Final Paper

Butler is a brilliant writer. Her methodologies in writing Kindred are exactly what draw me into a great book. The accurate portrayal of Dana’s experiences in the past was remarkable. Remarkable and many times disturbing due to the subject matter: ubiquitous rampant racism.

By now, the man had been securely tied to the tree. One of the whites went to his horse to get what proved to be a whip. He cracked it once in the air, apparently for his own amusement, then brought it down across the back of the black man… He took several more blows with no outcry, but I could hear his breathing, hard and quick…The man’s resolve broke… Finally, he began to scream” (Butler, 36).

This racism is not the same racism, that we might be familiar with today. This, indeed, is a whole other variety of racism; one that’s not even cognizant of itself, due to its ever-present authority. Before this time period and during, there was not a soul (white soul anyway…) within a hundred miles of the Weylin plantation who would’ve dared question the idea of treating a black man woman or child like a dog, or property of any kind. Dana becomes disillusioned, as a black woman, to the brutal truths of her ancestor’s existence. There was no shining light at the end of the tunnel. Even for those who dared to run, the dogs, the guns, the whip, and the auction block were often standing guard, waiting for them at the end.

While she witnesses the beating of the black man in the clearing in the woods, she is suddenly aware of the chasm of difference between story violence and real violence. “I had seen the too-red blood streaked across their backs, and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat, ore heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves,” (Butler, 36). Today in America, we live cushy lives, eat cushy foods, drink cushy drinks, and play with Nerf balls. Our society is, for the majority of us, at a complete disconnect with the elements of violence in this world. Despite the unbridled racism and violence that still permeates places like Africa, the Middle East, and Los Angeles, most of us would not have the faintest clue how to react, and fight back if necessary.

At one point in the book, Dana expresses her feelings to Kevin saying something along the lines of: the smells are more pungent, the tastes are more flavorful, the heat is hotter, in short, life was more potent. Butler shows that in her description of the past. The most graphic passage in “The Fire” chapter depicted the same beating mentioned above.

I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining against the tope as his screaming went on and on. My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet. Why didn’t they stop! (Butler, 36)

By placing the reader directly next to the victim of this crime, it becomes real. We get to feel the shame, we get to feel the pain. Butler has made this a reality.

When Dana is confronted by the Patroller outside Alice’s cabin in the woods, he begins to beat her. At one point, she is simply shocked that she is able to “absorb so much punishment without losing consciousness,” (Butler, 42). In this survival situation, there is no way her body would just let her pass out, what with all the adrenaline, norepinephrine, and endorphins pumping through her veins. And so she must continue to fight. As her struggle continues, her violence-oriented thought processing skills peak for a moment when she has an epiphany: she could completely disable the Patroller if she were to gouge her fingers deep into the man’s eye sockets. She almost does it, but it seems the mere mental tactile imagery of penetrating another human’s soft fleshy eyeball was enough to nauseate her. After he knocks her hands away from his face, her window of opportunity vanishes. “My squeamishness belonged in another age, but I’d brought it along with me. Now I’ would be sold into slavery because I didn’t have the stomach to defend myself in the most effective way,” (Butler, 42). Ringing true for readers in this time, each of these examples of violence, or a disconnected feeling towards one’s self-defense jump from the pages. Butler’s ability to deliver accurate portrayals is not limited to the violent aspects of the story.

In order to paint an accurate picture for the reader to follow, it was imperative for Butler to develop the natural world of the early nineteenth century Maryland. She not only had to provide the Maryland landscape, but it was also crucial to deliver the perspective of a woman from California in the 1970’s. After the fire incident with Rufus, Dana steps out for the first time into that early 19^th c. Maryland night. When she looks up, she sees the “half-moon and several million stars lighting the night as they never did at home,” effectively setting the stage of a time where the terms metropolis and street lights were still a century away (Butler, 32). On her way to Alice’s cabin, she mentions seeing, “trees, tall and shadowy—trees everywhere,” (Butler, 33). This too is a very important thing for Dana to note; not only because there would be many more trees then in Maryland than there would be now, but also the fact that Dana is coming from the chaparral of southern California, and walking out into the temperate forest that Maryland once was. As she ventures out of the woods and down the road toward the Greenwood home, she could hear the, “few night birds and insects [that] broke the silence—crickets, an owl, some other bird I had no name for,” (Butler, 34). Again, due to human-imposed extinction rates, several of 1815 Maryland’s birds are more than likely gone, but also, this is a southern Californian in Maryland, of course there’ll be birds she can’t identify at night in the woods. All in all, Butler was able to draw me in to her narrative because of her attention to accuracy describing both the time, and the perception of that time.

Text—Text

Bob Marley has long been known to sing out against injustice. Marley as an artist speaks toward racism from an international perspective. Having toured and traveled to countries all over the world, including places in North America, Europe, East Asia, and Africa, he speaks from a broadened outlook on the subject. His song War, released 1976 on his “Rastaman Vibration” album, was one of his most outspoken works of protest. “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned/Everywhere is war.” (Marley). He first calls out on the individual level to each human holding this philosophy at heart to recognize the superficiality of their perspective, and to refuse to participate in that type of thought process. “Until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation/Until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance that the colour of his eyes/Me say war,” (Marley). While still identifying with the individual level (as is evident in the second half of this lyric) Marley begins to call into question the values of those at the top: governments. For it is the government who sets the trend by its own actions, by the legislature it passes, and by the legislature it puts at the forefront of its priorities. “Until that day the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, and rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued but never attained/Now everywhere is war,” (Marley). He points out three beautiful utopian ideals that all humanity should be able to agree on, but are inherently impossible to achieve at our present state. By fostering any construct of a hierarchy of races, neither we nor any other nation will know these virtues first hand. “Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique, South Africa sub-human bondage have been totally toppled, utterly destroyed/Everywhere is war… We find it necessary and we know we shall win as we are confident in the victory of good over evil…” (Marley). With an attitude of hope, he leaves us with specific entities that need to be stood up against.

Dana, of all the characters in our book, knows this first hand. Having history books, and the advantage of hindsight, she can look over the progression of time, noting the change in international morality improve, but never lose its racist feelings altogether. On the personal level in Dana’s life, it seems that for the most part, “the color of a man’s skin is of no more importance than the color of his eyes. She and Kevin have overcome the racist hegemony of their culture and transcended skin color, opening a door into a loving life-long relationship.

Now I am a white male from the United States of America; so while I may not be able to speak from personal experience of being victimized by racism, as a human being, I can certainly understand and have compassion for with those who have, do, and probably will suffer from racial injustice. bell hooks is an author who can speak from experience, and from her essays I have learned to appreciate the rage. She published a book in 1995 titled Killing Rage, wherein she wrote an essay called “Beyond Black Rage.” “Black rage” is a term used to describe the retaliation of black people against a target(s) representing the population(s) by whom the individual has been oppressed. “Beyond Black Rage” is her response to an incident that occurred in New York on a commuter train, wherein a black man shot several people randomly. Some were white, some were not. The gunman carried a list of names which included multiple black male leaders. On his notes, he articulated contempt toward, “racism by Caucasians and Uncle Tom Negroes,” (hooks, 21). hooks points out that it was, in fact, the white-dominated media who a.) made it sound as though the man had only killed white people and b.) chose to reduce the man’s “complex understanding of the nature of neo-colonial racism to ‘rage against whites’… while representing [the white culture] as a group that is never carried away by killing rage,” (hooks, 22). This image, however, is only a charade. Without paging back through the annals of racist history, we know the track record of white people in this country. We have all heard the torturesome stories involving a lone black man against a posse of (usually drunk) white good ol’ boys. These attacks were usually random, and carried out regardless of class or upbringing.

The gunman in the story was an immigrant from Jamaica whose family belonged to the upper class. He had been living in the United States and had been going to school for some time. After Investigators questioned the man’s professors, it came to light that the man had been obsessed with race. In that period, the young man was subjected to repeated racist remarks/situations. Whether it was directly confrontational, or a simply refusing to make eye contact, each single racist event began to accumulate in the man’s psyche. hooks refers to this as the “maddening impact” of racism, caused by, “living in a white supremacist context, suffering racist discrimination and/or exploitation and oppression, can create and/or exacerbate mental illness,” (hooks, 23, 25-26). She moves to show that the “well-off” black community had a high level of sympathy for the gunman. This particular demographic of the black population knows all too well the rage that swells up after years of prejudice. For these people, hooks explains, much of their time has been devoted to assimilating to the white-dominated culture they grew up in. They must change their hair, change their clothing, they must even change the way in which they speak if ever they wish to be taken seriously in order to get a respectable job, family, or success. They often make such changes in the faint hope that maybe, just maybe, if they change enough, the white community will accept them as equals. The variety of rage they experience is:

…a narcissistic rage rooted in the ideology of hierarchical privilege that says “they,” not all black people, should be treated better. They see themselves as more deserving. Unlike underclass and underprivileged black people, they have a sense of entitlement. And it is the sense that they will be selected out and treated better, bred into them at birth by their class values, that erupts into rage when white folks arbitrarily choose to make no distinction between a black person from an “elite” class and someone from the underclass. (hooks, 28)

Whether superficial or deep, Dana knew these feelings all too well. For she was raised in a white 1960’s America as a little black girl. She would have witnessed the tail end of the riotous integration of public schools, and would have attended a school whose student body was primarily composed of white children. While in the 1970’s—Dana’s adulthood—the racist furvor had settled a bit in the U.S., Dana would have encounters utterly outside her experience when she traveled back in time. There was no doubt that the white population would inherently look down upon Dana as a black woman, but the extent to which the black population shuns her was astonishing. When Dana showed up wearing blue jeans, all the slaves asked her why she was dressed up as a man. Because of the way she articulated herself, the slaves wouldn’t trust her because she spoke “too white.”

Text—World

The 1960’s was arguably the most tumultuous decade in recent American history in terms of media-covered racial violence. In February 1963, a 24 year old white man by the name of William Zantzinger attended a socialite function wherein he got drunk and accosted several waitstaff (all black persons) which culminated in a display of violence: Zantzinger wielding his cane as a weapon. A woman by the name of Hattie Carroll, age 51, was accused by Zantzinger of taking far too long to serve him a drink. “’What's the matter with you, you black son of a bitch,’ he snarled, ‘serving my drinks so slow?’" (TIME). After he successively beat her over the head with his cane, she fell to the ground, only to leave the building by ambulance. It wasn’t until eight hours later that a brain hemorrhage killed Carroll. At the end of his three-day trial, William Zantzinger was found guilty of assult and fined $125. For the “manslaughter” of Hattie Carroll, he was fined $500 and 6 months in jail. “The judges considerately deferred the start of the jail sentence until September 15, to give Zantzinger time to harvest his tobacco crop,” (TIME).

Carroll was the 1960’s version of Sarah from the cookhouse. She was a working woman who dealt with the white people’s business. Both women had had several children, and while Sarah’s children were nearly immediately sold into slavery once old enough to work, Hattie Carroll’s children were fortunate enough to stay with her; although her death left them motherless—a few of them at a young vulnerable age, no less. While Tom Weylin was as ignorant as Zantzinger, he was a product of his time. He owned plantation land, owned plantation slaves, and that’s just how things were run. Zantzinger, on the other hand was not necessarily a product of his time—as it was very transitional in nature—so much as a parasite clutching to the previous dying age.

References

Butler, Octavia E.. Kindred. Boston: Beacon, 1979.

"Deferred Sentence." TIME 06 Sept 1963:

hooks, bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995.

Marley, Bob. Rastaman Vibration. War. 1976.

Commodification

So on Tuesday, we were discussing the idea that Heidi Klum (an icon for all models) has completely commodified herself, and that there is no distinction between her-real-self and her-business-self. We (or you and most of the class) also drew conclusions that we oursleves are "little Hiedis" in that we are always potentially capable of being exploited, and that our lives revolve around exploitation. I respectfully beg to differ, and i'll make my case here.
Before the advent of mass-communication of all media - satellite radio, television, cable, major news programs uploaded online, etc - this phenomena of the super model did not exist, this over-the-top commodification did not exist. I personally have been brewing a huge batch of distrust for the pop culture, the media, and the system at large for some time now, and i have taken many steps to keep those influences at a distance. i believe that i am a happier person for it, frankly.

In the years since 9/11 I have often heard may people fret over some increase in national security levels due to "terrorist threats." I have heard people fret over potential biological or chemical warfare. I have also heard people fret over WMD's. Beyond that, i have heard people discuss (at length) the results of the previous night's episode of American Idol. I have heard people discuss (like they ACTUALLY give a shit [excuse me]) the getting together or breaking up of famous pop figures. Constantly I hear people talking about the proverbial "big game," and who's gonna (or who did) win (I do not pay attention of any kind to any professional sports). On Tuesday, you must remember, the class was absolutely SHOCKED that i had never heard of some guy named Joe the Plumber(?!). And yet... somehow... having been completely oblivious to all these things... life still goes on for Bill Harrington.

How have people gotten so caught up in this system of commodification? Because they let it take a hold of them. Because many people's interests fall within the bounds of what They commodify: sports, fear/security, beautiful people, religion, junk food, nationalism, bad music with good beats, and many other things you might get bombarded with through mass-communicative media.

They (FDA/Media) promote food empty in nutrition, but full of chemicals ready to make us fat and toxify our brains. They (Entertainment Media) promote video games to numb our minds. They (Federal Department of Education) provide our children with less-that-adequate education. They (Department of Defense) misallocate our taxes toward meaningless war, and their pockets. They (FDA/Pharmaceuticals [who actually pay the bills at the FDA]) push drugs into the market like Ritalin and Prozac to control our minds. They (Media in conjunction with the Federal Government) raise and lower security levels and drill into our heads the idea of fear so that we stay tuned, and stay in line. They (Congress) have passed legislation that eliminate several of our basic rights including habeas corpus.

People need to get educate themselves instead of relying on the powers that be if they want to see what's happened to our society. Tenzin Gyatso the 14th dalai lama says in his book Stages of Meditation, "If we don't do anything constructive and expect that others will, then obviously nothing is possible."

Neuromancer

So far, this text seems to be going the way of "The Matrix." They already are talking about the matrix as some mysterious entity, giving it an enigmatic aura. We have met our disenfranchised loner hero-to-be Case. He definitely has Hans Solo characteristics having been a killer and thief. It’s funny how the intertextuality unit has altered the way I see things in texts, because I now make all sorts of connections with all sorts of movies, shows, books I’ve seen/read before. For example, when Armitage threatened Case with the “there’s toxin filled cysts (or something like that) that are going to dissolve into your bloodstream unless you help us” threat, all I could think about was the character Jigsaw in all the recent “Saw” movies.

So far, it seems like a good book, and although there’s lots of jargon that I’m not getting at all, I’m anticipating a lot of good action.

Kindred

I was truly amazed at how much gorier, realistic, and dreadful the experience was reading this account of ante bellum south, versus watching a movie about it. Page 35 and 36's account of a run in with the local patrollers left me nauseated. It was astonishing how vivid my mind could make the scene, almost as if I were there myself lying in a ditch below the weeping slave. My mind could relate previous experiences of accidents where I had experienced some great deals of pain, and harness it in such a way that I could almost feel the striking whip. Octavia Butler's words must've been strictly chosen, as she has written a gut-wrenching scene of a slave beating. I can only imagine that her imagery will either maintain their realistic nature if they don't get more convincing.

Self: At a Glance

As with everything in life, the way in which we relate a text to ourselves, others, and the world goes through an evolutionary process. There are three different stages of reading development put forth; Text-Self is the most basic of the trichotomy in that the text’s only demand upon the reader/viewer is that they ask themselves if they like it and/or if it agrees with their values as a person. The other two are a bit more abstract in their demands upon the reader. Text-Texts seek out any relations that the text in question may have with previously published/released work, whether it be of the same medium or not. The Text-World model leaves the realm of art, and opens it up to all aspects of life: politics, religion, science, economy, philosophy, psychology, to name a few. One by one, I have learned to use each of these models in order to appreciate published works fully.

The level of reading development I was in previous to this class, I believe was a mixture of all three stages. Since I was little, every time I see a movie, see a new music act, or read anything, I always look to see if it interests me. I have a wide range of interests, so I’m pretty open to checking out new things, and therefore get to make that type of analysis quite often (I assume most people do the same whenever they are exposed to something entirely new). The stage I tap second-most often, I would have to say is the Text-World model. This is due in part to the past few years of my continued education. While my attempts at higher education previous to Cardinal Stritch were unsuccessful-for one reason or another-I was still engaging myself in heady conversations and classes that exposed me to, and helped me understand my own personal viewpoints of many different aspects of society, religion, and science. For example, in the fall of 2003, I took a wonderful English class at UW-Whitewater taught by a professor by the name of Bill Keelty. That semester, he had our entire class subscribe to The New Yorker magazine, which was definitely a step ahead of what my pleasure reading was, and it exposed me to some of the greater themes in our society. I too, have taken many different science classes which have exposed me to a deeper understanding of the biological systems at work on our planet, allowing me to draw similarities and conclusions from my understanding. However, school is not the only influence in how I read.

I spent two years after my Whitewater experience living on my own in Colorado in different mountain towns getting by as a busboy, but mostly by teaching kids snowboard lessons at two resorts out there. Whether it was on the job, or talking to my 42 year old roommate (while I was at the age of 19), I learned a lot about how the world works, and how to treat different situations. Living with a 42 year old, and hanging out with my 30 year old co-workers changed my outlook on the world entirely, specifically helping me to break down the concept of “age” as a social barrier. In that light, I’ve been working at a stained glass studio on and off (whenever there’s a commission to be had) for the last four years. My boss at the studio is 73 years of age, and has more life experience that you can shake a stick at. With her insight—some of which, I’d like to think, has been passed to me—alongside my life experiences in Colorado, boosted by a few years of higher learning has often landed me in a position where I can evaluate subjects on the Text-World level. The last stage that I arrived at was the Text-Texts level which I achieved last semester. In the spring, I took a Writing Comm. class with Sarah Schuetze; one of our final papers for the semester was a synthesis paper that involved the comparison of three different texts. I chose a Twilight Zone episode, a dramatic film you may be familiar with, “The 6^th Sense”, and a Civil war historical fiction short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I chose those texts, because I saw in them usage of a similar literary technique: that of using an abrupt, epiphanal ending to a story. That single writing assignment allowed me to complete the circuit of reader development, as it were.

I now, so far this semester, have moved slightly away from the Text-Self model, and have begun to foster a deeper understanding of the Text-Texts stage, while maintaining a good deal of the Text-World capabilities. Our unit on intertextuality thoroughly heightened my ability to analyze texts of all sorts. As a reader and observer in general, I was always more apt to compare a text to aspects of real life in the world we live in rather than to previous texts. I also probably wouldn’t have analyzed what movies an actor had been in previous to one that I’m watching, in order to get a better understanding of what’s on the screen. However, in my second blog entry (the one on Pulp Fiction) I mentioned something that wasn’t brought up in class, but had a significant impact on how I watched the movie,

While perhaps a bit more subtle (whether I'm right or wrong), I got a laugh out of this next example. At Jack Rabbit Slim's, Mia volunteers the both of them to perform in a dance contest. The only thing is that... her dance partner is none other than John Travolta, the leading star from everybody's favorite 1970's flick: Saturday Night Fever. This example may not be a direct reference, but anybody that knows anything about movies knows that John Travolta made a name for himself with those dance moves of his (Self, blog page).

Now, I’ve seen that movie at least a dozen times, and never had I made the connection between that scene and Travolta’s earlier success as an actor. It is, however, that very information that can promote a deeper appreciation for a book/movie/TV show/etc. Indeed, this is a tactic for deeper understanding that is new to me, and will definitely be something that I will look into from now on.

It was on my first blog post that I reaffirmed my understanding of Text-World to myself by analyzing Paul Auster’s writing style in relation to my own past education, and the education system at large. I discussed how any and all reading assigned to me in the past had a point that I was to discover and relate to my own life. It seemed that I was given a task similar to Quinn’s while he was a private eye:

What he has are lines and zig-sags that somewhat resemble symbols one may have seen before, but what it is is a man walking down and across rectangular city blocks over time, that are eventually bound to create some sort of geometric pattern. I believe that his task was hopeless, like trying to find some deeper meaning in the random pattern in clouds. I also believe that this story is going nowhere. I’ve been conditioned over the years to read stories that had a point to be made, and an objective to be accomplished. This book, it seems, is challenging everything I’ve learned about reading, and is putting “patterns” out there that I'm focusing on, trying to make sense of it all, but in reality, I’m just grasping at straws (Self, blog page).

Whether it was due to the assignments given, or due to some unconscious decision of my own, I have steered away from the Text-Self model and really focused on the Text-Texts and Text-World stages of reading development.

I personally do not agree with the way these paradigms are approached as “stages.” I, in fact do not believe that this trifecta of “stages” are not stages at all really; I see them instead more like three different methods toward understanding literature. You see, I believe that I achieved the Text-Self and the Text-World “stages” well before I really ever put much thought into the Text-Texts “stage.” Of course while we all judge something first by how much we like something, our understanding of our surroundings and our appreciation for things matures and evolves. In that way, I believe that in order to have a true understanding of oneself (and therefore a more meaningful Text-Self comprehension), we must gain a deeper self-understanding of how we feel towards the qualities listed in the Text-World discourses: the political scene, the world’s religions, science’s contributions, the economy, philosophy’s questions, and the psychology of the human race. Also, the “stage” paradigm suggests that one might leave one stage, somehow graduating the individual toward the next level never to look back. I think that’s just foolish, as each method has its own place in literary analysis, it just differs depending on who you’re evaluating the text for, and what aspect you’re analyzing the text for.

I thereby declare the “stage” myth of reader development debunked! The evolution I have undergone as a reader—and a writer—has (very much like biological evolution) left branches of literary techniques, each of which is accessible at any given time for me to use effectively and conscientious.

The Dirty Yellow Chair

I, over the past week or so, have come to believe in what Jonathan Lethem has to say. My whole life I've been taught never to plagiarize, never to use what others have written/spoken/done in the past and use it for my own purposes. Lethem points out that, in his mind, the artist is inseparably interwoven with his/her environment/surroundings which includes others' speech, artwork, attitudes, everything! He had developed, and is now exposing me to his radical new way of thinking about art.
So now, we're taking what he has to say at face value, and taking him at his word. My group was assigned the Dirty Yellow Chair scene: a juicy, sexual scene that takes place (time and time again) on a filthy yellow piece of furniture. Our group tried very hard to make it as interesting as possible, aiming to eventually have the past and present flashback and forth between the two, creating a dichotomy between the two in the scene. My only complaint was that we only had one class period. We had really good ideas while we were brainstorming, but eventually got to the point where we all looked at the clock and realized we had less than 20 mins to wind up what we had going at the time! I think that we could've come up with a scene that would've worked quite nicely (especially if one got the cinematography transitions between flashbacks down [ie. zooming into one of the telephone receiver's holes by the mouthpiece]), had we been given perhaps one more class period: one for brainstorming, another for actually getting the ideas down in a concise manner.

Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction

The concept of intertextuality is one that, while it is quite new to me, i can look back in retrospect and remember many movies, TV shows, etc that were either centrally focused on or at least referenced a few pop culture icons/concepts. Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is not only a textbook example of this concept, it also draws from metafiction as well. One of my favorite examples of this intertextuality is in the restaurant scene (and the events leading up to) when Jules has taken the male robber hostage, and has the female robber pointing a gun in his face. While she seems to be loosing control of her emotions, Jules tries to convince her to be calm, asking her, "what would Fonzie do??" He'd be cool.

While perhaps a bit more subtle (whether i'm right or wrong), I got a laugh out of this next example. At Jack Rabbit Slim's, Mia volunteers the both of them to perform in a dance contest. The only thing is that... her dance partner is none other than John Travolta, the leading star from everybody's favorite 1970's flick: Saturday Night Fever. This example may not be a direct reference, but anybody that knows anything about movies knows that John Travolta made a name for himself with those dance moves of his.