REVIEW WRITING by JM

Don Florence’s American Literature 511
A View from Abroad
by Jeannette Maingot

There is no doubt that it must be a truly daunting task to choose seven books for a one-semester course on American literature. First of all, what is the objective of the course? Is it the reading of great literature by renowned American authors? Is it a lesson in American culture? Is it a critique of American society past and present? And then, what is the student to take away from the course? Is it a better understanding of the authors and their novels, an increased awareness of what is American, or maybe an improved ability to analyze and put into words an author’s message?

People read for many different reasons. We read because we identify with the characters in books and they express what we may not be able to express, because we find feelings that we are not able to decipher, because it is the closest we can come to knowing how other heads and other worlds work, and because we want to know that we are not alone in visualizing life the way we do. We read to live other lives, to complement reality, and to find a kindred spirit or confirmation of our beliefs. Personally, I read to learn, to forget, to remember, and to relax. I read to learn because one of my main interests in reading is getting to know other cultures. I read to forget because, at this time, I am living in one of the most dangerous cities in the world where ten murders in a day is so normal that the report is buried in the back of the newspaper. I read to remember because the world has changed so much that sometimes we need to go back in time to realize what the past was really like. And I read to relax because there is nothing better than sitting on a deserted beach or somewhere in the woods with a good book (and a bottle of wine).

The seven books I read this semester fulfill all these requirements and, at the same time, they have been quite an education in American culture. Ellison, Lee, and Morrison gave me an intimate look into the lives of American Negroes and the racism and prejudice of the societies they lived in; Silko and Anaya were masters in creating a clear picture of the hybrid identities that are so common in the American southwest, and Pynchon and Bellow took me back to my own sixties with their intriguing and disconcerting style and the time of chaos, emotion, turbulence, and confusion that was the sixties in the United States in particular.

White people have always been obsessed with the color of skin and they have done atrocious things because of it. There is no doubt that there are still many untold stories in this dark chapter of the history of the United States, but Invisible Man, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Beloved give those of us who live in other countries and have had different experiences a very clear picture of the cause and effect of that obsession with color. I think Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man paints the broadest picture of the American Negro experience. Ellison takes his protagonist from the innocence of his college days when he was taught to reject black culture as inferior and to learn to be like the white man, to devastating disillusion at the end of his time in the Brotherhood where he was taught not to have individual thought or expression, to a new realization that only he himself can bring about his own liberation. The nameless narrator tells his story from a basement in a New York apartment building where he is hiding, thoroughly disillusioned, after his countless and futile attempts to carve himself a relevant place in American society. At one point in the novel, by means of a series of misunderstandings and Kafka-like manipulations, he seems to have found this place in the above-mentioned Brotherhood where he works as a political agitator only to realize that even here he is the victim of racist distrust and prejudice and that his intentions are constantly misinterpreted. Thus, during a nightmarish riot in Harlem, the narrator goes underground in search of himself and the truth. Ellison’s style with its grotesque scenes and heavy symbolism is extremely effective in portraying the plight of the American Negro at that time in history and the book is the epitome of the black man’s search for identity.

Unlike the broad picture we get from Invisible Man, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird can be considered regionalist. The novel is, of course, a classic and poignantly dissects the racist, intolerant, and puritanical society of Maycomb, the quintessential southern American town where the story takes place. The trial of a black man for a rape he did not commit is the perfect backdrop for a discussion on race, prejudice, ignorance, and human values. Lee provides a true cultural lesson because the novel not only paints a vivid picture of that racism but also explains the southern caste system through the different characters in the novel. There is the humble and subservient black man, the self-righteous and ‘upstanding’ member of the middle-class white community, and the poor white who is only one rung, though a very marked one, above the black on the social ladder. All these stock characters live strictly within the constrictions of the town’s social mores. But there are also the exceptions like Miss Maudie and Atticus who follow their own code and try to teach the children and the people around them that there is another way though, as far as the townspeople are concerned, this is often an exercise in futility. The fact that the townspeople know that Tom Robinson is innocent, that Mayella Ewing is lying, and that her father is a reprehensible human being does not change the fact that they believe that Robinson must be punished because he is black and Ewing must get off scot-free because he is white. Lee has a through and through American style and even if she had not expressly stated where and when the story takes place, the events and the characters would have made it unmistakably American.

Reading Morrison is a painful tour de rigueur because she describes, better than anyone, the limits of freedom of her characters. In Beloved, this author makes the reader feel the terrible and inescapable pain of being black. The environment in which the slaves of the mid nineteenth century lived is described vividly and the power whites had over black slaves and the torture, both physical and mental, that these slaves were subjected to are painstakingly revealed in a way that is often emotionally difficult for the reader to absorb. It was not until recently that African Americans have been able to free themselves from the yoke that kept them imprisoned and this is what makes Morrison’s novel so significant. Beloved shows us different aspects of the black experience because the story takes place both when slavery still existed and shortly after its abolition. As a slave, Sethe, the protagonist, was not allowed to have an identity and had absolutely no sense of self-worth. She was treated like an animal, a breeder, someone to be raped, beaten, and abused, so much so that when the slave catcher finds her after she escapes from the Sweet Home plantation, she tries to kill her own children rather than let them be taken back into slavery. The novel takes us through her struggle to regain an identity and the immense challenge she faces of learning to enjoy freedom and believe there actually is a future for someone like her.

Invisible Man and To Kill a Mockingbird can be compared to Silko’s Ceremony and Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima in that Silko writes about an adult Tayo looking for his place in a multicultural world whereas Anaya writes about a young boy who experiences events that help him find his own path despite conflicting Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo cultural influences and messages. Ceremony in particular shows the reader America's perception of Native Americans. Tayo, half white, half Native American, joins the army where he quickly finds the respect and acceptance he never had from whites outside the army. After Tayo comes back from World War II and the Veterans’ Hospital and resumes life in the Laguna Pueblo reservation, nothing is the same. He no longer has the respect of whites, he finds he no longer has anything in common with his old friends, and he suffers from serious post-traumatic stress. He realizes he must find a way to cure himself. He instinctively knows this ‘cure’ lies with his Native American heritage but he doesn’t know how or even if to seek it there. On the one hand, he wants to reject that culture and on the other embrace it. As a person of mixed ancestry, he is lost and moves from culture to culture, both because his Auntie constantly reminds him that he is not entirely one of them but also because that is the message he gets from his peers and other family members. Silko’s depiction of life on an Indian reservation and the forces that pull its inhabitants in different directions are an invaluable lesson in southwestern American culture.

In Bless Me, Ultima, learning to bridge and balance these forces comes through appreciation for the natural and supernatural features of life. The mystical pantheism of New Mexico’s land and history, channeled through Ultima, suggests to Antonio a path to cultural and psychic integration that lets him begin to understand who he is. (Florence, Week 8 Lecture).

Author Rudolfo Anaya’s first-hand knowledge of the ins and outs of small town life in a multicultural community such as Guadalupe is essential in creating the realism and insight the author gives his readers into the many different cultures that coexist in New Mexico and the way this has shaped its people. Antonio’s growing up and being torn between the two cultures of his parents and finally deciding on one of his own could not have been conveyed the way it was if the author had not lived these experiences himself. Antonio, just like many people in the American southwest, adopts traits and characteristics of various cultures that are part of the environment he lives in. This mix of cultures has made the Southwest unique and as an author familiar with them, Anaya is able to overcome cultural differences between his characters and readers from anywhere – not just the Southwest.

Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Bellow’s More Die of Heartbreak are prime examples of the American sixties. I enjoyed both of these novels more in hindsight – after digesting them - than when I was actually reading them. The Crying of Lot 49 is a convoluted maze and most of the metaphors and allusions as well as the many references to all kinds of pop culture, science, and technology were often lost on me. The protagonist, Oedipa ‘discovers’ a conflict between two mail distribution centers that appears to have gone on for centuries. With every new ‘clue,’ she becomes more and more paranoid not in the least because the characters she meets along the way are thoroughly eccentric if not outright crazy. Oedipa is a bizarre character in a bizarre book: she spends a night with a lawyer in a motel playing strip poker, travels up and down freeways pursuing her so called quest - or conspiracy theory -, has strange encounters at the Yoyodyne electronics factory in San Narciso, has a psychiatrist called Dr. Hilarius who has himself gone off the deep end and takes her hostage, and ends up at the auction of Inverarity’s stamp collection because she believes one of the bidders may be from Tristero. The way the story is told often made me sigh in frustration, “only in California!”

And then there is Bellow. It’s hard to say which of the two authors’ styles is more American. Bellow is not as convoluted, but he certainly is as frustrating. The plot of his story is thought – I kept trying to find a focus but Kenneth, the narrator, rambles on endlessly as if he were writing down his thoughts which, for all intents and purposes, are a series of digressions though from what it is hard to say. He never seems to get to the point if there even is one. I would say that one of the main characteristics of Bellow’s style is the interrelation of comic and tragic situations with mostly intellectual characters whose monologues go from the sublime to the ridiculous. They are peculiar Jewish Americans who live in a big American city and who are incapable of having normal relationships with women. Why Bellow is considered representative of Jewish American writers is not really clear to me. Though familiar with the Jewish stereotype, I do not really know what the cultural characteristics of Jewish Americans or their literature are, and I do not have a real basis for comparison. According to Dr. Florence, “because of their traditional emphasis on learning, Jews perhaps have more ready intellectual and cultural associations for performing the drama of identity than do some other cultures. Lurking in much Jewish humor (and in much non-Jewish humor, too) is the sense of suffering and futility.” This certainly seems to tie in with Bellow’s novel. Both Uncle Benn’s and Kenneth’s characters fit these descriptions perfectly as both are nothing if not dramatic and their self-indulgent suffering and the futility of their search for a meaningful relationship with a woman is ever obvious.

It has always been astounding to me that in the North American culture made up of Native Americans and immigrants there can still today be so much prejudice, racism, and intolerance. People who publicly profess to be “all-embracing” will privately refer to the different minorities in very derogatory terms. In his essay What’s American about America, author Ishmael Reed says that this attitude is what caused “the concentration of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, the persecution of Chicanos and Chinese-Americans, the near extermination of the Indians, and the murder and lynching of thousands of Afro-Americans.

I enjoyed reading all seven books immensely (even Pynchon and Bellow). I think, however, that it would have been interesting if a book on Asian Americans and their experiences had been included in the course – not on the recent arrivals, but rather on those who have been in the United States for several generations. I believe they have played an important part in the country’s history and it would have rounded out my “cultural experience” just a little more. I would not want to venture a suggestion, though, on which book should be replaced and what it should be replaced by. All seven books were great choices and have given me much added insight and knowledge about the culture of the United States and its inhabitants.

Works Cited

Reed, Ishmael. What's American About America in Ourselves Among Others, Cross Cultural Readings for Writers. New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1994.