Freaking Out

            On Tuesday after midnight I did my usual search for bedbugs and found none. That makes it three days since I saw the last one. 

            I memorized the first verse of “Le vieux rocker” (The Old Rocker) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            The heat was blasting when I got up at 5:00. I switched it off at 6:00 but those old radiators hold heat for a long time and it was 8:30 by the time the place cooled down to a comfortable level. 

            I weighed 89.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            I had time for a few grapes and a few sips of coffee before leaving for class. It was raining and I was sure I would be soaked by the time I got there but I was only a little damp. Not enough to feel miserable while sitting two hours in a lecture hall. 

            Three stories: “Circumstance” published at the dawn of the Civil War; “Chickamauga” after the war but a Civil War story; “The Sheriff's Children” after the Civil War. This last one calls attention to what Harriet Jacobs called the tangled skeins of genealogy. Destruction of home in one case a sign of salvation and the other similar. 

            Of Harriet Spofford's 1860 story “Circumstance” Emily Dickinson wrote that the story itself becomes a predator for her. Emerson in self reliance talks of self alienation in a way that can be applied to Dickinson's statement. The story is based on an event in her great grandmother's life. 

           Spofford was popular in her life and wrote prolifically but wrote to support her family. Her writing fell out of fashion. But came back in the 1980s. She fell out of favour because the arbiters of taste didn't like melodramatic Gothic stories and so realism became the norm. 

           Questions about “Circumstance”: Is it a theological story, a story about a spiritual test in a Puritan mode? What is its relationship to the captivity narrative? And might we call this Settler Colonial Gothic? Is it a story about sexual violence? And if so in what sense? And even weirder--Is it a story about maternity and childbirth? 

            Genre. Captivity narrative. Accounts of it start with Mary Rowlanson's “The Sovereignty and Goodness of God.” About the “cruel and inhumane usage she underwent among the heathens for eleven weeks time and her deliverance from them.” A sermon by her husband is annexed to the story. The established genre involves an ordeal usually of a colonial American woman captured by savages. Abducted, escaped, to some degree sometimes assimilated. It is a popular enduring form. The type of story is retold in fiction and films such as John Wayne. This is the genre that Spofford is drawing on.

             Also there is the context of the theological significance of the wilderness in relation to Puritanism. Recall that nature took on a different significance later like a dangerous ungodly space with savages going to write their name in Satan's book. For some Christian settlers separation from god defined the natives. Later the transcendentalists celebrated the wilderness. In The Scarlet Letter Hester and Dimmesdale find love in the woods. 

            When a wilderness encounter is represented ask who the wilderness is for. Naming from a European perspective. Note the perilous state of her home, barely separate from the wilderness. Protected but vulnerable. Her use of the word “domain” is interesting. “Domain” means held by occupation as opposed to by a legal owner. The system of legal ownership sometimes obscures. The reunion of her family defies the representative powers of the author because it is too sacred. Ownership in force. 

            Equation of panther and native. That conflation could switch adjectives and nouns as she says “panther tribe.” My research finds there would really be no such thing as a grouping of adult panthers or cougars in the wild, but there's a name for it anyway: “A claw of panthers.” Later the cougar is referred to as “The Indian Devil.” 

            The protagonist is separated from her family while performing care work. She has a vision but she is not much phased by it. Professor Morgenstern reads the first paragraph and comments that it is more melodramatic when read out loud. 

            The cougar is coded as a demonic beast, as Satan, a tempter and a seducer. The intimacy is eroticized violence. It may be a sexual, racial predator. She is more disgusted than anything. We are told that it's called “The Indian Devil.” 

            I said “Devil” may have actually been what the Indians called it. She said that was interesting but generous. I found out later that actually the eastern nations tended to see the cougar as noble and as having good hunting medicine. Some of the western nations associated the cougar with evil and witchcraft. If she had been reading stories from the west maybe she came across that reference. 

            The protagonist's husband and baby are everything. The echo of her scream casts a musical spell on the cat. She becomes like Scheherazade with singing replacing story telling. When thinking of home she stops singing. When singing a lullaby the cat is figured as an infant. 

            A turn in the story comes when she thinks she is in god's hands. The cat as god. She is in divine rapture and spiritual ecstasy. Once in that state we leave her consciousness and move to her husband's. Her ecstasy is disrupted with his arrival and she loses her voice. In the story she only had a voice while in danger and alone. The theological and domestic readings are resolved because it is god's plan. 

            The result of her captivity is the family survives. They become Adam and Eve. Paradise lost quote: “The World was all before them where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.” -John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) 

            We are reminded of the Indigenous presence in the Freneau poem when he refers to the “unsocial Indian.” This is an Odd story. When one fits the pieces together one can't not be ambivalent. We don't read for greatness. 

            “Chickamauga” by Ambrose Pierce. He fought in the Civil War. He was an abolitionist. He sustained a head injury but he was military for the rest of his life and then when there were no US wars to fight he went to Mexico. 

            Chickamauga in 1863 was a significant union defeat with high casualties from the battle followed by more from disease. There was no thought of post traumatic stress at the time. Why does he represent this through the experience of a deaf child? This is seen as unsympathetic and removed from the character. His writing is seen as naturalistic. An unsympathetic object. 

            He begins with inflated language, talking of the ancestry of the child. The child begins to lead the wounded, deflating grandiosity. There is an odd mini frontier narrative with the six year old child in the woods. Part nature and nurture. General events are that the boy is playing at war but scared by a rabbit. His toy sword is his companion. He sobs himself to sleep and the battle takes place while he is sleeping. Reading the story gives alienation and defamilarization because it is from the eyes of a child.

            The story provides an answer to how to represent war. The paradoxical idea before time that to represent war one must fail to represent it. Failure to represent war takes the form of the event missed while sleeping. The child is immersed and estranged at the same time. He is a child and he is deaf. 

            I say that the child is a metaphor for the distant public reading and hearing about the war. The public is deaf to the war and mute about it. They have an immature response to the conflict and see it as exciting and fun to hear and read about. 

            Of the idea that the child is in a spell of child's play, what is a spell? A fantasy space. There is a switch in register. What does the boy not have access to in relation to his father's Negroes. Analogy from the boy's inability to read enslavement and his inability to read war. Being a white subject is to expect to shape reality according to fantasy. Maybe the war represents a limit to fantasy. 

           His home is destroyed and his mom dead but there is no sense of redemptive destruction. The professor compares this to the response to suffering and loss during covid. What kinds of strategy bring pain home to those removed? 

           The child is rendered grotesque at the end. Like a political reading of Emerson's child but enclosed in fantasy and indifferent to suffering. Animality degraded. But what is an animal? Humans are animals. Racialization from animalization. 

           Charles Chesnutt was a free African American. His parents were from North Carolina. He was a lawyer and could pass for white but chose not to do so. He wrote in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries during the Jim Crow period and the lynchings. 

           William Dean Howells, the most celebrated writer of his day said of Chesnutt: “The volumes of fiction are remarkable above many, above most short stories of people entirely white, and would be worthy of unusual notice if they were not the work of a man not entirely white.” -William Dean Howells “The Dean of American Letters” 

            The story “The Sheriff's Children” foregrounds a commitment to realism. There is a significant amount of detail at the beginning about the town being outside history and having been left behind. That is a frequent motif in writing of the US south. 

            Captain Walker the murdered man was a Confederate veteran who lost his left arm. Pay attention to the racially charged language and who uses it. The sheriff is the most educated person in town. He had been sympathetic with the union but joined the Confederate army. He had owned slaves. Think of voice. 

            The narrator is external to the world of the story. He is an extradiegetic narrator or one who narrates a story from outside the fictional universe of the text. The word “Negro” is not the sheriff's word. Race trumps the US political system's majestic ideals that all is well and good. We will follow the law as long as there is no disruption of the racial hierarchy. 

            The secret in the story is set up by the title. It is not a secret to Tom in jail. It is an open secret that Tom looks like the sheriff. A voice to deafness and blindness. The sheriff is above the lynchers but the story is about his limits. Tom surprises the sheriff and keeps surprising him. The sheriff relied on negro cowardice. Tom is different from the wretch the sheriff perceived him to be. There can be under-reading. Tom transforms. Learning more about the sheriff's perception. Whole lives are in his blind spot. He forgets the slave mother he'd had sex with and then sold. Blindness and education. Both are educated but the sheriff's not enlightened and the fruit of Tom's education is bleak. 

            The story ends juxtaposing the sheriff's sleepless night and a new thought process that confronts himself and his past actions. What can he do for Tom? 

            I said that first of all he left his wounded son alone in a jail cell while there is a lynch mob that has given no indication that they have given up on hanging him. The sheriff went off by himself to think it out, rather than stay there and communicate with his son and probably save him. 

            The ending is resonant with the end of “Bartleby the Scrivener.” 

            After class I asked Professor Morgenstern if Chesnutt created the trope of the sheriff versus the town. She didn't know but we both concluded that he probably didn't. I said this trope of the democratically elected sheriff standing off against the town that has reverted to pre-democratic mob rule against an outsider has been played out hundreds of times in literature, film and television. I said I think it's very effective for the author to use it to draw the reader in and then hit them with a surprise revelation. 

            It was still raining a bit when I left and so I just headed straight home. Just past Bathurst my left boot lace got caught in my pedal arm and I coasted to the curb to free it. But getting off my bike I lost my balance and fell on my left side with the bike on top of me. But unlike my accident a couple of months ago it was just a straight fall with no force added by the motion of the bike and so I didn't really hurt myself. I laced up and rode home. 

            I weighed 88.7 kilos before lunch. 

            I weighed 88.5 kilos at 18:15. 

            After posting my blogs, at about two hours before dinner I worked on editing my lecture notes. I was still working when I started dinner. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a chicken breast while watching an episode of Gomer Pyle. 

            In this story Lou Ann's former fiance is out in California for a convention and looks up Lou Ann. Since once again Gomer puts up no resistance to the idea of Lou Ann dating other guys, Lou Ann is upset and so she goes out with Monroe. Monroe comes to Gomer and tells him he is engaged to Lou Ann. Of course Carter says the best thing for Gomer to do is go out on a date with another woman. He sets him up with his old girlfriend Natalie. Lou Ann is looking gorgeous and all ready for a date with Gomer when Monroe shows up at the door. She calls for Gomer at the base but Carter tells her he's gone to the Paradise Club with Natalie. Lou Ann asks Monroe to take her to the Paradise Club. When she sees Natalie go to the ladies room she follows her and questions her about her date. Natalie tells her Carter set her up and all this guy does is mope over the woman that dumped him. Lou Ann is happy and goes to talk to Gomer. When Gomer learns that Monroe lied about being engaged to Lou Ann he asks Monroe to step outside. They go into an alley and Monroe thinks they are going to fight but of course Gomer starts to give him a good talking to and tells him he should be ashamed of himself. Lou Ann is listening when he tells Monroe that he and Lou Ann are now engaged and he should stay out of it. 

            The club is done up in a late sixties style with a very colourful hippy clientele and a band called “The Freakouts and Helen.” There doesn't seem to have been a real band by that name but to Freak Out meant to break free of societal conditioning and those who did so were called “Freaks.” I know because I was one.