Kurt Vonnegut--Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death (1969)

I’m finding it hard to say more than, I like this book a lot.  It’s really well-written, and way easier to read than Judith Butler.  But that would be really shortchanging the novel.

This brilliantly readable novel is centered around the experiences of protagonist Billy Pilgrim leading up to and during the bombing of Dresden during World War II.  Using the frame story that the author himself was present and has been unsuccessfully trying to write about the tragic event for some time, Vonnegut then tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, who has become “unstuck in time.”  This allows him to present a very fragmented (and yet very readable) story of Pilgrim’s life, through his marriage and old age as well as his experiences in a German prison camp the bombing of Dresden to his being kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, where he is put on display in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack.  Pilgrim’s experience on Tralfamadore has a profound effect on him, as they explain their sense of time, which is quite different from Pilgrim’s.  To the Tralfamadorians, all time has already happened, so the dead are never fully gone, and it’s better to dwell upon the good times rather than on tragedy.

This perspective provides an interesting undercurrent to the novel, as Billy Pilgrim is bounced from time to time, though seemingly without much say in the matter.  This theme is emphasized by the refrain “And so it goes,” which one report claims appears 103 times over the course of the novel.  However, what could be a terribly depressing book about humanity’s inability to avoid tragedy is saved by a strong sense of satire throughout the novel, as well as a sense of compassionate humor about humanity’s insistence on perpetuating trauma.

Flannery O'Connor--A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955)

A Good Man is Hard to Find is O’Connor’s first collection of short stories, which followed her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952.  This collection includes both “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People,” two of my favorite of her stories.  Its stories contain over references to what O’Connor referred to as the “Christ-haunted South,” such as the story “A River, in which a young white boy is taken to a river baptism by his babysitter Mrs. Connin.  The childish point of view in “A River” provides a sardonic and yet tragic take on charismatic religion, as the boy finds Mrs. Connin’s religious ceremony quite educational: “He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ.  Before he had thought it had been a doctor named Sladewall, a fat man with a yellow mustache who gave him shots and thought his name was Herbert, but this must have been a joke….If he had thought about it before today, he would have thought Jesus Christ was a word like “oh” or “dam” or “God,” or maybe somebody who had cheated them out of something sometime” (160).  He is so inspired by the baptism that he finds his way back to the river to baptize himself, and the story ends with him being carried downstream alone.

In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” one-armed Mr. Tom T. Shiftlet from Tarwater, Tennessee, appears at the home of Lucynell Crater and her deaf adolescent daughter by the same name.  The one-armed man fixes things around their home, works on their dead car, and teaches the deaf girl to say words.  The mother arranges Mr. Shiftlet’s marriage to the daughter, negotiating a price for the Shiftlet to take her daughter, throwing in the car and the farm.  After their marriage at the courthouse, Shiftlet abandons the girl at a diner on their alleged honeymoon in a strange, short story which reverberates with the male abandonment in “Good Country People.” 

Several stories make reference to the effects of war, particularly WWII.  In “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” Ruby deal with her shiftless brother Rufus, back from but seemingly unchanged by the European Theater.  In “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” Ruby, like Shiftlet, contemplates the possibility of life without a heart as she denies her actual state of pregnancy.  The two women in “A Circle in the Fire” cite the atrocities in Europe as things to be grateful for are happening at a distance.  “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” follows General Sash, 104-year-old veteran whose appearance in his military regalia makes him a symbol of “old traditions!  Dignity! Honor! Courage!” (253).  The General was not actually a general, but a soldier in the Civil War, and has no memory of that, losing a son in the Spanish-American War, or other history than receiving his uniform twelve years ago for the premiere of Gone with the Wind.  And in “The Displaced Person,” Mrs. McIntyre struggles to cope with the changes wrought by the arrival of refugees from Poland.  She is able to adapt only to a certain extent, however; while she tolerates the idea of locals marrying Polish people in order to bring them over, when the displaced people try to marry local black people, a line is crossed.  She watches Mr. Guizac, the Polish man who attempts to arrange this marriage, be run over by a tractor, and fails to alert anyone to the accident before it happens. 

“A Temple of the Holy Ghost” has an interesting vision of female ugliness:

All week end the two girls were calling each other Temple One and Temple Tow, shaking with laughter and getting so read and hot that they were positively ugly, particularly Joanne who had spots on her face anyway.  They came in the brown convent uniforms they had to wear at Mount St. Scholastica but as soon as they opened their suitcases, they took off the uniforms and put on red skirts and loud blouses.  They put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and walked around in the high heels all over the house, always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look a their legs. (197)

These girls are described as boycrazy morons, so once again, ugliness is a marker of female sexuality.  Although this is the judgment of the twelve-year-old narrator, she, too, is described as ugly, though more in her behavior than in her appearance.  After the cook asks why she must be so ugly all of the time, she connects her ugliness to her being too smart for her own good (203).  In this story, the older girls ridicule the notion of their bodies as “temples of the holy ghost” as their convent teachers insist; the narrator, on the other hand, in her interest in becoming a saint, contemplates her own body’s abilities to be an actual temple in her pursuit of sainthood.

“The Artificial Nigger,” like many of the stories in this collection, depicts country people unable to handle modernity.  Mr. Head, from a rural area of Georgia where they’ve run all of the black people out, takes his grandson Nelson to Atlanta in an attempt to introduce Nelson to the wonders of the big city.  They are so out of their element, however, that they become lost and desperate.  Nelson’s life in the country has been so sheltered that he has never seen a person of color, and he is overwhelmed by the black people he encounters in Atlanta.  At the end of the story, they see what to the reader is an offensive stereotype statue of a black man eating watermelon.  However, to Mr. Head and Nelson, this statue is terrifying; as Mr. Head notes, “They ain’t got enough real ones here.  They got to have an artificial one” (230).

Throughout these stories, themes of rural people who have trouble adapting to a changing world repeat.  The cultural clashes are often race-based (as “The Displaced Person” reveals, such race-based conflicts are not always Caucasian versus African-American), and the conflicts usually have extreme, grotesque results.  Certainly, there is a strong threat of dark humor which runs throughout, but it is a usually tied to the grotesque in some way.

Richard Wright--Native Son (1940)

This novel is the story of Bigger Thomas, a Mississippi-born young black man living in the Black Belt of Chicago, who over the course of the novel kills a young white woman, rapes and kills a young black woman, stands trial for the murder of the white woman, and is sentenced to death.  It is divided into three sections: Fear, Flight, and Fate.  The “Fear” section opens with a long scene of a rat attack first thing in the morning.  Bigger is awakened by the alarm clock in the one room apartment that he shares with his mother, sister, and brother.  A giant rat is loose in the room, and his brother and he chase it and finally kill it with a frying pan, though not after being attacked by the monstrous creature.  Bigger then goes to the pool hall, where he and his friends have planned to assemble before robbing a white jewelry store; in keeping with this section’s theme, Bigger is able to talk his friends out of the heist, realizing that their plan was too dangerous.  He then goes to the home of the Dalton’s, a rich family (who, it is revealed, are the ultimate owners of the dilapidated building in which he lives) who are big supports of Negro uplift programs, who have offered to hire Bigger as their chauffeur, as Bigger’s family is about to lose their relief money for food. 

One of Bigger’s first duties is to drive the college-aged Mary Dalton allegedly to a university lecture, though once in the car she insists that he instead pick up her friend Jan Erlone, a member of the Communist party who, along with Mary, tries to show Bigger solidarity through sitting in the front of the car with him and insisting that he eat with them in a restaurant, “one of those places where colored people eat, not one of those show places” (69).  Mary’s and Jan’s behavior toward Bigger confuses and upsets him, as his conditioning of strict deference to white people has taught him to fear what they intend as human kindness as a possible trick.  Though their intentions are well-intended, they still come across as not only condescending but racist, in Jan’s request for “authenticity” and Mary’s claim that “[Negros] have so much emotion!” and her insistence on hearing Bigger sing.  Mary gets so drunk during their night out that Bigger has to carry her to her bedroom; once inside, her blind mother comes in to check on her before Bigger can escape.  In his attempt to keep Mary quiet with a pillow, he accidently smothers and kills her.  Bigger, in his terror at having killed Mary, covers up his murder by stuffing her in the furnace (which it is his job to tend), chopping off her head with an axe in the process in order to make her corpse fit.

In the “Flight” section, Bigger tries to capitalize on his situation by attempting to blackmail the family after they discover Mary’s absence.  Bigger tries to implicate Jan in her disappearance, as he knows Jan’s Communism is as damning as his own black skin.  Mary’s body is discovered, however, by reporters who find her bones and an earring in the furnace after it starts smoking, and Bigger escapes into the Black Belt section of town.  An enormous police and vigilante search for Bigger targets this part of the city, as thousands of white men harass, arrest, assault, and attack black men (and the black part of town more generally) as part of their search for Bigger.  Bigger hides out for an evening with his girl Bessie, and tries to include her as part of his extortion and escape plan.  However, at Bessie’s refusal to participate, Bigger rapes her and then kills her in her sleep by bludgeoning her to death with a brick.  He then drops her body down an air shaft, realizing too late that the money he had stolen from Mary’s purse was still with Bessie.  The rest of this section consists of Bigger’s attempt to flee as the captors move in tighter and tighter.

The final section, “Fate,” describes Bigger’s stay in jail and his trial.  Jan reappears and provides Bigger with his attorney, Max.  Max tries valiantly to portray Bigger as a victim of circumstance: in Max’s words, “I shall endeavor to show, through the discussion of evidence, the mental and emotional attitude of this boy and the degree of responsibility he had in these crimes” (371).  Max’s devotion to justice evokes just enough hope in Bigger as to make his inevitable sentencing more poignant and painful, as Max is the first person Bigger has ever felt has seen him as a man.

In the essay “How Bigger Was Born” included as an addendum of sorts to the novel, Wright explains his motive for writing Native Son in reaction to the response to his 1938 collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children.  Wright states,” I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good.  I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears” (454).  Indeed, Native Son is unflinching and “hard,” in that it forces the reader to identify with Bigger’s point of view.  Just a few pages before raping Bessie, for example, Bigger reflects on how being black in America is itself a form of rape: “But rape was not what one did to women.  Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one” (227-8).

Leslie Marmon Silko--Ceremony (1977)

Silko’s first novel, it provides an alternative approach to history.  Unlike secular history, which takes an academic, scientific method approach, the kind of spiritual perspective of history which Silko utilizes instead requires initiation, is eschatological and millennial.  Ceremony takes place after World War II in the Laguna Pueblo, in the shadow of Mount Taylor.  Mount Taylor is significant to the tribe as it is the location of the emergence myths of many Southwest tribes, as it marks the spot where the first man and first woman emerged from previous worlds, and the access point for the next world.  Further, it is also the site of a uranium mine, signifying another kind of emergence place, as uranium represents a very real apocalyptic threat as well.

The main character, Tayo, a veteran of mixed ancestry returning from fighting against Japan in World War II. Returning to the poverty-stricken reservation at Laguna after a stint at the Los Angeles VA hospital, Tayo is recovering from battle fatigue, and is haunted by memories of his cousin, who died in the conflict when the two soldiers were forced to take part in the Bataan Death March of 1942. Seeking an escape from his pain, Tayo initially takes refuge in alcoholism. Gradually, helped by the mixed-blood shaman Betonie, he comes to a greater understanding of the world and his own place within it.

Ceremony has been called a Grail fiction, in that the hero overcomes a series of challenges to reach a specified goal; but this point of view has been criticized as Eurocentric, since it involves a Native American contextualizing backdrop, and not one based on European-American myths.  It dramatizes the conflicts felt by many Native Americans, especially those returning from war: what to do when traditional healing is not strong enough medicine to heal wounds caused by modern technology?  Is it possible for shamanistic traditions to change enough to address modern problems?  The novel itself is a form of modern medicine, as the novel not only tells the story of trauma, but in the fragmented, multi-model narrative style (which includes multiple points of view, poems, prayers, and mythic stories), it is able to not only convey the character’s traumatic experience but involve the reader more directly than a straight ahead narrative would.  In fact, by opening with an invocation and utilizing these different modes of narration, the novel itself invokes a sort of ceremony, which involves the reader in the very sort of “new medicine” it references.

Dorothy Allison--Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

This novel tells the story of Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright, a young girl in South Carolina who grows up the bastard child of Anney Boatwright.  The Boatwrights are not the deserving poor which Allison writes elsewhere are romanticized in stories of the South; rather, they are more aligned with the Slatterys in Gone with the Wind, the “trash down on the mud-stained cabins, fighting with the darkies and stealing ungratefully from our betters, stupid, coarse, born to shame and death” (206).  Elsewhere, Allison explains that she wrote the novel “because, ultimately, the way to claim my family’s pride and tragedy, and the embattled sexuality I had fashioned on a base of violence and abuse” (“A Matter of Class”).  In this novel, Bone grows up amid dire poverty, deprivation, and violence.  Molested and beaten savagely by her stepfather, Bone survives with the help of her extended family of aunts and uncles who are similarly trapped by poverty and violence.

There are no easy answers in this novel.  People are trapped by decisions they were too young to realize they were making when they made them, whether by having children at 15 or by petty theft even earlier.  Anney can’t stay away from her husband, Glenn, even after seeing him rape her 13-year-old daughter.  Bone’s beloved Uncle Earl is a womanizer who can’t stay out of jail.  Still, there’s a fierce sense of familial solidarity which is (to me, at least) uniquely southern, as the way in which these characters claim their Boatwright identity seems to be their most fundamental sense of personal identification.

Reading this for a Queer South class, there’s certainly plenty to be said about sexuality and sexual identity in the novel.  In “A Matter of Class,” Dorothy Allison is quite specific about her own use of the word “queer” in describing her own sexual identity:

I use the word queer to mean more than lesbian.  Since I first used it in 1980 I have always meant it to imply  that I am not only lesbian but a transgressive lesbian-femme, masochistic, as sexually aggressive as the women I seek out, and as pornographic in my imagination and sexual activities as the heterosexual hegemony has ever believed….My sexual identity is intimately constructed by my class and regional background, and much of the hatred directed at my sexual preference is class hatred—however much people, feminists in particular, like to pretend this is not a factor.

Allison does not shy away from troubling sexuality in Bastard: in addition to the scenes of molestation and rape, Bone’s emergent sexuality is one in her sexual fantasies usually incorporate violence and danger, and at times she fantasizes about being watched while Daddy Glen is beating her.  It is this frankness, however, which I think gives the novel its strength.  While the novel’s ending is hopeful to a certain extent—Bone lives with her Aunt Raylene, escaping the violence and danger of Daddy Glenn’s house—it’s certainly not an overly optimistic one. 

For my own research purposes, there are many places in the novel in which ugliness appears.  Boatwright family appearance is itself a physical marker, one of tragedy is recorded on the body.  After Anney’s husband Lyle dies, her sister Ruth notes that, “Nothing will ever hit you this hard….Now you look like a Boatwright….Now you got the look.  You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get” (8).  Bone herself identifies as ugly: “No part of me was that worshipful, dreamy-eyed storybook girlchild, no part of me was beautiful” (208).  To Bone, her ugliness is a marker of her unwanted state: “Love would make me beautiful; a father’s love would purify my heart, turn my bitter soul sweet, and lighten my Cherokee eyes” (209).  Bone sees her own inner rage and bitterness as written on her body, a vicious cycle in which she’s hated for her ugliness, a hatred which in turn feeds her own inner rage and keeps her angry eyes dark.

Even more fascinating to me is the story of Shannon Pearl which is embedded in the novel, a story which I’ve frequently seen anthologized as a stand-alone story.  Shannon Pearl is the almost albino-looking child of parents deeply involved in evangelical Christianity, as her mother manages a Christian bookstore and sews costumes for gospel singers, while her father books acts on the gospel music circuit.  Shannon’s ugliness is a threatening one which people find it difficult to turn away from; Bone compares her need to “hang around what Granny called ‘that strange and ugly child’” to a compulsion to pick at scabs (156).  In one description, Bone sees Shannon, “Looking back at me from between her mother’s legs, Shannon was wholly monstrous, a lurching hunched creature shining with sweat and smug satisfaction” (155)—a description which to me seems to posit Shannon as a monstrous vagina dentata creature, an incarnation of the monstrous feminine. 

Even more importantly, Shannon is just as ugly on the inside.  Bone notes, “I had the idea that she was so ugly on the outside, it was only reasonable that Shannon would turn out to be saintlike when you got to know her,” and explains that such a characterization is what would happen in storybooks (157).  However, Shannon is angry and mean, getting drunk at gospel shows and calling Bone out on her poverty and dependence.  Shannon’s death is just as monstrous as her appearance while alive: at a barbeque, she plays with lighter fluid and is almost immediately turned to ashes, as “all around her skull her fine hair stood up in a crown of burning glory” (201).  The story of Shannon Pearl is a fascinating amalgamation of the monstrous feminine and the monstrous Christian, obsession, love and disgust.  In some way, it connects female ugliness with devotion and religion, and her death in somewhat seems to illuminate Bone’s earlier description of religious devotion: “This was what the gospel was meant to do—make you hate yourself and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified” (136).  Shannon’s life and death seems to personify the combination of shame and glory.