A friend of mine was explaining to me the other day what her parents were like. She said her father's motto was "nobody lives forever," which didn't make him so much a thrill-seeker as just someone who accepted that he couldn't control everything in his life. My friend's mother, on the other hand, stressed to her children that they should trust in God. My friend observed that "in the end, they kind of came to the same thing," and she laughed at the thought that her parents, now divorced, would be chagrined to know how much alike they were.
That's pretty much what "Evensong" teaches us. The unnamed narrator is a control freak who desperately needs to learn to let go. She finds that while you can learn to let go without a religious experience, change will still share psychological similarities to metanoia. It will have "elements of" religious conversion, as the opening paragraph warns us.
The narrator admits to her need to control. In the face of an uncontrollable and in many ways unknowable universe, some react by just going with the flow. The narrator chooses the opposite path: "I am by nature a person whose constant battle against encroaching chaos is fought by list-making and organizational thinking. I make grocery lists that cover our immediate needs, our staple needs, our long-term needs, and our long-term needs of a special nature, such as a dinner party a month away." This is a response to stress much like that of PTSD victims, who cope with trauma by staying always on guard. Her anxiety extends beyond planning for events. She also worries about being in emotional debt to others. After explaining how family friends the Billiards did very normal friend things to assist them, like help them find a home and recommend doctors to them, the narrator confesses that "Sometimes when I cannot sleep at night I am tortured, as if by bedbugs or red ants, at the size of this debt."
Is this attempt to control everything working out for her? It is not. "My family tells me that I can sometimes be seen baring my teeth or muttering to myself as I make these lists."
So the narrator (I looked very closely to be sure she's not named. I thought maybe they slipped the name in there somewhere, but it looks like her lover Louis prefers to call her things like "silly girl") ends up in an affair with Louis Billiard, the patriarch of the family she is anxious about being in debt to. Why does she get involved? She claims she doesn't have reasons, but instead feelings. Her feeling is that Louis was attractive to her because he was fatherly. He does a lot of her family's household fix-up chores.
There are two reasons a fatherly person appeals to her. First, it gives her a sense of order and safety in a world that makes her anxious on account of its unknowability and unpredictability. She thinks to herself at one point wistfully about "how beautifully ordered are the lives of children!" It's an order she longs for as an adult, and a relationship with a father figure allows her that kind of safety.
The second reason is a more transcendental longing. God is called father in more than one religion, and dozens more cast God in the role of father even if they don't call him that. "This alliance had a preordained, familial feeling to it that I found irresistible." She is seeking comfort on a much greater level, even while she accepts solace on the much smaller scale of a human affair.
Orderliness is the first thing she notices about the Anglican seminary in her town: "...the orderly workings of this place--its piper on St. Andrew's Day, its Christmas procession and Easter picnic--would remind you that the season had changed, and you would know, because the hours are marked by bell ringing, what time it was at least five times a day."
Louis is the opposite of a control freak. His surname, "Billiards" seems to suggest randomness, because of the way once a billiard ball is hit, it is controlled by forces of physics. It just goes wherever the universe takes it. That's what Louis does one day just after he and the narrator are done "fooling around" and she mentions that she doesn't know anything about the meaning of the church bells she's been hearing for a decade. He jokes "from the couch to church," sacrilegiously, but he seems to genuinely enjoy the service. He enjoys it the way he enjoys all other things in life, as a "sybarite" or hedonist.
When the narrator complains about joining in the service, he seems to half pity her and half scold her. He points out how half-hearted her and her husband's Judaism is. When she worries she'll have to kneel, he asks, "What future for the Jews?" Meaning not "Jews are heretics," but rather, "You modern Jews with your lack of ceremony have forgotten what is enjoyable about religious services and why they're so popular all over the world."
Louis introduces the narrator to the aspect of religion that is healing for her. It isn't that she actually converts--in many ways, the narrator stands out for being such an unusually reliable one on this subject--it's that the rituals help take the place for her of obsessing. She asks Louis how he gets so good at using the different books in the service, and he tells her "practice." So she starts to practice, too, going to Evensong every day for weeks on end.
In some ways, it's just another obsession, but the difference is that this obsession doesn't indulge her instinct to control. Instead, after wondering over and over why she is even going to the services, she arrives at an epiphany that's the opposite of trying to control: "Then one day I had an actual revelation. It came to me that I might never know very much about anything. It might never be imparted to me what I was doing at Evensong. 'The thing about the unknowable,' I said to myself, 'is that you have to accept that it just isn't knowable, and that's that.' I found this very relaxing."
And just like that, she's better. She ends the story enjoying time with her family and wanting to examine her own faith tradition more deeply. Her affair has made her a better wife and mother. Maybe Louis, the father who fixes things, knew that's what she needed. Maybe he just did what he wanted to in his sybarite way, and this ended up also being the right thing, because the universe rewards people who don't try to control it.
We all still have a longing for the ineffable and transcendent, even agnostics like me. We're the same species that built all those churches. For those of us who can't believe churches mean what they used to mean for centuries but who still feel the same psychological and emotional emptiness, we have to find something of equal sacredness and seriousness to replace it. I've said many times literature and the close study of it somewhat fills that hole for me. The narrator seems to have managed to fill it for her as well.
A little puzzle I leave to others
I'm not going to get into this, but I think someone interested in racial or social theory could make a lot of how the narrator worries about how unknowable everyone is, but the only person she thinks she can confidently know is the woman in the African dress. She's sure that person doesn't have inexplicable affairs. Why is she so sure of this? Why, of all the unknowable people in the universe, does she think this one person alone is knowable? I leave it to someone else to pull this thread.
A few days ago, the New York Times ran an article about a retired professor who is a leading expert on authoritarian governments who went from thinking that calling Trump a fascist was overblown and unhelpful to thinking it was the right term. I wouldn't have thought much of it, except that George Saunders, who runs a Substack dedicated to answering questions from writers, recently revisited his 2020 short story "Love Letter," in which a grandfather of the not-too-distant future answers questions from his grandson about how his generation let the fascist government his grandson lives with happen. I found the story a little irksome when I looked at it as part of Best American Short Stories in 2021. While Saunders did manage to make it more than just a political essay disguised as a story, I still felt it was too on-the-nose about Trump, and also too willing to do what I felt was a bit lazy, namely to call Trump a fascist.
I acknowledge Trump has fascist tendencies. The question is whether having fascist tendencies makes one a fascist. With Trump, I don't think it does. A fascist takes risks to obtain power. When supporters take over the Capitol, a fascist will call on all supporters everywhere to back him. He wouldn't lamely and dazedly say, "You're right, but also go home." Calling him a fascist essentializes and simplifies the complexity of his badness. Other descriptors that come to mind for him before fascist are con man and robber baron. If we switch from nouns to adjectives, undisciplined and simple come to mind before authoritarian.
Let's look at a list of things Trump allegedly wants to accomplish, according to a New York Times article. It's broken down into objectives related to do illegal immigration (build camps, carry out mass deportations, reinstate a Muslim-country ban, and try to end birthright citizenship), using the Justice Department to go after his enemies (investigate Biden, indict those who challenge him politically, target journalists), using military force in Mexico and on American soil (declare war on drug cartels, use federal troops at border, deploy forces to Mexico), and increasing presidential power (strip employment protections from civil servants, bring independent agencies under presidential control, purge intelligence and law enforcement agencies as well as the Pentagon).
The illegal immigration stuff might be objectionable, but it's not the stuff of a dictator. He'll almost certainly fail to end birthright citizenship, because the originalist Supreme Court he put in place would see that as changing the Constitution. The same goes with using American military force outside of the country, even if he's saying he'd send it to Mexico, which would be politically disastrous. Saying he'd use it in the country is hedging toward authoritarianism, although saying he'd use it to defend the border sounds to me a little more like defending the country from external threats than internal ones. So we're left with using the Justice Department to go after political enemies and taking power away from parts of the government he thinks don't serve his interests.
If he uses the Justice Department to investigate Biden, the Obamas, or the Clintons for specious reasons, then that is a strongman action. It's moving in the direction of fascist. I admit that, and I hope it doesn't happen. I hope people understand that there is a difference between a guy who was always facing lawsuits before he was president continuing to face them afterwards on the one hand and cooking up charges out of revenge on the other. This is something we'll have to watch. He'll face the same headwinds as before, and even if he appoints Justice Department officials willing to do his bidding, he'll need enough lawyers willing to work the cases the department takes. That might be a challenge.
Trump's relationship with the law is troubling, for sure, but to me, doesn't a fascist just throw enemies in jail and not worry about using the Justice Department or the FBI to carry out an investigation?
As far as firing law, intelligence, and military officials goes, I can't help but be a little amused by liberal angst over this. It wasn't that long ago that liberals generally regarded these parts of the government as being ground zero for fomenting fascism. Now, they seem to secretly hope Trump is right and that they really are a deep state that can work against him. They seem to have discovered, to their surprise, the same thing Trump did, also to his surprise: not everyone in the military or in intelligence services is a white, Christian crypto-fascist. Most have been educated to cherish the Western tradition as much as anyone else has. It might be a version of the Western tradition that values Beowulf more than Foucault, but it’s a vision that still values freedom of thought and expression.. In fact, the majority aren't. As Michael Wolff put it in Fire and Fury:
"Trump's criticism seemed to align him with the left in its half century of making a bogeyman of American intelligence agencies. But, in quite some reversal, the liberals and the intelligence community were now aligned in their horror of Donald Trump. Much of the left--which had resoundingly and scathingly rejected the intelligence community's unambiguous assessment of Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a well-intentioned whistle-blower--now suddenly embraced the intelligence community's authority in its suggestion of Trump's nefarious relationships with the Russians."
It often seems that the stands political sides take have as much to do with opposition to the other side as they do with their own ideologies. As they circle one another and take jabs, they sometimes end up reversing roles. That's how conservatives ended up being the ones clamoring to end a proxy war with Russia or how liberals are now the champions of free trade and the need for a strong and militarily engaged America on the world stage. That’s what’s happening when the NYT is fretting about Trump dismantling intelligence services.
I can't stand Trump. I hope that's apparent. I can't stand him because I don't think he knows where Laos is on a map, because he thinks his hazy sixth-grade understanding of American history is enough to base decisions off of, because he is boorish and crass and lacking in the most basic understanding of how to treat people. However, occasionally, I understand his skepticism about the country that was handed to him, about the world order everyone said was unassailable. I hate that he lacks the logical and verbal skills to better express his skepticism with that world, but I understand why he feels that way. Before Trump, I was also skeptical of some of the same things. If I support them now, it's only because the last person I want to upend what has been there is him, and I think with all the problems the old order had, it's better than what he will put in its place.
Still, the desire to change some officials might not be fascist. It depends. Your typical civil servant is supposed to swear an oath to the Constitution. They're allowed to have political feelings, they just can't share them qua civil servant. That is, you can say "I like Kamala Harris," but you can't say, "I work for the FBI and I like Kamala Harris." But high-level officials who run executive branch agencies are often political appointees, and Trump could well demand they be loyal. If he starts requiring loyalty oaths to him rather than the Constitution, or if he changes hiring programs for regular civil servant jobs to favor those who supported him, then we have a problem.
Maybe I'm splitting hairs unnecessarily, but it does feel important to me that the left not excessively resort to charges like saying Trump is racist or fascist. He's got enough wrong with him that needs patient attention and analysis that getting off track is a distraction and wasting energy. I also think the left has done itself harm by crying wolf every time Trump says something stupid, which has made others suspect that Trump's criticism of the media has merit. I understand the desire to fight Trump for every inch of terrain, but that's not a good strategy. There is such a thing as strategically allowing an opponent to move forward such that he overextends himself.
I say all this because unfortunately, I think it's going to matter after tomorrow night. I'd love to be wrong. I'll be the happiest person to be wrong if I am, but I have little doubt left that we're about to face another Trump presidency. When that happens, I'll get my chance to see if he really was more fascist than clown. Unfortunately, if I'm wrong, I guess nobody will get the chance to gloat about it. Maybe I'll get the chance to give George Saunders some cigarettes in prison.
When I was a 19-year-old Korean student at Defense Language Institute, our military language instructor (MLI) told us a story that was meant to inspire us to become knowledgeable of not just the language, but the culture. As he explained it, there had once been an incident in his unit in Korea when they were interacting with South Korean allies. There had been a slight disagreement, and an older ROK soldier had raised his hand slightly at one of the Americans, as if to hit him. This led to others jumping in to intervene and prevent a brawl, and the incident came to the attention of my MLI's commanding officer. After interviewing the parties involved, the MLI was able to defuse the situation by explaining that Koreans often raise their hands like that without actually meaning to hit anyone. If anything, it had been a gesture meant to make light of a small disagreement, not to make it worse. The Korean person was joking like he would have with one another Korean, and didn't realize it would get the reaction it did. The intrepid and culturally aware MLI explained all this and thus averted an international incident, and the Korean-American alliance remains strong to this day. Or something like that. I was touched and determined that I, too, would be a vessel of cross-cultural understanding.
The unspoken corollary of being a vessel of cross-cultural understanding is that in addition to knowing when someone has quite unwittingly and innocently caused turmoil, you also have to know when someone really is just a piece of shit. Because there are times when everyone will look hopefully to the "maybe it's just a cultural thing" excuse to overlook bad behavior, and it will be the job of the cultural ambassador of good feelings to say no, as a matter of fact, that translates just fine, and that guy is really is an asshole.
That's what Judith in Alexandra Chang's "Phenotype" needs to do with KJ, the non-genius grad assistant she's dating while she's an undergraduate in cellular biology. There's a point in the story where she gets a text from him that says "You're pretty today." She decides not to be offended by the subtext, which is that she isn't pretty every day, "because he's ESL." (ESL means "English as a second language," a now somewhat dated but still used abbreviation.) She explains that she has"met a lot more foreigners working in the lab and ha(s) gotten very good at understanding ESL people."
False confidence of youth aside, she's probably not entirely wrong. She's at an Ivy League school with a lot of international students, and no doubt she's gained some skill in hearing past the slight mistakes people make to understand what they really mean. Of course, one thing about ESL is that every person struggles in a different way, largely depending on what their native language is. So there isn't one big "ESL," and she might be better with some versions than others.
Her confidence in her ability to parse the meaning of non-native speakers is contrasted with her lack of confidence in how people see her. She's worried about her "phenotype," her observable characteristics. She's had braces on for nine years, and she is always concerned about getting food stuck visibly in them, or about kissing badly because of them. She dislikes her hair.
Judith isn't simply over-confident or under-confident; she vacillates between one pole and the other. She's sure she's the equal of anyone in her program, and she's headed for being a "real" doctor. At the same time, she obsesses incessantly about her braces, and once those are removed, about the teeth below them. She also worries about whether she will bleed when she has sex the first time with KJ, and then, when she doesn't bleed, about that as well.
Ranks
Part of her attraction to KJ might be that he is a lot more self-assured than her. He probably doesn't rate his self-assurance, but he's got it, anyway. She's especially attracted to his aggressiveness on the soccer field, where he sometimes gets into fights. She thinks his assertiveness comes from his time in the military, where she was, Judith reports, "ranked very high up" before coming to graduate school.
Judith is kind of obsessed with ranks, which is probably a common syndrome for people who go to Ivy League schools. She tells us that her cell biology program is "ranked eleventh" in the country. She's very gratified when KJ tells her she's one of the top-ranked students in her class.
One problem, though: there is no way KJ was "ranked very high up" in the South Korean military before coming to graduate school, unless he is very, very much older than her. I take it that he's more like four to seven years older rather than twenty, so Judith has either misunderstood KJ or KJ has lied/exaggerated. He probably did his mandatory 18 months of training, after which he might have been a lower NCO, enough to boss around newer conscripts, but not at all "ranked very high up." Judith is not a reliable narrator at judging her own powers of comprehension nor of judging where people really "rank."
Is KJ a dick or is that the fault of a cultural misunderstanding?
Perhaps some of KJ's faults have a cultural origin, but his tacky insistence that visitors to the BBQ he and Judith host to announce their relationship to their peers should pay for their portion of the food is definitely not Korean. Any Korean who's ever invited me to anything would have insisted on treating. They also would have made sure the spread was top-notch, instead of half-assing it like KJ did. Among his other flaws:
Indirectly telling Judith "she'll get better" at kissing, meaning she sucks at it, when she's feeling self-conscious about it
Wanting to date Judith so he'll stop being just another Korean grad student, thereby using her
Pointing out that she has food in her braces when it's the one thing she's most sensitive about
Bragging about his incredible willpower
Looking disapprovingly when she doesn't bleed after sex, meaning he's semi-upset she might not really be a virgin, although he himself isn't one
I think that while the form of KJ's douchery may be culturally influenced, he's still a douche. That is to say, a Korean-American douche might be a douche in a different way from other people, but the basic doucheness will still be there. KJ is, in fact, a kind of douche that Koreans themselves often complain about. It's significant that he calls out being "traditional." In some ways, he is. He's the kind of Korean man that Korean women have been complaining about for the last twenty years.
I know most of you can't understand this song, but she's singing about a dude a lot like KJ.
So there's really nothing mysterious here. When people tell Judith that the reason she and KJ are still together is because they don't really understand each other, they're at least half right. They mean that if she understood KJ better, she'd know he's a dick. I think she does know this, but there are two things working against her being able to admit it. One is that she's very unsure of herself, and she covers for it, as many people who are unsure of themselves do, by acting like she knows exactly what she's doing. If she'd only ask someone else for an objective opinion, she'd quickly realize what it seems she already suspects. Instead, she protests too much that she doesn't care what others think. She insists she and KJ work together, right down to the final line of the story.
The second reason is that she's been hidden behind braces for nine years and KJ noticed her before anyone else did. Understandable, maybe, but unfortunate for Judith.
Ultimately, Judith doesn't really have a catharsis where she realizes she can do better, where the confident part of her starts to take control of the more timid part and she tosses KJ to the curb. Instead, the end of the story shows her going another layer deep in self-denial and in telling herself that this relationship is good for her. When she sniffs KJ's junk after sex, she smells "sweat and dust and the yeast we use in lab." In other words, he smells like hard work and an experiment, but she tells herself it "is not an unpleasant smell at all." Maybe it isn't unpleasant, but it isn't what's best for her, and it is going to take quite a lot more experimentation before she figures it out. Readers are denied the satisfaction of seeing her move forward in life and instead watch, likely somewhat knowingly, shaking their heads and thinking "such is youth."
Judith's voice
The voice in "Phenotype" is tricky to pull off, because Chang needs to give her narrator a naive and somewhat obtuse voice without boring or irritating the reader too much. Judith uses some trite phrases as she talks herself into a bad decision. Her similes, like "felt like stepping into the lab's cold room on a humid summer day," and "my teeth...felt like wet rocks along the lake," are not the best. (Although comparing watching KJ's hyper-aggression on the soccer field to "watching a nature show about her boyfriend" is better, maybe because she's got more power of observation when it's something close to science.) That's how it should be, though. It's important to remember that this isn't Chang trying to knock us out with her most dazzling prose. It's Chang trying to let Judith be Judith and yet still arrange it that what Judith says to us doesn't flop like her barbeque did. For Judith to pour out psychologically aware and insightful prose just wouldn't fit her character.
Does this count as a reader reception investigation?
I don't usually do research about stories from BASS. I might look up elements of the story that are unfamiliar to me, but I don't go looking for information about the authors, nor do I seek out interviews where they might have shared their thoughts on the stories. I don't look for other criticism, either, and not just because it isn't there most of the time. I do this in order to let my own judgement roam freely. In this one case, though, I decided that after I already wrote my take on the story, I would read what Alyssa Songsiridej said about the story in Electric Literature, since it's likely everyone who read the story there also read what Songsiridej said about it.
Songsiridej found the story more of a straightforward sweet reminiscence of young love than I did, and she also found Judith less naive than I. In fact, she cautions readers against thinking of Judith as naive: "...you might guess that the only reason Judith is dating KJ is because of her naïveté. You would be tempted, as Judith’s labmates are, to talk about their relationship derisively." Songsiridej doesn't see it this way, though: "While definitely inexperienced, Judith is also a little intense, studying and digesting her slowly widening world with the acute observations of a young woman eager to achieve."
I agree that Judith is observant, maybe even a little precocious with her ability to see the world. She isn't merely naive, but naievte is a big part of the equation here. It's why she's willing to believe her unremarkable boyfriend was really highly ranked in the South Korean military.
There's a curious heading to the story the way it's laid out in Electric Literature. It has a subtitle that goes, "The scientific method does not apply to first love." It's so prominent a tag line, I thought for a minute it was the title of the story. That's a pretty aggressive suggestion to readers about to dive into the story, and I also think it's totally wrong. Judith does nothing with her first love so much as treat it like a science experiment. The last image we get of her is of her going to great lengths to gather data on KJ, smelling his crotch after they've had sex the first time. What she smells reminds her of the lab where she does real science. She is very much applying the scientific method; she's just making mistakes. Much like some scientists become so enamored of their theories that they misread data, Judith's confidence in her own ability to interpret data is derailing her. I think eventually, Judith will amend her errors, but for the present, what we're seeing is how even smart people can talk themselves into bad choices.
Sonsiridej's reading is looking ahead to a nostalgia for first love that will surely one day come for Judith, but that's jumping the gun a bit from where we are in the story by the end. Of course it's normal to feel nostalgia about past relationships, even ones that weren't right, but Judith still needs to be disillusioned about her current relationship before she can get to the other side of it and appreciate what was gold in all the dross.
When I read through "Blessed Deliverance" the first time, I was struck by its similarities to watching a Spike Lee joint: the nostalgic sense of loss at the gentrification of Brooklyn balanced with an understanding of the inevitability of change, the great jazz music slyly dropped in, a young person's climactic move toward introspection as a way to deal with disorienting social change...the only thing missing was the double dolly shot.
On second read, though, a different story started to appear to me, one that still has some resonance for me with Spike Lee (maybe because I don't really know that much about New York in general or Brooklyn in particular, so anything having to do with Brooklyn is going to remind me of Spike Lee movies), but which reminds me more of earlier work I've seen from Jamel Brinkley. It's a colorful, wonderfully shot nature documentary inside the interior life of an intelligent and sensitive young man navigating a young adulthood with complicated family and social surroundings.
The story has five acts, and I think, rather than grouping elements of the story thematically like I often do, it's better here to follow the five acts chronologically, letting the themes unfold as we go.
Sun Ra, whose poster is on the narrator's wall, is one of the few jazz musicians I can say I enjoy without having to fake enjoyment to avoid being judged
Act I
An unnamed male narrator in his last year of high school gathers with his four friends one "balmy" October day. The friends are a boy named Antonio and three girls named Cherise, Walidah, and Roni. This balmy day is introduced right after a rather lyrical passage about the group of young people discovering their bodies. Some of this discovery had been within the group, and the trust build up by the members of the group knowing each other for a long time meant that when that discovery happened, it came with "ample room...an open field, like the ones in the Botanic Garden or in Prospect Park where on warm days, when things seemed simpler, we used to lavish time, each field providing a volume of space in which to flex and stretch ourselves freely, to play, to recognize that our bodies absolutely belonged there, among all the other fragrant and colorful organisms surrounding us."
The narrator explicitly puts the kids in nature and part of nature, in spite of being in the middle of New York. They are "organisms," which puts them on a level with flowers or trees or birds.
Or rabbits. As the kids are enjoying this balmy day linked in the narrator's mind with simpler times and open fields of green space, they come across a new store in the neighborhood. It turns out it's a rabbit rescue, and much to their surprise, one of the people working there is "Headass," a homeless and mentally ill man who has been roaming their neighborhood for years. They thought they had seen the last of Headass when a vacant home he was squatting in was raided. Headass had been a victim of gentrification and "certain cruelties of the law" that were "now being strictly enforced" because of gentrification.
Nonetheless, there Headass is, and the white man running the rescue calls him Reginald. The white man, named Cyan, has names for everything, rather Adam-like as he strives to turn Brooklyn into an upper-middle-class Eden. He gives names to all the rabbits, who are of course unaware that those are their names.
Headass/Reginald seems to connect with the rabbits. So, too, does the narrator, although perhaps he doesn't realize it yet. The narrator continually speaks of the group as "we," but keeps "I" out of his "we." We get all the names of all the main characters in the first act except the narrator himself. The narrator also doesn't seem to be partaking in the sexual exploration of the rest of the "we," meaning he doesn't fully see himself as an "organism" in his environment the way the rest of the group does. However, the narrator does unwittingly describe himself in a very rabbit-like way early on. When worrying about what the future might hold, he notes, "Life apparently would never stop with the excitement, leaping from the gray shadows of alleyways to jump you, knocking you to the ground and seriously kicking your ass." This sounds very much like an animal wary of being attacked.
Seeing Headass has temporarily reunited the group, who spend the balmy day in perfect harmony, like the old days. Perhaps they are also reassured by the rabbits' "serene confidence that everything they wanted would eventually and inevitably arrive." That's very much the attitude of a young child, and perhaps it is being reminded of these simpler, younger times that allows the group to be happy again like they used to be.
The group is bothered, though, that Cyan has given him the name Reginald, which they are sure is not his "government name," meaning his official, birth-certificate name. They object to white people in general giving whatever names they please to people and things that don't belong to them, including parts of the city.
As the first act ends, though, the narrator pauses to consider whether the friends have any leg to stand on when they criticize the new people for changing names. Hadn't they, or someone close to them who was part of their self-identity, once given Headass his name? They don't like the use of "DoBro" for "Downtown Brooklyn," yet they think nothing of using "Bed-Stuy" for Bedford-Stuyvesant, where they all come from.
To put the central tension another way: from whence comes their own right to name things? Have they been using names, and language in general, based solely on social convention? If so, what happens when the society changes or disappears? Will their names and language go with it? What really belongs to them? This uncertainty seems to be behind the narrator's wish to keep his own name hidden.
Act II
Headass's identification with rabbits gets a lot more literal. He's wearing a rabbit suit outside the rescue, in theory to drum up interest, although it's quite possible Headass just wanted to dress up like a rabbit. The suit doesn't seem right, prompting the narrator to observe: "Headass’s face peeked out of the creature’s open mouth, as though he was being swallowed or bizarrely birthed." Whether he is being born again or swallowed alive, either way, it is the end of one phase of Headass's existence. He will no longer answer to either the names Headass or Reginald. He apparently has some other name that he keeps to himself.
Meanwhile, the kids notice all of the people riding by actually wearing their bike helmets, "assaulting us with their show of law-abiding goodness and safety." This is the second time the law has been tied to the encroachment of development, and neither time has it suited those living under the previous, less-law-abiding society.
The kids try to remember what came before the rabbit rescue, because they are trying to remember what the intruders took from them. They can't remember, but they don't want to just ask the people running the rescue or Google it. They want the memory of what came before to be organic, something that would be theirs by right of belonging to the neighborhood.
Without realizing it, Headass answers their question. He starts to hum, or purr, or make some kind of chanting sound. The kids join in:
"What started with the incredulous stares of the other four became, gradually, through a process of reluctant submission, our unanimous choral moaning in response to his call. He moaned and then we moaned—Antonio did it so loudly you could feel the vibrations of his chest—and for a while it went on like that, antiphonal, until finally all six of us made the sound together."
They don't know it yet, but the rescue used to be a storefront church, the "Cathedral of Blessed Deliverance." The narrator's father will reminisce approvingly on the music that used to waft from it. Headass is reviving the neighborhood's memory of what was once there through his "antiphonal"--that is, a musical piece sung alternately by two groups in medieval Christianity--music.
At the end of this second act, the kids' mojo is broken, and they start breaking up. There are two groups of two and then the narrator as the odd man out. They feel they'd been cast into a "net from which they were eager to escape," which is a different reality of a rabbit's existence from what they felt at the end of Act I.
Acts III and IV
In the short act three, Reginald has been fired for not following the rules. He has been sleeping in the rescue, and the managers are concerned this might have been a code violation that would get them in trouble. The introduction of rules and law seems only to hurt the native organisms of Bed-Stuy.
In Act IV, the narrator's father remembers what came before the rabbit rescue. He also gives his own name to Bed-Stuy: "Cathedral City." Then, the father begins to cry while the narrator hears him through his bedroom wall with the poster of Sun Ra on it. The narrator remembers when his friend Antonio was also crying similar tears after finding out how sick his mother was. He remembers how he tried to care for him, and how he let his romantic feelings for Antonio slip through, then tried to apologize, but then Antonio pretended not to understand what the narrator meant so he didn't have to deal with what it meant.
This is the moment of the narrator's catharsis and realization. Again, the narrator takes on a mental position similar to one a rabbit would have. Realizing that with sadness, sometimes you don't even know what is hitting you, the narrator thereby makes sadness into one of the scary things "leaping up from the gray shadows" that he worried about in the first act. He method to survive these attacks is: "So, no matter how horrible the sound, it’s best to stay very quiet and avoid calling any attention to yourself."
The narrator is surviving an assault on his language, his neighborhood, and his cultural property by switching to an extra-linguistic way of thinking. He is thinking like a rabbit, which of course doesn't care at all what its name is.
Act V
Having come to this cathartic moment, Act V now works at the denouement. Headass has gone back to the rescue, taken a pot and a spoon, and banged on them in a sort of reverse-Pied-Piper-of-rabbits. He is setting all the rabbits free from the rescue center. The neighborhood cheers on Headass as he "delivers" the rabbits."
The neighborhood doesn't even all agree what they're cheering about. "Everyone seemed to be smoldering in their own private fire," the narrator sees. The big, socially constructed language we all borrow from is nothing but the effect of innumerable individually built languages. These will continue to exist as long as people look out at the world in wonder. Having shared in extra-linguistic thinking, along with Headass, the narrator is now able to learn names of things for the first time, his own Adam in his own new paradise. These are the names "given out of love." These names include Headass's real name and the narrator's own, but we do not learn them.
Questions
So whom or what is delivered in the story, and from what? In a literal sense, the rabbits are delivered from the rescue center, although to what fate, who knows?
Perhaps the narrator has been delivered from a relationship to language that is entirely logical and rules-bound. He has been freed from the oppressive law with its logic for creating words, and instead has acquired a more "organic" language, one that will allow him to continue to find new words for things no matter how often his environment changes.
A question I don't have an answer to is what the kids mean early on when they look at Headass being eccentric and say to one another, "There goes your father." Am I supposed to take this literally, or are the kids clowning on each other in the manner of a "your mama" joke? If it really is the father of one of the kids, is it Antonio? It isn't the narrator, because his father is at home crying, but maybe it's Antonio, for whom the sickness of his mother is therefore all the more poignant. I doubt this reading, because it seems like there would have been more mentions of Headass really being the father of one of the kids, but I honestly don't know the answer.
“Like most things, the truth has contradictions that don’t fit neat theories,” Samarra, the vampire who turns Viola into another vampire, says, and there couldn't be a better clue to reading the entire story "Viola in Mid-Winter" than that. It's especially telling that Samarra doesn't say "don't fit neat concepts" or "neat pre-conceived notions," but theories. Many authors are indifferent to theory, and feel that if theorists want to apply this or that idea to their work, that's their business, but "Viola" seems to invite theoretical approaches. "Viola" doesn't really make it easy, however, for a reader to feel comfortable with any particular theoretical approach. All "neat theories" get complicated by the "contradictions of truth" the story presents.
"Viola" is a story about a vampire, which places it within the horror genre. It's also about a female vampire, which places it within the world of horror in which the main monster is a woman. There are few theoretical fields that are more deeply developed than the union of horror and feminist theory. Even as someone who prefers to keep his participation in theory to the sidelines, I'm aware of this. I generally try to use theory sparingly in reading for this blog, but with "Viola," there's no way out but all the way in.
"Viola" plays with many of the main concepts in the field of feminist horror theory. As readers of this blog know, I don't really care whether an author intends to put something in the story that could be read a certain way by a critic or theorist. If it's in the story, then it's fair game, whether the author intended it or not. But "Viola" seems to want its readers to know that it knows what it's doing. There is a moment when the EMT pulls out a book of short stories from her bookshelf to read. Who the hell reads a book of short stories but people with an intense interest in literature? It's more or less announcing to the reader: I know you're the kind of person who is probably aware of Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine, because you're reading a short story in a journal like The Bennington Review.
So how does this work? You have sex and then she eats you, or she just eats you? Because it makes a difference...
There are four major ideas from feminist horror studies that "Viola" plays with, and it doesn't have a "neat" view of any of them. I'm going to briefly explain the four ideas below, before looking at how the story is interacting with them. I'm as surprised as anyone to be doing this; theory of this kind isn't something I naturally love. As a matter of fact, it's got a lot to do with why I ended my time in grad school with just an M.A. instead of going on further. One thing I really dislike about theoretical discourse is the way some theorist will take a word that has already been in use for a long time and has an established meaning, and then the theorist will create a bespoke meaning for it, and soon a whole school emerges using this special term but not telling you they're using it in their special way when they use it. As the theoretical community interacts with the term, they use it in new ways, so the bespoke meaning expands. It often expands until it can mean almost anything, which is the same as meaning nothing.
Below, I'm going to give much narrower definitions to these terms than the theoretical communities who propagate them. I'm also going to attempt simpler definitions than are usually given to them. There's a near certain chance I'll bastardize the meaning a bit, but I think the gain in clarity is worth the loss of exactness when writing according to the spirit of this blog, which is to write not for literary professionals, but for curious and intelligent outsiders trying to understand why a story is good enough to be included in BASS. Here we go.
The four theoretical concepts
1. Abjection or the abject
If you look up what the term abject means in feminism, you'll find it comes from the theorist Julia Kristeva. You'll find a lot of explanations that will say the abject has something to do with a loss of the distinction between subject and object, or self and other. That's not wrong, but I think it's a little hard to understand what that means, partly because "subject" and "object" have their own unique meanings in both psychoanalytical and linguistic theory which aren't always obvious.
My understanding of the abject is this: all societies have ways of promoting the notion of order and of hiding the fact that we're just one disaster away from killing each other for scraps of food. On a personal level, we also have psychological methods for forgetting that we are just animals who are part of a nature that's red in tooth and claw. We call cow meat beef, and we carefully avoid knowing anything about what goes into making it. There are customs for avoiding speaking too directly about sex or death. We lock the door while excreting waste, and we spray deodorizing aerosols to prevent others from smelling the aftereffects. We have euphemisms for all kinds of things so we don't have to think about how, even with all the trapping of civilization, we are still animals living in a very physical and savage body.
Whatever removes the barriers that keep us from remembering these unpleasant truths is the abject.
The abject isn't just a key concept in feminism. It's a major concept in horror generally, and it's used to explain what makes horror horrifying. But feminist theory has shown both that women are often considered as abject in society in general, and also that when women are the monsters in horror, they tend to be abject in a particular way.
When Mrs. Heretic had our child, I was shocked by how savage childbirth is. Baby showers are all full of fluffy stuffed animals and soft pastel colors and kitschy games, but pregnancy is a parasite growing in a human being, altering all her bodily functions, and eventually coming out in a mess of fluids. Women's bodies bleed every month. So the female body is uniquely abject in a way that male bodies aren't. It makes us remember that we are animals.
Creators of female monsters often capitalize on this. Think of the horror movies with women blasting out massive amounts of menstrual blood or projectile vomiting. Female monsters are monstrous in a way that is psychologically tied to how women tend to be demonized in general.
2. Liminality or the liminal
This is an oft-used word in theory that I especially hate for the ways it gets used in extended senses. There are two basic meanings. One is to refer to a space that is mostly empty or blank, like a cave. The other is an extended meaning. Since a lot of liminal spaces, like doorways, tend to be a transitional spot between one place and another, "liminal" can also mean "transitional."
In feminist horror theory, the liminality of the female body contributes to the particular terrifying effect it has. I don't know if you all are aware of this, but female bodies have a hole in them that male bodies don't have. Psychoanalysis since Freud has postulated various phobias of the female body, and some of them have to do with the liminal space of the vagina. Whether it's fear of castration or fear of the vagina dentata or just the fear that comes from realizing the vagina is liminal like caves or other places we fear, there are a number of ways of understanding the fear of the uniquely liminal space in women.
The liminal space in women is also part of what contributes to what makes them uniquely abject. Part of not being reminded of our animal, gross nature is keeping our insides inside, where we never have to think about them. But vaginal sex requires being reminded of the inside of a body. No wonder so many horror movies involve a death during or right after sex.
3. The damsel in distress
When women aren't the monsters in horror, they're often helpless and in need of saving. If the abject is the element in horror that makes it horrifying because of how it threatens the precarious hold we have on civilization and preventing carnivorous nature from going crazy on us, then the damsel in distress is what redeems horror. After all, what could be more acceptable to traditional society than protecting women from the horrors of what threatens order, so they can be free to have babies and make society grow, preferably out of sight so we don't have to grossed out by their abject and liminal bodies? Just ask Donald Trump! (I really hope that joke doesn't register with anyone in a few years.)
A lot of horror movies do, of course, have a damsel in distress. The screaming horror movie woman is an old cliche that doesn't seem to be going away soon. When women aren't helpless, though, it's often because they're the monster. This is part of what makes the monstrous feminine uniquely feminine. Women are supposed to be helpless and protected by the males of the community, not threatening them. Somehow, a female monster feels more monstrous.
4. The male gaze
This is a theory term that isn't in any way tied just to horror. It applies to film studies across the board. There are lots of kinds of gazes in theory, but the one nearly everyone has heard of is the male gaze. We may think of looking as a neutral act, but according to the theory of the male gaze, nothing is innocent about "just looking." Western art has tended to depict women as sexual objects to be passively present and available to be observed by men for pleasure. Feminist film criticism often looks at how women are framed and situated within the shot, and whether this framing and situating tends to emphasize the character as a subject or object.
I only bring this up because in "Viola," there is an interesting jockeying back and forth that goes on between two characters as they attempt to gaze at one another.
The many ways "Viola" is impossible to pin down
When Viola is in "love jail" with the EMT, she feels herself "fixed in place by the softest pin," but the story is nearly impossible to pin down to any theoretical approach. Below are just some of the interpretations that occur to me, along with the ways in which the text undoes some of those readings.
1. It's tempting to read "Viola" as a somewhat man-hating fantasy in which women set up an alternate society without them. Viola's start as a vampire comes during World War I, when men are off slaughtering each other in one of the most gruesome real-world horrors that has ever happened. By contrast, the women Viola is around back on the home front seem to be quite content with their husbands gone. Some who were getting abused finally have bruise-free faces.
Viola revels in how crude the women are, acting like stereotypical men who delight in scatological humor. She particularly likes Samarra, a manager at the factory. Samarra is the only one in the story who really is able to take care of Viola, although the EMT tries. Samarra provides food and clothing for Viola and her daughter Bea. It's Samarra who "occupies" Viola, turning her into a vampire. But unlike male vampires, females are polite. They have to get permission. Whereas in most vampire fiction, the act of biting a victim is a substitute for sex, with Samarra and Viola, the act of turning Viola into a vampire happens concurrently with sex, as Samarra is putting her fingers into Viola's special liminal space at the same time as she is biting her on the neck to turn her. It's an "occupation" that's bloody, but nonetheless far more civilized than the occupation going on in Europe at the same time.
With the exception of the EMT and possibly Viola's husband who died, all the men in the story are a threat. They are mostly hunters, and they try to fix Viola in their gaze from beneath street lamps. It's clear they are hunting her as much as they are the animals in the area. So after one reading, I was more than halfway convinced this was an alt-feminist version of horror in which females are just way more sensible about being monsters than men are.
But on the second read through, that reading fell apart completely. Viola doesn't become a strict lesbian who eschews the company of men forever. She's bisexual. Her name--especially when she names a dog after another Shakespeare character--calls to mind Viola from The Tempest, who is a woman pretending to be a man who is in love with a man but is trying to woo a woman for the man she is in love with. It's pretty gender- and sexuality-bendy, and Viola is herself quite fluid in her sexuality and in how she acts relative to gender expectations. When she loves men, it isn't predatory in any sense. She doesn't fuck them just for pleasure and she doesn't consume them when she's done. She genuinely cares for the men she is intimate with.
Moreover, the story doesn't portray female behavior as always better than men. Samarra changes Viola but is unwilling to help teach her how to handle her immortality. Viola, thinking of what she's learned over a century of life as an immortal, bemoans "the tendency of women to wound their own." This may be a story about female monsters, and they might have somewhat different rules from men, but that doesn't make them essentially less monstrous.
2. On many levels, it seems that Viola resists being seen as a damsel in distress, mainly because she of course isn't in distress. She's immortal. The hunters might see themselves as stalking her, but in reality, they're lucky if they don't end up on her menu. Nonetheless, Viola seems at least somewhat nostalgic about some aspects of chivalry. When she first meets the EMT, he thinks he is protecting her from obnoxious hunters in the parking lot of the Shop & Save. Viola's reaction is to spit loose tobacco onto the ground--that is, to resort to the abject, because she's not interested in being saved. Nonetheless, just before the EMT comes to her "rescue," she is pulling out a cigarette, and finds herself pausing "as if waiting for a light, an extinct ritual from a former life." Part of her finds the ancient practice of a man leaping to light a cigarette for any lady in the vicinity charming.
When the EMT comes to her house, he warns that her lack of winterization means she's "not protected." He offers to build her a house. Viola "doesn’t want him to build her a house but doesn’t mind the sentiment." Viola is actually kind of a sucker for even a chauvinistic gesture. The stereotypical angry feminist cooked up by Fox News would be so full of theory brain that she would immediately take offense to someone offering to build her a house because it was an attempt to control her through feigned protection. Viola can see that while protection is a mixed blessing, it's not entirely done with evil intent.
3. Is Viola abject? Other than the fact that she's a vampire and so feeds on blood and is a woman which, because of the female relationship to blood through their menstrual cycles, seems worse, she's only partly abject.
She is drawn to one type of abject behavior. Female shock comics who talk about sex in graphic detail or bodily functions are often considered abject, because polite ladies aren't supposed to talk about those things. But more than anything else about life among the women at the factory, it's their bawdiness that speaks to Viola. "Viola didn’t know women could speak so candidly, but she’d never been among so many, protected by war’s isolation," the narrative tells us. (Interesting that war here is thought of as "protecting her," given the complex relationship she has to being protected.)
Viola especially finds Samarra's ribaldry appealing. She remarks on how Samarra moves through a room like a "cleaver," a stock horror weapon of carnage. Samarra, whose "wide, expressive mouth made everything she said sound scandalous," seems to enjoy her vampire carnality with a gusto Viola lacks. Samarra is more than happy to eat her lovers when she's done with them, whereas Viola only engages in affairs with people she actually cares for. It's not hard to see why Viola and Samarra grew apart not long after one turned the other into an immortal. That being said, Viola never quite loses her fascination with the utterly abject Samarra, and when they meet after many years, Viola happily indulges in the "party" of a multi-day sex fest with her elder, followed by drinking down all the blood in the blood bank where the EMT works.
Viola is abject, but only sort of. She curses, and she likes that the EMT laughs when she does. But in the next breath, she is wondering if the EMT's biceps are defined, which is sort of a traditional, swooning female kind of thought. Her brain isn't quite a complete theory brain, meaning it's full of contradictions, because Viola is a real person. She's never able to fully subdue one half of her contradictory thoughts in order to bring order to her psyche.
4. Viola's liminal status is even more difficult to determine. If we include the sense of liminal that means "transitional," Viola certainly thinks she's not at all liminal. She contrasts herself to women at various "thresholds—after college, before marriage, before babies, after changing careers--" and thinks that because she will forever appear to be middle aged and no longer on the threshold of anything, she is able to pass unnoticed. "You’d be surprised how easy it is for an older woman to go unnoticed," both Viola and Samarra think.
Yet, she isn't ever completely unnoticed, because she's constantly subject to the gaze of hunters and people who regard her with suspicion. She thinks that as a middle-aged woman she's no longer liminal, no longer on any thresholds or in any transition, but she couldn't be more mistaken. When she was frozen in biological time, she was actually in the middle of a transition so big, it's often euphemistically referred to as "the change." For Viola, "menstrual blood disappeared for months then, as if to compensate, returned with painful hemorrhaging." After she has to quit being an airline attendant because 9/11 identity regulations make it impossible for her to be anonymous, she returns "to America and moved to the Western Catskills, where she spent the rest of the century in and out of hot flashes, chased by an unleavened smell, fertile and not, fertile then not, joints swelling, trapped in a developmental doorway." (emphasis mine)
Poor Viola decided to enter immortality at a time in her life that would mean eternal menopause. That's maybe the most liminal space any woman occupies.
Her complicated liminality--both not changing and changing all the time--partly explains why she also has such a complicated relationship to various forms of male gazing, both desiring it and wanting to hide from it. She bares her shoulder to a child in the grocery store but also creates a spell to keep anyone from being able to find her house.
5. It's not even sure which feminine-monstrous archetype Viola is. Barbara Creed lists six folkloric archetypes: the mother, the witch, the mermaid, the werewolf, the vampire and the undead bride. It might seem like Viola is obviously the vampire (which, because it quasi-sexually sucks life out of men, is similar to the succubus), but she's also kind of a witch. Witches are partly considered monstrous because they're crones/spinsters, old women no longer capable of producing life but only death.
Before becoming a vampire, Viola's community found her threatening because she was nearing becoming a spinster: "The neighbors viewed Viola with suspicion for waiting until thirty to wed." She narrowly escapes the fate of a crone by marrying late and having a child, but mid-career as a vampire, she learns from a woman how to put a "glamour spell" on a house so it can't be found or, if she wants someone to find it, so the house will tell her whether she's compatible with that person. A glamour spell is a witch's occupation, and Viola is hard at work doing it, armed with a dog named for Shakespeare's king of fairies who also uses spells to trick people.
---
In short, no matter what kind of theoretical approach you try to apply to the story or what kind of archetype you try to find in Viola, both the story and Viola will slip the bounds you place on them. Viola is living contradictions, perhaps, as a response to the contradictory things both society and men want of women. The EMT is charmed by her curses, but cowed by her showing skin. He wants to protect her, but when he finds she can hunt as well as she can, he puts her in his own crosshairs, warning her that if you think someone is watching you, they are.
I once knew a guy in the Marine Corps who liked to say that he was looking for the type of wife who was a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen, and a whore in the bedroom. I hated that guy so much, I'd totally understand if any woman who met him became an angry, man-hating feminist. But wanting both a good wife and a wild whore is exactly what the EMT who breaks Viola's heart ends up doing: "The EMT takes up with another local girl, homely with pretty eyes. Another progressive who insists that hunting is fair to the animal and who defers to him, unlike the bartender he keeps fucking even after he and the pretty girl marry."
Men are both fascinated by the abject and repelled by it. They want an abject woman to titillate them and also a demure woman to protect. Viola, who has to now suffer the long years of ideas "genuflecting" through time, is going to see every contradiction in both male and female desire, so it's no surprise if she becomes a series of contradictions herself to adapt.
A song that speaks to how men want impossible-to-achieve contradictions from women
What's the end for Viola?
At the end, Viola's granddaughter comes looking for her. Perhaps she wants what Viola once wanted from Samarra: instruction and guidance. Viola never gave it to her own daughter, Bea. Viola became immortal and unable to help her own daughter just as she was starting to try out abject monstrous womanhood herself ("she spit food and threw her plate"). Will Viola let down the defenses of her house and let her progeny in? Could the story itself be an undoing of the glamour spell that will allow women to learn from an ancestor? Will Viola, standing next to Oberon in mid-winter (the opposite of mid-summer, when Shakespeare's Oberon uses illusions to trick everyone), end the illusion?
Viola finds herself wanting to kill someone deathless. Is it Samarra, who cursed her with immortality? Is it death herself, whom Viola saw on a train and wanted to befriend? Does she want to kill herself and end the long drudgery of immortality? Or is it something more abstract, like the longing she cannot kill through the endless years?
"What I'm about to show you...might seem strange." -Uriah, from "Jewel of the Gulf of Mexico"
I never had a lot of anxiety about math in school. It's not that I was naturally great at it. I was okay. What made math low-stress for me was my secret weapon at home, which was my father. He had a B.S. in math, but it wasn't that he knew a lot about it that made it less stressful for me. It's that he had a very aw, shucks kind of calm simplicity to the way he thought about it, and he was able to communicate that approach to those who asked him questions. When you brought him a math question, he wouldn't immediately act like he knew the answer. He'd slowly talk his way through his reasoning process, not skipping steps, which allowed you to follow what he was doing. More than just following him, though, you would soon realize that math wasn't magic, and neither was he. It became apparent that he didn't just know how to do it. Even he had to think about it for a minute. It taught me that complex math was made up of simple steps, and even a good mathematician would walk through those steps. It also taught me that if you didn't panic, most problems could be broken down.
I say all this because this story does kind of give me a lot of anxiety. I take it as a given that any good story has levels of meaning beyond the what-and-the-what-and-the-what of the plot, but with a story like this, even after a second reading, I only have glimpses of guesses as to what some of those levels might be. But maybe this is a good thing. I write these analytical posts for non-professional-literature people. If I'm having trouble with this story, I'd wager a lot of other people are, too. So rather than act like I have this all under control, I'm going to reason through this here, sharing not just my answers, but some of the process for how I get to those answers.
1. Paraphrase
Cleanth Brooks coined the term "the heresy of paraphrase" to explain how he thought that form and content were so closely tied together, it was wrong to try to take the meaning away from the form by restating it in other words. I understand what he meant, but I also think it's a bit of a mystical approach to literature, one that treats texts like they'd too sacred to rip apart and get under the hood of. Paraphrase is helpful specifically because it removes meaning from form. Form is often a means to hide meaning, and stripping the two apart can help reveal what was hidden. Sure, once you've taken the two apart and formed some ideas about meaning, you need to put them back together to test out your theories, but it can still be enormously helpful to start with a simple summary. The dialogue and narrator commentary in "Jewel" is whip-smart and comes at you fast, but my starting point is going to be to make all of that dumb and slow.
Dumbed-down summary of "Jewel of the Gulf of Mexico"
The main character is the unnamed first-person narrator, but I get tired of writing "the narrator" in post after post. Some years, half the stories in BASS are unnamed narrators. The main character used to work at a jeweler's, so I'm calling him Jeweler Jim, or JJ.
JJ is a young man, but no so young he doesn't already feel like he's late at figuring out his life. So far, he doesn't have much to show for anything he's done. He has negative 34 dollars in his bank account, he quit the only job with any promise to lead somewhere, and it seems like all the options out there involve selling out. He's kind of like the black Lloyd Dobler.
He thought once that he was interested in jewelry, but more as an art form than a way to sell mass-produced pieces to clueless would-be husbands. That fell apart with a boss who was part paranoid about his employees stealing and part just didn't want to let JJ develop his skills. So JJ quit, but he hasn't found anything else to do since. To make matters worse, his extremely beautiful and spoiled rich long-term boo, Olivia, convinced him to knock her up as a way to shock his system into figuring his shit out.
Other than the sell-out jeweler, the other example of the "success" that JJ is supposed to aspire to in the story is Uriah, Olivia's eccentric, rich, well-traveled father. Uriah got rich as a rap artist making music even he now thinks wasn't that good. By the time he was JJ's age, he had already peaked in music and was being ushered out the door of the industry. He took his seed money from music, bought hundreds of patents, and got much richer. But he still couldn't gain acceptance into rich people clubs, so he started collecting weird and useless items as a way to be let into their society. He settled on buying slave...memorabilia? artefacts? JJ wants to be somebody ("I wanted to be important,") but he feels terribly inferior, or "simple," compared to Uriah.
The entire story takes place the night of one party Uriah throws. At this party, as a way to get JJ to figure out his life, Uriah "loans" him the prized piece of his collection, a slave ship called the Berthea. Uriah takes JJ out for a spin in the ship in the Aransas Bay, off the coast of Texas and just a thin strip of barrier island away from the Gulf of Mexico. The ship is piloted by three of Uriah's lackeys, whom JJ dubs "the Bobbies." Uriah drops some pseudo-profound wisdom on JJ, then the ship begins to break apart, at which point JJ grabs it, takes it back to safety, and it breaks apart altogether.
I feel like when Uriah was giving JJ shit for being so lost, JJ should have said, "I'm good at loving your daughter." That would've won Uriah over.
2. Looking for patterns, images, recurring ideas
Once I've kind of got the plot down, one of the main things I look for in a story the second time through are repeated words or similar words, patterns, and the images in the story. From a writer's perspective, many stories come about through trying to see pictures in the writer's mind, but then in later drafts, writers will pick certain images, pictures, metaphors, etc. that seem to build to a theme. So I assume nothing is there by accident, and everything is a potential clue. With that in mind, here are some of the repeated words, ideas, and images:
It's later than you think
The story's opening lines are: "Springtime again. After ten o'clock." Springtime brings to mind the promise of youth, but the "again" means there's already impatience in that youth. And "after ten o'clock" means that even within the time of youth, it's getting late. JJ feels enormous pressure to have it figured out, and the baby Olivia is going to have makes it all much worse.
At the party, he is seated "where the geraniums used to be." The flowers of spring are now gone, and JJ, like them, will soon be gone, too. Nearby is a former ballerina, already washed up at age 23. JJ is stuck trying to figure out his way in life, and it's all so, so much worse because he can feel the clock ticking and the final Jeopardy music playing. He senses that a lot of older people are full of shit, and yet they seem to be doing so well in their shit. In what may be my favorite line of a BASS story ever, he laments being forced to be a part of "someone else's stupid yet realized dreams." He resents having to watch Uriah enjoy his success: "You can only congratulate a person so many times. You can't be happy about the other person's good fortune forever. It's actually inhumane." The sense of time being nearly out before JJ's life has really begun makes all these feelings much stronger.
JJ's body has a lot of reactions to stimuli
JJ seems to be having all kinds of psychosomatic responses to stress or to unpleasant stimuli. Here is a list of some of the ways his body reacts:
-choking
-Glasses start to fog, the way they always do when he realizes he's about to get in trouble. (He also broke his glasses when he first met Uriah)
-body threatening to go supernova
-glasses fog up again in hallway
-the nothingness above the slave ship "poured into (his) stomach like sand"
-the talented tenth "raises his core temperature"
-his ears start to burn
JJ really wants a high level of intimacy with Olivia, but thinks it's impossible
JJ twice mentions his desire to have a high level of closeness to Olivia, but also his feeling that it will never happen. Once, he thinks that he might have been relieved by how happy she made him, but "in reality, there's no such thing as mutual understanding. You're a chump to want it."
Another time, in his mind, JJ imagines Olivia, and when he does, he imagines her reaching a hand back to scratch the back of her head, only "it felt like my head was the one getting scratched. That's how close I wanted to get to her."
JJ clearly loves Olivia, even after a fairly long courtship. Nonetheless, he sees a threat in her. He describes her face using weaponry images, saying she has a "dagger nose, and chin pointed at my heart." Or again, he describes her looking at him "with lashing winds," something he's soon to become very familiar with when he rides the Berthea.
There are a lot of earth elements in this story
Jewels and metals show up everywhere. They are trying to keep the story tied to Earth, but Uriah seems to think jewels represent something else, the "preternatural" and the "visionary." In other words, the transcendent, or that which goes beyond the Earth. But when he tries to take the Berthea, the "jewel of the Gulf of Mexico," out to sea, he finds it belongs to the land. He has misread what jewels mean. Dolphins, the mammals who figured out how to get off the land and take to the sea, just laugh at the attempt.
Uriah isn't a total heel, but his experiences have led him to misread a lot of signs in life. He's slightly misread one sign after another, until he has come to believe that owning the tools of some of the most inhumane actions ever done by humanity are a sign of culture, of having "outdone himself."
JJ has some self-made proverbs he lives by, but they're not really working out for him
JJ has tried to find some way to ground himself as he drifts through early life. He's come up with some bespoke proverbs. "Don't wait more than fifteen minutes for anyone" is one, and he claims it was given to him by God himself. Another is, "You only need directions if you're lost." He's trying to create rules to help him find his way, but he is still lost, and just like a man, he's too stubborn to stop and ask for directions.
3. Okay, so what's the deeper point here?
I guess this is the point where I have to stop delaying and solve for X. Is there any hope for JJ and his "busted feeling"? In a world where even art seems to only be used cynically, can he hope to find some grounding?
I think there is, and it's around Olivia's finger. Early in the story, she leans in next to him and tells him to snap out of it. She is wearing her engagement ring, which is "a pear-shaped amethyst that had survived two fire sales." This is the solid stuff of Earth, something made to last.
Most of JJ's dreams will, perhaps, come to nothing. We can't all be singers and artists. I myself am on year 22 of working a job while I wait to hit it big as a writer. But one of his dreams, it turns out, isn't all that stupid.
Early on, JJ kind of kvetches that Olivia treats his failures like her own bad memories, but he doesn't realize that this is her giving him exactly the "scratch your head and I feel it on mine" kind of intimacy he's looking for. He figures it out at the end. When the boat crashes in the marsh and they are saved, she eases "herself under (JJ's) blanket like she'd been traumatized, too." She grabs him by the earlobes, perhaps sensing the "burning ears" he had just been feeling. She is in tune with all his crazy bodily reactions to everything. She looks at his eyes, and her own eyes turn to "sparkling confetti." JJ concludes, "That's how it is when you find what you're looking for." It's a catharsis with a one-sentence denouement, the simple "You crazy fool" from Olivia.
JJ really does love Olivia. He might take shots at her for being one of the most spoiled black kids he's ever seen, but he loves her. And unlike a lot of the realizations characters come to in stories, the idea that this kind of earthly love is what can really ground us while we deal with the frustrations of not taking off and flying is actually a good insight about life.
See also Karen Carlson's reading of this story, in which she does some good field work running down the origins of elements in the story, as she so often does.
The first thing the narrator, Kartik, does in "The Magic Bangle" is attempt to erase his communal identity. He's from Hyderabad, India's fourth largest city, but when his father hits him after discovering a message from a man on a dating app, he decides to pretend he's from somewhere else. He goes around Hyderabad like he's a tourist, giving us, the readers, a good view of the city while he's going about. There are two reasons why it makes sense for Kartik to pretend he's an outsider. First, he feels like an outsider in his own home, where his parents are pressuring him to accept an arranged marriage. Second, since communities tend to give us our identity as much as a way to define us and control us within the communal order as a way to allow us to thrive, it's natural that Kartik would want to escape the control of the community. He imagines a gay utopia where where it's safe to love men, and he pretends to be from there.
But no sooner does Kartik seek to escape the control of community than he demonstrates what seems to be a contradictory impulse: he seeks the safety of a fortress. He wants autonomy from community, but he also wants the security that community can provide. Kartik is keenly interested in the layout of the Goldona Fort, one of the historical sites of Hyderabad, hiring a tour guide to show him "the fort's many tricks." Kartik enthusiastically notes the defensive advantages the fort provides: "Alcoves for soldiers to hide in plain sight. Unseen vantage points from which to pour hot oil on intruders. Kartik likes the clap trick best. When the watchtower soldier clapped, the sound traveled all the way to the courtroom: two claps for an approaching friend, one clap for a foe."
The protections Kartik puts up are no less intricate.
Kartik hopes for a future in which he can hear the two claps that mean a friend is coming. These hopeful claps, however, are only available to someone who lives behind the enclosed fortress that community provides. So Kartik cannot make the choice that other non-conformists to community standards have made of living without a community. Kartik wants the self-fulfillment equivalent of having his cake and eating it, too, which is to be able to determine his own identity and yet still live safely within community. This has sometimes been called "autonomy within community," and it's sort of the perfect balance most humans long for.
Kartik tries a few tactics to achieve this. The first is to hide. He tells everyone he's going out of town so he can get away. As a matter of fact, this isn't just hiding; it's repeating the soldiers' trick of hiding in plain sight. He's still in his hometown, but disguised as a tourist. When he meets Shahrukh, they continue hiding in plain sight together. They eat together at the Shadab Hotel in Hyderabad, "a place of communal eating" where "no one blinks an eye at them." It's a restaurant full of men eating together who have just come from Friday night prayers at the Masjid (Mosque). It's the very picture of community, and because of that, the two men are able to have their first date together without arousing the anger of the community.
While they are seated, a qawwali--a type of Sufi music--plays, and the lyrics include these words from the 19th Century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib: "Allow me, Imam, to drink in the mosque or show me to a corner where God isn't there." That is, allow me to sit in the symbol of community, but allow me to transgress the community's requirements while there. If not, allow me a place to remain unseen by the ultimate keeper of community standards." It's a wish to remain both true to one's desires but also not to be cast out from the community.
The bangle arrives
When Shahrukh pulls the bangle from his pocket, it feels as much out of place as Kartik is in his hometown. It's a magic item suddenly appearing halfway through a realistic modern story. It promises to answer questions, but it comes with a proviso: if it tells you what is going to happen in the future, you have to make it come to pass, because the djinn who gives the bangle its power hates to be wrong. Kartik later learns that the djinn really is from out of town: she lives in a minaret in the Thar Desert.
The double-edged sword of identity
Identity is both something a community gives us and something we develop for ourselves. Both self-given and community-given identities have strengths and drawbacks, although we in the West probably think of self-given identity much more positively than we do the community-derived kind. Judith Butler, who probably has had more influence over gender theory and theory surrounding sexuality than anyone, was wary of identity. She believed identity came with high costs for both conformists and deviants, and she wanted both community-derived and self-derived identities to lose their power. She hoped for a general relaxation of our focus on identities.
It's this relaxation of identities that presents a more permanent hope to Kartik and Shahrukh than hiding does, either out of sight of in plain sight. From the moment Kartik meets Shahrukh, he is in a world where the limits between communities begin to blur. Shahrukh is a Muslim named for a Hindu film maker. He speaks a mix of Urdu and Hindi, thus blending two linguistic communities. When they walk around the city, Shahrukh points to a Hindu temple dedicated to Lakshmi, which is next to a minaret (a tower next to a masjid/mosque), which represents a blend of two religious communities.
The ultimate symbol of this hoped-for blurring of lines comes with the celebration of Holi, when the people of Hyderabad throw colors on one another:
On Monday they stand on the balcony and watch people on the street smear one another’s necks and faces with color and water. The sectarian difference, made particularly volatile under the current regime, vanishes. The only riot is that of colors staining the air pink, blue, and green. The only guns fired are water guns. The only shrieks are those that rise from throats drunk on bhang: milk steeped with cannabis, ginger, cardamom, and rose and served cold.
In a carnivalesque moment, identities are blurred and it's possible to glimpse a future in which safety in community will be able to co-exist with one's own preferences. We don't know exactly what the magic bangle tells Kartik and Shahrukh about their future, but it involves the sound Kartik has longed for, the two claps that mean a friend is approaching.
I would need a hell of a lot of bhang to not hate being around this many people who think it's okay to smear color on me.
The story brings to mind another theoretical concept Butler was fond of, one she took from Foucault, the concept of "performative" speech. Most language merely repeats past usages of language, which is what makes it intelligible. But speech is also constantly being used in novel ways, ways which make the language change and evolve. At the extreme end of creative speech acts are "performative" acts, those which make something come into existence. Making a promise is such an act. In the story, a djinn predicting the future is performative, and woe to those who work against it.
In a sense, though, the whole story is a performative act, an act of conjuring a better future through imagining that future. Akella himself reads the story that way in his author note from Fairy Tale Review:
I recently endured a homophobic attack in Hyderabad, my hometown. In “The Magic Bangle,” I reinvent Hyderabad’s old district as a queer utopia. This decision was inspired by the myths my maternal grandmother once told me. In the South Asia of her tales, nonhumans and humans were equals, wish-granting djinns didn’t demand sacrifices, and god was a friend whose blue face you could playfully smear with mud. The telling of such fairy tales, I believe, isn’t escapist; it’s a way of wishing a desired future into being, of believing that “another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” (Arundhati Roy)
India already has much of the blurring of cultural and social lines that would make such a utopia come to be. Hindi and Urdu are both spoken in many families. Masjids are next to Hindu temples. Although the Modi administration has tended to make lines worse by acts of preference to Hinduism, the pieces are there. "The Magic Bangle" is a prayer to a hoped-for future to appear.
Post-script: is political progress possible without identity politics?
I'm certainly sympathetic to a desire to blur lines and a dislike for identity politics. Butler was one of the few theorists I found myself (to the extent I could understand her) agreeing with as a student. It seems a bitter irony that one of the products of the influence of theory in American culture has been identity politics.
Part of Butler's concern was that even if you create a new identity that is recognized by the community--say, LGBTQ people--that new community will no sooner come into existence than it will seek to create its own standards, which will reward those who conform and punish those who do not. Shows like Modern Family get big kick out of showing just how rigid some gay communities can get with policing dress, speech, and acts among their members. When many people say "that's gay" to mean "that's stupid," I think they're more referring to something like this, to a highly rigid, dogmatic, and fastidious guarding of arbitrary rules, than they are saying "homosexuality is stupid."
Beyond the way sub-communities will continue to ostracize and create more and more sub-communities, I also find it gross the way identity politics gets commodified by capitalism. I often think that the reason corporate America embraces DEIA programs so fully is because it's good for the bottom line. If you can get people to self-identity as part of a community with knowable wants, then it's easy to sell to them. Get your Pride Day swag. Play your fuck-the-man rap music on an app you paid for on a phone you paid for while driving a car you paid for. The guy next to you is listening to a conservative podcast telling him how evil your music is using the same phone and driving the same car. No wonder the number of identifiable interest communities keeps growing.
So I'd love to put an end to America's obsession with identity, except there's a voice inside my head that just won't let me. LGBTQ didn't just become an identifiable community because evil corporations created them. It became a community because society was denying its members a necessary constituent of happiness. In our particular form of government, the most effective way to acquire rights is to form the type of community that is called an interest group, one that can collectively pressure the government for change. When dealing with the government, it's best to be able to present clear and unified demands, which means marginalizing sub-groups. There was a time not so long ago when groups like this were literal fortresses for LGBTQ people, when they meant the difference between life and death, or at least life and a life not worth living. So while it may be annoying when Pepper raises an eyebrow at your choice in ascot, that particular policing of community was inevitable the moment there was a group being unjustly discriminated against in society.
I was all ready to give "The Magic Bangle" my full-throated approval, and I do, in fact, really like the story and join in its prayer for a future without borders. Part of me, though, wonders if the skillful literary resolution of the story can be turned into a real-world solution. Can performative speech really change the world, can an incantation really perform magic?
Kartik tells a story of two lovers who are not allowed to be together, so the gods turn them into two intoxicating substances, tobacco and cannabis. It seems like it's only in moments of intoxication that borders really break down. The revelers at the Holi celebration have been drinking milk mixed with cannabis. Maybe that's what it takes to break down barriers is just a succession of intoxications. If so, "The Magic Bangle" is itself such an intoxication, and I hope those who read it felt a moment of blurred lines and blurred identities like I did.
