Race, violence, and trauma. This should be a fun week! What did you like, what made you angry, what should we discuss? Please note which time your section is.
Besides the passages we close read in class, the passage that stuck out the most to me was the opening paragraph of Mailer's essay, "The White Negro", where he describes his generation's suppressed feelings about the Holocaust. I found this passage particularly striking because of the associations that could be made between his generation and the Holocaust and our generation and 9/11. Those two events defined those generations, yet we are reluctant to speak of it to anyone in personal terms, as if having feelings about 9/11 not related to terrorism was taboo. The deaths of the people in the Holocaust are similar to the deaths of the people who died in the World Trade Center, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon because nothing about a person's individual character had anything to do with their death. In novels, most deaths happen because of a character's problems and flaws, not just as a senseless act where true character isn't a factor. Mailer says dying like this would mean that the death was meaningless, it "would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked" (338). I just think that this is such a relevant concept today, and says a lot about the way that Americans in general deal with overwhelming world events on a personal level.
In lecture we discussed O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and how the grandmother might have been flattering her way out of death. We questioned her notion of goodness and what it was that motivated her to see potential in The Misfit. However, when I was reading this story, I read the grandmother's character as completely naive, unaware, and almost senile regarding what could happen to her if she continued interacting with The Misfit. When she realized it was him, she was excited enough to tell him she recognized him, which put her family in even more danger. I think her behavior was selfish throughout the story which is ironic because she was one the who wanted to avoid Florida and the possibility of running into The Misfit.
I read O'Conner's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" in high school and it's seemingly incongruent tone and subject matter struck me. Reading it again last week, I discovered new aspects of the Misfit I had not seen in high school. Here is a quote I especially found interesting.
"Yes'm" The Misfit said as if he agreed. "Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course," he said, "they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't been treated right. I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."
This quote from the Misfit goes back to the idea of original sin, the belief that all human beings were born sinners and will thus be forever punished. It is not unless saved by the grace of God that the sinner will be redeemed. The Misfit, punished for a crime he can't remember, sees the world as cruel no matter what he does so he sees no reason to blindly follow a superficial moral code, as the Grandmother does. Even the "best man" Jesus Christ was punished for a crime he did not commit. "No pleasure but in meanness," he later goes on to say. The Grandmother however has a moment of grace when she gives up her selfish ways and shows compassion for the killer. In fact, the Misfit even remarks on this moment of Grace when he says, "She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” It was a moment of crisis that caused the grandmother to be absolved of her original sin. -Molly Speacht, M 4-4:50
Like Molly, I also read this story in high school, but this time, a passage that was particularly striking to me was the following:
" 'It's not much farther,' the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey's shoulder...The car turned over once and landed right-side up in a gulch on the side of the road " (2106).
This description gives of a sense of unreality, namely given its central claim that the grandmother's thought was what triggered a series of events that led to the car accident. The events of the passage seem theatrical, like a slapstick comedy, and ridiculous, like a Rube Goldberg machine. We therefore catch a glimpse of where O'Connor parts with reality and enters the absurd. This stands in contrast to the eerie realism with which O'Connor describes the grandmother dead on the ground: "the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a pudddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky" (2111). But then again, this realism seems so vivid and perfectly presented that it makes me question its reality. I believe that the play between these two excerpts leads to our sense of the grandmother as an allegorical character, who stands for something larger than she is presented as on the surface.
So the question I'd like to discuss is: how does O'Connor move between realism and absurdity, and what does this dialectic accomplish?
Mailer's intentions are to locate, define and describe the hipster person. He navigates several contextual factors in order to place the hipster, who ironically, is largely describes as rootless, experiencing the "present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention" (339). Mailer focuses on the bodily when discussing the present, one that is inextricably wed to primitivist notions that connect the Negro figure to the hipster--a figure that the hispter persona is derived from/depends upon. How can we reconcile the unusual relationship between ideas of rootlessness/presence with identity--the very identity that Mailer attempts to classify? How can we better understand the logic of the present (354)?
O'Connor has very different intentions with her writing. She harbored a general distaste for "a symbol-hunting mentality that things it has "understood" a story when it has completely discarded the work's literal level and discovered, as in an algebraic equation, what every detail "stands" for" (2100). How do we fight the urge to symbol search in a story that is potentially so allegorical. Do the philosophically dense moments (namely the strange and striking morality of the Misfit) lend themselves to a certain clarity of message that O'Connor dislikes? Does O'Connor succeed at using her story as a space to illustrate a sense of incompleteness which she believes "gives serious fiction its value and meaning"?
Although both authors are writing in completely different genres, I am curious about the intentionality behind their pieces--in both cases it seems that they have a strong agenda that is revealed and concealed in different ways.
Besides the passages we close read in class, the passage that stuck out the most to me was the opening paragraph of Mailer's essay, "The White Negro", where he describes his generation's suppressed feelings about the Holocaust. I found this passage particularly striking because of the associations that could be made between his generation and the Holocaust and our generation and 9/11. Those two events defined those generations, yet we are reluctant to speak of it to anyone in personal terms, as if having feelings about 9/11 not related to terrorism was taboo. The deaths of the people in the Holocaust are similar to the deaths of the people who died in the World Trade Center, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon because nothing about a person's individual character had anything to do with their death. In novels, most deaths happen because of a character's problems and flaws, not just as a senseless act where true character isn't a factor. Mailer says dying like this would mean that the death was meaningless, it "would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked" (338). I just think that this is such a relevant concept today, and says a lot about the way that Americans in general deal with overwhelming world events on a personal level.
ReplyDelete-Stacy, M 11:00-11:50
In lecture we discussed O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and how the grandmother might have been flattering her way out of death. We questioned her notion of goodness and what it was that motivated her to see potential in The Misfit. However, when I was reading this story, I read the grandmother's character as completely naive, unaware, and almost senile regarding what could happen to her if she continued interacting with The Misfit. When she realized it was him, she was excited enough to tell him she recognized him, which put her family in even more danger. I think her behavior was selfish throughout the story which is ironic because she was one the who wanted to avoid Florida and the possibility of running into The Misfit.
ReplyDelete-Michelle, M 11-11:50
I read O'Conner's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" in high school and it's seemingly incongruent tone and subject matter struck me. Reading it again last week, I discovered new aspects of the Misfit I had not seen in high school. Here is a quote I especially found interesting.
ReplyDelete"Yes'm" The Misfit said as if he agreed. "Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course," he said, "they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't been treated right. I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."
This quote from the Misfit goes back to the idea of original sin, the belief that all human beings were born sinners and will thus be forever punished. It is not unless saved by the grace of God that the sinner will be redeemed. The Misfit, punished for a crime he can't remember, sees the world as cruel no matter what he does so he sees no reason to blindly follow a superficial moral code, as the Grandmother does. Even the "best man" Jesus Christ was punished for a crime he did not commit. "No pleasure but in meanness," he later goes on to say. The Grandmother however has a moment of grace when she gives up her selfish ways and shows compassion for the killer. In fact, the Misfit even remarks on this moment of Grace when he says, "She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” It was a moment of crisis that caused the grandmother to be absolved of her original sin.
-Molly Speacht, M 4-4:50
Like Molly, I also read this story in high school, but this time, a passage that was particularly striking to me was the following:
ReplyDelete" 'It's not much farther,' the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey's shoulder...The car turned over once and landed right-side up in a gulch on the side of the road " (2106).
This description gives of a sense of unreality, namely given its central claim that the grandmother's thought was what triggered a series of events that led to the car accident. The events of the passage seem theatrical, like a slapstick comedy, and ridiculous, like a Rube Goldberg machine. We therefore catch a glimpse of where O'Connor parts with reality and enters the absurd. This stands in contrast to the eerie realism with which O'Connor describes the grandmother dead on the ground: "the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a pudddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky" (2111). But then again, this realism seems so vivid and perfectly presented that it makes me question its reality. I believe that the play between these two excerpts leads to our sense of the grandmother as an allegorical character, who stands for something larger than she is presented as on the surface.
So the question I'd like to discuss is: how does O'Connor move between realism and absurdity, and what does this dialectic accomplish?
Marlena Gittleman, M 4-4:50
Mailer's intentions are to locate, define and describe the hipster person. He navigates several contextual factors in order to place the hipster, who ironically, is largely describes as rootless, experiencing the "present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention" (339). Mailer focuses on the bodily when discussing the present, one that is inextricably wed to primitivist notions that connect the Negro figure to the hipster--a figure that the hispter persona is derived from/depends upon. How can we reconcile the unusual relationship between ideas of rootlessness/presence with identity--the very identity that Mailer attempts to classify? How can we better understand the logic of the present (354)?
ReplyDeleteO'Connor has very different intentions with her writing. She harbored a general distaste for "a symbol-hunting mentality that things it has "understood" a story when it has completely discarded the work's literal level and discovered, as in an algebraic equation, what every detail "stands" for" (2100). How do we fight the urge to symbol search in a story that is potentially so allegorical. Do the philosophically dense moments (namely the strange and striking morality of the Misfit) lend themselves to a certain clarity of message that O'Connor dislikes? Does O'Connor succeed at using her story as a space to illustrate a sense of incompleteness which she believes "gives serious fiction its value and meaning"?
Although both authors are writing in completely different genres, I am curious about the intentionality behind their pieces--in both cases it seems that they have a strong agenda that is revealed and concealed in different ways.
-oriane piskula