. . . featuring the emotional misadventures and ambiguous experiences of Holden Caulfield, Esther Greenwood, Alison Bechdel, Jason Taylor, and Benji Cooper.
Spring 2023
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
Rate Your Experience
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
A Generation Gap
Thursday, April 27, 2023
Notebook Prompt: Ben and "the other boy"
Friday, April 14, 2023
Toxic Masculinity in Black Swan Green and at the Jersey Shore
Although he would be unlikely to describe it this way himself, we can see that over the course of Black Swan Green Jason is struggling with gender trouble. So much of his anxiety about being accepted into the tribe of “hairy barbarians” (as Madame Crommelynck memorably christens them) has to do with performing a particular version of heterosexual masculinity—anything that would be denounced, by local standards, as “gay” or not “hard” must be rigorously edited and suppressed, whether it’s a wooly hat, a map of Middle Earth, or the fact that he’s taking a walk on a weekend day (because walks are, you know, gay). Poetry—probably the most meaningful and “real” part of Jason’s life at this point—is the “gayest” of his propensities, and he literally conceals his poetry under a false name, terrified of the consequences if he were “outed” as the author.
There are closeting dynamics throughout this novel, as Jason is afraid that his insufficient masculinity, or his “gayness,” will be discovered. It goes without saying that his “life will be over” if it is. Jason doesn’t appear to be attracted to boys, at this point in his life, and there’s no evidence that he’s experiencing actual gender dysphoria (he does confess to us that he sometimes wishes he’d been born a girl, although he knows that saying so out loud would subject him to violent homophobic harassment [6]). But what if Jason (or another kid in his position) were gay? What if he were experiencing gender dysphoria? David Mitchell makes clear that there is, in Worcestershire in 1982, no possibility of coming out, of living openly with a gender nonconforming identity, among this teenage culture. There is a consistently homophobic and gender-normative valence to all of the bullying depicted in the novel (“Maggot” is just one letter off from the most common term of abuse I endured at Jason's age), and it’s easy to see how daunting it would be for a gay or trans kid to come out in such a context, where even wearing a wooly hat on a cold day can get you denounced as “gay.”
And this heteronormative gender-policing regime is not limited to the kid-culture in the book. We first see Jason anxiously editing himself in “January Man,” as he joins an exclusively kid group on the frozen lake: these standards are enforced primarily through other kids, who police each other’s gender expression relentlessly for any sign of deviance or weakness. But as the novel unfolds, we can easily see how systemic this culture of masculine heteronormativity is throughout the community. Think of Mr. Carver, the P.E. teacher, who gets laughs from all the kids when he makes homophobic jokes about Floyd Chacely and Nicholas Briar in the showers. Or Mr. Murcot, the metalshop teacher, who calls the co-ed class of students “boys,” unless he’s “bollocking” them, in which case they are all “girls.” Think of the stories and rumors surrounding Mr. Blake and his alleged physical abuse of his son, who has left home forever. Think of Uncle Brian getting creepy and sexist at the dinner table, interrogating Julia about her choice of college and implying that she’s following a boyfriend to Edinburgh, and how Hugo reminds Jason of Uncle Brian when he sexually harasses Kate Alfrick at Mr. Rhydd’s shop. These hairy barbarians Jason is so eager to impress didn’t invent these gender standards—they have inherited them from their fathers and teachers, and we see this most clearly in the Ross Wilcox situation. It is implicit in Mr. Kempsey’s aphorism, “The brutal may have been molded by a brutality you cannot exceed” (212).
As we were unpacking the Ross Wilcox situation in class, thinking about the role that Ross’s father plays in his son’s brutality, I recalled a story from my own experience as a non-gender-conforming kid growing up on the Jersey Shore in the 1980s. I have far too many of these stories, and I usually don’t like to share them in class, because it takes our focus away from the literature. But dealing with what we now would call “bullying” was pretty much a daily occurrence, in some form, for me and my friends in our first two years of high school. The social dynamics were different from Black Swan Green, and the “hierarchy” Jason describes was less rigidly defined. But when my friends and I started to get into skateboarding and punk culture, which at the time was pretty much nonexistent in our town, the backlash was swift and immediate. I have sat in a classroom while a teacher mocked my haircut or called me a “girl” or “card-carrying queer” (I swear my history teacher used precisely this expression, a favorite of his to denounce liberal politicians in general). I have had cops tell me that they would not pursue the person who just assaulted me because I “asked for it” with my “faggot haircut.” On some days, it would just be random people yelling insults from passing cars, and on other days the cars would stop and the violence would be verbal and physical. On some school days, it would just be random football players or metalheads shoving you against the lockers as you walked the halls, and on other days (one in particular) I ended up in intensive care with a ruptured spleen and liver. Simply riding a skateboard through town put a target on your back, and my partly shaved head with gross little dready spikes on top was seen as a direct provocation in the hallways at school.
I didn’t know the term “toxic masculinity” at the time—I first heard it maybe ten years ago, and it was one of those phrases that I knew immediately what it meant. It’s something I’ve experienced, and pushed back against, my whole life, but it can be illuminating and even revolutionary to be able to name something like this. (As when Julia helpfully teaches Jason the term “Pyrhhic victory” [115], and he is then able to grasp why his father hasn’t really “won” when he celebrates the crane eating Helena’s new koi in “Rocks.”) When we think about Ross Wilcox and his horrible behavior as being largely shaped by his experiences at home, by the model of masculinity that his tax-dodging, wife-beating father represents, we are thinking about the effects of toxic masculinity, or how this culture of bullying has become systemic in Jason’s world.
As we discussed Ross Wilcox and his father in class, I suddenly found myself thinking back to Robbie Holmes. He was never one of my main tormenters—just a kid two years older than me who would reliably mess with me about half the times I ran into him, but not someone I usually think about when I revisit these old days. He never did anything too bad, and for whatever reason he seemed to have it out for my friend Pat even more than me (these guys would sort of play “favorites,” in that it often seemed like they hated one or two of us especially). But this one interaction I had with Robbie when I was fifteen and he was probably seventeen, as he stood in my face asking me why I had to be such a total queer, springs to mind as a neat example of toxic masculinity. On this particular day, I was loitering with a couple of friends around a public bench, doing some tricks on the curb and the bench—the same as a hundred other afternoons over these years. Robbie Holmes and another guy came up to us, and we braced ourselves for what might come next. On this particular day, Robbie focused on me.
It was a common kind of interrogation: “Why do you have to look like such a queer? Why do you wear those earrings, don’t you know that’s gay?” In the mid-1980s in America, it was somewhat acceptable for a straight/cis male to have one pierced ear, but it was widely understood that it had to be the left ear; I have no idea where this notion originated, but everyone knew that a pierced right ear was a signal to the world that you were homosexual. I pierced my own ears, both of them, with safety pins—this was the kind of thing I thought was fun at the time—and I had one ring in my right and two in my left, an extent of accessorizing that went beyond the narrow bounds for men and boys in those days. Robbie’s interrogation then ascended to a new level: “Do you know how bad my father would whip my ass if I came home looking like you?”
I don’t remember how I responded—probably something very witty like “No, I don’t, why don’t you tell me?” But I distinctly remember thinking more along the lines of Your father sounds like a real dick. I’m glad he’s not my father. I don’t know what Robbie Holmes was trying to convey with this statement, but it was clearly an expression of disgust, a statement of what I deserved for my deviance. Was he impugning my own father, who was too weak to beat me for cutting my own hair and piercing my own ears? My Dad hated the way I looked in high school, and he would really have preferred me to pursue a more conventional route, but he never punished me or beat me for it. Was he doing an insufficient job as a father? What kind of man allows his son to go around looking like this? At the same time, I sensed a twinge of envy, as if Robbie Holmes would really like to have the flexibility to explore his identity in these ways, but he knows that his Dad would kick his ass if he did. He hated me and my friends because we represented a kind of freedom he could not enjoy, and he took it upon himself to police these gendered boundaries, to enforce the “iron-clad rules” his father had taught to him.
This particular interaction did not lead to violence, apart from the verbal abuse. It is likely that Robbie ended it by taking my skateboard and rolling it into traffic, a common move by lunkheads who couldn’t skate and wished they could. And I don’t remember even talking about it with my friends at the time—this stuff was so common, we’d just get back to whatever we were doing after the goons walked away. But in retrospect it strikes me as an almost too-perfect illustration of the concept of toxic masculinity, and how it is “inherited” and enforced from one generation to the next. He was literally bullying me by threatening me with the prospect of his father being my father, and gloating about how this “real” father would have abused and rejected me because I wore earrings and liked to skate.
The happy ending to this story, if there is one, is that the culture does seem to be shifting in profound and significant ways when it comes to gender expression among teenagers, and it is possible that the cycle is starting to weaken or break. In my hometown these days, the tennis courts where we used to get kicked out for skating are now a skate park, and the popular kids at my old high school in the early 2000s skated and dressed like punks (I have no idea what the local scene is like these days). These were the sons and daughters of my tormentors, in many cases, and I did smile at the thought of their parents having to accept their shaved hair and piercings (even if these accessories were purchased at the mall).
Friday, April 7, 2023
A Novel with a Soundtrack
So why have I been opening so many of our classes lately by trying to play music on our janky off-brand Bluetooth speaker? What valid pedagogical role could songs by Human League or Talking Heads play in a very serious English literature course like this one? Is the instructor pursuing a personal agenda to promote the appreciation of 1980s synth-pop in today’s generation? Well, no, not exactly (although if you ended up checking out Fear of Music because you first heard “Heaven” in my class, that would be okay by me). Aside from the fact that it nicely breaks up the monotony and puts us all in a good mood when we listen to “Mr. Blue Sky” before launching into the second half of discussion—a song so full of earworms that the entire class will have little snippets of bouncy chords, freaky vocoder effects, and the jauntiest guitar solo ever recorded ricocheting around in our heads for the rest of the day—music serves as a uniquely crucial element of this novel’s evocation of Jason Taylor’s world. For one previous iteration of this course (2019) I tried to go for deep authenticity and produced a mixtape of the songs in these chapters on my cassette deck on my home stereo system. I was borrowing the library's boombox, which featured a cassette player, but the player was in pretty bad shape, and the music sounded terrible. So now we're using Spotify, which Jason Taylor wouldn't have had access to. He needs to overhear music from his sister's room, or be turned on to cool new music like Talking Heads by her boyfriend. And in this way, he reflects a lot about the role of music in popular youth culture in the 1980s.
Music is a part of Holden Caulfield’s world, too, of course. Our picture of late-1940s New York in The Catcher in the Rye might be enhanced if we listened to a general example of the kind of music Ernie must have been playing in the piano bar, or if we could track down the (fictional) song “Little Shirley Beans” by (real-life) Estelle Fletcher (even though Phoebe herself never gets to hear the song). But the vital place of music in Jason’s world reflects significant changes in the role of popular culture by the latter half of the twentieth century, and we’ll see the same thing in Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, which is set in the same era. David Mitchell is so specific about the songs that are playing in crucial scenes throughout this novel—“Don’t You Want Me?” by Human League is namedropped in the very first paragraph, like a theme song over opening credits. For many readers, a reference to a song like this will immediately evoke the era, along with the other pop-cultural references to The Rockford Files or The Empire Strikes Back.
But what if you’ve never heard the song before? Does a novel like this require a supplementary playlist in order to be fully understood? Are these musical allusions akin to the literary allusions throughout Fun Home, which depend on a reader’s familiarity with Greek myth or the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald? When I first started teaching this novel, in 2009, most students in class associated “Don’t You Want Me?” with a Swiffer commercial (apparently the broom is upset because the homeowner has started using a Swiffer exclusively?), which is not the association David Mitchell has in mind. For me, in contrast, the song inevitably evokes the local roller rink when I was 12 years old, cruising in wide circles on urethane wheels to the sweet synth sounds of British pop ("Cars" by Gary Numan was also a big hit at the rink).
I have put together a 24-song Spotify playlist for Black Swan Green (and I will do the same for Sag Harbor, which is similarly anchored in musical references), and while it does include some stuff I haven't played in class, it doesn’t even include every song mentioned in the novel (by the chapter “Disco,” we’re getting two or three songs mentioned per page! I do include most of the DJ's inspired playlist). It also no longer includes "Words," by Neil Young, since Neil pulled all of his catalog off Spotify last year, to protest their production and promotion of the Joe Rogan podcast. Typically, there’s one song per chapter, and listening to these songs in order works as a nice parallel to the novel—we think of lovelorn Julia up in her room, blasting Kate Bush, or newly stoked Jason kicking back and playing “Mr. Blue Sky” five or six times in his room, or fantasizing about escaping the stresses of his life in the front seat of Ewan’s car while listening to David Byrne sing about heaven as a “place where nothing ever happens.” The songs are a key part of these scenes, and a reader should be able to “hear” them (either literally or in our minds’ ear) when we read. These are more than superficial details; a reader really misses something important about this book if they aren’t familiar with the songs Mitchell cites.
Some critics have suggested that contemporary writers like David
Mitchell, Colson Whitehead, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Nick Hornby, and
others run the risk of dating their works by packing them with references to
popular culture. Literature aspires to the eternal and the universal, in this
view; a novel should cut more deeply than an episode of “I Love the 80s” on
VH1. I can sort of see the logic here—would a reader of Black Swan Green in 2123 require audio footnotes to “explain” all
these allusions to long-obscure pop music from the twentieth century?
The music in Black Swan Green is more than simply a nostalgic trigger for Gen X readers. It’s a fundamental part of what it was to be a kid Jason’s age at the time. He doesn’t go to shows to hear live music, he doesn’t go to clubs, he doesn’t play music himself. He listens to recorded music, often alone, on the radio and on LPs and cassettes, and the author marks important moments in his character’s story by specifying the exact song that was playing at the time. He pays close attention to what his older sister and her friends listen to, and he sneaks a chance to play her records whenever he can. We can observe a progression over the course of the novel, as Jason goes from overhearing Human League in his sister's room, to "borrowing" her records without permission, to playing her records when she's not home, to being introduced to new stuff by Ewan and Julia (via a mixtape, a quintessential genre of 1980s music culture), to choosing and listening to his own music in the later chapters. He has strong feelings about the music he hears—Jason is rarely indifferent to a song, and he deploys (often italicized) adjectives like “incredible” and “kazookering” to describe what he hears. Forming his musical tastes is a significant part of Jason’s formation of a self, and David Mitchell namedrops songs in part as a method of characterization.
Thursday, April 6, 2023
Notebook prompt: Jason as "Maggot"
In the ninth chapter of Black Swan Green (September 1982), the moment Jason has been dreading since "January Man" has come to pass: the chapter opens with Ross Wilcox, his breath smelling like "a bag of ham," getting in Jason's face and outing him as a kid who "goes to the pictures with Mummy!" and also (to his horror) as the "school stutterboy." The chapter "Maggot" follows through on Jason's debilitating dread of exposure back in "Hangman," as he is compelled to read aloud (from Lord of the Flies, appropriately enough) in English class. By the end of the day, when Ross and his "lot" toss Jason's Adidas bag on the roof of the departing schoolbus, he believes himself to have fully become the voice in his head that he calls "Maggot."
As you reflect on this harrowing day of school, narrated in excruciating detail, think about how Jason's experiences connect to your own experiences throughout childhood. Have you witnessed "gang-up" or bullying dynamics in your school career? Inside or outside of school? What side(s) have you found yourself on in these situations--part of the mob, victim of the mob, bystander, or somewhere in between? Does David Mitchell's depiction of Jason's most hellish day of school ring true to you? Does it seem hyperbolic? Are kids generally less cruel, or less prone to mob dynamics, than they were in Mitchell's era? Does Jason's experience in this chapter resonate with you at all? Do you take away any insights from his worst day of school ever?
Take 7 minutes now and reflect on this chapter, in whatever direction your thoughts take you. You can use these questions as prompts, but don't try to address all of them.
Thursday, March 9, 2023
Notebook prompt: An Antihero's Journey?
Why does Alison Bechdel title the seventh and final chapter of Fun Home "The Antihero's Journey"? What ideas does it evoke, and how do you see these manifest in the chapter (and the book as a whole)? In what sense might we view Bruce as an antihero? Would this make Alison the "hero" of her own narrative? How, in the end, does this graphic memoir frame the complex relationship between these two protagonists?
Please take 5 minutes to contemplate these questions in your Notebook.
Wednesday, March 8, 2023
Libraries in a Book about Books
Given her self-described “bookish” upbringing, it’s not surprising that libraries feature prominently in Alison Bechdel’s coming-of-age/coming-out narrative. Her own memoir is saturated with other books, which aren’t only referred to in passing but are fundamental structural elements of the story she tells: we view the story of the Bechdel family through the lens of Greek mythology, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Henry James, Collette, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Camus, and a bunch of others I’m probably forgetting right now. Fun Home is a book that is very much “about” other books, and Bechdel uses other books as a way to give shape and meaning to her story. She gets this habit, in large part, from her father. The brief period of “closeness” between them, in the final years of his life, has a lot to do with the fact that Alison is now getting into reading, and Bruce clearly is thrilled at the prospect of sharing his favorite books with her, serving literally as her teacher in English class (in a coming-of-age-themed course, “Rites of Passage”), with her as the “only one in that class worth teaching” (199). It is fitting that her efforts to understand him after his death are filtered through the books he loved. She hates Ulysses when she tries to read his old copy in that winter-session course, but she’s clearly studied it very closely in the intervening years: chapter 7 of Fun Home reflects a deep critical familiarity with Joyce’s uber-modernist, antiheroic mock-epic, which is itself an extended ironic riff on Homer’s Odyssey.
Early in chapter 3 (“That Old Catastrophe”), Bechdel introduces us to Bruce’s library as a prime reflection of the artificial façade that defines him—the “art” that the constantly remodeled home represents, which prizes artifice and appearance and décor over underlying reality. She acknowledges the pretensions reflected in Bruce’s “library” right away: “For anyone but the landed gentry to refer to a room in their house as the ‘library’ might seem affected, but there really was no other word for it” (60). The illustration of the room includes labels that specify the artful décor—velvet drapes, gilt awnings (or whatever those tops of window-dressings are called), “flocked” wallpaper (not sure what “flocked” means either). The room looks like the epitome of Bruce’s “art”—ornate, lush, baroque, antique, crowded with ornament and accessory, very much a visual spectacle. Bechdel narrates the room as a kind of stage set for Bruce’s performance: “My father liked to imagine himself as a nineteenth-century aristocrat overseeing his estate from behind the leather-topped mahogany and brass second-empire desk” (60). The “library” appears to be the masterpiece of Bruce’s carefully curated illusion, a pretentious affectation that (once again) conceals an underlying reality.
But Bechdel qualifies this picture somewhat, by acknowledging that, for all its pretensions, the room is a functional library (“Where’s the atlas?” “In the Canterbury atlas rack” [61]). “Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense . . . and becomes, for all practical purposes, real” (60). Bruce is both playing a role, projecting himself as a quasi-nineteenth-century aristocrat with a library in his mansion, and actually being that role. The image is Bruce’s reality. The room is a key prop in his “country-squire routine,” which involves “edifying the villagers—his more promising high school students” by lending them books by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. And she also notes that these innocent exchanges of books were often likely cover for clandestine sexual relationships (just about everything in Bruce’s life could be seen as cover for his clandestine sexual relationships), a key feature of the “act” through which he seduces his students: “Such a suspension of the imaginary in the real was, after all, my father’s stock in trade,” Bechdel narrates, as a “promising high school student” remarks, “Man, being in this room is like going back in time. What’s this shit?” (65).
The primary intertext here is The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s novel about a man who reinvents himself and creates a house (an actual mansion) that reflects and projects this invented personality. Gatsby’s mansion on Long Island prominently features a library as a foundational element of his fictional origin myth, even if Jay Gatsby (not his real name) hasn’t actually read any of the books on the shelves—Bechdel alludes to the moment when a party guest marvels at the “thoroughness” and “realism” of Gatsby’s illusion because his books are “real” and not “cardboard fakes” (84). Gatsby “knew when to stop,” however—the pages in his books are not “cut” (which is how you could tell if a book had actually been read or not: pages used to be in bundles, and you’d have to “cut” the edges in order to separate the pages). Bruce’s books (most of them) have “clearly been read,” and therefore his illusion doesn’t go as deep as Gatsby’s, but nonetheless, Bruce’s library reflects “the preference of fiction to reality” (85). The library in the Bechdel home is an elaborate stage set designed to bolster Bruce’s “fictional” self, and a convenient cover for his “secret life,” his surreptitious affairs with younger men and boys. In chapter 3, it serves as a primary image for Bruce’s essential dishonesty, sexual repression, and self-evasion, hidden behind a beautiful façade.
Libraries (and a co-op bookstore) play a key role throughout Alison’s own coming-of-age/coming-out experience, and once again we see fundamental contrasts between her and her father. Bruce’s library is an affectation, window dressing, a stage set, the creation and maintenance of an illusion so thorough it becomes “real.” He uses it to push books that he values onto others, and we see him do the same thing with Alison when she’s old enough to appreciate it—a place for him to tell others what they “have to” read next. Alison’s library experience, significantly, is framed as more of a private experience of self-discovery: she describes her “realization at nineteen that I was a lesbian” as “a revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind” (74). (Technically, this scene takes place in a “co-op bookstore,” but the function is very much like a library: she stumbles upon the book herself and “borrows” it, reading it surreptitiously in the aisle.) She experiences the first “qualms” about her emergent identity at age thirteen, when she sees the word “lesbian” in the dictionary, and from there, her journey of self-discovery and self-revelation takes place almost entirely through books. First she “screw[s] up [the] courage” to buy a book called Lesbian Women at the bookstore (an initial, partial, hesitant form of public acknowledgment), and then she follows all the references in that book to find others in the school library. She finds “homosexuality” in the card catalog (you have no idea what this is, a kind of early prototype of an online book search using paper cards in alphabetical order), and then she proceeds to “ravish” a “four foot trove” of books on the subject. There’s an early kind of coming-out progression, as the initial fear and embarrassment leads to her “trolling even the public library, heedless of the risks.” This initial course of “independent reading” leads directly to the moment when she writes to her parents to declare “I am a lesbian.”
The contrasts with Bruce’s stage-set library are stark: the library for Alison is functional, practical, a source of nonfiction information rather than fiction (she reads books of interviews with lesbian women, psychology, cultural studies, history), and, most importantly, a route to self-knowledge and a public embrace of that identity. In chapter 7 (“The Antihero’s Journey”), she frames this experience as the start of an “odyssey . . . nearly as epic as the original” (203). To put a fine point on it, Bruce uses his library and fictional books to construct an elaborate façade; Alison uses the co-op bookstore and academic and public libraries in order to get to a deeper truth about herself, which she will then declare and embrace publicly. His library is private and a reflection of his personal aesthetic (concealment, decoration, artifice), while Alison’s is public, academic, scholarly. Bruce’s serves to conceal a fundamental truth about himself; Alison’s serves to reveal a fundamental truth about herself. One more way that these two can be seen as “inversions” (or negative mirror-images) of each other.
There is a sense in which, in chapter 7, we see Bruce’s library take on new potential—as a possible form of bonding and mutual understanding with his daughter. There aren’t many points in this book where I identify with Bruce, but the way he gets so “elated” while picking books off his shelf to share with his daughter is one of them. He ends up lending her the French feminist writer Collette’s memoir Earthly Paradise, in part about gay and lesbian Paris in the 1920s, which plays a key role in her “independent reading” on the subject of queer identity through the ages. Bruce, in these scenes, seems more “real,” less performative. He isn’t putting on an act for Alison, and he is only trying to “seduce” her by inspiring her mind, finding some common ground to talk about books. As you may know, I too very much enjoy sharing books that I have found interesting and revelatory with younger people—it’s really at the heart of what I do for a living. And I admit to occasionally pressing a book or movie on my kids, telling them they “have to” read or see it. It is one of the great pleasures of life to introduce someone to a book that may make a difference to them, and I remain grateful to the people who introduced me to these same books when I was younger. We see some potential for a deeper, more meaningful, and more truthful relationship between father and daughter start to emerge here—but, perhaps predictably, we see Bruce start to overdo it, getting too excited, talking at Alison about all the books he’s pressing on her, and generally driving her away into her own independent-reading course. She’s not as into Ulysses—initially—as he hopes she will be. She’s far more interested in reading about lesbian culture, and she quickly falls behind in her course. But Joyce’s novel has clearly made an impact on her, as this whole final chapter represents an extended meta-riff on Ulysses and its creative refiguring of The Odyssey. Bechdel knows Ulysses very well, now, at the time she is writing this book, and it’s as if she’s sharing these insights into “spiritual” and “consubstantial” fathers and children with Bruce posthumously, to try and come to some kind of understanding of their complex and ambiguous relationship.
I can’t help but assume Bruce would be proud of his former student.
Thursday, February 23, 2023
Sylvia Plath reading her late poems
In the final year of her too-brief life, Sylvia Plath was living in England as her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes fell apart. This was a very productive year of writing for Plath, as she completed the manuscript of The Bell Jar and prepared it for (pseudonymous) publication and wrote a number of her most well-known, beguiling, and deeply personal works of poetry, usually in the early morning hours before her infant and toddler were awake. These late poems were posthumously collected in the book Ariel (1965), but Plath was reading versions of them publicly in 1962, including a series of recorded readings for the BBC.
Here is a recording of Plath reading one of her best-known poems, "Lady Lazarus," on the BBC in 1962:
Notebook Prompt: Esther's Recovery as a Coming-of-Age?
The Bell Jar ends at a literal threshold: Esther is about to step into the room where her psychological fitness will be assessed by a panel of experts. She is hopefully "graduating" from the asylum and returning for the spring semester at college--she describes herself as "patched, retreaded, and approved for the road" (244), as if she were a car being inspected for safety. How do we view Esther's harrowing experience in these psychiatric institutions, and what do they have to do with the larger question of her coming-of-age? Is her life-threatening descent into clinical depression and what sounds like schizophrenia a brief episode of deviation from her path, and at the end of the novel she is essentially returning to where she left off? Or do we view these experiences as an inherent and important part of her coming-of-age? Is she being "restored," or do we see her as somewhere new at the close of the novel? Does the narrative of The Bell Jar represent a significant kind of growth or development in her character, or is she instead "starting, after a six months' lapse, where [she] so vehemently had left off" (236)?
Please take five minutes now to contemplate your views on the conclusion of The Bell Jar and the question of coming-of-age in your Notebook.
Friday, February 10, 2023
“The Perfect Setup of the True Neurotic”
Friday, January 27, 2023
Holden’s Grecian Urn
Tuesday, January 24, 2023
Notebook Prompt: What would you say to Holden Caulfield?
Throughout his lonely wanderings around New York City, Holden Caulfield is seemingly desperate for a little "intelligent conversation," trying to strike up some kind of discourse with everyone from cab drivers to Sunny the disturbingly young-seeming sex worker he inadvertently hires. But in most of these attempts at conversation, Holden has no interest in talking about himself or his current crisis--after he gets the "start applying yourself in school" routine from Mr. Spencer, he seems uninterested in any advice or suggestions about his plight, and while he certainly seems to enjoy complaining in his rants to the reader, we have to remind ourselves that he's not in fact walking around the city criticizing everything and everyone he sees.
Starting with his ill-fated "date" with Sally Hayes, we see Holden start to talk a little more directly about the "topics on his mind," and we also see Sally and Carl Luce push back against the assertive self-assurance of Holden's narrative voice. They both call him out in various ways, and we get an uncomfortable glimpse of how Holden is apt to come across to others in his life: emotionally immature, erratic, and seemingly out of control.
If you could talk to Holden Caulfield at this point in his narrative, what would you say to him? And how would you say it so that he wouldn't simply denounce you as just another phony giving him phony advice? Remember that this narrative style uniquely positions or projects the reader as a close friend and confident--along with Jane, we are the only ones he's ever told about Allie's baseball glove, for example. He seems to presume that we will always agree with him or "get" his various complaints about human behavior and society, but he also seems to trust us, to potentially value our opinions. Imagine that this is a friend of yours who is going through this difficult period: What would you say to him? What does he need to hear?
Please take 7 minutes to contemplate this prompt in your notebook.