October 5, 2016 - 20:49
I. coursekeeping
* we start today on Suzan-Lori Parks' novel, Getting Mother's Body.
try to finish it over break--we'll spend both Tues & Thurs discussing
it, then meet w/ Parks right after Thursday's class.
After that we'll go straight into Monique Truong's novel
The Book of Salt; if you can, also read on into that...
* on Thursday, you created some great, non-linear "equations"
linking Baldwin to Parks, to our earlier texts, to our own declarations....
I took pictures/posted them on-line, if you'd like to go back to them
II. Today we turn to Parks' novel:
* being transparent: didn't pick a play because I really don't know how
to teach 'em--novels w/out dialogue; scripts for "something happening"
* did pick her one novel because it's another v. strong intervention
in the American literary canon; when we first met as a group
last April, I asked for your suggestions for what we might read,
and Creighton immediately mentioned Faulkner....told her he used
to be very important to me, taught me a lot about my
positionality (my family moved from Pa to Va in 1870s--
so they weren't plantation owners, but they really were carpetbaggers
of a sort [do you know this term? it's used to describe Northerners
who came south after the Civil War to profit from the Reconstruction;
carpet bags were the cheap luggage they used; they generally supported
measures to democratize/modernize the South – civil rights legislation,
economic development, public school systems--but they definitely
combined "doing good" with "doing well" for themselves....anyhow!]
Faulkner taught me alot about this kind of privilege, abt how having
money can allow you/us to do evil w/out having to pay for it, w/out
having to be accountable for your mistakes; his work was really
revelatory to me as an undergraduate, but re-reading his novels
this summer, they felt very dated to me, really disrespectful of
the complex personhood of his black characters in particular--
& I decided we could do better...
when I heard that Suzan-Lori Parks was coming to campus,
and started reading all her work, I realized that
Getting Mother's Body is her Rep&Rev of one of Faulkner's novels.
She explains in an interview that
"It's a deep and reverent bow to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which also has characters on a journey dealing with a dead relative. So many of my plays have been about the dead. But the novel was really born in the landscape of West Texas, where we spent time when my father was with the Army in Vietnam. I love the big sky and arid landscape of that place. The characters came out of that landscape and the story came out of those characters. Then there was Faulkner's novel, which I had read eight years before."
Parks has been engaging in "canon critique" for over 2 decades. The protagonists of both In the Blood and Fucking A are named for Hester Prynne, the protagonist of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter [do you know this novel? used to be standard in h.s. English curricula] In In the Blood, Hester is separated from the community; she is a contemporary black woman on welfare, with five absent baby daddies, including one who is a clergyman (like Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's novel). In Getting Mother's Body, Parks turns from Hawthorne to Faulkner as another white male forebear she can critique; she uses these intertexual dialogues in particular (says a critic) "to resurrect bodies, especially Black bodies, that have been commodified and exploited."
The NYTimes reviewer of the novel: "Parks brings a dramatist's skills to her fiction...she loves the sound of people's voices...knows how a conversation pings idly back and forth between two people sitting on a porch in the kind of town where when you want to know the time, you look up at the sun. And she understands how characters drive a story, how their desires propel them into conflicts that form scenes and how each scene kicks the story farther along, making it feel inevitable."
The reviewer continues: "The relationship of what have become known as her Red Letter Plays to The Scarlet Letter is like the connection between a dream and something the dreamer read right before falling asleep. Here's what [of Faulkner's novel that can be found in Parks's...the corpse of a woman -- an ambivalent mother and unfaithful spouse -- that mobilizes an entire family to a road trip; short first-person chapters, each titled with the name of the person speaking, including the dead woman; the woman's young, pregnant and unmarried daughter; an amputee; intrafamilial theft; a serious, clan-wide and semi-legendary case of bad luck. There's even a minor figure named Snipes, whom one character vaguely refers to as ''Snipes or Snopes" [in his collection of novels, all set in the same county in Mississippi, Faulkner created a whole clan of Snopeses: rapacious, depraved, poor white people, wanting-to-get-ahead, whom he develops as a negative contrast to the failing old order of Southern aristocracy]. Obviously [the reviewer continues], William Faulkner's ''As I Lay Dying'' is tangled up in the unconscious of ''Getting Mother's Body,'' but it would take an analyst of Dr. Freud's caliber to figure out just what that means."
A low blow. As Parks says in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "We 'know' much more than our conscious minds think we know."
Some of her switches are straight on/obvious: Faulkner makes all of his characters white; Parks clearly doesn't; she also gives her female characters far greater voice and agency than Faulkner gives to his. A number of you (Aliyah, Nyasa, Joni) have spoken/written about the role of the mother in black and interracial families, and I think will be esp. interested in what happens in this novel. I won't give anything away today, except to say that the questions central to As I Lay Dying are "whether [the woman being buried] is a bad mother" and, more largely, "what is a Mother?" Parks answers these questions in a round critique of As I Lay Dying. One critic said that the novel's prevailing question of inheritance is not whether Willa Mae's treasure is buried with her (since we already know that Dill has taken it), but rather whether Billy will turn out like her mother. ''I don't favor no Willa Mae,'' she insists.
We'll talk about this more once you've read to the end.
I'm realizing that (no one?) has read As I Lay Dying,
so though I want you to have that background/framing,
I'm done talking now about that Rep&Rev...and want to
shift to what you've noticed so far, what sense we can
make together of the novel, given our own shared background
in Lemonade, Beloved, The Truth about Stories....
III. Let's begin by taking a few minutes to look through what we've read.
Then write down one reaction to the first 1/3 of the book: a concrete question
about character or plot; a response to the humor; a reflection on how you see
Parks picking up, playing w/ Baldwin's ideas, or Morrison's; thinking out loud
about whether she seems to be doing what she says she does in her plays (I'm
thinking esp. of her "Equation for Black People Onstage"); or sharing a way in
which you find yourself puzzled/ provoked/confused by what she's up to so far.
Turn to the person next to you and share this.
Let's now go round, and hear where/how each of us is entering the novel;
we'll have to table some of these questions 'til we've all read more of the book,
but I'm hoping to build a large-group discussion around some of these initial reactions.
A reminder, as we do this, that we're all practicing listening:
really trying to hear what each of us is saying,
thinking about where that might be coming from...
IV. Where to go from here?
What are your reactions to others' reactions?
(again: being reflective about how you
might take up what others are saying...)
----
My reading notes from "Equation for Black People Onstage":
* a refusal to be "trapped...in a singular mode of expression";
"the Klan does not always have to be outside the door..."
* "what happens when we choose a concern other than the race problem to focus on?
...the realm of situations showing African-Americans in states other than the
Oppressed by/Obsessed with 'Whitey' state...where audiences are encouraged
to see and understand and discuss these dramas in terms other than that same old shit"
* "The-Drama-Of-the-Black-Person-as-an-Integral-Facet-of-the-Universe"
* "...encouraging myself to listen to the stories beyond my default stories..."
* "we African-Americans should recognize this insidious essentialism
for what it is: a fucked-up trap to reduce us to only one way of being..."
The Role/Effect of Humor here?
Cf. King, p. 119: "stories that make me laugh...help keep me alive."
(@ least) two effects of humor (from a long-ago class on
"Thinking Sex": preservative (defuse situation/preserve status quo),
and/or revolutionary (call up its unstability/unsettle its presumptions).
Parks says humor happens when you "get out of the way," that
laughter is a very powerful way (not of escaping but) of arriving on the scene
How is it functioning for you in the novel?
Turning to intersectionality/heading toward The Book of Salt.
Truong is Vietnamese-American, and her book is very much about
intersectionality: racial difference deeply entangled with,
inseparable from class/gender/sexuality...
what are your reactions to Dill/the presentation of Dill?
what seems to be Dill's role/purpose in the novel so far?
Terrell Tebbetts, "Treasure in the Ground: Getting Mother's Body's Dialogue with As I Lay Dying": In a move unrelated to plot but central to theme, Parks makes the Beedes' neighbor Dill Smiles a hog breeder. Dill has allowed her breeding sow named Jezebel to farrow in her own bed. The would-be patriarch has unknowingly found the perfect imitation of the patriarchal role: she owns a female, breeds it, owns its offspring, and uses them for her own profit. Dill is a man-woman participating in the patriarchal system of comodification.
The question of form:
Suzan-Lori...was eager to distinguish her work in style from the more familiar domestic conventions of say, Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun....Maybe that was because her teacher at Mount Holyoke was Jimmy Baldwin, the author of a famous essay called "Everybody's Protest Novel," in which he criticized...belligerent ideologizing in some black fiction writing....Parks's writing has always been as much a product of Western postmodernism as of African-American consciousness and the black experience, an unusual amalgam of the two. In this she had a literary prototype in Adrienne Kennedy, one of the earliest African-American women writers with more on her mind than race. "It's insulting," Suzan-Lori once said at a public symposium. "It's insulting when people say my plays are about what it's about to be black, as if that's all we think about, as if our life is about that. My life is not about race. it's about being alive." And she added, "Why does everyone think white artists make art and black artists make statements? Why doesn't anyone ask me ever about form?"....Parks had been carefully schooled in the formalist breakthroughs of the postmodern school. Like other members of that movement, notably Gertrude Stein in The Making of Americans....for example, she is very preoccupied with deconstructing the English language....And she is deeply concerned with identity and how the presence of the Other helps both to define and to obscure our sense of ourselves....her work has been influenced a lot by music, both jazz and classical, from which she derives her concept of what she calls "repetition and revision"--that is to say, revisiting and revising the same phrases over and over again....But it cannot be denied that Suzan-Lori is also writing plays about race. (2004 Hunter College Symposium)
The question of an "equation" (from "Elements of Style":
badmath: x+y=meaning, ability to make simple substitions, clarity;
characters [misread] as symbols for obscured meaning rather than simply thing itself;
cf. that NYTimes Review by Laura Millermay"But, as with a lot of contemporary American plays, there's not much more than meets the eye...no tissue of imagery or ideas underneath the surface of this novel, nothing that repays the effort of rereading, even if the first time around the book is lots of fun. As refreshing as it is to encounter characters who want things, and badly, Parks hasn't endowed Billy Beede and her family with all the complexities and contradictions of real people. Their personalities are organized around fairly simple concepts...in its preoccupation with family power struggles and legacies...nuance is not its strong suit.
Neither is any sense of mystery. The absence of such spooky moments in Getting Mother's Body makes all those echoes of As I Lay Dying -- a novel animated by weird, elemental forces and really not a work to which any first-time novelist wants to invite a reader's comparison -- even more bewildering. Faulkner's vision has been rendered by Parks into something considerably less rich and strange, an uninspiring destination, however enjoyable the trip."
VI. To close:
What questions do we have going forward?
How have we done on the listening beat??
See you tomorrow @ the Barnes--and then happy fall break!