Light Still Arriving
After the last child reached for the golden ring and descended from painted wooden horses, after the music stopped playing and the world stopped spinning, the shops closed their doors and the crowds returned home, and Damien Fry waited alone.
A hundred lights swayed in branches overhead where glistening rain slipped past to beat his shoulders and drip from his fedora. One finger from his broad hand traced the stitches of his briefcase. He watched the street where water raced the gutters past large windows decorated for the season.
When the final bus rounded the corner Damien Fry stepped to the curb. It veered toward the gutter and doors flew open spilling fluorescent shadows across his face. He climbed the stairs and quietly dipped a token in the font beside the driver who nodded with a habitual smile.
Damien Fry stood at the aisle where aluminum pews repeated in rows front to rear, occupied by a dozen passengers with heads bowed in solemn silence. He removed his hat and took a seat near the front, stale diesel incense burning his nostrils. The driver pumped the pedals and the engine swelled, and the wheels chanted in unison.
A thousand lights passed splattered windows like a procession of colored stars, staining the passengers with blue, red, yellow, and green. They swayed in unison at each turn and bowed at each stop until the driver pumped again, the great engine swelled, and the liturgy continued.
She boarded at one bright intersection just outside town in a flurry of leaves, wind, and rain making her seem part of the storm. Wind ran the aisle, stirring the passengers like a tent revival meeting. They rustled when she wrestled a soaking load of bags. They worked into a frenzy when she fumbled for a token. They were ready to run the aisle by the time she deposited herself near the front. The young woman stopped to survey the passengers, their faces in spasms and their bodies nearly in fits.
Her yellow raincoat and hat seemed like a fisherman except for long red curls falling like a hurricane around her face. Her legs were long, bare, with her broad mouth painted the same dark red as her hair. She tucked a stray curl behind an ear and smiled, cautiously, then took her seat across from Damien Fry.
The night had grown dark and the bus was a strange aquarium of fluorescent green shadows. The passengers swayed like seaweed as the bus lurched and retreated like the tide.
The young woman sat quietly, but something about her seemed unusual, almost mythical. He knew they had never met; she appeared from nowhere like Venus on the half shell, and yet he knew this woman, somehow.
She seemed to watch for some cue, but he could not guess what. Damien Fry watched, curious, until she caught his glance. He smiled politely and pretended to look outside.
“Can you believe this weather?” she said. “It almost feels cold enough to snow.”
“It’s been quite a storm.”
She waited for more, then sighed dramatically and fished through her purse. But when Damien tried not to notice, the search became more frantic.
Damien faced her again, and she stopped.
“Gum,” she said.
“I’ve been trying to quit smoking but I’m starting to wonder if this gum chewing thing isn’t just as bad of a habit.”
She held up a ransacked purse.
“Or worse,” she said.
Damien smiled and returned to the window.
She tossed a piece of gum into her mouth, chewing it into submission, then sank back in her seat and sighed heavily.
She checked to see if Damien was watching, “Don’t you just love gum?”
Damien could no longer mask his curiosity. She clearly wanted his attention, but he couldn’t guess why.
“Do I know you?” he said.
She stopped chewing and turned to face the window. After a few moments she seemed to find a new energy and leaned closer to the glass.
“Oh, look!” she said. “It’s stopped raining and the wind has blown the clouds away. You can see the stars.”
She cleared her throat and proceeded slowly.
“It’s a funny thing about stars, don’t you think? How the light we’re seeing right now when we look at them is actually millions of years old. It took millions of years for that light to arrive here where we can see it. For all we know, the star where it came from might not even exist anymore.”
Damien listened intently.
He said, “Where did you hear that?”
Her voice started to shake. She seemed to be reciting.
“The light we see right now started before the dinosaurs ever existed. It might have started before the earth was created. It was traveling here before man walked on earth. The three wise men followed a star that could have stopped existing millions of years before Christ was born.”
“Where did you hear that?” Damien said, and his face turned pale.
She didn’t answer.
“My mother once told me . . .” he stopped. “Where did you hear that?”
“It’s just something I remembered.”
She added quietly, “The thing about those stars is that it really doesn’t matter if they still exist at all. The light from them is still arriving. As long as we can still see them when we look at the sky, that’s all that matters. For us they’ll always be alive. They’ll always be young and beautiful.”
The world could be watching and Damien Fry wouldn’t care. But the bus stopped again and he recognized his stop. He blinked quickly.
The young woman watched silently as Damien picked up the briefcase, grabbed his hat, and stepped off the bus.
The air had grown crisp and clear. Damien paused on the sidewalk, staring at the millions of stars overhead until the bus continued down the street.
His heels clicked loudly down the sidewalk, percussive as the thoughts in his mind. The sidewalk ended at his driveway. Only the stars continued further.
His key slid easily into the lock, worn from years of use, and the door opened quietly as always. The silence inside seemed ancient.
His hat and coat found the rack with little help, but he measured every step, every movement, to place his briefcase on the table near the door. His hands were numb and trembled slightly as he maneuvered the latches, opened the briefcase and lifted a manila folder of yellow newsclippings and typed papers.
“You see those stars?” his mother had once told him. “The light from them is millions of years old. We’re seeing it now but it took millions of years for that light to reach us here on earth.”
He had looked at the stars. They seemed so big to a six year old, and so close. How could the light have taken so long to get here when he could almost reach out and touch those stars?
“They seem like they’re close, but they’re not,” his mother said. “They’re very far away and they might not even exist anymore. Their light takes so long to come to earth. The only reason we know they were ever there at all is because of the light they’ve left behind.”
“How can they still be shining if they’re gone?” Damien said.
His mother smiled and drew him closer.
“That light is like a memory of them,” she said. “They’ll always exist to us, as long as we can still see the light.”
“Will they go away if we forget about them?”
“Probably. So we just have to make sure we don’t forget.”
“I’ll never forget them,” he said.
Damien Fry ran a finger along the edge of the manila folder which contained everything he could remember about his mother. He could remember her coming home from shopping one day with armloads of presents for Christmas, then leaving again, saying the most important present was missing. He also remembered his father waking him the next morning to tell him she was gone and could never return. But most of what he could remember about his mother depended on this folder of yellow newspaper clippings.
All the other pages in his folder, those he had typed and labored over, were only ideas of how it might have been.
She might have only bent down a moment. Damien always believed it was when she found the missing present, the knife he had asked for all year.
Clouds could have parted to let moonlight fall across the frozen lake, illuminating the ice and her pale face. The snarled remains of her car might have sat quietly on the shore. Disoriented by the collision, she could have pulled herself out of the car and onto the smooth ice.
For a moment she could have realized what was happening, before her mind started to drift away.
Snow gently tumbled across her cheek, falling in tiny lace shadows like a shroud, winding through her hair and making crystal webs around her eyes. She could barely feel her body, but the numbness offered a welcome refuge from the pain.
Her long wool coat may have dipped tentatively at first through a fault in the ice and slowly drew in water from the lake. It could have become more saturated and slid further in.
Without doubt, the cold night became more intense when her legs finally slipped into the water; her mind had already drunk of the lake’s dark water when it first invaded her wounds.
With the ice no longer able to support her, she might have heaved one final gasp of cold night air and disappeared slowly into the lake, soon feeling the ground again beneath her body, where there was no sky, no snow, and no pain; only this icy lover who kissed her open lips, filling her pale breast with his cold breath.
Damien closed the folder and returned it to his briefcase, next to the small pocket knife he had kept so many years.
In the morning’s blue hour Damien Fry had awoke and dressed, and now he waited quietly. Morning had arrived in a snowy blanket and a thousand tiny colored lights glowed dimly beneath it.
Again he fumbled with the stitches of his briefcase and watched up the road. Trees overhead slept heavily beneath the icy mantle.
The morning star had reached its full height across the sky. Eosphorus, Venus, the apparition sometimes called Lucifer. It wasn’t a star at all, just a planet. Closer than any star, and still there. Damien regarded it silently.
The stars had all gone away, promising to return as though such mysteries could ever be predicted. The sky was barely turning blue, but Damien closed his eyes and could imagine it dark. In his mind he could still see the stars, the light from millions of years ago. He could remember them, and as long as he remembered he knew they would continue to exist.
Down the road the bus again approached, rustling the blanket beneath its wheels. It moved slower than before, yet still determined, its headlights slicing the quiet morning air. It approached the curb, but Damien did not stand. Instead, he waved it past with one broad gesture.
He stared into the tracks left. The tracks would have been easy to follow. The bus would stop and wait if he asked it to, and he could climb to his place at the helm. But another possibility had occurred to him, and Damien Fry rose slowly and walked home.
His leather Oxfords didn’t seem suitable for the snow anymore, so he left them on the sidewalk. His socks had grown wet, so he left them in the driveway. The fedora he wore wasn’t made for days like this so he left it on the porch.
He left his briefcase on the table inside the door. Inside the house he left his coat, his suit, and shirt. Naked, he stood before the tall glass doors at the back of the house and stared across the back yard at a freshly iced lake.
Damien turned the handle and the door swayed open. He walked across the deck and stepped into the soft white snow past the stairs. He let the cold shoot through his body, throwing his hands overhead to let the cold pass out his fingertips like rays of light. He stood a moment, stretching for the bright morning sky, then dropped his arms to his sides.
He ran toward the lake. He ran like he had as a boy on warm summer days, and like a young man in cool summer evenings. He ran to the lake and the far end of the dock. And he jumped.
The ice parted easily from the impact and after a few strokes he came up beneath it. He strained against every instinct to break the ice again, to breathe free. He opened his eyes and waited.
He waited to know, to understand. He waited to remember.
Going to Meet the Author: The Lynching of James Baldwin
On one hand, James Baldwin’s short story “Going to Meet the Man” seems fairly straight forward. A deputy sheriff in the changing south remembers his family taking him to the lynching of a black man with the same air of excitement someone might experience on a family picnic. The details are both gruesome and disturbing, but there doesn’t seem to be any hidden message, at least at first glance. However, by reading a little deeper possibilities open and Baldwin’s tale of dying Old South sensibilities takes on another layer of meaning. While “Going to Meet the Man” clearly repeats themes speckled throughout the bulk of Baldwin’s writing output, one small detail of the narrative could hint at a more obscure message, a three-cushion shot such as Hemingway described.
Before the black man is brutally disfigured we are given his description through the eyes of the story’s main character, Jesse, as a child:
He saw the forehead, flat and high, with a kind of arrow of hair in the center, like he had, like his father had; they called it a widow’s peak; and the mangled eye brows, the wide nose, the closed eyes, and the glinting eye lashes and the hanging lips, all streaming with blood and sweat.
A widow’s peak had also been a prominent feature of the main character in Baldwin’s earlier work, “Go Tell It on the Mountain”. It is mentioned when the young protagonist John Grimes studies his face in a mirror:
His father had always said that his face was the face of Satan - and was there not something - in the lift of the eyebrow, in the way his rough hair formed a V on his brow - that bore witness to his father’s words?
From what Baldwin reveals of himself in his autobiographical essays, we know this passage is not far from a self portrait. Further, we see a widow’s peak in photographs of Baldwin, so we know it was one of his own physical traits.
From his short novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain” forward, Baldwin’s writing dealt almost exclusively with racial or sexual oppression, speaking with power because it stemmed from lived experiences in Baldwin’s own alienation. As “Go Tell It on the Mountain” dealt with the semi-autobiographical plights of the Harlem black, “Giovanni’s Room”, published in 1956 dealt with semi-autobiographical plights of the homosexual white. In reference to the latter, Baldwin once stated, “That was something I had to do; I had to work through it.”
In light of Baldwin’s tendency to include autobiographical elements in his work, a question is raised. Could this reference to a widow’s peak in “Going to Meet the Man” indicate a connection between the black man who is lynched and Baldwin himself? Is Baldwin making an autobiographic statement, and if so, to what end? Is this a purely self-centered statement or might it be interpreted with a more universal view?
The first section of “Going to Meet the Man” introduces Jesse, a small town deputy sheriff in a changing South. Because of the changes taking place, he finds himself both impotent and unable to sleep. Earlier that day Jesse had brutalized a black man in the jail, the “ring leader” for a group of black protesters. Before falling unconscious, the black man reminded Jesse of an incident years before when as a boy he had defied him for showing disrespect for his grandmother. This memory fuels Jesse’s unrest and paranoia because although he believes he and his fellow whites are soldiers “out-numbered, fighting to save the civilized world,” but ultimately he knows they cannot succeed because they have become “accomplices in a crime.”
Jesse recalls one of the spirituals the black protestors had sung. It came “flying up at him” from “out of the darkness . . . out of nowhere.” The song triggers the memory of a pivotal event in Jesse’s life, and this story begins with another evening when he cannot sleep. Jesse’s parents had told him they were going on a family picnic, but what he actually witnesses is the mutilation, castration, and burning of a black man accused of raping a white woman. A festive feeling is in the air and Jesse notes a strange beauty on his mother’s face. He experiences the greatest joy of his life and a deep love for his father who “carried him through a mighty test, had revealed to him a great secret which would be the key to his life forever.”
Jesse is changed by this sadistic memory and “his nature again returned to him”. His manhood and sexual potency seem linked to brutality and symbolically Jesse becomes the “nigger” raping his own wife, “Come on, sugar, I’m going to do you like a nigger, just like a nigger, come on, sugar, and love me just like you’d love a nigger.” He labors over his wife until the morning when he hears a vehicle coming up the driveway, possibly a call back to reality and a moment when Jesse may have become more aware of his own guilt.
Beyond the inclusion of Baldwin’s distinctive widow’s peak, elements of the story do seem to support Baldwin could have, consciously or unconsciously, placed himself within the narrative as the black man who was lynched. On a symbolic level, Baldwin himself had been mutilated, castrated, and burned. Although Baldwin’s mutilation had not been literal, he had been verbally mutilated his entire life. Baldwin was not physically castrated, but because of his homosexuality he had difficulty expressing himself fully as a sexual being. He was not burned like the black man in his story, but Baldwin’s sexuality did force him to live in shadows, darker than he would have normally been if he had merely been black.
Baldwin’s father was a strict lay preacher who not only expressed his disdain for whites but abused his son both emotionally and physically. This symbolic mutilation followed Baldwin throughout his life and formed the inspiration for the young John Grimes in “Go Tell It on the Mountain”.
In the eye there was a light that was not the light of Heaven, and the mouth trembled, lustful and lewd, to drink deep of the wines of Hell. He stared at his face as though it were, as indeed it soon appeared to be, the face of a stranger, a stranger who held secrets that John could never know. And, having thought of it as a stranger might, and tried to discover what other people saw. But he saw only details; two great eyes, and a broad, low forehead, and the triangle of his nose, and his enormous mouth, and the barely perceptible cleft in his chin, which was, his father said, the mark of the devil’s little finger. These details did not help him, for the principle of their unity was undiscoverable, and he could not tell what he most passionately desired to know: whether his face was ugly or not.
Along with this character, Baldwin himself dreamed of being “beautiful, tall and popular,” someone who could become a poet or a college president or even a famous movie star.
In “The Devil Finds Work” Baldwin recalls, “My father said, during all the years I lived with him, that I was the ugliest boy he had ever seen, and I had absolutely no reason to doubt him.” The depth of his low self image is apparent in his attempt to come to grips with his father’s criticism of Baldwin (and his mother) in this passage from “The Devil Finds Work”:
So, here, now, was Bette Davis, on that Saturday afternoon, in close-up, over a champagne glass, pop-eyes popping. I was astounded. I had caught my father, not in a lie, but in an infirmity. For, here, before me, after all, was a movie star: white: and if she was white and a movie star, she was rich: and she was ugly. I felt exactly the same way I felt, just before this moment, or just after, when I was in the street, playing, and I saw an old, very black, and very drunk woman stumbling up the sidewalk, and I ran upstairs to make my mother come to the window and see what I had found: You see? You see? She’s uglier than you, Mama! She’s uglier than me!
Consistent with universal elements of Baldwin’s work, in his mind this symbolic physical mutilation extended beyond himself to include all blacks. In “James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture”, Clarence Hardy observes:
Ugliness does not simply describe a lack of attractiveness; in the context of Baldwin’s life, ugliness is linked with a blackness that circumscribes and restricts the life chances of those who labor within its concealment and are unable to give or accept love.
In “Going to Meet the Man” the lynched man was literally castrated. In real life, the difficulties surrounding Baldwin’s homosexuality in a sense left him symbolically castrated. Several of Baldwin’s major works involve a character who must resolve issues related to his homosexuality. John in “Go Tell It on the Mountain” has sexual feelings for Elisha which are in conflict with his involvement in religion. In “Giovanni’s Room” David cannot resolve his concerns over public opinion about his masculinity with his own homosexual feelings. The relationship between Rufus and Eric in “Another Country” was doomed by Rufus’ inability to accept his feelings for another man. Although all three of these examples are also related to self-acceptance, an extension of Baldwin’s problems with self image based on the symbolic physical mutilation previously mentioned, each character is unable to fully realize themselves as a sexual being because of outside constraints, both real and perceived. Each character’s inability to accept their true sexual identity left them emasculated.
In his study of gay self-representation in fiction, David Bergman argues Baldwin carefully portrays all potentially gay main characters as bisexual. They are never depicted as “‘faggots’, by which Baldwin means exclusively and effeminately homosexual.” This line of separation seems to echo Baldwin’s own similar struggles. Baldwin finds it difficult to represent his characters as fully homosexual, much as he struggled with labeling himself as such.
Once the black man had been castrated, “the crowd rushed forward, tearing at the body with their hands, with knives, with rocks, with stones, howling and cursing.” Once the man had been castrated, his sexuality being cut away, he became something which could be consumed by the general population. He had already been a spectacle, but remained unapproachable because his sexuality made him a complete being. In a similar fashion, the emasculation of Baldwin was necessary before the general public could approach his other parts.
African male homosexuals have been shadowy figures in American Literature; they have been present, but not always seen or acknowledged. Melvin Dixon and Kendall Thomas argue the James Baldwin remembered and canonized by some is a man stripped of his homosexuality. Baldwin expressed his thoughts on homosexuality and race in a 1986 interview with Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice (published in James Baldwin: The Legacy, edited by Quincy Troupe, 1989):
A black gay person who is a sexual conundrum to society is already, long before the question of sexuality comes into it, menaced and marked because he’s black or she’s black. The sexual question comes after the question of color; it’s simply one more aspect of the danger in which all black people live.
Because the character had already been born black, the process of burning would not have been necessary to change his skin color. The burning is something which was done to him, and therefore might represent some other process. Perhaps the process of burning the lynched man could represent the gay black man’s relegation to the shadows. Through fire, Baldwin is refined and made presentable; his sins are left in the dark corners and do not need to be faced.
While the man in the story is being burned because he has been accused of raping a white woman, this is only an accusation and its heterosexual implications, if we accept the lynched black man represents Baldwin, could represent how some readers would like to impose a “normal” sexual orientation upon writers they admire, possibly in an attempt to ignore and make homosexuality a non-issue.
Baldwin’s own feelings about sexual relations between a black man and a white woman, and between two men, might have been characterized by Leo in “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone”. Leo recalls these possibilities, sex with a white woman and sex with a man, as the two forbidden desires of his life. If this story followed Baldwin’s tendency to inject his own views and feelings into those of his characters, Leo’s feelings might reveal the author viewed these desires and actions as taboo.
Burning is the final part the lynching sequence in “Going to Meet the Man”. The things which had not been addressed by the crowd’s mutilation were “taken care of by the fire”. In a parallel manner, that which the public could not otherwise contain enough to face through symbolic mutilation and castration of Baldwin could be made dark and thereby relegated to the secrecy and anonyminity of the shadows. In the story Jesse recalls, “The head was caved in, one eye was torn out, one ear was hanging. But one had to look carefully to realize this, for it was, now, merely, a black charred object in the black, charred ground.”
James Baldwin, once sanitized and repackaged for the masses, is left merely an object, an author without an unpleasant human reality attached. But upon looking more closely, we can see how this view leaves the reality of Baldwin twisted and mangled.
If the lynched black man does represent Baldwin, what role does Jesse play in the story’s symbolism? The role of the crowd seems obvious enough, they are the masses who read, criticize, and ultimately seek to categorize Baldwin. But could Jesse serve some role other than a part of the crowd?
While Jesse seemed to feel a loss associated with the fading Old South, where blacks were relegated to a lower, almost non-human class, he also seemed to feel some guilt over his participation as an accomplice in “the crime”. Both in his abuse of the black protestor and his observation of the lynching, Jesse recalled a moment of looking into each victim’s eyes. Ultimately, we may believe Jesse will never feel fully justified for his role in both these crimes and will be required to live with or oppress this feeling of guilt for the rest of his life.
In a similar manner, members of the white culture today must deal with their participation in crimes perpetuated against blacks in the past. Whether they were direct participants or merely onlookers, feelings of guilt will be present. Each person might have different methods of dealing with these feelings. Like Jesse, we can attempt to suppress these feelings, or we may choose to perpetuate these crimes directly through our own actions. Therefore, Jesse could be said to represent the individual, the member of the crowd. He may or may not have been the one perpetuating the crime, but he will still have to deal with it on a personal level, one way or another.
Regardless of Baldwin’s conscious intentions in writing “Going to Meet the Man”, which we do not find clearly explained by Baldwin himself within his published works or personal interviews, the piece can easily lend itself to a broad interpretation as Baldwin’s own commentary on his life and times. Accepted interpretations of Baldwin’s other works show the personal revelation he often infused into his writing. We know enough of Baldwin’s life to see he was clearly abused as a child, made to feel worthless, and these actions brought on a struggle with self acceptance and identity which followed and plagued Baldwin throughout his life. We know through direct self revelation that Baldwin lived and struggled with living a gay lifestyle. We also know through history both blacks and gays were generally unaccepted and persecuted by the largely white American culture.
Baldwin placed himself and his experiences inside his stories to lend depth and truth to his writing. However, it is important to note Baldwin did not ultimately see himself or his characters as victims. If Baldwin did intend the lynched man in “Going to Meet the Man” to represent himself, it would be important to remember the larger message of hope and healing which is central to Baldwin’s corpus of writing. We have to remember the great amount of sympathy he conveys for all the marginalized, not limited to blacks or gays.
In “Critical Theory Today” Lois Tyson points out the difficulties of interpreting a piece as though the author is projecting his unconscious desires, fears, wounds, or unresolved conflicts onto a story’s characters, setting, and events.
Psychoanalyzing an author in this manner is a difficult undertaking, and our analysis must be carefully derived by examining the author’s entire corpus as well as letters, diaries, and any other biographical material available.
Clearly an isolated piece is bound to present an incomplete picture, but it doesn’t necessarily follow psychological information cannot be found within a single work; especially since the same themes occur in Baldwin’s other pieces.
Noting the political and social agendas of Baldwin’s other works, it does not require a large leap of faith to assume Baldwin had some personal agenda behind the writing of “Going to Meet the Man.” But even if such an assumption were proved to be false, and it could be solidly refuted that Baldwin could not have had some subconscious intention for writing the story, one which served his own private internal struggles, nevertheless this story would still serve as an adequate framework for outlining an examination for lifelong struggles Baldwin faced as a black, gay man and a writer, as well as the struggles faced by others who struggled with labels of a similar kind.
Self Contempt in James Baldwin’s Novel “Giovanni’s Room”
James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” is a poignant take on self contempt and personal deception. David is a young man who not only attempts to deceive himself, but deceives others along the way. In today’s world of trite pop psychology we tend to focus on the harm we cause ourselves through self-deception, but Baldwin’s story points out the pain and suffering our attempts at self deception can inflict on those around us.
Sometimes we inflict pain upon those unfortunate enough to love us when they reveal or reflect traits we cannot accept in ourselves. David is a young man who cannot accept his own homosexual tendencies. As a teenager he establishes a pattern which will follow him into adulthood. He makes love to a boy, then projects his self contempt onto that boy by bullying and degrading him. Years later, David meets a man named Giovanni but cannot accept the love which develops between them. He leaves Giovanni without explanation, and ignores what they have been to each other until he becomes ridden with guilt over Giovanni’s execution, which might have been avoided if David had been less selfish.
I’ve heard it said shy people are among the most vain; they refuse to come out of their shells because they might do something to reveal an imperfection. The shy person feels superior and is unwilling to risk a situation which might break that image. In Baldwin’s story, David is unwilling to risk what people might think of him if he came out of his shell and was labeled as a homosexual. He refers to the acts he performs with other men as degradation of the body, and we get the idea he also means degradation of the mind and soul. David mocks and calls older gay men “fairies”. He describes them as disgusting, although he is willing to exchange a sexual favor (or the promise of one) for an occasional handout. It seems likely, part of David’s inability to accept his own homosexuality is the threat he will one day appear as “ridiculous” as these old gay men.
Just as David is willing to take advantage of the old gays he calls “friends”, he is also willing to satisfy his own urges at the expense of younger and more beautiful men. Although highly aware of onlookers, and defensive about what this audience might be thinking, he allows himself to be seduced by Giovanni. I suppose if you’re all about image, it would be somewhat easier to be with a handsome man, one you could wear on your arm like a prize, than an aging and effeminate man. But it is just a continuation of the pattern he started with the young boy years before.
It is difficult to find much sympathy for David. Baldwin attempts to gain our empathy for David with deep inner struggle. At one point David admits, if only to himself, that he believes he was truly in love with Giovanni, but his actions don’t back that up. David’s struggles are only about the way things effect him personally. He leaves a trail of bodies in his wake but never goes back to ask forgiveness or to make amends. His affair with a girl named Sue only leaves her feeling used, the relationship with his fiancee Hedda only leaves her disillusioned and hurt, but the relationship with Giovanni ultimately leads to that boy’s downfall and execution.
While it’s true David is dealing with an identity issue steeped in taboo, and one which has been difficult for many men to face, my heart went out more for those he hurt along the way. Nevertheless, Baldwin did paint a convincing picture of a struggle many face or repress when it comes to accepting themselves. David’s disdain for himself caused him to create pain in the lives of all those unfortunate enough to have loved him.
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Northrop Frye’s Theory of Myths
Northrop Frye’s “theory of myths” refers to a system of patterns which mankind has used to realize the narratives of his stories and literature. Frye asserts human beings realize basic narrative in two fundamental ways; representations of the real world and representations of an ideal or fantasy world. Frye calls the two fundamental narratives the “mythos of summer” and the “mythos of winter”. Summer is a time of heroes and adventure, and winter is a time where life’s complexities are faced. But in spite of the convenience a system could afford our attempts to categorize the written works of mankind, real life isn’t always so easily defined. It would follow naturally then, literature which reflects life in its fullness might not fit neatly within Frye’s two basic theoretical categories. Great literature echoes real life in its tendency to defy simplified explanation. So because Frye realized life’s tendency to travel between times of summer and winter, he also introduced two times of transition: “the mythos of autumn” and “the mythos of spring”.
Indeterminacy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Although the Jazz Age in America came on the scene with a bit of a strut in its stride, taking bold steps forward into a whole new era, the same bold steps brought an air of uncertainty; new territory, previously uncharted, could bring its own dangers. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” echoed that underlying fear, either consciously or unconsciously, creating an air of indeterminacy which left the potential result open for interpretation.
Just as indeterminacy leaves gaps in the text, or possibly the discovery of these gaps is what fosters the uncertain feelings, the era of Fitzgerald’s novel was a time where gaps were par for the course. Where were relationships headed, and what would happen to our old family values? What would happen when the idle poor became the idle rich and fortunes could be made with a few telephone calls? The very foundation of American society seemed up for debate. In a time where the buzz word meant freedom, where would the journey take us and what would we leave behind?
Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” promises a story of riches and intrigue; who is this Jay Gatsby and where did he come from? Soon we begin to expect a love story; will Daisy fling off the oppressive life she has chosen and return to the arms of her one true love? These are stories we are comfortable with, stories that lead us where we expect to be lead. But soon an uneasiness begins to shadow the rest of the story. We begin to wonder who is good and who isn’t. If their story is to be so simple, why are these characters so complex? Are things going to turn out the way we expect in the end.
One image of indeterminacy in Gatsby is the dusty part of town called home by Tom Buchanan mistress, Myrtle. The place is covered in gray dust, and underneath that dust is a complex triangle between Myrtle, her husband George, and Tom. We wonder what the dust means. Is it some oppressive layer Myrtle will fling off in the raptures of her affair with Tom? Or is it the dust that settles on something that’s already dead, like the layer of gray dust in an old abandoned house or ghost town? Does the layer of dust foreshadow its throwing off, or does it foreshadow the approaching death and the abandonment of dreams to follow?
Early in the novel Gatsby holds one of his large parties with what seems like hundreds of guests, largely uninvited. It is a banquet, much like we often call life a banquet. But nobody really seems to know what it’s all about or why they are there, or even who the host really might be. Many at the party drink too much, laugh too loud, and care about the entire thing a bit too little. When the party disbands one of the drivers lose a wheel and a big fuss is created until the entire incident is laughed off as some form of a joke. When we see where Fitzgerald ultimately leads his characters by the end of the story, it’s easy to wonder if this party scene isn’t a parallel to the world and life. Is the whole thing a big party where we take things for granted and ultimately laugh the whole thing off as a joke? Are we uninvited guests at a party where nobody really knows the host? Is Gatsby God?
Indeterminacy isn’t the “what” of the story’s events, it may not even be the “why”. When thinking of indeterminacy in the context of Reader Response Criticism, it could be thought of as one of the many possible meanings of the text. But when introduced into a novel as full of contradictions and unanswered questions as Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, indeterminacy becomes the element which makes the story echo real life. We are left to wonder not only what the text could have meant, but what life itself is all about.
A Marxist Critique of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
When we feel we have nothing out of the ordinary, when everything we have is viewed in our society as a commodity, we raise the bar of our expectations and want something more. But even then, it isn’t enough to merely have it. We want to have it and rub it in the face of those around us at the same time. We buy our furs, our fancy cars, and our large houses telling ourselves it is because we need them, they are a commodity, but in reality it is all for show. Fitzgerald approached the idea of conspicuous consumption in his novel “The Great Gatsby”; it wasn’t enough to live in the richest part of the richest city in the richest country of the entire world, but his characters had to “look” the part as well.
A Psychoanalytic Criticism of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Although psychoanalytic criticism believes we are each born with a clean slate, soon that slate is cluttered with images. Even before we have words to label them, we begin working to sort this clutter and make sense of the world around us. If a thing is suitable we keep it or forget it, but if a thing causes us pain, shame, or any number of negative responses, instead of forgetting it we repress it into our subconscious where it festers and poisons our waking thoughts and actions. As Fitzgerald puts it, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Much of our conscious present is made of dealing with the suppressed and unconscious images of our past. In life this battle with the past can feel like we’re paddling upstream, and in Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” each character fights the current in their own unique manner. Jay Gatsby, subject of the book’s title, was “borne back ceaselessly into the past” by fighting the repression associated with it. Having been raised in a lower class family, he spent his adulthood attempting to establish himself among the “upper” classes. However, his true desires may not have been purely social or economic.
In our pre-verbal period of infancy we experience a life of fantasy, an illusion, but it is shattered when we find things around us have an order and we begin to realize our place within that order. We learn our mother is separate from us and does not feel what we feel. We cannot control her with our minds and she does not feel pain when we inflict it upon ourselves. Further, we find she does not belong to us but in fact belongs to our father. We may spend the rest of our lives trying to replace the hole this leaves in our gut. Gatsby believed he could fill the void by aspiring to win the love of Daisy. She was of another world than ours, yet something which seemed to remind us of the illusions of our infancy. A relationship with Daisy could restore that feeling of complete intimacy we once thought we shared with our mothers. But just as our idea of that relationship with our mother was a fallacy, so is the idea we can be “one” with the woman we believe will replace her.
Daisy herself dealt with her own issues regarding the replacement of that illusory world with a concrete, verbal reality. But in her disappointment she adopted the protective shield of distance from others; she became unwilling to experience intimacy in her current life as a reaction to the painful loss of a perceived intimacy from her infant hood. Instead of allowing herself to draw close to Gatsby, she felt, possibly on a subconscious level, that he wanted too much of her. She perceived his desire for intimacy, and although his desire may have been rooted in the same place as her own needs and desires, her reaction was exactly the opposite.
In the closing lines of “The Great Gatsby”, Fitzgerald summarizes a theme we had revisited often within the novel. We press on, and we may feel as though we are swimming upstream. We never get what we want, even if we don’t truly know what it is we desire. We dip the oars into the water hoping they will drive us into the future, but the very act of dipping in means we dredge up the past. However we try to reach for the green light across the bay, we are still forced to face the darkness inside us, even if that darkness is beyond our reach as well.
An Overview of Structuralist Criticism in Literature
A typical American middle class home is built from a few basic ingredients: wood, nails, miscellaneous wires, pipes, and tubing, wrapped in layers of plaster and paint. But a student of Architecture wouldn’t necessarily be interested in how these ingredients are combined to make one single house. Such a student is more likely to study how these ingredients were used in similar houses within one historical period. In a similar manner, a student of Structural criticism would be interested in the basic ingredients of many stories within the same period, and the similar ways in which these ingredients were used.
However, where Structuralist criticism breaks from this comparison is in use of the term “structure”. A Structuralist isn’t interested in literary structures as physical entities, but studies conceptual frameworks used to organize and understand physical entities. The rules of grammar would be one such conceptual framework; this sort of structure exists to organize, classify, and simplify. The Structuralist might also be interested in the field of semiotics, or the study of linguistic and nonlinguistic signs and how they operate symbolically to convey a message.
It’s easy to see why the relationship between structuralism and the study of literature is important. Since literature is a verbal art based on the manipulation of signs and symbols, structuralism not only seeks to discover a universal meaning to these signs but to understand the framework associated with their meanings. Literature and Structuralism share a common goal; an effective understanding of how these signs and symbols are and can be used.
One major Structuralist theory about these underlying frameworks is Northrop Frye’s “Theory of Myths”, which seeks to understand and classify the underlying structural principles of Western Literature. Frye refers to four narrative patterns which he believes provide the framework of Western Literature: comedy, tragedy, romance, and irony/satire.
A New Criticism View of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
In another age, traveling medicine shows would tout their amazing stars as “The Great” or “The Invincible”. We learned to expect feats of magic and miracle from these men, even if beneath it all we knew they were charlatans. Fitzgerald used this bit of the pop psyche in the title of his novel, “The Great Gatsby”, and as we might expect he delivered a character strikingly similar to these miracle men of old. However, many people believed in these charlatans, even if they wouldn’t say so in public. Their tricks tapped into our desire for magic and wonder; they were men of fantasy and intrigue. In naming his novel “The Great Gatsby”, Fitzgerald stirred the complex reaction America had to all the Great and Invincible of our history, tapping into a rich spring of paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension.
Fitzgerald drove the reader into his novel with the question of Gatsby’s greatness. We wondered who this man might be. We come with a prejudice from the title, then Fitzgerald further guides us to accept Gatsby’s greatness by showing us his wealth. He has such wealth we are willing to accept the man must be great as well. But an ambiguity exists at the same time; nobody knows where this man came from, where his wealth originated, or indeed what makes him so great. But we believe it just the same. Here we have a man who has wealth and seems willing to share it. He seems well mannered and genteel, yet he reaches down from his pedestal and befriends our narrator, Nick. It seems somewhat a paradox, but real life is full of such opposites that the story only seems more real because of it. Because the paradox seems so real we believe the story, and because we believe the story we commit even deeper to believing the story’s title; the man must indeed be great.
But Fitzgerald also introduces a tension, possibly springing from the sense of ambiguity. As a reader we want to know where Gatsby came from, why he is wealthy, but we are afraid we won’t like the answer. Fitzgerald strings us along then plants little seeds of doubt, and we begin to worry. What if Gatsby is a bootlegger or a gambler, would we be able to reconcile the belief we have already adopted that he is indeed great? We need him to be great, because we already believe he is. Eventually, however, we come to realize Gatsby was not born to greatness nor did he really aspire toward it. Even his schooling is questionable. He does not have any of the sure signs of greatness we have come to expect, yet we realize there is still something great about him. It might simply be that we want to justify the decision we’ve already made about him. We need him to be great because we’ve already made up our minds that he is, but this brings a certain irony into play because we have committed to his greatness even though he isn’t great by the definition we originally would have given the word.
Again, it is like the charlatan who made us believe in snake oil. When the snake oil doesn’t cure baldness or make your hiccups go away, we tell ourselves “The Great and Powerful” charlatan was a great entertainer. He is still great, just not in the way we originally expected him to be. In “The Great Gatsby” Fitzgerald first made us believe Gatsby was great, then left us to justify the reasoning in spite of the evidence. But that is just like real life.
A Feminist Critique of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Even if they disagree about other issues, all feminists believe patriarchal ideology works to keep men and women confined to traditional gender roles so male dominance may be maintained. Utilizing the precepts of Feminist criticism, it could be argued “The Great Gatsby” promotes a thinly veiled patriarchal agenda. Through Fitzgerald’s treatment of the three women in “Gatsby”, as well as masking the possible homosexuality of a central character, the novel seems to promote only the traditional gender roles, swaying uncomfortably from any possible variance. This hidden agenda may be uncovered using common tools of Feminist criticism, primarily through the use of psychoanalytic theory, but with elements of Marxist theory and deconstructionism as well.
Psychologically, Daisy, Jordan, and Myrtle are obviously quite different from each other. In fact, it could be said they are like three corners of a triangle, supporting each others’ role in the story but entirely separate at the same time. Daisy is portrayed as a classic beauty who uses an innate sex appeal to gather some amount of control over her surroundings. As an athlete Jordan might carry the greatest potential to stray from a typical gender role; she could easily have been characterized as a lesbian because of her detachment from men, her self-centered lifestyle, and her unexplained connection to Daisy. Myrtle seems to be a more earthy woman, possibly possessing a raw sexual energy, but Fitzgerald stops short of portraying her as an independent, sexual being, empowered to pursue her own sexual experiences. In many respects these characters could have been deeper had Fitzgerald felt free to expound upon these possibilities; it seems the story would only have been enriched if he had explored these women deeper. However, the fact that Fitzgerald was not willing to fill out these women to their potential could indicate a desire, either of his own or one he felt society had placed upon him, to keep them within the expected stereotypes of their gender.
A similar opportunity showed itself within the characterization of his narrator, Nick. Nick’s reluctance to enter into a relationship with Jordan was not sufficiently justified by the ol’ “girl back home” routine. No attempt at all was made to explain why Nick found himself at the bedside of an effeminate man, who was in his underwear. Nor did Fitzgerald explore Nick’s admiration for Gatsby on what seemed to be a more physical basis than of friendship; Nick made frequent schoolgirl-like references to Gatsby, but there didn’t seem to be much reason for a friendship. Gatsby’s motivation was clearly to make contact with Daisy, but why did Nick want to be close to Gatsby? These issues could have easily led to some discussion or admittance that Nick might have been gay or at least questioning his gender role. But the author’s unwillingness to breach these subjects seems to indicate he had made himself subject to the established patriarchy. By not saying anything against it, Fitzgerald inadvertently spoke in favor of the established order.
From a purely economic standpoint, the patriarchal agenda is evident in how all three of the major female characters are dependent to varied degrees upon the men in their lives. Even Jordan has some need for a man. Daisy and Myrtle are more obviously and traditionally dependent. The patriarchal agenda is also supported in the way men do “business” and women sit around and gossip. Even Nick, who in some ways is portrayed in a traditionally feminine role because of his financial dependence upon his family, is given a nice “man’s” job in the stock market to remove any anti-patriarchal doubts. Simultaneously, a deconstructionistic dichotomy exists within the novel; the characters live in the decadent and supposedly “free” Jazz age, but at the same time seem unwilling or unable to free themselves from the patriarchal elements of society.
Overall, a Feminist criticism of this novel allows the reader to understand how subtle and pervasive the patriarchal influences are within our society. Through the questions Feminists ask of the text we are able to see a possibility for deeper characterization and a more enriched human experience without the shackles of patriarchal tyranny.
-
Subscribe
