Modern Wastelands Reexamined

“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

-T.S. Eliot

In its opaqueness and seeming tautology, T.S. Eliot’s quote epitomizes itself. By limiting his description of modern fiction to Western civilization and the “present” juncture, Eliot makes his statements specifically referential to the author and the audience in his day in age: the intelligent beneficiaries of the procession of western artistic endeavors in literature and other forms up to such point. Because the audience is so accustomed to certain interconnected meaning, the author must present a work which is correspondingly intriguing. To be a great work of literature in the modern age, this work must have internal nuance and densely connected themes of thought and action on the part of the characters within the prose descriptions of such actions and must have external allusions to the broader body of cultural knowledge that the author and audience share.

Through the use of these common pre-understandings, the author can assign multifaceted but simultaneous meanings to language that bear significance to his audience specifically. For example, in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus’ last name alone implies much about his character and relies on the preexisting erudition of the audience to make the connection between Joyce’s protagonist and the dangers of prideful brilliance as demonstrated in the Greek parables from which this personality takes its birth. In Greek mythology, Daedalus traps a Minotaur within the confines of his (i.e., Daedalus’) own elaborate invention. Similarly, Stephen’s inexplicable genius forges an alienation from his peers, his family, his country and even himself; this isolation becomes his own complex and puzzling mental labyrinth. Likewise, Stephen’s eventual disavowal of Ireland mirrors the winged escape engineered by Daedalus from his imprisonment on Crete, which cost him a family member of his own. This type of involved definition of mental state that Joyce tries to communicate through something as singular as a name is exactly the type of “complex result” to which Eliot refers. It is also an example of dislocation of language in that a proper name is not conventionally a definitional category of its subject.

As a dystopian narrative, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange relies heavily on the preexistent knowledge of its audience to predict the causal chain of events that could lead from the present (as Burgess sees it) into this possible future. The series of psychic clues left by the author throughout the novel invite the reader to imagine how the world came to be as Burgess imagines it in his piece. The hybrid slang employed by many of the novel’s characters, a fusion of English and Russian extant vulgar dialects, imply that the USSR has accomplished cultural parity, if not cultural hegemony. The inference the reader draws from Burgess’ vision invites further speculation on what it would have taken for Russia to achieve such dominance. The answer, implicitly presented by Burgess, is that Western populations, especially elite intelligentsia, have lost fundamental faith in their liberalized democratic institutions of governance and the moral convictions that originally compelled their establishment.

Alex, the novel’s neurotic anti-hero, whose nightly activities include sexual assault and gang violence, preys upon a society that has lost the will to stop him. After a police apprehension, Alex is chosen to participate in an experimental behavior modification procedure called The Ludovico Technique. This form of aversion therapy, which involves the coercive re-engineering of Alex’s personality by the forcible association of negative stimuli with previously positive phenomena, is an analogy to the entire pedagogy of 20th century behavioral psychology, and more directly a critique of B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning thesis. Burgess’ novel concludes that if Americans are willing to accept the central tenant of this behavioral psychology, that we are programmable organisms not unlike animals, than we have already forsaken the central belief in the Lockean conception of the individual and have doomed ourselves to the collectivist framework of the deterministic social interaction that undergirds communism.

F. Alexander, whose outspoken beliefs on pathological freedom of the individual provide a counterbalance to the politically dominant party that seeks to employ forcible reconditioning, eventually abandons his philosophical framework in favor of personal vendetta, embracing a fear-based reactionism instead. Ironically, the personal tragedy he experiences at the hands of Alex and his “droogs,” which directly fosters this moral implosion, can be understood as a product of excessive personal freedom, a potential consequence of his own previously held convictions. He represents the collapse of western moral resolve by the predations of fear. In the novel’s context, our fear of the Russians causes a compromise in the core foundations of our philosophy; we utterly denigrate out of fear of a competitive force and the violence it may exact upon us. These interconnected associations of meanings are varied in nature and rely on a foundation of understandings the audience should already have, which falls within the ken of Eliot’s notion that a writer of modern fiction must achieve a level of complexity commensurate with the world as the audience knows it in order to effectively communicate with them. The way in which Clockwork implores its readership to create in their own minds the progression of human events which takes their present to the author’s future provides a model of analysis for almost any dystopian novel under the Eliot paradigm.

Policy 10.007: DNA Swabbing (Policies & Procedures Manual, Sample #2)

(Sample taken from the 250+ page P&P manual I wrote for the Minimally Invasive Surgical Institute in 2014.)

Why I Love Lochwood

Does it seem to you that the days of neighborly hat-tipping and backyard barbecues are behind us, when uninitiated conversation was welcomed and front doors could be left unlocked? If so, stepping into a neighborhood as vibrant and interconnected as mine — the place where I grew up and live still — may seem like entering a different world altogether.

The small but bustling community of Lochwood sits tucked away a few miles east of White Rock Lake, a 15-or-so-minute drive from downtown. It sits at a curious junction of natural beauty and metropolitan living, in an area as replete with foliage as it is with nightlife attractions. This place offers the best of both worlds. My childhood memories here are chockfull of creek-side hiking adventures and bike rides to the local movie theater. The woods stand in the center of our community and offer a peaceful respite from the bustle of urban life; you can follow that creek all the way to White Rock Lake if you choose, without hearing so much as a car horn.

This is a community where people look out for one another; the residents connect through social media to address safety concerns and organize response teams when folks need help. Recently there was a woman whose backyard was decimated by a fallen tree; the expenses required for removal by a professional would have been enormous, so she reached out to her neighbors for help. Dozens of people showed up with chainsaws, wheelbarrows, and smiles on their faces — it took all of two hours to clear the rubble.

Lochwood has been this way as long as I can remember. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina there was a vacant house a couple streets over whose owner kindly opened its doors and offered refuge to a family of survivors, and I remember watching night after night as people dropped off bags filled with groceries, household electronics, and Toys “R” Us packages for the children.

The really great thing about growing up here is that there’s always something to do. Whether you’re a nightlife enthusiast in your mid-20s or a married mother of four, the neighborhood is close to enough activities and hangout spots to keep you busy for many a weekend.

Within three miles of Lochwood you’ll find a goldmine’s worth of hole-in-the-wall eateries — whether you seek a pub with atmosphere, a sandwich with personality, or a house dressing with attitude. These are the same menus I was ordering from 15 years ago, and the salivation has followed me to adulthood (as has the paunch, I’m afraid).

If the skies are clear, it’s a short drive to the gardens of the Arboretum, or you can drop a few bucks to rent a kayak at the lake. And when the sun finally sets, when you’re tired and worn out but wouldn’t mind knocking back a local craft brew or two with your buddies, stop at Goodfriend on your way back — it’s an aptly titled spot. (And you could easily do all this with a bike, if you prefer.)

I could go on about the seemingly endless list of nearby attractions that Lochwood boasts, why it’s a haven perfect for both the young and the old, the quiet and the outgoing, but that’s not what matters most to me. The reason I live here has less to do with the location and aesthetics and more to do with the people and the spirit. At the end of the day, what I need is a place where the neighbors look out for one another, where I feel safe but not sequestered, where I can enjoy the best my city has to offer—there’s a difference between a house and a home, after all.

Note: this article originally appeared in D Magazine’s “Neighborhood Guides” section. Click here to view the original article.

On Daniel Gilbert’s ‘Stumbling on Happiness’

After reading the unfathomably popular Stumbling on Happiness, this much is clear: Daniel Gilbert is a happy, accomplished guy who is amazed by his own thought-stream and loves to hear himself talk. The book inhabits an exciting new category of creative non-fiction that can best be described as “speculative nouveau-psychology”, wherein academics convey a series of very basic ideas by way of witticism, good-humored anecdote, and prose so exhaustive it reminds you of a teacher who says “dude” a lot and sits backward-facing in chairs to appear informal.

Like many a psychologist, Gilbert is much better at describing the nature of the problem than he is at suggesting how to deal with it. (The 263-page book’s “solution” portion begins on page 247, to give you an idea.) Now, look: I realize this is cognitive psychology and not self-help; I realize that the intention was to objectively deconstruct—rather than philosophically medicate—the happiness that eludes so many, choosing instead to debunk misconceptions and address the subconscious habituation that caused us to feel shitty in the first place. And all masturbatory prose aside, Gilbert is a thorough investigator: he is rarely speculative when presenting ideas, always careful to attach supporting data to his every claim (usually in the form of case studies), which ultimately makes for a more scientific and data-driven read.

The problem lies not in Gilbert’s reasoning or approach; it’s that none of his conclusions are really all that revelatory—at least not to the genuinely depressed person for whom they were (ostensibly) intended. It’s as if the book was written for the layman who is merely curious about the unhappiness of others, or perhaps the grad student who’s just looking to spruce up the anecdotal rhetoric he’ll someday need in order to professionally buffer the unhappiness of his patients. That might sound extreme but it really isn’t. Entire chapters are spent convincing the reader of such heavy-handed concepts as “sometimes people who seem happy really aren’t”, and “our view of the future is often wrong”, and even (no joke) “sometimes bad experiences are only bad because we don’t think about all the good ones”—all in meticulous, mercilessly pragmatic detail, as if he were demonstrating some deeply involved theory of the universe to a group of wide-eyed schoolchildren. The only thing more frustrating than the condescending simplicity of his conclusions, however, is the redundancy with which he feels the need to drive them home. Here’s how it generally goes—a recollection courtesy of Yours Truly:

DG: Study X shows that the participants who had already eaten the Doritos were actually less likely to accurately predict how hungry they would be the next day. I guess you can say we like to hedge our bets when the “chips” are down…

YT: Yes, people’s current emotional states often affect their predictions of the future and yes, these predictions are driven by circumstantial factors and are thus often wrong.

DG: Might I provide an additional forty pages of similar data to prove it? Let’s say the waiter gives you the option of either buche de Noel or a mouth-watering slice of tiramisu… [The man likes his food analogies.]

Alright, maybe I’m being too hard on the guy; after all, the content heats up (a little) at about the halfway mark and there are certainly some interesting conclusions to be gleaned. After reading it, I truly want to say that I am better equipped to confront the deceptive illusions of the brain, this subconscious house of mirrors that keeps me from living my life to the fullest, but that just isn’t so. And while Stumbling on Happiness contains a few interesting tidbits here and there, with enough nuggets of anecdotal wisdom interspersed to make for a halfway interesting read, there just isn’t enough here to justify its length or the accomplished tone of its author. Then again, maybe I’m just the kind of person who’s spent his entire depressed life pondering the transient nature of an ever-elusive happiness and am simply projecting that frustration onto a book because none of this shit is news to me.

On William Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’

Worst acid trip ever.

But seriously, though. This book is a high-speed roller coaster ride through Hell that, like many drug experiences, begins with seemingly pineal-gland-stimulating fun followed by immense disappointment and, eventually, an upset stomach. Naked Lunch is that low-grade hallucinogen you buy from that guy you don’t really trust, in that city you know nothing about, when you can’t find a decent hookup but still want to get high. Lo and behold, the onset puts you on your ass, but the initial shock wears off pretty quickly and by the time you reach the halfway mark, you really just want it to be over. But you press on. You have no choice really; you’re already locked in. And when you finally come down, you realize that the secrets of the universe probably aren’t contained in your couch pillow after all, and that you don’t like Frank Zappa as much as you thought. To put it simply, this is one of those things you’re sort of glad you did, but only because you can check it off your list and never return. Are you sick of the metaphor yet?

“Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that…You see, it has no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.”

Just as Dr. Benway’s grisly operation has nothing to do with treatment (and everything to do with promoting his own sadism), so too does Burroughs take us through an exasperatingly vapid museum of filth and grime for the mere purpose of eliciting a gasp from the audience—screaming, “Art! Art!” all the while. Since each vignette subscribes to this mantra by pounding it into our heads like a dead horse, we are left with a novel that has little to say, contains nothing beneath the surface, and strives only to push us to our gastric limits. It’s a disappointing admission indeed, mostly because Burroughs’ prose turns out to be surprisingly masterful—both effective and unique in its ability to portray things in fairly concrete terms whilst disorienting the absolute shit out of you. Sadly, these small chunks of flavor can’t conceal the gaping emptiness at the novel’s center, and one quickly gets the sense that the author is trying too hard to compensate for that. Also, take note: When we use the word “filthy” in the Burroughs context, we’re not talking about innuendo or the dated vulgarity you’ve perhaps come to expect from other literary “progressives”—this is juvenile, shit-you-find-in-the-woods-style filth, folks, and while a few sections of Lunch come across as convincing hallucinatory fiction, others read more like something you’d find in a pedophile’s dream diary. Not quite my idea of a night out. On a slightly more positive note, some of the junkie-specific stories are kind of fun, and I guess if this book has succeeded in anything, it’s succeeded in obliterating any chance of me trying heroin EVER.

Look, there are ways to be disgusting and vile. There are ways to create Burgessian landscapes that convey how fucked up everything is. But there are ways to do it creatively and with purpose as well. The problem with Naked Lunch isn’t necessarily the filth itself, but rather the emptiness behind it. This book is lifeless and nonhuman and the appeal hinges entirely on its own shock value, as if Burroughs, much like a Hostel or Saw sequel, just wants to see how much carnage and blood spatter you can take. Some people enjoy this sort of thing—hell, there was a point in my life where I did too (and yes, I loved every last one of those god-awful movies). But I was fifteen, man; today I’m a fully developed, fully dysfunctional human being living in a fucked up world where violence and suffering is less a joke than a reality, in an era where time is invaluable and choices have consequences and entertainment has power like you wouldn’t believe. And while I don’t necessarily expect a good novel to supply all the answers or act as some towering beacon of morality, I want it to mean something, and I want it to mean a little more than this.

So, in conclusion: If you’re young and the cooler is empty, give it a go—but if you’re looking for something that’ll knock you off your axis, there’s better stuff out there.

Behind My Eyes: Reflections

Li-Young Lee’s poems from the first half of Behind My Eyes capture flawlessly the alienated misery of an immigrant as he explores love, life and spirituality. Many of the works allow his audience to catch glimpses into a past that he both cherishes and scorns, and Lee admits he knows “nothing about happy endings,” (31) a dark signifier that sets the tone for the remainder of the book’s first half. Poems like “Immigrant Blues” and “Sweet Peace in Time” seemed to give me the impression of Lee struggling with the English language and the synonyms of words that sound similar (“song” and “wing”), all the while feeling the need to embrace the language and culture entirely in order to understand the meaning of life’s trivialities and concepts like death. This is how I wanted to see the poem, but as I re-read it I realized it could simply represent a spiritual or mental disconnect from one’s words and meanings rather than strictly a language barrier. While many of Lee’s poems seem direct and simple at first glance, I found that further speculation caused his lyrics to become stylistically ambiguous at times. That isn’t to say, however, that his references to the past are not what they seem; on the contrary, “A Hymn To Childhood” is as straightforward as any poem I have read. Here, Lee mourns for a childhood he never had but at the same time can never escape. We see flashbacks of his family’s furnishings being smashed to bits by armed soldiers, his mother weeping with grief over each letter she receives, and Lee himself questioning God. His childhood was both an experience that “didn’t last” (2) and “one that never ends,” (30) leaving the poet in a conflicted state of being. These haunting memories make it easy to understand why he finds himself being the only child on the playground who is actually concerned with the extent of the universe in “Becoming Becoming,” where he distinctly remembers his unanswered questions to playmates, or why his vision of life embodies itself as a morbid card game that deals him horrendous scenarios as he tries not to lose (die). His past has changed his perspective on life entirely, and I feel like this is one of the messages Lee tries the hardest to get across. In “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees.” Lee warns all immigrants that meeting someone who offers hope for a new beginning is a notion just as convoluted as meeting someone with a past similar to their own.

From Sand Creek: Reflections

Robin Riley Fast does an excellent job of putting Simon Ortiz’ From Sand Creek in perspective by outlining the importance of the poet/reader relationship in her article “It is ours to Know,” where she examines the vivaciousness of Ortiz’ poignant narratives on the history and fate of his people. Fast found a slightly different thesis than I did in my reading, but presents Ortiz as a more sympathetic being searching for a new America. Fast gives us some vital biographical info (some of which I was unaware myself) both about Ortiz’ inner connection with his culture and his relationship with many of his own people’s personal plights (Ortiz’ many poems that take place in the veteran’s hospital are a direct result of the time he spent their for alcoholism, for instance) and this helps us better understand the text. What Fast really tries to get across, however, is the importance of reading Ortiz with a comprehensive eye and embodying a sense of responsibility to temporarily embrace the perspective and continue its analyses in our own lives, the same way a campfire storyteller relies on his or her audience’s influence in order to truly keep the story alive. The stories of the Sand Creek Massacre and similar historically suppressed events, according to Fast, should be read or listened to with a sense of intimacy and compares the experience to hearing a Holocaust survivor speak: it won’t be long before the first-hand accounts of these tragedies have all but diminished, and the responsibility is placed on the following generation to make such recollections viable in the minds of the next. Fast later claims that through the examination of its three types of people in his poems (Indians, whites and veterans), Ortiz searches for an alternative legacy for his people, one that is not fraught with needless violence and despair. In my previous response paper, I made a point in saying that I didn’t feel as though Ortiz’ tragedy-stricken poems were as bitter and damning as they could have been because of their allusions to the overarching evil of individuals rather than the demonstrative efforts of one force, and Fast makes a similar connection when she finds Ortiz referring to the perpetrators of Sand Creek’s downfall as merely pawns influenced by and responsible for their own choices and actions: “they weren’t simply encouraged by the ideologues and preachers of Manifest Destiny, but collaborated in its realization as, in the expansion of the U. S., settlers repeatedly pressed beyond treaty-established boundaries, then insisted on military support” (Fast 55). This allows Ortiz to see 20^th and 21^st Century America as a descendent of individuals rather than spawns of either the invaders or victims of 1864. It is this mindset that opens the door to sustaining a sense of commonality among the present people, and one cannot attempt to do so by remaining silent. Ortiz’ bleak recollections are intended to stir us with discomfort and recognize our own lack of involvement. When we hear his campfire stories, we become witnesses whether we like it or not, and prompts us to respond by making alternative decisions similar to what the settlers could have chosen: they could have, at any time, made peace with the Indians and attempt to understand them. In the same way, we can make the decisions to “Remember Sand Creek” and “Remember My Lai” by taking the perspectives of others into account and refusing to accept delusive information at face value. The power of history used throughout the poetry, coupled with the hope he describes for a bright and new America, should give us the incentive to keep this utilization of language and storytelling alive in literature.

For all my supposed understanding of From Sand Creek, I was surprised at how many dots I had failed to connect after reading Fast’s article. In addition to the vital biographical information listed (which, upon further reflection, I now realize any reader of Creek should be given), Fast pinpoints not only Ortiz’ overall message, but what should be done with it. She suggests that the audience has a responsibility to use what they have been given as a foundation in order to make better choices than the generations before us. While I find this agreeable, I would further argue that it is our responsibility to pay the same respects to our country’s past as we do for its future, and that in doing so, we can not only make a difference as individuals but rather a collective formation of rectifying thought and retaliation.

Bird Eating Bird & the Social Construction of Race: Reflection

My immediate concern when entering this course was my difficulty reading, understanding and ultimately interpreting poetry. Although I’m an English major and the thought is, in itself, pretty ridiculous, I have always found it to be a reoccurring problem throughout my academic life. But it’s something I am determined to get better at, and that’s why I chose to take this course. I was able to put my mind somewhat at ease after reading Ian F. Hanley Lopez’ article The Social Construction of Race, which I thought did an excellent job of approaching the topics of race and multi-ethnicity as viewed in America today in a direct but understand format. I appreciated how each claim was backed up sufficiently with a valid source, beginning obviously with the Hudgins v. Wright case and continuing on to the appropriation of Mexicans as a race rather than a nationality for strictly socially-based reasons. I found myself being hit with knowledge I was previously unaware of to begin with (although I should have been), like the statistical reference to the intragroup and intergroup fact that members of the same race often exhibit less similar genetic characteristics with their own groups and instead have more genetically in common with others; I don’t place much weight in the theory that race classification is a purely biological issue, but this shocked me. The article did an exceptional job of proving its own thesis: that race is purely a product of the social influences surrounding the present time and environment of which such a classification is assumed. My only complaint with the article is a minor one, but it still bothered me, and this was how Lopez brought himself and his racial identity personally into the article. By telling us of his mixed heritage and revealing his favor for one over the other, it felt to me that the paragraph did nothing for the article’s otherwise strong argument and instead stood out awkwardly from the rest of the work.

My prior concerns aside, I was pleasantly surprised as I read through the poems of Bird Eating Bird at how coherent most of the work was. I enjoyed Naca’s vivid imagery and the interpersonal emotions of everyday life from the perspective of a Hispanic/Filipino-American, as seen in narratives like “Speaking English is Like,” “Speaking Spanish is Like,” and “In Mexico City,” all of which feature laundry list-style excursions of mixed feelings toward her current residence and places of origin. To Naca, the English language is both as graceful as “the curtain flicker in the leafy, august breeze” and as difficult and burdensome as tree branches sagging under the weight of heavy sacks. Mexico City too proves itself to be filled with nostalgic memories of sadness and unfulfilled expectations for the Naca, but also the source of her strength due to the embedding of tumultuous life lessons she was forced to learn while living there. I enjoyed the narrative of driving through Nebraska (which I have done many a time to see relatives) and the strange scenery of the motor lodge that is apparently located in San Antonio, but oddly enough I think my favorite poem appeared early on in my readings: Ode to Glass. A poem about a Pepsi bottle isn’t exactly the most striking of topical subject matter, but I somehow found myself understanding the author better in this narrative than in any of the others. The childlike sense of admiration Naca exhibits for something which seems insignificant as an adult really captured me. It made me think about how I used to collect soda bottles and caps as a kid, something that obviously wouldn’t interest me today. With the switch from the Mexico to the Philippines taking place, perhaps a Pepsi bottle was the familiarity she could retain.

Shadow of Al-Andalus: Reflection

I found many of the poems in Victor Cruz’ In The Shadow of Al-Andalus to be very nostalgic in their approach to the poet’s multi-ethnic background and his personal account of how the “meshing” of these cultures has affected him. I found him addressing similar issues as Kristin Naca does in her poetry, but with a more direct, less abstract personal perspective. While I certainly enjoyed reading through Naca’s work, I did find myself absorbing Cruz’ poems with a little more ease. Take the poem “Manhattan Transfer,” for instance, where we see a melting pot of different cultures in the heart of American suburbia; Cruz, a child or younger man I would assume at the time of this reminiscent occurrence, seems to be caught between a life he remembers and a life he has been forced to delve into as he describes he and his family’s first impressions of the bustling American lifestyle. Instead of mountainous landscapes, he sees luminous skyscrapers; when the temperature drops to scathingly low levels, this is when his family realizes their mistake, and the poem seems to take a dark turn as the poet feels more and more alienated and reluctant to accept a new lifestyle where the people, speech, furnishings, and geographic surroundings are all foreign to him. The lines “The Spanish language took us to divorce court, / while the English fought battles against us” (Cruz) brought poems like “Speaking English Is Like” and “Speaking Spanish Is Like” to mind as Cruz fights to retain the sanctity of his culturally devout home against these English “invaders”; he does this because other than his dreams and personal memories, the tightly held grip on his past is his only immediate way of salvaging the life he lived before. He dreams nomadically of his past but assures us that he is able to look both backwards and forwards, and this glimmer of hope, coupled with the profound sense of chaos he feels – stood out to me as a driven thesis in Shadows.

Cruz uses superstition and primal nativity to illustrate the roots of his family and people as a whole in poems like “Clan,” which deal with the supernatural extensively and examine the poet’s ability to look “both forwards and backwards” like in “Manhattan Transfer.” In this vivid excursion we see a baby of mixed origin die in Cruz’ family (it is suggested that the German blood was the cause), his aunt hallucinating images of his cryptic dead grandmother, the destructive rampage of a supposedly demon-possessed horse, and an uncle whose wife dabbles in the occult for medicinal purposes. These stories all carry some level of weight in the primitive human mind, yet when presented with reading and writing, Cruz’ family refutes its overarching value and dismisses it as nothing more than sounds that please the ear. He deals exclusively with the past, present and future in three steps: first with the past as he visualizes a fond childhood memory of swimming in the ravine with his family overlooking a beautiful landscape of green pastures. Yet when Cruz returns to this very spot in the present, he is deeply disappointed: “it all looks so diminished, so small, / the river is but a stream subtracted from the immensity / I once sensed” (Cruz). Next, we see the poet taking a glimpse into the future, which he describes as only experiencing in his dreams. But these glimpses of what is yet to come are brief, and before long his dream is reverted back to the past. This multi-linear view of the human experience, and Cruz’ perspective particularly, demonstrates an effective and thorough view on a wide array of cultures in America today.

Works Cited

Cruz, Victor Hernandez. In The Shadow of Al-Andalus. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2011. Print.

Fringe of Reality

Anyone planning to critique a literary work of any kind must first understand the basis on which that literature was created, the background surrounding it, and the social commentary used by the author. Throughout history, themes used by writers have proven to be subjective to the environment surrounding them. They represent the struggles and philosophies of the author in relation to his surrounding society, giving readers a better sense of its purpose. By interpreting each novel’s theme and the author’s lives surrounding it, we can understand who the work was intended for and what it was meant to accomplish. Light In August and Cane are two novels in which isolation and dislocation are used frequently by each respective author in order to convey a sense of non-linear development among characters who are not viewed equally by the rest of the world. Both Toomer and Faulkner give similar versions of the black experience in their novels by using the recurring theme of mixed racial background to show societal disapproval.

Jean Toomer examines three main types of blacks in his novel, Cane, which help us better understand how race was portrayed negatively in society: the primitive black, who makes decisions based on emotion rather than logic, the “urbanized” black, one generation removed from slavery, whose educational background and financial position keep him from truly being able to connect with the black experience. He presents a picture of the primitiveness depicted in blacks through the character of Karintha, whose savagery is that of a slave returning to its roots. She is, in many ways, a noble savage; innocent though sexually promiscuous. Without self-restraint, she is a beautiful mind that is misunderstood and seen only as an object of physical desire. The image Toomer creates with Karintha easily accounts for the black female stereotypes in early 20^th Century America. A middle class man of mixed racial background, Toomer himself felt a deep sense of alienation within the rigidness of white and black communities because of how his race and economic classification affected their view him. He later joined the Quakers in an effort to secede from society altogether. Toomer’s struggles with racial identity are described through socially distant characters such as Becky, a white woman who is exiled by her community for having sex with a black man, and her two nameless offspring, who both experience severe racial confusion and become outcasts of both communities as well. These boys are prime examples of how societal dissonance towards members of mixed heritage affects their outcome as human beings. They are completely nameless to the surrounding town that judges them solely for being the children of a white mother and black father. Because of their displacement from society, they live as outcasts and have trouble keeping jobs. Society’s hatred of the boys inadvertently forces them to become increasingly defensive and violent to survive; in one scenario they are seen responding to a town’s racial prejudice by shooting two men and shouting “Godam the white folks; godam the niggers” (Toomer 6). This coarse philosophy loosely represents the unfortunate truth of what many racially mixed Americans of this era must have been feeling. With no sense of belonging attributed to either racial experience, they were forced to tread on the fringes of reality. The nature of his background kept Toomer from truly understanding the black experience, and this made him want to explore it. Because of this, the recurring themes of isolation and alienation are especially prevalent in Cane because Toomer writes as an onlooker; an outsider looking in. Toomer’s personal life draws similar conclusions about society’s ignorance of the biracial man; in 1923 he agreed to submit a bibliographic statement to the Associated Negro Press to promote Cane, but was outraged when they asked him to mention his “colored blood.” He responded angrily that he was not a Negro and would not feature himself as such, going so far as threatening to cancel the book’s publication. Therefore, the intended audience for the novel consists of those who can judge Toomer’s standpoints based on the quality of his writing, not his racial background. At a key time during the Harlem Renaissance, Toomer explored the vanishing aspects of the black experience and revealed his own alienation from it for being a biracial man.

William Faulkner paints a similarly haunting image of societal alienation through the character of Joe Christmas, a biracial man whose heritage keeps him from developing into a fully functional character. Instead, he is just as much an outcast to the rest of the world as the two biracial boys are in Toomer’s novel. As a child in an all-white orphanage that experienced dissonance and racial slurs on a daily basis, Christmas becomes a caged beast of his own psyche at an early age, forced to lash out at the dismissive and racist society he feels trapped inside. Throughout his life, he is systematically dehumanized by almost everyone he comes in contact with and this causes him to become distrusting and ill-tempered; he walks through a white neighborhood with feelings of insecurity and carries a razor in his hand for protection while passing a group of blacks. The traits of his abusive father cause him to turn to violence more quickly, as seen in his treatment to the drunken Joe Brown, who he pounds incessantly for hurling racial insults at him. The hatred he has for his controlling mother is reflected in his actions toward Miss Burden, who is murdered by Christmas after voicing her intentions to change him. Because his own existence is so empty and devalued, mercilessly taking the lives of others becomes a tragic, if not inevitable, result for Christmas. Joe Brown becomes a prime suspect in the murder only to be freed immediately and without further questioning after revealing out of desperation that Christmas had “nigger blood in him” (Faulkner 98). Immediately, the police shift the tone of the investigation toward Christmas, assuming that he must have been the murderer since he is of mixed heritage. Although Christmas is, in fact, guilty; he is never given a fair trial and the case is not investigated further; he himself is later brutally murdered on sight by law enforcement, whose only incentive towards him lies in the fact that he is biracial. Joe’s sociopathic tendencies can just as easily be traced to the violent world of retribution and hatred he grew up in.

Both Toomer and Faulkner employ non-linear storytelling techniques in their novels to amplify the distance that separates the characters from society. At one point in Light in August, Christmas loses his track of time altogether and asks a woman on the street what day it is, only to be told not to set foot on her property. In the same way, Becky is so far removed from society that she is spoken of like an urban legend by the narrator, and her existence continues to be defined by her interracial involvement even after she is found dead. The themes of isolation and displacement used by Toomer and Faulkner are examined in the non-linear sense that the characters live outside of the timeline. Joe Christmas and the two mixed brothers are not characters with histories, but rather a personal reserve of painful memories that forcedly shaped them into abrasive sociopaths. They live on the outskirts of humanity and inhabit a world of their own making, sabotaging any opportunity to establish a human connection. Their development as human beings has been compromised, partially by their own actions but mostly by social forces which are beyond their control. Defined only by a traumatic past of rejection which keeps them from experiencing human connection, they remain irrational and misunderstood as the pathological prejudices of society shape their destinies for them.

Works Cited

Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Liveright, 1993. Print.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.