes that cut across works of African American writing are the color line, economic oppression and poverty, travel narratives, and artistry, particularly writing and music. Hughes regularly comments on the struggles of being a black man, particularly when it comes to finding housing or a job. While he knows that other races are discriminated against, he knows they also have an easier time finding work, which makes all the difference. And he struggles with the knowledge that many of the black elite are not interested in changing the situation because they feel that there can be no progress unless they tell the white people what they want to hear. He states that while the Harlem Renaissance was happening, the majority of the black communities in America felt nothing change in their situation or economic or social standings. Economics and travel go hand-in-hand for Hughes, who travels in order to get money, which he can never keep as he comes back to the US, or even as he simply travels from one country to another. Job opportunities do not change, and while he doesn’t experience the same type of color prejudice, he does experience it in that the natives of the countries he visits dislike him for being a threat to their jobs.

Artistry is the other large portion of this narrative. He shows several of his poems and discusses when he wrote them and why. Much of his work was strongly influenced by blues songs and structures, which can be seen throughout much of his poetry with the AAB writing format, just as many blues lyrics are written. He also talks about how dance and music were a rich part of many black people’s lives, specifically citing the many rent parties and house parties he went to, some of which were certainly to help pay people’s rent, but others which were just hosted to be hosted. He provides several examples of printed up tickets for these events. He states that these parties were the spaces where he liked to be because black artistry was not put on display for racist white audiences. His understanding of what it is to be a black man or a black person in general is changed and given more value in an all-black space.

However, he also discusses the problems that come with the assumptions that all black people have rhythm and can dance and sing: he could not dance or sing, and those were almost the only jobs available to him in Europe and even in the US. The stereotype led to success for some, but not for long for many: once they were injured or could no longer work or could not work the grueling schedules or create enough new material, they often died in poverty. It ultimately narrowed black people’s options and avenues for success, even as it provided a rich culture and outlet for many. In discussion of his own work, he also talks about how a narrow view of what black artists should create doomed his work Fine Clothes to the Jew because critics and general public readers alike felt that the dialect and blues structures should not be used in his art: white people saw enough of that elsewhere, and writing was supposed to highlight the best to show people that black artists were capable of high art. The strict rules placed upon what a black artist could write or create further limited what people read, and who could be successful in the field of art.

August 28, 2018August 26, 2018 by bluesyjune