My name is Nathaniel, and I have read Sparknotes

Sparknotes is a website where sports medicine majors go to read short summaries of literature and character analyses so they can plagiarize the site in hopes of getting a C from a lazy teacher's assistant or something of the sort. All of my academia friends speak of websites like sparknotes with vile hatred, and I can understand since their whole purpose is to make it possible for lazy students to not have to dig on their own through stories.

However, I read it frequently for a lot of my readings in many classes. Not as a replacement for reading the actual work, but as kindling to start my criticism. The problem for me is I don't really know how to do criticism. I am a kid hammering on a piano with no training. I'm no dummy, so I can sometimes find something melodic and go with it, but it's amateur at best. So sparknotes is like Fisher Price my-first-literary-criticism.

I bring this up because, after reading Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," I was madly in love with the story, but wasn't able to articulate exactly what was going on under the surface of the story. I sensed religious tones, regionalism, and characters that were more complex than "hero" and "villain," but I just couldn't figure it out. The Misfit and the grandmother's dialogue with each other at the end intrigued me, but I didn't know why.

So I went to sparknotes, and read up on it. And what I read about The Misfit was the most interesting because I completely disagreed with sparknotes.

"He has carefully considered his actions in life and examined his experiences to find lessons within them. He has even renamed himself because of one of these lessons, believing that his punishment didn’t fit his crime. Because the Misfit has questioned himself and his life so closely, he reveals a self-awareness that the grandmother lacks...The Misfit’s philosophies may be depraved, but they are consistent. Unlike the grandmother, whose moral code falls apart the moment it’s challenged, the Misfit has a steady view of life and acts according to what he believes is right."

I think they miss the mark saying that The Misfit is consistent. While he is more analytical than the grandmother and her family, there is something within him that isn't satisfied with his philosophy. His cool amoral attitude is challenged by the grandmother, and he cracks. When she talks to him about Jesus, The Misfit, who establishes himself as not one of the faithful, becomes upset about his lack of certainty.

"I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't," The Misfit said. "I wisht I had of been there," he said, hitting the ground with his fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now." His voice seemed about to crack...

The Misfit obviously isn't so sure about his philosophy of "no pleasure but meanness." When he kills the grandmother immediately after, it seems like a different sort of murder for him. It isn't part of his iconoclastic revenge against society, killing these people that he felt were part of the system that punished him unfairly. He killed the grandmother because she recognized him. She knew who he was, not just him being The Misfit, but who he was to the core of his being, and it scared him.

So, I highly recommend visiting Sparknotes. And then tearing their crappy criticism apart with your own observations about the text.

An Adonis is Upon Us

A lot of focus in not only my literature classes, but in many of my humanities classes, is put on how women and femininity are treated in society, and with good reason. Still, I feel compelled to talk about how masculinity gets portrayed. Not because I want to steal the spotlight away from women, but because I think that patriarchy hurts men too by defining what it means to be a man. Then men go chasing this unrealistic ideal and all sorts of misery comes out of this pointless pursuit.

I feel that Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" is ripe for this sort of analysis. Willy Loman is obsessed with performative masculinity. He lies about his reputation, his commission, and his own stature. He mocks his neighbor and his neighbor's son, saying "Between him and his son Bernard they can't hammer a nail!" and "A man who can't handle tools is not a man. You're disgusting."

Willy is old and tired and has never been all that successful. By America's standard of masculinity, he isn't much, which is one of the great tragedies about Willy Loman, he has bought into the lie that is unattainable to all despite being the sort of person that should criticize the mold that patriarchy wants its men to fit into. He calls his sons "Adonises," and attributes business savvy to them that they cannot live up to either.

In the end, the irony is that for all Willy's male posturing, he's just pathetic.

Booker T. Washington Was an Uncle Tom

Last quarter we read an excerpt of W.E.B. DuBois' book "The Souls of Black Folk." We read some of his sharp criticism of Booker T. Washington, specifically Washington's "Atlanta Compromise." This quarter Booker T. makes another appearance in the first chapter of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." The narrator says in the second paragraph, "they were told they were free...in everything social, separate like the fingers of the hand." That last part is a direct quote of Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech where he essentially told his fellow southern african-americans to stay in the south and help white people rebuild it. He advocated separate but equal segregationist policy, and white southerners loved him for it. This is why I call Booker T. Washington an Uncle Tom, he was an assimilationist that capitulated to the racist demands of the southern whites of his time.

Ralph Ellison's protagonist is raised in a family that upholds Washington's values, though the protagonist's grandfather seems to realize on his deathbed that this lifestyle is harmful to him and his people. Despite the grandfather's warnings, the protagonist lives the life of submission that whites demand blacks live in a white society. He is commended for his behavior, because his behavior maintains the inequity of power in the times of Jim Crow. The protagonist seems to go so far as to experience Stockholm Syndrome when he says, "I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks..." He feels guilt when a naked white woman is revealed at the Battle Royal because in the time of Emmett Till, even looking the wrong way at a white woman can be a death sentence.

This is the life of a black person in Jim Crow south. It is one of internalized racism, de facto and de jure societal racism, and constant fear. When the protagonist simply implies that "social equality" is a worthy goal as an abstract concept, the crowd of white men clamps down on him. "We mean to do right by you, but you've got to know your place at all times" one of them tells him.

But perhaps the most troubling part of our reading was when the protagonist is involved in the boxing match, and is the last of two men standing. When he asks the other man to take the fall, even promising him all of the pay, so that they can get this stupid brutal skeptical over with, the other guy refuses. "For them?" he asks. "For me, sonofabitch!"

I may have been reading too much into this, but it seemed like a metaphor for the internalized conflict within the black community. The ways that America's power brokers have fomented strife within the lower classes so that they don't realize that their true enemy is the bourgeois and the capitalists. The white folks force these black men to fight one another for their amusement. And while some participate out of fear, and some have bought into the pride and machismo of winning, even though you never really win anything. The game is rigged.

Render Muttons

Non-representational art is a conundrum for me. On one hand I would like to dismiss it because I'm a philosophy major and it is my job to seek out the rational and logical purpose of a thing. However, I also like my red plaid shirt, and the cover of Joy Division's album "Unknown Pleasures," and I hate houndstooth jackets on women. All of these are non-representational patterns and images, there is no narrative or character or moral, they just are abstract shapes for the most part. So I cannot say that non-representational art doesn't have validity and doesn't illicit an emotional response.

And after ending my blog for the last literature class with an exploration of the death of the author, it wouldn't be intellectually honest to say that my inability to discern Stein's authorial intent with Tender Buttons means it has no value. I shouldn't even allow my grudge against her for being a fascist color my opinion of her writing since authors don't matter.

But man, I just can't get into Tender Buttons. For a split second I thought I was going to like her, when I heard the title. I thought of a mother buttoning her child's jacket on a cold day. It gave me this nice comforting feeling of maternal bonds and I thought that I might be able to get other such interesting images out of her work.

I'm reminded of the movie Donnie Darko, when Drew Barrymore's character tells her class about a linguist that said that "cellar door" is the most beautiful phrase in the english language. The point being that the aesthetic sound is pleasing despite the semantic meaning being dull or even possibly negative if you think of musky basements. That scene was always perplexing to me because I could not figure out why "cellar door" was all that pleasant a sound. I also cannot figure out why Gertrude Stein's poetry is arranged in aesthetic terms instead of semantically.

And here is the paradox because I enjoy the idea of the death of the author. Screw all your context, the text is all that matters. However, when it comes to "cellar door" and "The time to show a message is when too late..." they are meaningless to me without context. I do not give a damn about "cellar door" as a phrase in and of itself. But throw some Polish Jews in 1939, hiding in the cellar, and they can see the uniform of a Nazi through a hole in the cellar door, well now I care quite a bit about a cellar door.