On
Wednesday night at 20th Century US Literature class, Scott arrived
about ten minutes late and took attendance. He offered a quote from Betty
White’s character, Rose, in The Golden Girls, who explained that she’d skipped
school on the day they taught everything. Then, I guess as a dig against those
that weren’t there, he said, “Tonight I’m going to teach everything!”
He was about to start lecturing but
he was suddenly distracted when he noticed several small bugs crawling on the
floor. “That’s disturbing!” He exclaimed and then commented that he’d once had
a mouse run out from under his desk while he was giving a talk.
He gave us some advice on how to
write our essays comparing two texts. He told us to avoid saying that they are
the same but different. He said to also avoid ping-pong essays where one
alternates paragraphs about each work. He said, “Write about what you make of
the differences and similarities.” We need to unify the texts and avoid
repetition. Find different ways of getting at the argument. Be specific from
the start. He recounted that he’d once had a student who had tried to answer
every single suggested question in the essay outline. He declared that the
introduction is the most important part of the paper and we shouldn’t start
with, “Since the beginning of time …” He warned us that it’s not necessary to
follow the format that is taught to high school students, and he drew on the
blackboard the three figure diagram that represents that form, with the thesis
as an upside down pyramid, a rectangle for the body of the text and an upright
pyramid for the conclusion.
You don’t have to give away
everything. You could begin with a quotation. Your conclusion doesn’t have to
restate your introduction in different words. Restate your argument and make it
clearer.
We started with “Recitatif”, which
is the only short story that Toni Morrison ever wrote.
Recitatif is the name for the
annoying talk-singing that happens between real songs in operas.
In the story, two girls, Twyla and
Roberta are put together in an orphanage because their mothers can’t take care
of them. Roberta’s mother is sick and Twyla’s mother is too busy dancing all
night. “Dances all night” might be a euphemism for prostitute. They have
different mothers but in the orphanage they are in the same boat because they
are the only residents of the orphanage whose parents are alive. The dead
parents of orphans are all perfect but Twyla and Roberta are united in shame of
their parents. The one person each knew was the other.
Scott says that we can’t tell which
girl is Black and which is White and the race of the girls is meant to be
ambiguous. This had not occurred to me at all and I thought it was obvious that
Twyla was Black. I still think so. Later when they meet, Roberta is on her way
out west to see a Jimi Hendrix concert. Black people weren’t Jimi Hendrix fans.
Scott said that many African
Americans were against bussing. That’s true but it was mostly because of how it
was done. They were pro-integration.
Roberta Flack is Black and Twyla
Tharp is White.
Morrison said we try to figure out
the story by figuring out races. Race is a determiner here but class is a
bigger one.
It would be hard to convey this in a
novel. I think this is true especially because she couldn’t obscure the races
of the two girls over an extended time.
The text is about what is missing.
The two girls could not agree on
whether Maggie was Black or White or whether one of them had kicked her. If the
kick occurred did it cause her a grave injury? Maggie is a cipher, perhaps with
developmental problems and perhaps biracial.
They distinguish themselves from the
Puerto Rican girls.
Misremembering is scary.
Toni Morrison hardly ever writes
White characters.
Scott decided not to take a break
before looking at Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith”. Roth got labelled a self-hating Jew for
Goodbye Columbus and his comical and critical representation of Jews. He was 26
years old.
Freud wrote a book on jokes was
called “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious”. The jokes were all
anti-Semitic.
To write a character and make fun of
them is to degrade them.
The sergeant was named Marx because
of Karl Marx. Jews were accused of having started Communism. Marx, although a
Jew was very critical of Jews. Some considers Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”
to be anti-Semitic because of quotes like this: “What is the worldly religion
of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money”. The Jews did not fair
better under Communism. But anti-Semitism in Russia has roots that go back to
the Russian empire and so it infiltrated Soviet Communism. Marx’s dispute with
Judaism was simply that he believed there should be no separation of cultures
in a Communist state because for it to work everybody has to be one big happy
family under one culture.
Who was the “defender of the faith”?
The title was given to Henry VIII by Pope Leo X, but then revoked by Pope Paul
III after Henry split from the Catholic Church and formed the Church of
England.
In Roth’s story, the character,
Grossbart insists on religious privileges for Jews even though he doesn’t care.
He just wants to get out of work or gain privileges.
Marx has been in the war. He was one
of the liberators of the concentration camps.
Marx is trying to pass without
making his Jewishness stick out but Grossbart manipulates his Jewishness. The
young Jewish soldiers are weak, unlike Marx.
Grossbart gets strings pulled to
arrange things so he doesn’t have to go to the Pacific to fight the Japanese.
Marx countermands that and works things so Grossbart will end up going to a
place where he could die.
The United States did not want to
enter World War II and would have let England fall to Germany if Japan had not
bombed Pearl Harbour.
When one is a US soldier and a Jew,
which identity comes first?
Black soldiers weren’t even given
guns. They were issued shovels for digging graves and latrines.
Roth writes characters with flawed
masculinity and none of them are likeable. His stories are sexist and
homophobic. He questions but offers no assurance.
Both “Recitatif” and “Defender of
the Faith” are stories about doubt, United Statesian identity and Freedom.
The Civil War is still going on.
According to Scott, Dave Chapelle
left his show because he didn’t like what White people found funny about him.
Gloria Steinem said, “Of course
there is power in calling yourself a victim. That’s why men do it.”
Scott ended the class an hour early.
Just before getting ready to leave, I asked him about a word that he’d
mentioned last week in relation to Frank O’Hara’s poem “A Step Away From Them”
where he said, “I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of Federico Fellini …” He remembered and told me
that the play between “Juliet’s” and “Giulietta” is an example of “metonomy”
and that it’s a type of lateral thinking. But that word doesn’t exist and what
comes up is “metonymy”, which doesn’t fit because that means “the use of a
single name or characteristic of an object to identify the entire object”, as in
“I have twenty head” for “I have twenty cows”.
When
I got home I had dinner and watched “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour”. The story was
similar to an earlier one from the same season in that a murderer feels guilty
after covering up his crime but then by the time he confesses nobody believes
him. In this case, George, the middle-aged pharmacist of a small town is having
a Sunday picnic with his wife out in the country by the woods. He decides to
take a walk while she is taking a nap and comes across an attractive young
woman that he knows, who is sitting by the lake, listening to the radio and
drinking beer by herself. She invites him to have a beer with her. He sits down
and tries to kiss her but she says she’ll tell his wife. He covers her mouth
and tells her to promise she won’t say anything. She nods, but when he takes
his hand away she begins to call his wife’s name. So he strangles her to stop
her shouting but ends up killing her. He goes back to his still snoring wife
and pretends to go to sleep beside her. The sheriff arrives to do some fishing
with his boys and they find the body of the young woman. The suspect was her
wild boyfriend, J.J. who had been with her that day but had opted for lying on
his back and floating around in a rowboat. J.J. already has a criminal record
and he’s a bit of an ass, so everybody in town is convinced that he is the
murderer. He doesn’t help his case by getting another girlfriend as soon as
he’s out on bail. When the trial comes up, George is selected for the jury, but
he refuses to find J.J. guilty and so he eventually sways the jury and J.J. is
freed. But the town won’t accept it and they not only continually harass and
attack J.J., but they boycott George’s drugstore because they blame him for
J.J. getting off. George tries to confess but people think he’s going crazy. He
goes to confess to J.J. just after J.J. has been beaten up by some local boys.
George tells him he was the murderer but J.J. doesn’t believe him. Then J.J.
tries to shoot himself because he can’t handle living like this anymore but
George tries to take the gun away from him and accidentally kills him. When the
sheriff arrives George tries to confess to killing J.J. but that isn’t believed
either. George is laughing in the end.
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