Fire Addendum

Jack presented a really neat poem titled Detroit Addendum on Friday about the power of poetry in an industrialized Detroit.  The stanza that stood out to me and was a central point of discussion was the fourth one that had frequent references to fire. It was especially interesting because the fire can interpreted in many different ways:

From fiery epicenters, black faces,

white faces, glow red. We stare through words

into fire until our eyes are also fire.

One widespread symbol is of passion. It is very fitting in this stanza as passion of the poetry, referenced elsewhere in the poem. The word “stare”, singularly italicized, shows a focus. This is channeled by the “words” that are present as a part of the fire. This fire eventually consumes them, with their “eyes also fire”. The faces “glow red” with passion”. This could be a way to escape a restrictive society.

Fire can be a representation of the industrial society as well. This connects to the themes earlier in the poem where vehicles are listed as the industry of the city. The fire can be seen as a chaotic force that spreads through everyone. “Fiery epicenters” would represent the factories with the workers’ faces seaming to “glow red”. The “through words” could be taken as going beyond the words of the people; the industrial world was not part of pure humanity.

Lastly, the fire might simply be showing a force that unifies the people. These people, as Chris pointed out, are physically separated, but the fire is able to shine on all of them. This is shown by the strong sense of black and “white faces” transcending racial bounds. This interpretation is reinforced by the use of “we” in the second line of the stanza when referring to multiple races. The fire appears to stand in for something in the city that is able to affect everyone.

In class, this fire imagery sparked a previously smouldering discussion with fuel forged from ambiguity. I was able to stoke the glowing embers and an inferno of possibilities blazed in my mind. I hope you were warmed by this idea set ablaze. How did you read this smoking stanza?

The Neurological Significance of Beloved

When we were looking at the passage that has the description of memory, I noticed some very real parallels with neuroscience among the various supernatural elements.

Memory is described as being tied to a place, namely 124; it will never die as long as that place exists. WE took this as a supernatural quality of 124 to be able to retain memories. However, this is very similar to recent studies of classroom dynamics. They suggest that what you learn is tied to the space that you learned them and you remember them best in that place. This is a part of memory by association. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_%28psychology%29) Therefore, the house is not haunted, but the characters are being haunted by this familiar place.

Sethe takes this a step further and romanticizes the relationship with the memory. This makes the process more spiritual, but founded on similar neurological concepts. The reader gets the impression of a memory that is animate and evolving. This directly relates to studies of memory reconstruction. Science has shown that your memories are rebuilt from scratch each time you access them and evolve each time they are reconstructed, having been saturated with the experience of the experience of the memory. Re-memory is an illustration of this concept. This information comes from a mind blowing radiolab documentary that has stuck with me (http://www.radiolab.org/story/91569-memory-and-forgetting/ I would definitely recommend listening to this).

In conclusion, the complexity of the plot is reflective of the nuances of the brain and the 

processes of memory. Much of the weird dealings with memory in Beloved are founded in science.

Graffiti: Controversial Art Form Goes Beyond Art

   The documentary Style Wars was very interesting because it showed the viewer graffiti from many angles that most are not aware of. The personal interviews with the "writers" were especially powerful. One of the main things that many of us took out of the movie was that Graffiti was a true art form that deserved more recognition as such. I completely agree with this; much of graffiti is very beautiful and powerful and I think it has made a generally positive impact on cities visually. 

    However, after thinking about the dynamic between the writers and the administration that was at times comical and ironic, I realized that there were much more powerful motives than the debate of its legitimacy as art. I found this issue of graffiti in this time period as a power struggle. The "writers", while creating art for sure, were mostly expressing their power to leave a mark on the city. When the boy in kitchen with his mom first pointed this out, I thought it referred to his personal power. However, I later identified this to be representative of a movement to defy the authority of the city that was seen as oppressing these teens. I do not see this as a bad thing because this a relatively harmless outlet for such feelings of resentment. Someone asked why they did not all just use canvas for their artistic endeavors. It would just not have been rebellious enough to write one's name on a canvas repeatedly.

    On the other side, we spent a lot of time making fun of the city officials who were opposing the graffiti and declaring it to be making people feel unsafe. I think a lot of their motives were to maintain order (as any governing body does), so it was imperative to cover up the rebellious acts, whether they were art or not. This is reinforced by the fact that the graffiti inspired art was so successful among a similar group. It is too bad they were forced to clear off such great pieces of art. 

   Graffiti is a great form of art to have come from teens who would otherwise be restricted in this creative regard. However, it is important to acknowledge the power struggle that went along with it. 

From Grotesque Caricatures to Twisted Racism

After watching the documentary last week, I realized that racism in the media has progressed, not extinguished. In Ethnic Notions, we see television displaying blatant racism without any worry because it was the norm. There were many examples of belittling, emasculation, minstrelsy (and on and on) that the modern audience is horrified by. This is because white Americans, as depicted in White Boy Shuffle, have gone through a phase of exaggerated color blindness. This made for a situation where people were pointedly displaying how they ostensibly did not care. On the outside, this may seem to be a positive development to avoid racist behavior, but it created a new dynamic of racism that is well depicted by Beatty. This translated to the media where everyone went out of their way to avoid the mention of race. However, this has progressed further as the colorblind behavior was found to not be the best solution to the problem as is evident from the description by Gunnar. Many people have identified the problems with a colorblind approach and have become increasingly paranoid about how to correctly approach the topic of race. This makes for many awkward conversations as people try not to ignore the issue but to find a politically correct way to say it. The documentary also points out how the portrayal of racism in the popular media can have an impressive impact on how the audience views the world and acts. Therefore, this obsession over not being offensive has spread to be a very pervasive issue, even when we do not think about it. In class, we often mention stand up comedy to illustrate our point so I wanted to throw in a very explicit example of this dynamic although it does not involve exclusively black racism. This is from popular 2014 tv series Silicon Valley. I thought of this scene when we watched the documentary and decided to investigate how what was depicted in the documentary related to modern television.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0q9PjM4FCU

This is a very broad topic that I have only scraped the surface on. Any thoughts on our modern racism in the media?

What Does It Mean To Be Blind?

When we were reading Invisible Man, we realized that every use of words related to sight and invisibility and color were always very significant sources of symbolism, no matter their context. Therefore, the descriptions of colorblindness in White Boy Shuffle immediately caught my eye. Looking back on Native son, blindness is something that Bigger grapples with throughout the book. There is a huge difference in what these descriptions represent, but they are very racially charged and make up part of the identity of the character involved.

Invisible Man explores "invisibility" throughout the novel and the characters’ traits’ relation to sight is never fully defined. However, we have concluded that it involves flying under the radar and generally being ignored by society. Invisible men are those who are not fully engaged in society as a way to avoid the social burden of their race. As far as we are aware, the invisibility is not acknowledged by any white characters.

Native Son utilizes the word "blind" as a descriptor commonly used by Bigger when looking on various other characters in the novel. He uses it to label people as being ignorant to what was going on in the world around him. Bigger labels his family, Bessie, Jan, and even himself as blind during his adventures. He often utilized it when frustrated, but it always carried a connotation of not understanding the way the world worked.

White Boy Shuffle, as of chapter two, displays a white construct of "colorblindness". Gunner grows up with the white school system pointedly preaching that everyone has to look past race. This is an interesting contrast to the other instances because it represents being so aware of race that they need to try redefine it.

This difference could demonstrate a shift in the problems facing blacks in America between the two time periods. I have barely stepped into this topic and have not come close to doing it justice; how do you incorporate this motif of obsessing over symbolic vision?

Their Eyes Were Watching Guns

The title of the book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is written out on page 160 when they are watching the hurricane’s approach. They are described as feeling “puny” (160) against Him. Janie and Tea Cake sit helplessly as they watch the storm building strength. This expectant powerlessness is a powerful theme of the novel, evident from the title. I noticed this dynamic repeated in the most dramatic scene of the novel. Tensions peak as Tea Cake is overwhelmed by his illness and takes up arms against Janie. Guns inherently hold lots of power, deciding between life and death. Janie watches it as it is aimed at her with no power over Tea Cake whose mind has been radically twisted. This is very similar to the scene anticipating the hurricane.

Additionally, in both cases, action is taken to secure safety with ultimate failure. Tea Cake and Janie are actually able to escape death during the hurricane by making their way to high ground. However, power of God manages to take down Tea Cake with the bite of a crazed dog. In the same way, Janie believes she has dodged a bullet when she takes out 3 of the shells from the pistol. However, as she looks on, he clicks through them all and fires the gun. She is forced to fire back to protect herself. This an important motif to that helps to define the story of Janie that dominates this novel.

Distilling a Poem

“The House of Falling Leaves” was presented by Elissa last week, and I was very intrigued. During the discussion I made a comment about all of the capitalized and I thought I should revisit it. I was intrigued by the seemingly random capitalization throughout the poem. After further inspection, I realized that I could pull out these words and get the following:

House Falling Leaves

Room

Time

Autumn

Time

Winter

Memory

This represents a distilled version of the poem that manages to maintain a lot of meaning. The first interpretation of this set of words is as a description of the life of a leaf as mentioned in the title. Time is the biggest factor for change for a leaf so this selection of words accurately describes the passing of the seasons and how the leaf eventually becomes a memory. This can be taken in a number of directions symbolically as is true for this whole poem. these words show a clear sense of inevitability due to the emphases on time and passing of seasons. That is intriguing when talking about the people separating or passing away into a memory. We want our life to be meaningful, but similar to Native Son, it all appears to be just as predictable as the passing seasons (shown here). The seasons metaphor is also similar to the discussion we had about Their Eyes Were Watching God and the passing of time for Jamie. We described the phases of her life in seasons as well. Jody could be the ‘he’ in this poem that passes from her as her life passes out of Autumn. It is every interesting to see these parallels emerge from these writers. There is so much more that could be said about the poem itself, but I wanted to take a moment to look at a conscious choice by the author to highlight some key words.

What do you see as their significance?

Invisible Sons and Native Men

We have done a lot in class to compare Native Son and Invisible Man. We have highlighted many differences in the attitudes and themes of the authors. These themes are summarized very well by the contrasting titles. Ellison, writing 12 years later, chooses a title that clearly mimics Wright’s for his response novel. The construction of adjective then person is visible in both, but the connotations for the words are much different.

The first word (“Invisible” and “Native”) represents a great deal of significance to the theme of the novel in both cases. Furthermore, it displays the final judgement and world views of a character in the end of the novel. In Native Son, “Native” is the basis for Max’s argument of the inevitability of Bigger’s crime. He talks about how Bigger is a crime himself due to the environment that he was brought up in. He is native to this society and it is what defines him. Alternatively, Ellison chooses to present a more complex world view with the narrator's realization of the concept of invisibility. This main theme of the novel is very hard to pin down and is never truly defined. That is why invisibility is the perfect term because invisibility is inherently mysterious. It shows a sense of free will associated with flying under the radar. The contrast of these terms in very interesting because their definitions do not show any relation at all, but in the context of the novel, they both carry strong connotations of relative freedom.

The second word supports the themes discussed of the first. “Son” shows Bigger’s existence as a direct result of his society and demonstrates a clear path of origin for the character. It also immediately defines him as a son of something bigger (no pun intended, although that could be deliberate symbolism) rather than an individual. “Man”, on the other hand, is a completely anonymous, which is how the narrator describes himself at the end. It is the term that would be used on a news headline where the identity of the person is not important. It is also much more individual than “Son” and is a successful contrast to Wright’s novel.

In conclusion, I read through both books without even noticing Ellison's homage to Native Son in the title. This represent the endless symbolism in Invisible Man that I have acknowledged that I will never fully grasp. The symbolism found in almost every line is what makes this book powerful for me and worth another read.

What has he got in his pocketses?

In chapter 23, the narrator is wondering the streets and uses glasses and a hat as a disguise. After putting the glasses away, he remarks that his “pocket was getting overloaded” (489). He describes that the pocket was being filled with the “leg chain and Clifton’s doll” (489). This line stuck out to me because all three of these objects carry such deep emotional significance. I interpreted them to represent three different levels of freedom (and racism) that he has experienced. However, the pocket serves to conceal them from others. These objects are a physical and emotional burden just like the bank earlier in the book.

The first thing he received while at the brotherhood was the ankle chain from Tarp. This represents maximum physical racial repression that he endured with a weight chained to his leg. The narrator has not experienced something this brutal, but his emotional connection--including a sense of protection--to what it represents is evident (did I use the em dash correctly?). There is clearly no free represented here. The second item is the doll that Clifton was selling before he got shot. This dolls, as discussed in class, carries many metaphors including a parallel to his work in the brotherhood as being controlled by invisible strings. This character demonstrates a little more freedom, and even appears to dance. However its brutal racism is still blatant. The most recent item to be added to his picket are the glasses that he is using as a disguise on the street. These glasses go beyond disguise, however; the narrator begins to realize that they provide to him the power of invisibility. He immediately is recognized as a man who is succeeding at being invisible. This invisibility, not yet clearly defined by the narrator, is very hard to pin down, but the role of theses glasses give the reader some indication in this chapter. The invisibility gained by donning the glasses is far beyond that represented by the other objects. The narrator carries all of these parts of him everywhere he goes and he is starting to become “overloaded” (489).

Two bosses, Lots of Hate

In chapter 10 of Invisible Man, an important chapter for a variety of reasons, there is a definite turning point in the narrator’s treatment of authority. Up to this point, he has been very subservient and excepting with his first major outrage coming from the realization falsification of the letter in the previous chapter.

He has very similar feelings about the two bosses that are assigned to him in the chapter, however, his actions are very different. His mental abuse of Kimbro and later physical abuse of Brockway both show the transition in his character.

The first man who assumes power of the narrator in the pain factory is Kimbro, who in initially described to the narrator as “terrible” (194) by a co-worker and the narrator’s opinion gets steadily worse.. Throughout his time with Kimbro, the narrator thinks very poorly of the man. He quickly questions the motives of this man, wondering if he was “trying to kid me?” (195). The anger felt toward Kimbro is deeper than his anger with Bledsoe in their confrontation. The narrator curses Kibro with words like: “flunkey, a northern redneck, a Yankee cracker” (196). His contempt for the authority is evident when he considers “writing the owners” (202) to complain about his treatment.

After being given a new boss, the narrator immediately appears to have no respect for the man. His first confrontation with the man resulted in him turning up the stairs. He goes on to continually be wary of Brockway and wonders how such a figure could earn such power. What sets apart the narrator’s reaction with Brockway from that of Kimbro is the physical actions of the narrator. When threatened, the narrator, “throwing myself forward” (221), fought instead of running out of the basement.

The beating up of this frail man shows a strong connection to the scene in the prologue where the narrator beats up a random man in the street. The progression from submissiveness to ‘invisibility’ is very evident with two steps in his rejection of authority being indicated in this chapter.

When No One Else Ever Cared

We studied “The Rose that Grew from the Concrete”, written by Tupac Shakur in class and I was taken by the last line. It reads: “when no one else ever cared”; it does not have enough context to explain all of the implied elements such as the object of the caring. This ambiguity was frustrating at first, but I have discovered that is able represent multiple relevant social issues, all of which can be explained through the context of Bigger Thomas. He represents the flowers that never made it through the concrete.

The first interpretation is that nobody ever cared about or noticed what the flower was doing until it got out. The flower had to go through the process of “proving nature’s law is wrong” before ever being noticed. The people that are referenced as “caring” would be the rich or white people because that is what the concrete represented. For Bigger, none of these people ever noticed him until he made his crack in the concrete (though he never blossomed). He was nobody to the white people in his society.

To take the word more literally, it could mean that no one ever cared for and helped the flower grow. The poem describes it as not “having feet” and learning by itself; the feet are the foundation provided by others that it never had when oppressed. Bigger feels very hopeless in this regard. He reminisces on how his ambition was stripped from him.

Lastly, the subject of the caring might be the all of the suppressed people. This flower was the only one “to breathe fresh air”. all of the others did not even care to try. They were lacking all ambition to accomplish something great beyond what the suppressors allowed them. Bigger Thomas was one of those that did not care and his friends never had plan to even try to escape their situation. Only after the first murder did bigger start to care.

I believe that any of these interpretations are possible, backed by the rest of the poem. For me, the last line of a poem is the most important and this one is masterfully constructed. The ambiguity that I once did not understand, I now venerate.

Free will in Native Son

The central motive and conflict in Native Son is discrepancies in free will. Throughout the novel, Bigger Thomas’ free will is suppressed and he feels cornered by the white people, who have ultimate freedom. The perception of such freedom is largely dictated by propaganda from both sides. The scenario involving no free will is demonstrated in one of the opening scenes in which Bigger hunts a rat who has entered the apartment. It, like Bigger, lacks any opportunity to do anything beyond flee its pursuer.

There are multiple levels of free will in Chicago in the 1940’s. Each character is defined by how much control they have over their life and their happiness based on how much freedom they perceive to have obtained. Mary and Jan represent the white youth and they exercise excessive free will. Mary is able to enter into black society simply because she feels like seeing what it is like. She is a very happy and carefree character because she finds joy in doing whatever she please, especially when she blatantly disobeys her father. Youth in white society were also told that they could do anything they wished in their life by their parents. On the other hand, Bigger feels as though he has no ability to achieve. He describes how the white people have both physically forced them “to live in one corner of the city” and did not allow them to “fly planes or run ships” (23). This crushed all ambition for Bigger and thus made him depressed. Additionally, he does not have the freedom to visit white society in any capacity beyond service (a role inherently lacking free will). This one sided nature of society is shown bluntly by the sign depicting the political candidate who symbolized the weighted voting with the slogan: you cannot win written on it. However, in the novel, Bessie is a character that had even less freedom than bigger. He ordered her around and dragged her into the crime. After doing so, Bigger posses all power over her as he rapes and kills her. This demonstrates that gender can diminish one’s opportunity even further.

Because of all the oppression, Bigger wants “anything” (23) interesting to happen in his life to make it meaningful. For example, he admires Hitler, without consideration for morality, simply because he has accomplished something great with his people. Therefore, when he is running away from the white people after he has murdered, he feels the peak of freedom. Bigger feels a sense of twisted happiness when he realized he has accomplished something, even though it is bad. Additionally, during his time in jail, he takes responsibility for the murder that was considered an accident by him and the reader up to this point. This is because “he had never given himself wholeheartedly to anyone or anything, except murder” (383). During the confession, he feels an amount of pride in his actions because he himself did them.