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).
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.
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.
