The Lone Ranger & Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Sherman Alexie

Ignoring the old maxim about not judging the thing by its cover, let’s begin by looking at this volume’s front, with the familiar basketball hoop against a background of surreal orange and purple thunderheads, in which we can see at the top the shadows of Tonto and the Lone Ranger (by the way—remember the Lone Ranger was a cowboy and Tonto the Indian, and Tonto in Spanish means Stupid). Then, at the bottom, across the back-board of the basketball hoop is the laser-lit trajectory of a trout, as though he has flown past (but not through) the basketball hoop. Oh, and over there behind and to the right of the hoop we can see the smoky flame of a fire burning.

This mighty list of incongruities really does sum up Sherman Alexie’s book of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which, not incidentally, was the basis for his award-winning film, Smoke Signals. One interesting reaction to Alexie’s work came from J.T., a professor whose opinions I respect. He had seen the film and read a bit of Alexie’s work—perhaps some of the anthologized stories. He said something to the effect of: “I just don’t know where to put those ideas.” In other words, even classifying Alexie’s ideas was difficult for J.T., because they don’t relate to any of the traditions J.T. (a white male) is accustomed to.

That makes a lot of sense. J.T. is aware of the traditions that create his “taste” (I’m using that word for lack of a better one at the moment. But other readers and reviewers aren’t so aware—and that’s how writers outside of the traditions get marginalized. I’m not sure I’m making my point very clearly here—so I started by talking about the picture on the cover of the book. Many people who were steeped in traditional art would look at the book cover and say “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” They might not stop to think about the Indian traditions that informed the art, or that they themselves are biased by their white, traditional upbringing. Similarly, they might not stop to think how limiting their reading has been—and they might not understand that Alexie is doing something with his writing that can teach all of us something.
One thing we learn is Indian truisms, like Victor tells us in the story, “A Drug Called Tradition, “There are things you should learn,” he says (21), and “We are trapped in the now” (22). There’s tremendous depth in these stories. And while they are traditional in that they have a beginning, middle, and end, I find that the forms of the stories are sometimes different, and that there is more of a puzzle to them.

One thing that is somewhat different (and especially interesting to me) is the humor. One example of Indian humor is the way Indians hide from tourists behind “quick joke[s]” (“Amusements” 55). Also, we find out about wry Indian inside jokes. In “All I Wanted to do was Dance,” Victor shares a drink with a drunk stranger, who tells him it is his birthday. Victor asks him, “What tribe are you?” and the stranger tells him, “Cherokee.”
“Really? Shit, I’ve never met a real Cherokee.”
“Neither have I.”
They laugh at this, and share some more drinks, and then the stranger says,
“Hey, cousin [...] You know how to tell the difference between a real Indian and a fake Indian?”
“How?”
“The real Indian got blisters on his feet. The fake Indian got blisters on his ass” (91).

I like humor like that, because it feels most like authentic Indian humor—like we’re being let in on secret Indian jokes.

Other funny passages, though, are more contemporary and cross pop culture borders. For example, in “Family Portrait,” Junior says, “I’ve seen Indians who could do all this MTV Club dancing, electric slides and shit, all over the place and then look like a white person stumbling through the sawdust of a powwow” (201).
And Norma tells him “You can’t dance very good but you got the heart of a dancer.
Junior tells her “Heart of a dancer [...] And feet like the buffalo” (201).

Alexie doesn’t want to be called Native American, because the term is just a symbol of white guilt to him, is worth reading because he’s a great writer, not because he’s a marginalized writer. His book is fantastic.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou

Hmmm…a memoir, I kept saying. Why would this be on the list of American Comedies? Let me rephrase that: A memoir in which the author tells the very upsetting story of her molestation by a step-father—as well as her repeated abandonment by her parents and other events…how can that be a comedy. A few parts were funny, and by that I mean that I might have smiled as I turned a page once or twice, but even though I could not put down the book for the two days it took me to read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I found it hard to judge the book as a comedy. Viewed broadly, from a literary seat at roughly the height of a tennis chair umpire, I suppose it is accurate to call Angelou’s book a comedy in the way the ancient Greek plays where the couples that have rotten beginnings and end up married are called comedies. Similarly, Angelou, who suffers agonies the Greeks never thought of mentioning, ends up with a baby son (just never mind that no one would sleep with her, so she decided to deny her lesbianism—and who knows what about her transgenderism—and get the cutest boy in the neighborhood to do her [not such a bad plan], but then she lucked out and got pregnant first try). So she’s stuck with raising him on her own. I guess I’m Euro-centric in assuming that’s not such a happy ending. In WASP-ville, that’s a one-way ticket to permanent shame-ville, and I could cite you ten examples right now of some shamed WASPs who headed directly to trailer-ville with their out-of-wedlock children. But no one asked me.

Mostly, I’m being silly there, because it truly is none of my business to discuss, but the notion of being outside my culture to discuss child-rearing practices, but the ability to observe one’s culture—as well as what’s outside it—is one of the themes of Angelou’s book. The story of her life truly does deserve to be memorialized. Her first memory is being put, at the age of three, with her four-year-old brother on a train from California to Arkansas with a note pinned on their shoulder about where they were going. The story says so much that she didn’t have to say. Having just taken a train trip, I am astonished at the irresponsibility of the people who did that….and how they could have let two such tiny children out of their sight. Not to mention how the little children managed to feed themselves, much less stay out of harm’s way (the train wheels, diapers, etc….). How terrifying for them! I wonder later at the various other abandonments that occurred to Angelou along the way, the various places and ways where people let her down. The only “symptom” of such brutality that she reports is that she stops talking for a while, which at the time when she does it (after she is raped) seems like a perfectly adaptive response. Indeed, the book is entirely—and seemingly without her knowing it—a testament to her strength of will, to the depth of her character.

How does she do it? How was Angelou strong in the face of disaster after disaster, which to many other lesser human beings would have been extremely destructive and might ultimately have resulted in the annihilation of the personality? I think in part the tremendous strength of her grandmother, who at least partly raised her, was very helpful as a type of stability. Angelou’s belief is strong in the African-American female of every variety as a source of strength. In the end, she argues:

The fact that the adult American Negro [sic] female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance. (273)

Miss Lonelyhearts

Nathanael West

In all these years of reading Great American Books, how did I miss N. West? Turns out I love Miss Lonelyhearts. Almost every one of the passages is funny, and even though some of them are perhaps a bit overwrought, I think he means for them to be so, and from that excess of feeling derives much of the humor. In case you haven’t read Miss Lonelyhearts, it is about a newspaper reporter who, at the bottom of the proverbial writing totem pole, is assigned to write an advice column (thus the title). At first, he’s cynical about the whole prospect, but the experience of having to write the column turns him into a humbler sort of fellow. That synopsis makes the story sound overly sincere to the point of being trite—but believe me when I say that it isn’t. The tone of the story is anything but syrupy.

For a sense of the tone, the reader must listen to a few descriptions from early on in the story. One of the first times the narrator allows us to see Miss Lonelyhearts at work (we know the writer by his pen name), the narrator explains that Miss Lonelyhearts can hardly face his subjects. He wants to turn instead to:

the imagined desert where desperate, broken-hearted, and the others [are] still building his name. They [...] run out of sea shells and [are] using faded photographs, soiled fans, time-tables, playing cards, broken toys, imitation jewelry [...]. He killed his great understanding heart by laughing. (26)

So by listing the squalor he sees around him. Miss L. is maybe for the first time in the literature (1930s) describing some of the squalor he sees around him—but for entertainment.

One of the interesting parts of the narrative, for me, is the protagonist’s name. Clearly, we are to snicker a bit each time at his being called “Miss Lonelyhearts”— all the other characters also call him that. Of course, that raises the issue of an entire gender-crossing subtext; one could read this book productively from the perspective of queer theory, questioning the way Miss Lonelyhearts feels distant from (and moves closer to) Jesus Christ as a possible metaphor for the distance from the church a transgendered male feels from the church. Textual evidence abounds that would support such an argument. At one point, for instance, when Miss Lonelyhearts ponders his distance from Christ, he decides that he can “find no support for either his eyes or his feelings” (39). The narrator doesn’t explain, but the reader can infer from the passage the sense of distance.

But from the standpoint of a researcher of comedy, to call the male character Miss Lonelyhearts is to destabilize him, to create an incongruity about his obvious masculinity, and that is humorous.

Shrike, Miss Lonelyhearts’s boss and sinister seeming editor, seems to have several purposes. Lonelyhearts smiles at him “as the saints are supposed to have smiled at those about to martyr them” (44). We are to gather a religious feeling about Shrike—and about Lonelyhearts himself, who the narrator often compares to a priest who hears confession in reading and answering the letters. But the comedy comes from his smart-ass responses to the letters. When he can’t write a heart-felt response, the snide answers are comical. Lonelyhearts’s inability to feel makes fun of the sentimental response that we’re expecting.

The climax of the novella happens when Miss Lonelyhearts agrees to go home with the disabled Mr. Doyle, husband of Mrs. Doyle who he has been sleeping with (after reading her letter about being lonely in the presence of her “crippled” husband). It’s a terrible scene, in which Lonelyhearts agrees to go with Mr. Doyle, fully knowing what awaits him in the room with Mrs. Doyle, and indeed it happens that she tries to play footsies under the table. Only this time, Miss L. “only [breaks] his beatific smile to drink” (48). He has decided in this case to take the high road, and he’s waiting, it seems, for some sort of communication from God. The narrator explains that he’s not afraid of silence because he’s “busy trying to find a message” and that when he does “speak it [will] have to be in the form of a message” (48).

Finally, Mr. Doyle, the disabled man, apparently having observed his wife’s flirtations with Miss L., half-jokes “Ain’t I the pimp, to bring home a guy for my wife?” (48). Mrs. Doyle protests in a fury and they both laugh, but then fight, ending the tousle in tears. Finally, Miss L. says something:

Please don’t fight [...] He loves you, Mrs. Doyle; that’s why he acts like that. Be kind to him. [...] You have a big, strong body, Mrs. Doyle. Holding your husband in your arms, you can warm him and give him life. [...]He [carries] a heavy load of weariness and pain. You can substitute a dream of yourself for this load. [...] You can do this by letting him conquer you in your bed… (49)

But rather than stunning them with his brilliance, Miss Lonelyhearts merely confuses them. This “sage advice” turns out to be a bunch of silliness. Mrs. Doyle is “too astonished to laugh” and Mr. Doyle is “embarrassed” (49). Miss L. has “failed to tap the force in his heart and merely written a column for the paper” (49). This part is really clever, see, because West makes fun of the kind of sentimentality that everyone else writes by writing it himself—and then making fun of any reader who might have fallen for it!

So what can Miss L. do, then but try again. He becomes “hysterical” and screams “Christ is love,” which might at first sound like the ultimate trite ending, but listen to what else he says about that: “Christ is the black fruit that hangs on the crosstree. Man was lost by eating of the forbidden fruit. He shall be saved by eating of the bidden fruit. The black Christ-fruit, the love fruit. . . “ (49). It sounds like his own love poem to Christ, not someone else’s made up religion.

That would have made a good ending, but in fact what happens is bizarre, what is truly an end-of-the-twentieth century Hollywood ending, rather than a 1930s ending, for my money. Don’t read this if you don’t want to know. Miss L. is sick with a fever and hallucinating. He begins to hallucinate, looking at the crucifix on the wall across from his bed, seeing “a background of blood velvet, sprinkled with tiny nerve stars” (56). Then he realizes that “the room [is] full of grace” and hears the voice of God. The narrator says “his identification with God was complete” and “God approved of his every thought” (57). By a silly twist of events, Mr. Doyle has decided to kill Miss L. So in comes Mr. Doyle, and disguised behind a newspaper, of course, is a gun. Doyle and Lonelyhearts struggle over that gun.

The really great part of it is, though, that Betty (Miss L.’s other almost virginal, but now pregnant lover, who he has agreed to marry) enters the scene in time to stop the struggle. But when Doyle sees her getting in the way, he tries to drop the gun, which then goes off accidentally, shooting Miss L. anyway, who then takes Doyle down the stairs with him—the joke here is that the deaths are accidental/on purpose, the ultimate random end to the religious, no?

Side Effects

Woody Allen

“Needleman was constantly obsessing over his funeral plans and once told me, ‘I much prefer cremation to burial in the earth, and both to a weekend with Mrs. Needleman.’ In the end, he chose to have himself cremated and donated his ashes to the University of Heidelberg, which scattered them to the four winds and got a deposit on the urn” (“Remembering Needleman” 3).

We meet Needleman in the first story of the collection, a narrative that serves as a scaffold to rest jokes upon—jokes that stand of their own accord, or perhaps would stand up were they given Allen’s live delivery.

Did you know, reader, that Allen was first a standup comedian—funny, at that?

At any rate, it is difficult not to read Allen’s short stories in his familiar stammering, sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow speech. What is true, though is that this story, “Remembering Needleman” doesn’t develop Needleman as much of a human being the reader is to care about; rather he—and the others in the story are meant to reflect the kinds of people we might encounter. That is, if we live in the big city. Needleman waxes philosophical by pondering the nature of Existence:

“Authentic Being, reasoned Needleman, could only be achieved on weekends and even then it required the borrowing of a car. Man, according to Needleman, was not a ‘thing’ apart from nature, but was involved ‘in nature,’ and could not observe his own existence without first pretending to be indifferent and then running around to the opposite end of the room quickly in the hopes of glimpsing himself” (“Remembering Needleman” 5).

Needleman is a city hero, who has to borrow a friend’s car to achieve any sort of enlightenment. Only a New Yorker can understand that. Someone from L.A. doesn’t get it; hell, as the song goes, “nobody walks in L.A.” In NYC, you don’t need a car, but for nirvana, one borrows one. Profound.

Interestingly, though, these one-liners continue through the other stories, including the now much-anthologized “Kugelmass Episode,” in which the eponymous character, Kugelmass, a middle-aged and unsatisfied college professor gets an opportunity to travel in time. For $20 a visit, the inventor of the device can throw “any novel into [the] cabinet” with him and “shut the doors, and tap it three times” (44) Then, Kugelmass finds himself within the pages of that same novel and may cavort freely with the character of his choice. He selects Emma Bovary, but then finds the affair gets out of control when she becomes too demanding.

While the characters are slightly developed in that story (since Emma Bovary in and of herself is somewhat developed in Flaubert’s own book, and so we can hardly credit Allen with having invented her in the first place), we can credit Allen for having developed for characters that truly do seem to change and develop in the final story, “Retribution.” This story felt, plotwise, more like the outline of one of his films, in which the young man loves—idealizes—his girl, but she doesn’t love him—until the tearfully break up, he finds someone he professes to love, and then he finds something else to do. Then SHE decides she likes him. Reverse psychology works. More to say here, but much more to read.

A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces

It took me twenty years to finish Toole’s book. Someone in college gave it to me, shocked that I hadn’t already read it, and I practically threw the book away after reading only about thirty pages, believing (I confess to you ashamedly today) myself to have been identified by the gift horse as the Ignatius Reilly character. Perhaps if I had been more accurate, I would have realized the only person who had identified me as Ignatius was myself. But to say we’re stupid when we’re twenty years old is a truism, so we’ll just skip on by that and say that twenty years later, I did see what everyone liked about the tragic Toole.

First, if you don’t know, Walker Percy, one of U.S.’s great writers, wrote the introduction to the book, explaining how it came to be published—and to cult classic status. Toole committed suicide in 1969 before the novel ever met human eyes. Toole’s mother decided in 1976 to take it to Loyola University where Percy taught. As one might imagine, explains Percy, “if ever there was something I didn’t want to do, this was surely it: deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read the manuscript that she said was great and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared scarcely readable carbon” (7). Much to Percy’s shock, though, Confederacy turned out to be not just okay, but very good—in fact, also very funny, but at the same time, he reminds us, very sad, not least because we remember as we read it that the book will be the only John Kennedy Toole novel that we ever read.

But what a novel Confederacy of Dunces is, most of all because the characters are drawn so intensely. The protagonist, the aforementioned Ignatius Reilly, who wears a bizarre New Orleans version of a Holden Caulfield Hunting Cap, is morbidly overweight and behaviorally challenged. He complains constantly about his stomach in times of stress: “My [pyloric] valve closed on the streetcar,” he says to his mother, explaining why he looks like he’s about to die—and why he didn’t get a job (70). He lives alone with his mother, who he badgers because he believes she drinks too much—he accuses her constantly of clandestinely storing booze in the oven. Early in the story, Mrs. Reilly has a car accident that she must pay for, which requires Ignatius to go to work—a turn of events he finds immensely distasteful, since he believes he is writing important works of literature in his bedroom. He gets a job at Levy Pants as a file clerk, where he systematically throws away the files because he’s too fat to reach the lower drawers and where he tries to organize the factory workers to rise up against the management (but fails because he’s so offensive). Other equally absurd characters figure into the story including a dancer and a doorman in a French Quarter bar as well as friends of Mrs. Reilly’s. They’re so aptly drawn, when I was reading the book, I kept feeling as though I saw them on street corners, saying to myself, “now that guy there, he could be Ignatius.” It’s not very often that I read a book so vivid.

Another fascinating part of the book is that it truly is a novel of place. Like Walker Percy’s novels of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes, this book truly evokes the New Orleans-ness of the city with the descriptions of the place around the seedy strip club where Darlene and Jones work:

Twilight was settling around the Night of Joy bar. Outside, Bourbon Street was beginning to light up. Neon signs flashed off and on, reflecting in the streets dampened by the light mist that had been falling steadily for some time. The taxis bringing the evening’s first customers, Midwestern tourists and conventioneers, made light splashing sounds in the cold dusk. (29)

Toole also captures the place around which Ignatius ends up selling hot dogs. When Ignatius goes to collect the hot dog cart, we read about the location of the vendor:

Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, was housed in what had formerly been an automobile repair shop, the dark ground floor of an otherwise unoccupied commercial building on Poydras Street. The garage doors were usually open, giving the passerby an acrid nostrilful of boiling hot dogs and mustard and also of cement soaked over many years by automobile lubricants and motor oils that had dripped and drained from Harmons and Hupmobiles. The powerful
stench of Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, sometimes led the overwhelmed and perplexed stroller to glance through the open door into the darkness of the garage. (164) What’s funny about it? Well, first of all, Ignatius is the biggest of the buffoons, and it’s clear that Toole most wants us to laugh at him. But, just as Percy points out in the introduction, it’s hard not to infer some autobiographical sense to the novel—outlandish as it is. After all, it’s about a depressed young man living with his widowed mother, so we—or probably more accurately I should say I–feel pretty sad about laughing at Ignatius. Mrs. Reilly herself is pretty silly too, though. However, then, for much the same inferential reasons, I find myself feeling sorry for the long suffering Mrs. Toole. But the many absurd characters—even the racistly drawn African American, Jones—are very funny because of the absurdity of their behavior. I have the sense that Toole must have had that sense of the world, that people, in his view, really do act stupidly—that they (like Flannery O’Connor’s Aunt said, have certain things that they just have to “go and do.”).

Life on the Mississi

Life on the Mississippi

This is a book that, without the contextual essay in the beginning, would have formed a great question mark in my mind—perhaps on its way back to the library in a big hurry. Johnathan Raban writes that Clemens had a terrible time writing a travel book that William Dean Howells proposed to him from a series of articles he originally had written for the Atlantic Monthly. Problem was, making more than the existing seven chapters proved to be more difficult, apparently, than he thought.

As a result, Raban explains so aptly, “Reading Life on the Mississippi, it is not the river one sees first, but the writer’s desk—a desk littered with magazines, books, brochures, writing pads” (xiii). In other words, as readers we feel Twain’s struggle to find enough material to speak about. We can picture him surrounding himself in the research. He tells folktales, relies on maps, other people’s stories, too much material that is, in effect, outside of himself. The result is disjointed—quite literally it needs a major revision. Says Raban, “Few books expose the halting progress of their own authorship so plainly” (xiii-xiv). Truly we see both the best and the worst days of Twain’s writing in this book.

It’s a great one for me to read as a model for a few reasons: surely parts of it are quite funny, so it’s evidence of American humor writing; also, it’s either a model of a travel book or a model of how not to do a travel book, depending on which way I want to read it; but perhaps most interesting, the book is at least in places an attempt to define and distinguish among the regions of the U.S. Parts of the book, for that reason, are particularly fascinating, because even if what Twain says is true only historically, they’re interesting and relevant to what I’m about to write.

First, though, it might help to look at the way he structures the book as a travelogue; Twain deals with the history of the river, which is appropriate within the purpose of his book. We also find out about his experiences as a “cub pilot” of a steam boat, also important historical information – but the appeal of it has some interesting connections. First, of course, we as readers of the present relate to the persona of Mark Twain/Sam Clemens as a mythical figure of American Literature/History; the stories are clearly exaggerated—they’re as tall as the tales about Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan or any of the others we’ve heard for ever and ever. Even if we shrink the tales down a size or two, though, reading about Twain’s life experience has a voyeuristic appeal. Maybe “voyeur” is too strong a word—but we like to see inside him. To a certain extent, I think the appeal of the narrative criticism I’m interested in is the revelation-of-self of the critic. We’re interested in the person who’s talking, even if s/he isn’t a mythical persona. An invisible, omniscient voice is authoritative and, ultimately soporific—kind of like Ben Stein’s bland teacher voice-over in The Wonder Years “…anyone?...anyone?” What I’m saying, if I’m saying anything at all that makes sense, is that indeed we do like to find out about Mark Twain’s life—but we like to find out about the traveling writer, even if s/he isn’t a mythical person, because the person is a key part of the journey.

And/but/so….later, Twain begins to examine regional differences, which is interesting, but sort of disappointingly dated and not helpful. He was writing shortly after the Civil War, when such regional differences were painful. In a chapter, “Southern Sports,” Twain takes up the topic of conversation about the war to illustrate just how the tensions regarding the war show up in the various regions. He says that in the North people might mention the war once a week or as much as once in four weeks because, in “dinner company of six gentlemen [...] it can easily happen that four of them [...] were not in the field at all” (275). However, in the South, “every man you meet was in the war; and every lady you meet saw the war.” Thus, the “war is the great chief topic of conversation” (275). So we shouldn’t surprised when things are “’placed’ as having happened since the waw; or du’in’ the waw’ or befo’ the waw’ or right aftah the waw;” because that is evidence of how much everyone was affected by the events of the war (275). He goes on to tell a few stories about why all the southern men are called Colonel, and so on, but for the most part, he’s going for local color and that’s all.

The Diaries of Adam and Eve

I never even knew about this soft-hearted little book Twain/Clemens wrote. The first part he wrote in the late 1890s from the point of view of Adam, discovering the effusive, garrulous Eve, frustrated with her mystifying habits as well as those of the bizarre creature she spawns (good old Cain), which he mistakes at first for a kangaroo, and later rules out that he is a fish, though Eve will not allow him to throw baby into the river as a test. This Adam is a comical, fin de siecle Deborah Tannen, only in this case men are from Eden and so are women. But, while Eve bothers and distracts him at first, Adam concludes, “After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve….it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her” (31).

The poignancy comes from reading the part that is Eve’s diary. I’m not sure one even really has to know that Clemens wrote this part about fifteen years later, in 1904, shortly after his wife, Livvy, died. The style of Eve’s diary is entirely different, more lyrical. While Adam’s short sentences communicate merely the events that occurred (on one day, his report is merely “Pulled through.”), Eve describes her surroundings enthusiastically, loving even the stars, saying “I wish I could get some to put into my hair” (36). But in her descriptions, Eve reveals that she knows the way she chases after Adam, always naming things before he can get around to it, always talking and disturbing him, annoys him. Nevertheless, she says, “this kind of love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just comes” (62). Most poignantly, though, she wants to stay with him, to “pass from this life together” (62). The most heart-wrenching part, though, if we know that Livvy died before old Sam Clemens, is the last passage, where she says (you’ll forgive the long quote):

But if one of us must go first, it is my prayer that it shall be I; for he is strong. I am weak, I am not so necessary to him as he is to me—life without him would not be life; how could I endure it? This prayer is also immortal, and will not cease from being offered up while my race continues. I am the first wife; and in the last wife I shall be repeated. (63)

Oh sure, we can write it off as nineteenth (more accurately early twentieth) century sentimentality, but it’s very sad. The last line is from Adam’s point of view, “Wheresoever she was there was Eden” (63).

The Diaries stretch out over the great intertext to Don Delillo’s White Noise, in which the protagonist worries throughout the story, as he thinks of his wife, “Who will die first?” (Delillo 30). Maybe it’s a universal thought; inherent in commitment is the end of commitment. A happy thought as the leaves fall on a rainy day.

Peer Day 10: Art for Everyone

For a lot of people, going to a museum conjures the image of walking in a gaggle behind a humorless tour guide in sensible shoes past numberless bland impressionist landscapes that speak nothing to them, works painted by long-dead white artists with French names, men who have an elusive concept of beauty that simply cannot be understood in the simple minds of the average folk. Perhaps some of those feelings of disconnect come from a lack of relationship to the art in the museum, and a lack of representation among the curatorial staff. According to Museum Studies experts like Edmund Barry Gaither, for people from traditionally marginalized cultures, the experience of going to the museum has made them feel disenfranchised because their cultures have not been adequately represented. Museums like the Studio Museum in Harlem and el Museo del barrio were created to address the issues of marginalization and representation; these issues were the topic of discussion in Leslie Bedford’s peer day.

Edmund Barry Gaither discusses issues of inclusion in his article in a recent Smithsonian collection, Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Gaither believes that museums devoted specifically to the cultural heritage of a single group are important because they offer “a forum for the discussion of cultural issues and for the development of criticism, without becoming bogged down in racism” (60). At present, when more generally oriented museums attempt to reach out to diverse groups, often they do so in a condescending manner. So, perhaps, says Gaither, “when museums in the Unites [sic] States tell a more accurate and integrated story, more Americans from all cultural groups will feel ownership in them, and will say, ‘Hey, that’s mine’” (64).

When a museum oriented toward a specific racial group hosts an exhibit, then, presumably, the show is curated by a person from that racial group. According to Paula Vogel’s essay from Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, that’s an important consideration, since, though many museum visitors are not aware of it, the contents of a show are “mediated” through the eyes of its curator” (193). So if we see a show in a museum designed by and for Latinos, then presumably, we see the artifacts through the eyes of Latinos, an important mediation.

Concepts like these in the readings were fascinating and, I thought, useful to me not just for the peer day, but also as a student of culture. During the first half of our peer day, we discussed the theoretical readings we did in preparation for our touring the museums. Each of the readings favors the existence of museums oriented to marginalized cultures. While I agree in principle with having such museums, I find it interesting to connect some of the ideas, particularly mediation, to some reading I am doing for Union coursework. Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in it raises an interesting and related idea regarding culture and mediation.

In the context of mediation, de Zengotita tells about an Australian ethnic group, Imparja, who were given a television station to broadcast in their native language, “to give a cultural voice to the aboriginal peoples in the outback” (223). In this case, they were allowed to “mediate” themselves publicly through the Australian airwaves rather than in a museum. The interesting part, de Zengotita tells us, is that the “highest demand on the Imparja channel” was “Seinfeld. Other American sitcoms too, but especially Seinfeld” (223). According to what Gaither said, we might have expected the group to desire more Imparja-culture programming, but almost none of the shows were anything other than U.S. situation comedies. So de Zengotita explains if reading that these native people want to watch these programs makes you “recoil, hold on a minute. Who are you to say that Australian aborigines should prefer traditional activities to kicking back with Jerry and the gang? Haven’t they got a right to be hip? No one’s forcing them. It’s a choice, right?” (223).

I brought up this example in our discussion in the peer day, wondering whether exclusive, segregated museums are in fact good for race relations. We (peer day participants Leslie Bedford, Lila Staples, Paul Gaffney and I) debated the relative value of exclusive or segregated museums and a few important issues were raised. To begin with, in favor of these museums, Gaither made his argument from the perspective of an African-American man, a point of view none of the four white people at the table, no matter how sensitive we want to be, can fully grasp. Also, the museums segregated by culture might inspire a certain pride in heritage among groups that were previously marginalized. Those were good arguments raised in favor of the exclusive or segregated museums. But on the other hand, who is to say that the only exhibit Latino museum visitors want to see is, for example, a display of photographs by a Latino photographer? Perhaps Latino museum visitors would like to see an exhibit about Asian weaving, or African American visitors would be interested in an exhibit about Latino women painters. For those reasons, it seems as though museums with a broader range of interest make better sense, particularly in this era of limited public funding for the arts. The best way to make a determination, though, was to go to the museums and see for ourselves.

Taking the subway from Greenwich Village to Harlem was, to my mind, as much a part of the peer day as the museum visits and discussion. We had the chance on the trip to experience the transition between the upscale West Village and the extreme range of diversity in Harlem, where fifteen years ago, a group of middle-aged, middle-class white people like us might have felt unsafe standing at the intersection of Malcolm X Boulevard and 125th Street. But in 2005, this crowded street corner was packed with business people, street vendors, baby strollers, and so on: in other words, it was, perhaps not so different from other busy street corners in the city, except a few of the vendors were selling incense and daishikis, rather than the mundane hats, scarves, and sunglasses sold at the vendors midtown and below. Some of the vendors wore beards and knitted cotton Kufi caps that identified their Muslim faith. Perhaps the only difference that I noted between this and other Manhattan neighborhoods I visited was the fact that ours were the only white faces—a fact, I note with embarrassment, that should not have made me nervous. We were treated more kindly here, if anything, than on the Upper East Side. The only tension we experienced, we deserved—and that was because as tourists, we dallied at the intersection when we should have walked with the green light. One woman said, “GOD! Why don’t they HURRY UP!” which sounds a lot like something I would say about Washington, D.C. tourists.

After lunch in the Harlem Starbucks (which is, as one might imagine, identical to every other Starbucks in the world), we went to the Studio Museum, where we were looking forward to seeing both the Chris Ofili Watercolors (Ofili is famous for his portrait of the Madonna made with dung—censored by Rudy Guiliani in a previous exhibit) and the Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse exhibits. After paying a very reasonable $3 entrance fee, we entered the museum and began looking at the Ofili Watercolors. Leslie and Lila went ahead, eager to see the Traylor/Edmondson Modernist exhibit, only to be told by the guard that the exhibit, due to be closed on July 3rd, had been closed early, without explanation (or apology, apparently), so we would only be able to see Ofili and the museum’s permanent collection, which consists of about twelve pieces. Leslie, a Museum Studies learner, was incensed that the museum could close an exhibit early—particularly without posting due notice to the public before they paid their entrance fee. It is this sort of shoddy management, she explained, that often prevents museums like the Studio in Harlem from developing a good reputation. While we enjoyed the Ofili exhibit such as it was, we observed that the only other museum visitors were a tour group from a local school; the message to them (and us as well) seemed to be that the museum didn’t have its act together. I wondered, then, if it was the teachers’ purpose to develop the students’ love of attending museums for the future whether the mediocre experience they had on the 28th of June had in fact the opposite effect; it certainly didn’t overwhelm me with the urge to return.

I should mention, though, that the Studio Museum in Harlem is in transition; June 30th, the day we were there, was the last day for the director. A new director was to start on July 1st. So perhaps new and better exhibits and planning is to come there. The museum itself is a beautiful facility, so the new director has a great place to work with.

A great museum director is clearly more important than a beautiful facility—el Museo del barrio is proof. While this renovated school may not be the most beautiful place, I found that its exhibit of Photographs by Agustin Victor Casasola (1900-1940) was fascinating. Casasola was a reporter in Mexico City who founded a photography agency where he and members of his extended family worked to assemble an archive of photographs about Mexico’s history.

Curated by a Mexican-American, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, the exhibit shows 92 photographs of scenes such as the Mexican revolutionary war, the post-war rebuilding of the Mexican infrastructure, Aztec mythic imagery, Mexican nightlife, and scenes from the Mexican criminal justice system. The diversity of the subject matter of the photos is stunning. Some of the photos showed early in the show are political (war photos), and one thinks the entire show will be political figures like Pancho Villa and Presidente Madero. However, later, we see the curiosity of images of Diego Rivera and the nightlife of dance hall performers and variety theater performers, as well as the horror of dead bodies on slabs of marble in the morgue. The range of subjects and the sometimes sensitive, sometimes objective, and often voyeuristic portrayal is intoxicating. The show, with its fascinating bilingual commentary, is well worth seeing. In this case (aside from the Mexican music playing in the background), I realize I have ever so subtly been told a story about Mexican history. It’s a great story, well told—but it would be at home at any of the finest museums in the country, to my mind.

In the end, visiting the two museums was a good experience, and debating the question about whether exclusivity or segregation into museums by culture or racial group was a worthy exercise. I don’t know that I have fully answered the question for myself. I began the peer day leaning against the practice, but having visited these museums and considered some of the issues, I wonder whether I—a white woman of considerable privilege (being in a Ph.D. program at a private university)—should have a say in the matter at all. I’m really not a member of the “Other” group.According to de Zengotita, “instead of treating the Other as an alien something [… ] recognize in the other an autonomy and agency equal to your own and place yourself in a reciprocal relationship of dialogue with the Other, etc. This is the most visible, the positive aspect of the otherness trope. The cardinal rule is to acknowledge the Other as other; that is as categorically different from you” (223) I believe what he’s saying here is not that we can never be equal or never have inter-racial dialogue—but rather that it doesn’t make sense for one group to presume to speak for the other. Thus, I take his advice. I found this, my last peer day to be a worthy one, for which I did some profound thinking.

Peer Day Report

If you’ve ever skirted the green, woodsy rectangle in New York, seen an aerial shot of it, or even walked through Central Park, you might well have thought that the city somehow wisely foresaw its future overgrowth of concrete and mercifully left undeveloped an idyllic 800-some acres of land for future leisure enthusiasts. I learned in this peer day that Central Park indeed was the result of some wise foresight—but the park was not simply crafted by nature; rather, Central Park is an extraordinarily large public art project, designed and conceived of in the nineteenth century (mostly) by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

I would have proceeded without knowing about Olmsted if it were not for Lila Staples. Lila, whose focus at Union is Museum Studies, convened the peer day and selected biographical readings about Olmsted (including Rybczynski’s excellent biography, A Clearing in the Dark) as well as more current readings about the park written in the context of the recent Christo Gates exhibit. Lila wanted to look at the park as a work of art or special public experience of leisure. Our purpose was to consider the present state of the park and determine how it continues to fulfill the mission of its creator as well as how the park has adapted to more contemporary public concerns. We evaluated the evidence both by discussion and walking through the park, stopping at various places for discussion (a formal agenda is appended).

In addition, in preparation for the peer day each of the peers present (Lila Staples, Leslie Bedford, Paul Gaffney, and I) wrote reflective narratives about an experience in the park; we shared these narratives during the beginning of our discussion. It is important to explain here that writing the narrative one of the best parts of the peer day for me, since writing about places will be a critical part of my PDE. Connecting place, the park, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Holden Caulfield (who seemed to me to be an obvious connection to literary humor) was a great exercise. I’ve appended the piece I wrote to this evaluation; I think it is a good start, or at least good PDE practice.

This sort of thinking ahead (towards my own PDE) is important, and it was an excellent connection to Central Park’s architect. Reading about Olmsted, I confess, it was hard not to think of the future. Most remarkable about Olmsted was his near-prescient ability to prepare for the future. Olmsted’s biographer, Witold Rybscynski, tells stories of Olmsted knowing exactly what to plant and where. For example, when he was asked to design cemeteries for the Civil War dead, Olmsted “advocated using trees indigenous to each region” since the cemeteries would need to be constructed in various parts of the country (Clearing 22). He offered a plan whereby the trees could grow a certain amount within five years, after which time more trees would be planted and a different look achieved (Clearing 22). Olmsted’s ability to understand the long-term outcomes of his designs was remarkable.

Consider this: around the time that the idea of a park in New York was conceived, around 1830, “urbanization” had already begun to occur, but the city had not yet developed the means of handling the sanitation problems that come with all those people. Olmsted’s biographer, Witold Rybscynski calls New York “dangerously unhealthy” because of its lack of “effective trash removal” (Clearing 32). Not only that, but also he explains that the city was “notorious for the pigs that freely wandered the streets in search of slops” (Clearing 32). By 1932, cholera outbreaks became epidemic, especially in the summer, which is why many people who could afford to do so left the city when the weather was warm (Clearing 32). People who stayed in the city were so upset by the problems with sanitation that riots ensued—and at the time not even a police force existed to assist with halting the mayhem (Clearing 32)! The inception of a park with shady trees and ponds must have seemed idyllic, and incredibly healthy, to the people. So, in July of 1853, the state legislature of New York approved a law that designated the land to be used as a park. Five years later, in 1858, Olmsted and his business partner Calvert Vaux began work on what was originally “treeless, rocky terrain and stagnant swampland,” and what became “the first major public park built in America” (Central Park).

Central Park turned into a place where free concerts and theatre were held; however during the 1960s, it also became a place of crime and ill repair. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the grounds were managed poorly (likely because at this time the city was being managed poorly and was in bankruptcy). According to the Central Park website, the grasses were “trampled,” and statues and benches were covered with graffiti (“Central Park Then & Now”). Finally, a number of advocacy groups formed a Central Park Coalition to raise money for the renovation and restoration of the park. The group, called the Conservancy, was responsible for restoring the park to its original beauty and now maintains the park with 100% private funds—the staff, materials, and equipment are entirely funded by donation rather than taxpayer monies.

The park’s 843 acres originally took 20 years to complete. The 150 acres of water, including the reservoir, three ponds, and a lake, were constructed from drained swampland to which city water pipes were added and water pumped in. The park has more than 26,000 trees, as well as 270 species of migratory birds. Every year the park has more than “25 million human visitors who can walk through its 250 acres of lawns and 136 acres of woodlands (Central Park 150th Anniversary Map & Guide). Visitors can enjoy the park all day and into the evening, but they have to leave by 1:00 a.m., when the park closes (I must confess, though, that we were confounded by how that rule could ever be enforced).

Modern-day attractions in the park are many, including a number of sculptures from Balto the sled dog (at East 67th) to Alice in Wonderland (at East 75th). Also, there’s a Carousel at mid-park on 65th and the zoo at East 63rd-65th. Brochures suggest bicycle rentals, horse-drawn carriage rides, boat or gondola rentals, tennis courts, and skating rinks. All these activities are important because they fit in nicely with Olmsted’s populist vision of what the park should be, with one possible exception. Olmsted was opposed to placing statues of any kind in the park because he thought that that kind of art was inaccessible to the masses, so he might have protested the current statues. However, we decided that he wouldn’t contest the ones we saw since they were small and they weren’t the off-putting “guy-on-a-horse” variety, but rather they were appealing, particularly to children. The idea of the park was for recreation. Rybscynski says in that regard “Olmsted was a purist” since he “considered skating and boating integral parts of the park experience” (“Olmsted vs. Christo”). So he would probably have approved of most of what exists in the park today.

The existence of a two-and-a-half mile-long rectangle park, which might be considered by someone like Donald Trump as essentially unrealized real estate profit in the most expensive city for real estate in the U.S. is an extraordinary luxury, in my view a great kindness to the people. Maintaining Olmsted’s park paradise is a great gift to people at a time when most leisure activities are costly and involve electronic accessories, or the “right” clothes. Visiting Central Park is a rare and welcome instance when we feel the relevance of nineteenth century ideals, a reminder of what Olmsted said he hoped for his work on his parks:
Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think…that a time is to come when…men will say, “See! this our fathers did for us” (qtd. in Clearing 364).

From Olmsted to Caulfield

Aerial shots of rapid motion intersections at night, where car lights become incandescent crayons, drawing insane paths. I see sudden sunrises and sunsets, helicopter views of the dizzying edges of high rises where my eyes are in danger of scraping the proverbial sky. TV shows seem to be in the business of capturing the visual clichés of what New York is supposed to be: tall buildings, traffic, the impersonality of concrete and glass. It works on me; whenever I see the city, I feel like a rube fresh off the bus from Podunk, rubbing my eyes and saying well, goooolllleee…All that concrete feels dignified, important, and I am insignificant. Yet whenever I see New York, I feel like I own it, that it is in some odd way my city.

Big cities—especially Manhattan—are criticized for loud crowds, the roar of traffic that cancels out sunsets, skyscrapers that erase trees, anonymous people whose shoulders touch, yet never speak, but for me those same qualities give the city its sense of place, and those same qualities give us our sense of belonging there as well, whether we’re visitors or residents. Even if we condemn the City (just capitalize it…there’s only one) for these faults, people are awed at the same time, every time they look up towards the sky, or just turn their heads and glance up and down Broadway. Those who really want to identify New York, though, lift it up by its handle, there in the middle in the green part, Central Park.

Central Park is infamous; people who have never set foot east of Indiana’s Wabash, the Missouri, even Utah’s Green River know about Central Park. Maybe you read A Catcher in the Rye and met protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Holden has, undeservedly in my mind, earned a bad reputation for inspiring madmen like Mark David Chapman to assassinate John Lennon in front of the Dakota back in 1980. Holden should more be remembered as a 1950s anti-hero who mythicized Central Park for literary audiences worldwide.

Holden’s anti-hero status has caused the novel to be banned in any number of North American school systems. The story begins when Holden runs away from Pencey Prep a few days before Christmas break, when he learns he’s failing out. But we know from his unreliable first-person narration that his grasp on the world is shaky; we infer that at the time of the story, he has been taken away to a sanitarium of sorts in California to recover from a number of difficulties, including his brother’s death and issues he glosses over in the story, and which are easy to miss if we in the audience are not paying attention.

One element of the story that is repeated—with humorous results—is Holden’s obsession with the lagoon at Central Park South. Whenever Caulfield gets in a cab, he asks the cab driver about it:
“That little lake, like, there. Where the ducks are. You know.”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Well, you know the ducks that swim around in it? In the springtime and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime, by any chance? […] I mean does somebody come around in a truck or something […]” (81-82)
None of the cabdrivers are willing to ponder the answer to his question, though Horwitz does consider what he thinks are related factors:
“The fish don’t go no place. They stay right where they are, the fish. Right in the goddam lake.”
But Holden insists:
“[…] The fish is different, I’m talking about the ducks.”
Horwitz finally argues:
“[…] It’s tougher for the fish, the winter and all, than it is for the ducks, for Chrissake. Use your head, for Chrissake.”
“They can’t just ignore the ice. They just can’t ignore it.”
Horwitz argues some more:
“[…] They live right in the goddam ice. It’s their nature, for Chrissake. They get frozen right in one position […]” (82).

Holden’s remarks about the ducks (and the fish) are funny: He tells us, the readers, when the conversation is over “He didn’t answer me, though. I guess he was still thinking. I asked him again, though. He was a pretty good guy. Quite amusing and all” (83). Holden the character is what he would call “horsing around.” But we can’t rely on Holden’s judgment as a first-person narrator. We have to arrive at our own conclusions and think of those helpless ducks a little bit like the way think about our helpless friend, Holden. Holden wonders what the ducks do when it gets cold, whether someone will come to take them away when it is no longer safe for them just as Holden doesn’t know what to do with himself now that it’s “winter” for him and things are no longer “safe” for him. Holden wants to know how “ducks” know when it’s the right time to “take off” because he’s just about ready to do it. When we have insight into Holden’s truth about the Central Park lagoon, then the Park becomes Holden’s source of truth for a moment.

The lagoon—and the Park—belongs to Holden, but at the same time it belongs to hundreds and millions of us. I too can say, “I own that lagoon,” because I assign it my unique narrative. It will forever hold the story of the day of the toy boat regatta in 1983. Even at this moment I can see the brilliant East-side button-down blue sky when I walked up the hill from Central Park South, down by the Plaza Hotel and came upon the lagoon on my right and saw the boats in the water there, as though I were suddenly able at great distance to see Lake Michigan being invaded by an armada of clipper ships. The illusion paled, though, with the sound of the tinny model motors—not to mention the sight of the many enthusiast operators lined up around the lagoon, black aerialed boxes in hand furiously racing the ships, big enough maybe to give a ride to the Chihuahua puppy I saw on a leash in the grass off to the left. Big or small, boat races have never made much sense to me, and they seemed even sillier on the precious real estate of the pond. It was an exquisite puzzle to think about, I reasoned, stretching out with my lunch near the big rock on the right as one approaches the pond. The day stayed impossibly blue and sunny as long as I wanted it to, though I never did figure out the rules of the race. All I did and all I know is forever more Central Park will be my park, at least for that day. Even though I never spoke to another soul the whole day, it would be wrong to call the city anonymous.

Though I didn’t know who he was at the time, I realize now that the park’s landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmstead, would have approved of my day at the races, since, according to his biographer, Witold Rybczynski, “he considered […] boating […] [an] integral part of the park experience” (“Olmsted vs. Christo”). Olmstead wanted nature to be available to city dwellers (though he could not have imagined the concrete jungles we have created in the present day). His design was meant “to foster a single ideal—the democratic use of public space,” which if you think about it is an extraordinary plan for a city (Ginsburg). As a result of this democracy, Holden Caulfield, Fred Olmstead, Heidi Moore, even the kids from Hair—all of us experienced the lagoon and the Park itself individually; it is ours. The point is that because the place is there in the center for all to enjoy, it somehow becomes universal. We have a collective experience, because it’s “our” Park, “our” lagoon, even though our feelings occurred asynchronously: “Oh, the lagoon! Yes! I’ve been there!” But then our memories part. We are the same as Holden Caulfield for a tiny moment, and different all at once, blending back into the high rises, the dizzying incandescence and neon. It belongs to all of us.

And Then There's Maude

I’m watching Maude, episodes 203 & 204 (from 1973). In episode 203 we see a great comic scene where a drunk Maude and Arthur try to decorate grandson Philip’s birthday cake with whipped cream and throw a great big yellow candle in the middle to disguise their mistakes. Even though we can see it coming from a mile away as a very poorly mimicked Lucille Ball routine, they still do a great job. Drunks are always funny, and it’s always funny to mess up a kid’s birthday cake. Walter has three or four drinks at lunch every day and three or four at dinner, as well as a brandy after. They finally must alert him that he might be an alcoholic. That part of it is funny just as an anachronism. The end-of-show morality play is priceless.

In the next episode we see Maude and Florida (Esther Rolle) in the kitchen. Maude tells Florida that the soup “kicks her butt.” Florida feigns ignorance about the meaning of this statement, and Maude informs her that this is a compliment in Black English. Florida says, “Well, you must have been Black longer than I have.” So, Maude reaches over to get her Black slang dictionary and asks Florida what to say to impress her in her “Black Ghetto slang.” Florida says it would be, “you can take the rest of the day off.” Maude says her signature phrase, “God will get you for that.” The scene is really icky.

The race thing gets left aside other than the performance Rolle gives around changing the sheets in the confusion around whether the boyfriend will sleep in the daughter’s bed or in the guest room. Maude tells Florida to change the sheets in the guest room; Carol, the daughter tells Florida to prepare her own bedroom. Florida makes a big joke about the problems about to arise—and says she’s glad she’s about to leave on the bus. You have to hand it to the writers for entering the idea into the consciousness of America that the black woman has to go home on the bus while the white family relaxes at dinner (tension or not).

So of course this ridiculous tension does occur while Maude goes through her ridiculous denial about her ambivalent feelings over her 27 year-old daughter sleeping with a 30 year-old boyfriend. After the issue is ostensibly resolved, then Maude and Walter have their requisite heart-to-heart that lays out the issues. Says Walter: “these feelings that you have are just as honest and valid as they were 100 years ago.” Ugh. Then Maude: “I refuse to be upset about the two of you in this house. I mean lord only knows what happened in that camper….STRIKE THAT….C’mon Walter….let’s you and I stay in the camper.” Ultimately, Adrienne Barbeau chickens out too, saying that the thought of sleeping with her boyfriend in her own mother’s house makes her uncomfortable. They’re going to a hotel. Maude, incredulous, asks her to explain. In the resolution, Maude gives her best one-liner of the show: “Some people take laxatives, I take guilt.”

The General, Cops, The Playhouse

I watched Buster Keaton today, thinking I was just getting The General, but the DVD had the surprise bonus of Cops and The Playhouse as well. The General is really unbelievable because of the stunts. The stuff he does is stunning, particularly since it’s obvious there is no stunt person, either for Keaton or for the woman who plays his lover, and they’re doing absurdly dangerous things on a rapidly moving steam engine. In one scene, the train speeds forward, and Keaton perches on the front on the cow-catcher. He’s reaching out on to the tracks to grab heavy railroad ties that the enemy has lodged in the tracks, one after the other, to derail the train. As soon as he grabs one heavy tie (a single one would be enough to throw a person off balance), another comes up for him grab—and he gets that too. Somehow it’s funny, yet at the same time the suspense is unbelievable, which is an unusual combination I don’t often see (maybe in some Jim Carrey vehicles – though some purists might hate the comparison). He couldn’t possibly have made a mistake at picking up those ties with that train speeding along; I simply couldn’t envision how multiple takes were possible or even how they could manufacture dummy Styrofoam lightweight ties in 1927. The sheer complexity of so many of the shots in this film is mind boggling. It’s pretty surprising to know that it was a commercial flop.

Watching The General made me want to re-read Wes Gehring on “Comedian Comedy.” His characteristics of “the clown model” from The World of Comedy: Five Takes on Funny apply well to The General. He talks about how clown comedies encapsulate the “schtick” of the comedian. So if it’s a Keaton film, it captures his “schtick” (19), which in this case is a “man against machine” battle (7). We can tell it’s a clown comedy because “physical/ visual comedy” plays a large role in the plot (19). We see endless examples of physical comedy in The General. I like one very simple situation that occurs when Buster pays a visit to his girlfriend and two neighbor boys follow him inside. They seat themselves on a couch next to the couple in the parlor. Befuddled by the problem of the two boys, Keaton finally puts his hat on and bows to the young woman, which forces the two little boys to do the same. He opens the front door and politely allows them out before him. However, instead of following them out, he closes the door, takes his hat off, and sits back down next to his girl, this time alone (and victorious).

Also in the “clown model,” clowns tend to be “underdogs who frequently exhibit comically incompetent behavior” (30). We see this behavior repeatedly in The General when Keaton tries to be a soldier to please his girlfriend. She has told him to enlist in the confederate army, specifically not to show his face to her until he’s wearing a uniform. He’s been denied conscription, though, and whenever he tries to fake enlistment, he becomes inept and clumsy with hilarious results. He trips on his sword and makes a fool of himself generally.

Gehring goes on to say that film clowns are “nomadic, with direct literary ties to such picaresque heroes as Don Quixote and Huck Finn” (33). Even more specifically, Gehring gives some reasons they go on road (not all apply, but of those that do): “it gives the clown an endless supply of new settings for his comedy” (33), it places “a clown in some unlikely setting can be an ongoing joke in itself” (34) and it causes “pursuit by authority figures” (36). We see all these in The General because the film is an endless chase/pursuit scene.

So all this is interesting. It’s all Keaton against the machine. Maybe even more interesting because it was a surprise is The Playhouse. I absolutely loved the first half, in which Keaton played all the roles, the conductor, the musicians, the actors--ten or twelve across the stage (Mr. Brown, I think it was, in Blackface), the audience. It was so cool, particularly since they all were on camera at the same time (at least the ones on stage)—and this in the early 1920s, so it had to be done with amazing camera and film trickery unheard of at the time. It’s so elaborate that he even runs fake credits in the middle of the film with Buster Keaton listed for each of the actors and the crew. It’s very funny, I think. Unfortunately, though, the film goes on to include a bunch of Vaudeville skits, unremarkable mostly. One minor exception is a skit where Keaton dresses up as a monkey in a stage scene. The amazing thing about it is that he manages to capture the motions a monkey would make pretty remarkably, including running up the wall and walking on his hands and feet. But ho hum. There’s another sort of funny part of a skit where a man smoking a cigar catches his beard on fire and Keaton grabs an axe out of the place in the wall where it says “IN CASE OF FIRE.” Using the axe, he chops the man’s beard off, essentially shaving the man. It’s pretty funny, actually, but it lasts about 20 seconds. Ho hum too. I thought the same ho hum about Cops. It’s funny slapstick. The plot is not remarkable enough to recount here. More remarkable, though, are the amazing group scenes of parading cops which turn into huge numbers of cops chasing Keaton. The sheer choreography of it is worth noting—and of course it’s funny.

Keaton choreographs people and objects in ways that were stunning for the time, and they still are stunning because they require no special effects. They all just magically occur without stunt people or animation—impossible today.

Paul Lewis’s “Politics of Comedy and the Social Functions of Humor”

In Chapter Two, Lewis begins with Suzanne K. Langers argument that comedy has various degrees of humor (31). Lewis explains that a “critical controversy” exists between “universalists and anti-universalists,” saying that for “some theorists comedy can be defined by its use of humor; that is, comedy is the humorous genre. For other th

Lewis summarizes the main theorists’ views:

• Walter Sorrell’s 1970 work: “Laughter is a physiological phenomenon, comedy is the product of a creative act of one man’s humorous capacity” (32).
• Aristotle says in The Poetics that “comedy invites us to laugh at low characters,” or the ones, according to Lewis, who have “small defects and minor vices” (33). However, says Lewis, “we discover which characters are low by learning to laugh at them” (33).
• “Bergson sees comedy as social reprimand,” in other words as a way to correct the behavior of others.
• “Northrop Frye sees comedy as a movement from an old social order to a new one.”
• Wylie Sypher says “comedy always supports some value system” but that “the system can be conservative, reactionary or revolutionary.”
  Scott Cutler Shershow sees the struggle in values “between cynicism and optimism, between how the world is and how it should be.”

• Harry Levin “has identified an essential comic clash between killjoys and playboys” (33).

Now, let’s try to distinguish specifically between HUMOR and COMEDY, which is a major concern of the anti-universalists.

Lewis says that no matter whose theoretical approach we ascribe to, we still must analyze a joke in terms of its incongruity. One way to
think about it is to take a look at “how humor acquires its rhetorical
force” (34).

Lewis says, “An incongruity analysis suggests that humor embodies values not by virtue of its content alone but as a consequence of what it does with its materials” (34). He’s talking about here what we do with humor’s apparent message and how we might process the unconscious message (this is from Freud’s work, obviously. Freud thought that one reason for taking pleasure in jokes was the “temporary freedom from the ork of repression” (34).

Lewis gives an example of a joke that might illuminate:

Q. Why do mice have such little balls?
A. Because so few of them know how to dance.

So the idea here is that one might laugh, or one might not think it funny for one of any number of reasons. Either it isn’t funny because the sexualized content it approximates is too touchy or it gets too close to the animal rights issues…or whatever. Lewis says “The rhetorical force of humor in comedy derives from the mobilization of such implied value judgments. Freud notes that a joke ‘bribes the hearer with its yield of pleasure into taking sides...without any very close investigation.’” In other words, by telling such a joke, we expect the listener to join us in our beliefs. If the listener does not, we feel thwarted.

It may seem unimportant but the distinction is a social make-or-breaker…figure that if we tell a joke or two to people who don’t laugh, we usually don’t make friends, right? Indeed, the studies back me up. According to Lewis, “Sociological studies have shown that, because it expresses shared values, humor can be a social lubricant and a tool or force in the exercise of power in social groups.” Lewis cites a 1972 study that found that “in intergroup relations humor can serve to foster consensus or to damage or redefine the relationship between the groups, and in intragroup relations humor can serve either to solidify the group, control in-group behavior or foster a hostile disposition toward an out-group” (37).

The study really proves what is, to me, common sense. Groups use humor to demonstrate what is expected—or who is ostracized. Lewis also cites studies that show how these dynamics are demonstrated at work and in prison.

Interestingly, though, Lewis brings up some of Freud’s discussion of how jokes sometimes are used between strangers “to register [...] resentment, without risk of punishment” to provide “a social mechanism, short of violence for the venting of anger” because individuals “who can joke instead of fighting will be less offensive and destructive” (38). So of course, people can joke to thwart the urge to kill (I speak now figuratively, rather than literally, for the most part).

Now, Lewis analyzes “the politics of comedy and social functions of humor” in several literary works in this chapter, but the most interesting of these analyses is called “From Shakespeare to Sitcoms.” He reminds us at the beginning of this part of the chapter that many theorists tell us that humor is not a necessary element of comedy—but then says “we are left to wonder why there is so much humor in comedy” (64).

Lewis works to distinguish further between humor and comedy here by looking at the form of each, discussing Frye’s definition of a “traditional comedy,” in which “a young man” falls in love with “a young woman who is kept from him by various social barriers: her low birth, his minority or shortage of funds, parental opposition, the prior claims of a rival. These are eventually circumvented.” Another obstacle may arise near the end that may seem as though the two may not marry, but indeed they do and the “conclusion is normally accompanied by some change of heart on the part of those who have been obstructing the comic resolution” (Frye qtd. in Lewis 64). Lewis, citing Eyre, argues that humor also “has a definite structure” in that it moves “from the perception to the resolution of an incongruity” (64). We may perceive humor as “a molecule, rather than an attribute” of comedy, “the irreducible but complex substance out of which comedy is made” (65). These ideas are complex. What do they mean?

Lewis tries to explain the idea with a structural analogy, saying that the idea of humor as a molecule of comedy “may help us understand the vital functions of humor within comic structures” (65). Within Frye’s definition of humor, we “see that comedies move from a problem to some easy [...] solution, just as humor glides past incongruities, refusing to pause long enough for meditation or fear” (65). So according to this view, comedy deals with the big picture, whereas humor deals with the small. Hmm.. I didn’t think about it this way before.

Next, Lewis takes up comedy within the form of the situation comedy, discussing David Grote’s 1983 book, The End of Comedy: The Sit-Com and the Comedic Tradition. Grote distinguishes between the kind of comedy in a traditional comedy and a sit-com, saying that the difference is found in “the way they resist change” (Lewis 65). Lewis explains:

“The traditional comic plot focuses on love and marriage; the typical sit-com plot revolves around an unchanging family unit. Traditional comedies feature stock characters like the fool, the scoundrel, and the innocent who implicitly or explicitly attack the social and moral norms; the sit-com avoids these characters and the anarchic world they inhabit. The result, Grote insists, is that in the sit-com we have subverted the radical impulses and energy of comedy, producing a sterile and conservative middle-class dramatic form, one suited to a country that no longer looks to the future with hope and idealism” (65). David Marc says something similar a little later on. If both Davids are right, then maybe the situation comedy is to blame for all those red state votes?

Lewis’s criticism of Grote’s argument is apt: he notes that Grote completely misses the humor in situation comedies. If we ignore the one-liners, the “dynamic humor” in the shows, then we miss their charm completely. Lewis’s example is “the running intergenerational bickering of Norman Lear’s All in the Family, in which the audience surprisingly identifies with the “deliberately ethnocentric, racist, malaproprian anti-hero, Archie” because of the humor (66).

So in lining up the important functions of humor as well as distinguishing between comedy and humor, Lewis writes an important chapter in this one.

Love's Labour's Lost: Wooing A Bunch of Jacks

Love’s Labour’s Lost is an early Shakespearian comedy; it does not have all the elements of classical comedy down exactly. The characters themselves step outside the narrative to alert us of the play’s peculiarities. Berowne says, "Our wooing doth not end like an old play;/ Jack hath not Jill: these ladies' courtesy/ Might well have made our sport a comedy" (V.ii.867-9), referring directly to the end-without-marriage (note, incidentally, the cool eye-rhyme on line 868—can you imagine how hard it was to write a play in verse?).

To understand my comments, it will help to know a summary of the plot. We are supposed to believe that four ostensibly straight men—the King of Navarre and three members of the court—decide to take an oath of celibacy so that they will be better equipped to focus on their “studies.” Right. They agree not to consort with women on the palace grounds. So suspend disbelief and go along with Shakespeare believing that they actually do want to date the women that come up in the next part.

Now when they take this oath, only one of them, Berowne, does so against his will. He tries to remind the king that the Princess of France is on her way to visit, but the king doesn’t listen. This is an excellent ruse, incidentally. Clearly Berowne is in love with the king. But seriously (or not), when the Princess and her court near, the king has to circumvent his own rule by inventing a way to visit her outside the grounds of the palace.

Well, of course as luck would have it, all four of the men fall for the princess and the women in her court—but the romance of it all is interrupted when the princess learns that her father has died. The women must leave and end the romances for a year—but promise to continue them later…and that’s the end, other than Berowne’s little speech-out-of-character there at the end. (Of course, this stroke of luck leaves them in tremendous relief to their homosexual rompings—which provides the REAL happy ending. But nobody’s supposed to notice THAT, right?)

So what does this mean? Well, it certainly still follows the plot arc of old comedy—up to a point. In the article, “The Structure of Aristophanic Comedy,” G.M. Sfakis proposes a standard narrative structure for Old Comedy: First we see “[v]illainy, lack or misfortune” (129). In the case of LLL, it is a lack the four men bring on themselves (at least ostensibly) when they agree to foreswear women. The second step is the men's “[d]ecision/plan to counteract misfortune,” (129) and in this case we see the plan to “step around” their noble plan of studying. They decide, instead, to bend the rules and meet the women outside the palace grounds. Third in the structure is “[s]ervice or help of a supernatural or quasi-magical helper” (129).

I’m not so sure about this one, though I do see Boyet, who is the attendant to the women, as somewhat of a helper and in many ways a catalyst to building the relationships, since it is his role to joke around with the men and to facilitate their meetings. Fourth in the plot is “[t]ransference” (130). I see this element as crucial to a romantic comedy because it’s so evident any romantic comedy. Here, we see that Costard, the clown, is supposed to deliver letters from the men to their respective ladies, but he makes a mistake and the wrong letter goes to the wrong lady. Number five, “[o]pposition or obstacles” (130), in this play means the confusion over connecting the proper man with the proper lady after the letter confusion. However, ultimately Love's Labour's Lost's plot is problematic because another major obstacle does not get resolved; the princess’s father dies and thus delays the wedding. Thus, the remaining plot elements, “persuasion exercised in debate…liquidation of villainy or misfortune….[and] triumph of hero” are not included (400).

Further on what it all means is to ponder the notion that for thousands of years, we have managed variations on a single form of plot without getting sick of the story. That goes to show us, though, that the form of a story is quite different than the delivery, subject matter, or characters.

Paul Lewis’s
Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studying Humor
Chapter One
Paul Lewis’s book on an interdisciplinary approach to the study of humor in literature was helpful in a number of ways. I thought that the way he brought in the theory of humor in social sciences (particularly Freud and various interpretations of Freud’s theory) was particularly interesting. He sees the application of the study of behavior as quite appropriate to literary humor, since after all writing about the lives of people is writing about their behavior. In a sense, then, the “mixing of methodologies” that occurs in interdisciplinary research is especially apt for humor research (ix-xi) Another helpful part of the book was seeing the way Lewis applied theories of humor to specific literary works like Poe’s gothic stories and poems or to “fictions of development” like Catcher in the Rye. I liked his close readings, and the way he specifically applies the theories, avoiding the generalizations he warns against is a good example to follow.

Lewis talks a lot about the potential pitfalls in theorizing about humor. First is “the universalist mindset,” which he defines as “the danger of universalizing or globalizing literary humor,’ which may lead one to think that “humor can be easily explained or subsumed under a catchy formula or definition” (x). Another danger can be found in humor study’s own subjectivity (this echoes a concern about American Studies). Lewis asks, “if humor appreciation is subjective and contextual, rooted in individual affective and intellectual responses, how can critics isolate such elusive phenomena for analysis?” (x-xi). The answer, Lewis decides, is that we cannot have as our critical goal to “standardize humor appreciation but to refine our understanding of the humor we perceive in literature by helping us see how it is structured, how it functions, and how [...] it is one determinant or component of character, genre, and writer” (xi).

In his first chapter on “Humor Criticism and Humor Research,” Lewis tries to dispel long-lived assumptions about Humor, replacing them with truths grounded in research. For example, a common assumption has been that “one of the root causes of humor is fear” (4). Lewis disputes the connection, saying that in fact such a connection has never proven the connection, that “research is demonstrating [...] humor and fear often seem to arise together or in sequence not because fear causes humor but because they have a common origin in incongruity” (5).

Lewis also discusses James F. English’s argument that “we needed to move away from traditional comic theory toward a broader interest in literary humor generally” or what English calls “trans-generic” criticism (8). That way, according to English, we could think “more precisely” about humor and determine “form, content, function and context” (8). That would allow us to more thoughtfully mix literary criticism and “social science research,” and the result would be that when we analyze the humor of a character, we would know specifically whether indeed we “are focusing on humor appreciation, humor creation or both” (8).

If we accept certain “distinctions” and draw on the existing research, says English, then we don’t have to belabor the established ideas in humor studies, namely that: (1) “humorous experiences originate in the perception of incongruity [...]; (2) in most cases humor appreciation is based on a two-stage process of first perceiving an incongruity and then resolving it; [...] (3) that humor is a playful, not a serious, response to the incongruous;[...] (4) that the perception of an incongruity is subjective, relying as it does on the state of the perceiver’s knowledge, expectations, values and norms, that, because the presentation of a particular image or idea as a fitting subject for humor is based on value judgments[and ...] (5) the creation and use of humor is an exercise of power; a force in controlling our responses to unexpected and dangerous happenings, a way of shaping the responses and attitudes of others and a tool of intergroup and intragroup dynamics (qtd. in Lewis 8-13). So if those assumptions are givens—and indeed they are stated repeatedly by many theorists—that gives us room to move forward into discussions of why and when that others haven’t thought of.

Lewis also discusses Victor Raskin’s real/unreal dichotomy for understanding jokes (in The Semantic Mechanisms of Humor [1985]) in which Raskin defines three means of interpreting jokes: “the actual versus the non-actual, the normal versus the abnormal and the possible versus the impossible” (12).

Looking back at those assumptions, then, we can begin there and move forward into analysis. Arthur Koestler’s Act of Creation, says Lewis, examines “cognitive and emotional responses to the incongruous” (14). Koestler discusses “how the fool, the artist and the sage follow similar cognitive processes, moving from the perception of an incongruity to an assimilation that results in the creation of humor, art or knowledge” coming to the conclusion that the creativity he discusses applies “to literary works as well” (14). In other words, says Lewis, “we can learn a good deal about the generic properties of particular works, about the personalities of given characters and about the ways in which given writers tend to use humor by observing (1) what they regard as incongruous and (2) how they deal with the incongruities they contain or perceive” (15). Here, Lewis applies Koestler’s idea to interpreting and analyzing literature—we begin where the idea of defining incongruity left off and, in effect, answer the “so what” question about it. Lewis says we can ask two questions to analyze a humorous text: “within the fictive world it creates, what is normal and what is not?” (15)

Similarly, Mary K. Rothbart’s “safety-arousal model of humor appreciation” finds “three primary responses to incongruity,” namely, “fear, problem solving and amusement” (15). Rothbart asks: “(1) Is the stimulus dangerous?; (2) Is the stimulus evaluated as a serious challenge to the person’s knowledge or is it seen as playful or inconsequential?’ (3) Can the incongruity be resolved?” So in this model as well, we can see reactions that “may lead to smiling and laughter” (15).

What is interesting is that incongruity doesn’t necessarily guarantee hilarity. The difference between tragedy and comedy is often minute. According to Susan Snyder, “Shakespeare’s great tragedies achieve much of their impact by following but then subverting comic structures” (qtd. in Lewis 18). Lewis also points out G.W. Knight’s “classic study of humor in King Lear” that argues that “Lear’s downfall is due in part to his inability to laugh at himself” (18).

Another interesting part of Lewis’s discussion points at the “shift in taste away from writers like Cooper and Poe in America toward writers like Twain and Howells.” According to Lewis, this shift could be attributed “in part to the development of a new sense of humor.” Lewis cites Edwin Cady’s argument that the shift in sense of humor began because of satires of romantic texts (20).

Lewis also points out another way to get at the incongruous, by character analysis. He says, “we can better understand a character by seeing the extent to which he or she deals with incongruity by way of defensive reactions, fear, problem solving and/or humor” (20). In addition, says Lewis, “Humor uses and appreciation can also reflect a given character’s openness to change, his or her adaptive potential” (21).

To study the way an author uses humor seems fruitful—in fact, it might seem as though there would be a certain pattern of life for the humorous author, but in fact there isn’t one, says Lewis. According to Lewis, Seymour and Rhoda Fisher tried to find out in their Pretend the World is Funny and Forever: A Psychological Study of Comedians, Clowns, and Actors. They found the typical comedian:

* “[H]ad to deal with contradictory and incongruous messages from his or her parents about such fundamental matters as the parents’ expectations and feelings about being parents” (22). They describe the typical mother as “severe and non-nurturant” and with low expectations for the child’s behavior. The typical father is described as dependent “on his child for emotional and even material support” (22). As a result, the comics often had to care for siblings and act as “adult beyond their years” and “gave more psychologically to their parents than they received” (Fisher qtd. in Lewis 22).
* Demonstrated “a magnified fascination with contrasts of moral values—good vs. bad, virtue vs. vice” as well as size when they were given a Rorschach test (22). The Fishers related this ability to detect contrasts to a sense of incongruity necessary for a sense of humor.
* Demonstrated “a sense of relativity of all norms and an impulse to deny or evade danger or menace” which would contribute to “two humorous strategies employed by comics in dealing with the incongruous” (23).

Some of the personality types sound a little suspect—like the cold mother. It seems reminiscent of the schizophrenic “cold mother” type. They always want to blame the mom has become a cliché. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to consider the above as a template.

Lewis explains, in sum, in his first chapter, that interdisciplinary models of humor were at one time considered flawed because it was thought impossible to have “’universal components of humor” that would apply to literature (26). However, Lewis holds that the argument was probably never valid because no need to focus on “humor as universal and constant phenomenon” exists (26). Lewis believes it is important for literature scholars to follow the work of humor scholars in the social sciences (27).