Next Generation

Sag Harbor ends on an portentous note, with Benji wondering if this is the end of an era. Of all the summers he has spent and all the memories he has made there, he can’t ignore that a change has taken place -- the bonfire isn’t as energetic as it once was, and slowly his peers have returned to the city. Soon he will be back in New York with the summer far behind him.

When Benji attempts to find “Little” doppelgangers in the midst of the community’s annual foot race (a tradition he and his friends have now outgrown) he immediately recognizes himself in a clumsy but sanguine little boy with an unfortunate afro. But when he tries to pick out his future self in the crowd, the results are much less transparent and promising. With this uncertainty, the possibility of him becoming one of “Those Who Didn’t Come Out Anymore” is just as likely as him raising his own family and returning to Sag every summer. Benji has long condemned the selling of one’s Sag Harbor property as the ultimate offense, but what does that mean for people like his sister, who were once just like him before permanently relocating to the outside world? Will he and his friends even come out next summer? Only time will tell. And if they don’t, who will take their place?

In its final pages, the novel hints at this potential, describing a new generation of Sag Harbor “aborigines” as they stake their ground. One young boy in particular, towering over the other kids in both stature and guts, quickly makes a strong first impression. It’s natural to expect him to mirror one of the characters mentioned previously in the novel, but I think it’s important that he doesn’t. As Benji contemplates the fate of his generation, this random kid, whom no one can seem to place, literally destroys pieces of Sag Harbor while his young peers cheer him on -- one boy even discards the once coveted race medal in spirit. Benji and his friends are helpless as they passively discourage the destruction before turning their backs to it. Just as he felt the disconnect with his parents’ and grandparents’ generations despite their failed efforts to incorporate him, there is a distance between him and this new breed. They will figuratively and literally tear down his generation’s legacy and carve out their own, starting their own traditions and making their own memories.

As I watched this year’s seniors tearfully embrace one another in their matching class shirts today, I couldn’t help but sense the same prophetic change taking place. Within months of their graduation, an entirely new flock of subbies will be ushered in to fill in the empty lockers. Throughout the years I’ve commented on how each crop of subbies manages to be so distinct from the previous yet still renew the youthful energy. And while we may occasionally see fragments of ourselves in their optimistic faces, the school will never be the same. These students will talk about their fancy new laptops and legitimate science teacher, but they will never have had the opportunity to meet Sue Kovacs or reminisce about playing Smash in the lounge. I have a rough idea of what Little Athena was like, but the future of Big Athena is hard to picture. A year from now, my class will probably be experiencing the same apocalyptic rush of emotions the seniors must be feeling right now. It is my hope that amidst their necessary trampling and incineration of our legacy, the future subfreshmen will spare the lasting reminder that we were once here.

My first kiss went a little like this...

“It seemed impossible not to remember something like that. The first time a girl put her lips on yours. What kind of chump forgot being a five-year-old mack? I would’ve coasted on that for years if I’d known. But I did know. I was there. What put it out of my mind? I looked at Melanie’s profile, the coast of her nose and mouth and chin. She was one of us. A Sag Harbor Baby.”

Most of us remember our first kiss. An innocent peck on the playground in pre-K or a hormone-pumped make out session in middle school -- they all count. So how could Benji, a self conscious teenage boy eager to have the ultimate summer experience, completely forget his precocious rite of passage? Melanie, as she called herself, was a long-lost descendant of first generation Sag Harbor beachgoers whose family had done the unthinkable and sold their Cuffee Drive property a decade before. Upon her homecoming, Melanie immediately proves herself as a well-versed local -- not to be confused with a townie -- and becomes involved with NP, so when she confesses to Benji that she had been his secret admirer all those years ago, he is completely caught off guard. It is interesting to note that during this pivotal scene, instead of focusing on the adrenaline, Benji keeps talking about the house, his “long lost love”. This seems to contribute to the fact that his first kiss is completely wiped from his memory as well as the resulting scene at the end of the chapter where Melanie acts as if their second kiss hadn’t happened either. The common denominator seems to be the destination, Sag Harbor, where memories are made and sometimes kept, the essence of them ultimately overshadowing the details. When Benji reflects on his summer, it’s not really Melanie he remembers, but the coming of age experience she shared with him that he would carry to his back-to-school setting, much like how Jason’s first kiss seemed to be a precursor for his adolescence. Before we are quick to scold him for his forgetfulness, imagine if Benji had remembered his childhood fling. Would he have used that experience and built on that reputation? More importantly, would he have been the same narrator?

Reign of Terror

In “To Prevent Flare-ups”, Colson Whitehead finally provides some insight about Benji’s homelife. He begins by comparing the Coopers to the Huxtables -- a doctor father, a lawyer mother, and an overall a well-mannered bunch adored by black audiences and white audiences alike -- each embodies the ideal successful African American family. What tips the scale is how the Coopers conduct themselves behind the scenes. For some reason, Mr. Cooper has an insatiable appetite for asserting dominance in front of his family. We see glimpses of this when Benji describes how he is coached to have a zero-tolerance policy for even the slightest throwings of shade and to react with violence when his racial identity is even suggestively disparaged, but until now, the implications of his father’s moral character have remained chiefly speculative.

What makes The Cosby Show significant is the fact that it is the first mainstream non-“coon” show to depict a picture-perfect family the Coopers can finally identify with and take pride in doing so. However, the sitcom aspect as well as the overtone that Cooper family dynamics are not as they seem further cements Mr. Mitchell’s statement that family itself is a performance. Just as boys tend to pick fights in public when they know they have an audience, families usually want just the opposite to avoid making a scene. What’s interesting is that Mr. Cooper doesn't seem as concerned as he maybe should be in terms of who can can see their dirty laundry. It’s Benji who closes all the windows so the neighbors don’t hear his parents arguing and Gail -- a woman who argues for a living -- who has to back away into the living room so that her friends don’t hear her husband debase her. Meanwhile, Mr. Cooper himself is perfectly content with being seen as the chipper dad who can make a killer barbecue, implying perhaps that he believes as long as he can preserve his outwardly innocuous reputation he can somehow remain immune to the consequences of his personal infractions.

It’s impossible not to draw some parallels between Mr. Cooper and the other dads we've met, in particular those of Stephen and Jason. All three have a history of alcohol abuse, a device that often reveals facets of their true nature. For the previous two dads, drinking is used to fill the space left by impotence and to compensate for the increasing lack of control they have in their downward spiraling lives. It takes on a completely different form in Mr. Cooper, who not only appears to be very successful in his industry, but also has no problem staying in control in his household, despite being absent 24/5. In fact, all of his family members are scared of him. And who can blame them -- Reggie gets two C-’s and immediately becomes “Shithead”, for Gail, every paper plate purchase is a gamble, and who knows why we never see Elena? In this regime founded on fear, the only coping mechanism has been total submission; you either agree to everything he says or suffer the consequences. If you displease him, your your options are limited; you can either to completely avoid him by booking extra shifts at Burger King or write a bullet-pointed list of his abusive practices.

So far, Mr. Cooper has attempted to teach his son how crucial it is to assert dominance. Apparently this means you have to scream at your wife in front of all her friends, lest you take the fall for dropping some macaroni salad. He has hammered it into Benji’s head that no one should be able to get away with snubbing his race unless it’s with a black eye. But to Benji, the only message received was that “No one can hurt you more than I can.” Is it really the same end result, psychologically? I think it’s important to realize that the only way a dictator like Mr. Cooper can continue to maintain a reign of terror is if people are actually scared. In “To Prevent Flare-Ups”, Whitehead reveals that at least in Benji’s eyes, his time may be up.

"Hangman"

Before beginning Black Swan Green, I’d kind of always assumed that the social ramifications of speech impediments were mild and rather inconsequential to a person’s psychological development. Now, after reading Jason’s vivid portrayal of his constant internal struggle and general feeling of powerlessness against his demon, I feel extremely sheepish for my ignorance.

Jason calls his tormentor “Hangman”, ironically the same name given to a word game that slowly executes a helpless victim via the selection of incorrect letters. The real life consequences of choosing the wrong words are fully acknowledged and feared by Jason, who avoids ones that start with “N” and “S” and will even sacrifice expressing his true thoughts and feelings in order to escape public embarrassment. According to my research, this is a very common course of action for stammerers and stutterers alike. So is the feeling of guilt; the stammerer may believe that their handicap is merely a flaw of their willpower and that if only they had stronger self-discipline, they would be able to correct their bad habit. Such individuals would be very prone to self-blame, which is consistent with Jason’s narration. These feelings only augment when perhaps well intentioned but misinformed spectators try to dole out suggestions like "slow down, take a deep breath, think about what you want to say”. Ms. De Roos seems to understand these dynamics and for that reason Jason does not feel pressured around her. She can grasp that for Jason to speak publicly in front of a large crowd is his worst nightmare because as we've seen, he can’t predict when Hangman will reveal himself. This social anxiety causes individuals like Jason to constantly anticipate and assess the difficulty of imminent situations, which includes a negative reaction from their audience and a desire to avoid the humiliation of such a scenario altogether. Because disfluency so heavily impacts a person’s self esteem especially if that person is a child, it is particularly important how that person’s family deals with their condition. By finishing their sentences or telling them to slow down, a parent could be subconsciously damaging their child’s confidence. In Black Swan Green, it’s very telling when on page 33 Jason admits that one of the reasons why he can’t argue with his father is because he knows a single inarticulacy would topple his argument.

In other ways, Jason’s stammer gives him supplementary advantages. For example, we mentioned that by reading dictionaries for replacement words, he also builds his vocabulary. Additionally, the self consciousness that is otherwise a burden helps him have a particularly meticulous social radar that helps him survive the brutal arena of adolescent boys, at least for the time being. To conclude, I know that I can by no means speak for stammerers or people with other speech impediments and I can’t even begin to understand what it must feel like, this novel is doing a good job of at least encouraging me to make a perfunctory reflection.

No Country for Men

Housekeeping opens with a vague abstraction of the narrator’s grandfather, Edmund Foster, who on a whim, ended up in Fingerbone. As a consequence of what can only be considered a rash chimerical decision, fate placed the following two generations of Fosters in the small town as well. For a novel with such a scarcity of male characters, it’s rather ironic that a man is single-handedly responsible for all of them being in this position. Had Edmund Foster not arrived in Fingerbone, Sylvia would not have married him, nor would she have stayed after his death to raise their three daughters, and Helen would not have chosen this town to drop off her own daughters, and Sylvie would not have had to return to raise them.

The first thing that came to my mind was that in the aftermath of the unfortunate train accident that killed Edmund, there are two other widows who decide to leave the town. Suddenly it occurred to me that these women may not only have left Fingerbone to escape reminders of the tragedy that took place, but also because their husbands were the only things that had been keeping them there in the first place. Sylvia decides to remain, but deals with the loss of her husband by avoiding the subject for the rest of her life, giving us an even more nebulous impression of his character. Even more enigmatic are the portrayals of Helen and Sylvie’s husbands, only one of whom we are granted with a physical description. Due to the lack of male figures and abundance of female figures in their lives, one would think that Ruth and Lucille would spend their childhood and adolescence searching for a surrogate father, yet it’s just the opposite. Time and time again we see them defining and redefining the image of their late mother and evaluating the existing maternal presences in their lives, searching for one that will fit each of their respective sensibilities. In Sylvia’s household, the lack of a father caused her daughters to start paying more attention to her in a way they had not before. With Ruth and Lucille’s circumstances, the arrival of Sylvie made them optimistic about finally having a home and a mother. Unfortunately (for Lucille), the very aspect that is associated with women of this time and consequently most of the peripheral female characters in the novel -- the home -- is absent in Sylvie’s current way of living. To her, becoming Ruth and Lucille’s guardian is accidental protocol, and in terms of housekeeping, she mentions that she only hoards tin cans because she “considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping”. Housekeeping itself is about appearances, upkeep, and public perception, all of which are foreign to Sylvie the transient who has led a life in the shadows. Similarly, this lifestyle does not fit the mindset of Ruth who consciously and subconsciously avoids drawing attention to herself.

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered the possibility of a feminist presentation, but to dismiss the exclusively female selection of characters altogether would be incredibly naive. Whether or not it was intended to make a statement, clearly such discretion was a conscious choice made by the author. Now that I have finished the book, I think it’s more accurate to say that at the very least this singularity paved the way for a more focused and pure analysis of female relationships.

Joan

On the surface Joan Gilling appears to have followed a path eerily similar to Esther’s. Both girls were high academic achievers, both dated Buddy, and both end up in a psych ward. The fundamental distinction is in their demeanor: whereas Joan has a tendency to yield to outside influences while perpetuating a self-confident guise, Esther delegates her trust and admiration to people sparingly and has been experiencing spells of self-doubt. So what role does Joan play in Esther’s narrative? Notice how Joan explains she was only inspired to kill herself after religiously following Esther’s story in the media -- this does not discredit her mental instability, but rather serves to corroborate it. And why did she kill herself? Does she want to be Esther or with her? True, Joan does appear to imply she has feelings for Esther and may even feel wounded that Esther would sleep with Irwin, but all things considered, this detail is far too inconsequential to be the reason for her suicide. It seems much more probable that with her release from the asylum, Joan has tricked herself into thinking that her mind has been cured -- to the point where even Esther is envious -- making her return to the institution that much more traumatic, almost as if her recovery has somehow been invalidated.

If Esther and Joan are so similar, how did only one manage to kill herself? Does it betray how susceptible Esther is to the same fate? Or is Joan a metaphor for Esther’s illness itself? And though The Bell Jar draws heavily from Sylvia Plath’s own experiences, is there a possibility that Joan partly exists as a parallel manifestation of Esther’s symptoms? Consider this: Esther is at rock bottom when she first encounters Joan in this period of her life -- physically grotesque, weak, and a shell of her former self -- while Joan emits a peculiar exuberance and an air of self-assurance. Their initial interactions are rather hostile, with Joan constantly flaunting her superior social skills and recreational privileges in front of Esther while Esther furiously curses Joan her under her own breath. But as Esther’s mental state begins to show clear improvement and she even manages to earn some privileges outside of the asylum, Joan’s progression takes an inverse course, starting with the loss of privileges and followed by a thawing of her exterior. Their rapport begins to soften, and soon Esther is able to tolerate Joan, which may signify that she is learning to become more familiar with her disease rather than trying to punish it. When Esther is figuratively and physically released from her state of confinement and begins to consider new options, even engaging in her first sexual experience, Joan quite literally fades into the background before completely being extinguished. The dull impact her death has on Esther perhaps demonstrates that Esther’s departure from mental illness is a process so subtle and so quiet that once it has lifted, one almost doesn't notice because the burden has been diminishing for a while on its own, as if trying to commit suicide. Esther's lack of compassion reveals she never really cared much for Joan, seeing her as little more than an uninvited companion she had become accustomed to.

The similarities between the two girls shows that Esther’s disease is an integral part of her -- it’s a replica of herself but not quite. Whether or not you choose to deliberate the symbolic nature of Joan’s character, the evolution of her presence and demise are extremely relevant to Esther’s story line in and outside the loony bin.

She did it

Practically all of the female characters in Esther’s life let her down -- the rebellious Doreen succumbs to a man; the woman who raised her fails to comprehend her mental state -- given how consistently she is disappointed and disenchanted by the circumscribed expectations and limitations imposed on her gender, it’s almost a godsend that the asylum introduces her to Doctor Nolan, who is not only credible by her title as a doctor, but also surprisingly sympathetic to Esther’s cause. It almost makes me think that she could be a potential version of Esther, because even with her limited dialogue, she manages to convey herself as a dependable ally, with the exception of her delayed warning about the shock treatment. Doctor Nolan first got my attention when she responded to Esther’s hatred for her mother with a satisfied “I suppose you do.” This initially gave me a sinister impression, until I began reminding myself exactly what her mother represents. From her high appraisal of shorthand to her evident ignorance of Esther’s symptoms, Mrs. Greenwood somewhat unknowingly puts an exceptional amount of pressure on Esther to conform to society’s norms for women. For Esther to literally reject this notion indicates to Doctor Nolan that her mindset is on the right track for rehabilitation.

Esther’s difficulty with trusting people is glaringly apparent throughout the novel and often hinders her ability to articulate what she wants. Doctor Nolan is perhaps the one character that earns her trust and represents what we often refer to as an “ideal audience”. Her blatant dismissal of Doctor Gordon’s shock regimen, other than being the correct assessment, is extremely symbolic on a larger spectrum. Whereas Doctor Gordon conducted the treatment extremely impersonally, Doctor Nolan’s administering of the shock treatment is supposedly effective in curing Esther with the added bonus of her considerate reassurances to Esther about her safety.

When a noticeably deflated Buddy finally returns to pick Esther up from the asylum and asks if he’s responsible for her insanity and Joan’s suicide, she can’t help but laugh. But what I find most striking about this scene is Doctor Nolan’s unwavering response: “Nobody did it. She did it.” While this could be seen as victim-blaming, it’s almost like the Doctor is giving due recognition to Joan on account of her choice; in other words, men have already taken so much, they don’t deserve to take credit for this too. Even with the novel’s proto-feminist sentiments, we cannot expect Esther to emerge from the asylum as a completely self-confident, self-empowered individual with no tolerance of gender circumscription, but she is certainly able to employ a new mindset that makes her as accountable to her own fate as any male doctor or husband that may impress on her. Doctor Nolan gives her this perspective, and it’s not by shrugging off the role men play in constraining and oppressing women, but rather by emphasizing that in spite of these restraints a woman should not allow how she chooses to cope with that burden to be under male jurisdiction.

My Brother's Keeper

Like a curator who preserves the artifacts in his museum, Holden Caulfield enshrines and embalms his relics -- memories -- and is none too fond of adding to his collection. If I had to come up with a broad definition to prescribe him, it’d be something  in the vicinity of “cynical idealist”, because no matter how highly you are regarded by Holden, his distrust of the capriciousness that is so integral to human nature prevents you from ever completely gratifying his ideal. By far the most enduring semblance he allows himself to keep is that of his younger brother Allie. In fact, Holden mentions that he often finds himself acting 13, the age he was when his brother died, as if along with Allie, a part of him had died as well. It’s almost undeniable that Holden’s proclivity to lying compulsively is symptomatic of the PTSD triggered by his brother’s death because by lying he can gauge and manipulate his audience’s emotional responses to reflect what he wants them to feel; lying gives him control, the one thing he did not have over his brother’s fate.

I think it’s also valuable to consider that as much as Holden extols his brother’s purity and singularity, Allie may not have been so perfect after all. I’m thinking of the passage on page 206 in particular when Holden mentions that although at times he hated and complained about Stradlater and Ackley, once they were gone, he found himself missing them. This is all relative to how we prefer to remember people; when all that remains of someone are fragmented memories, the slightest courtesy we can provide is preservation of their good name.

In spite of and despite of his lying, Holden repeatedly proves his natural altruism, which is as much tied to his brother’s death than anything else. Holden is by nature distrusting and judgmental but ultimately everything he does is with good intention -- from his sympathy for the nuns to his reference to the catcher in the rye, I think what he really wants is to be for someone else what Allie was to him. Above all we can forgive Holden for his impulsiveness and dishonesty because we know that when he says he doesn't concern himself with losing things, it’s because he already suffered the worst loss possible.

Middle Path

The story of Joyce, told vicariously through Stephen, is chock full of variances -- the character is egotistical but lacking in confidence, able to thoroughly commit himself to a cause but also prone to discursiveness, imaginative but unable to see past extremes. Yesterday’s discussion regarding Joyce’s career actually brought to light the extent to which he allowed his own consciousness to leak into Stephen’s.

Of the most noteworthy is Joyce’s complicated relationship with his birthplace, Dublin, a venue he saw throughout his life as a spiritual home so ubiquitous that he could not bring himself to write about any other setting, as unwelcoming as she was. Due to his radical literary deviations and the tendency to portray her characters in an outspoken light, Joyce was essentially blacklisted by his motherland, never to return except to attend his mother’s funeral. If this “obsession from afar” sounds familiar, it’s because Stephen’s interactions with Emma and women in general are very similar. Even with his precocious sexuality, zealous approaches toward poetry, and extensive romantic fantasies, Stephen proves time and time again that his fixation with the female figure -- prostitutes, the Virgin Mary, Mercedes -- is more abstract than literal; in other words, he is in love with the idea of women but when it comes down to it, he can’t take the initiative to make an actual connection. This, in combination with his high mindedness, causes Stephen to give women ample screen time as auxiliary symbols in the legend of Stephen Dedalus but little consideration in terms of their own personalities. Likewise, his first ambitious poetic endeavors imply that his infatuation with the idea of making and sharing his art far outweighs his initial skill and creativity. This is especially apparent in his cut-and-dried attempt to write a love poem to Emma -- everything he knows is derivative of conventions and even when he does manage to put his feelings into words, he can’t find the courage to present the poem to the object of his affection. With religion, we can see that Stephen has a strong affinity to the concept of spirituality but that his devotion is misplaced. Even when he plays the part of a superlative aficionado, he almost sees the entire ordeal as a moral transaction rather than a sincere deposit of faith. The only aspect he seems to be able to grasp is the universality of God’s love, but keep in mind that this only serves the purpose of confirming his specialness yet again.

The early life of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism shares some parallels with Stephen’s narrative. He too experienced both ends of the lifestyle spectrum before directing his spirituality toward a middle path. Stephen, on the other hand, experiments with both borderline religious fanaticism and then debauchery but the closest thing to a “middle path” he takes is his gradual integration of art and spirituality. While there is certainly some merit in having the ability to exclusively dedicate to an objective, I think to an extent, by confining himself to extremes in the attempt to be taken seriously, Stephen has been being counterintuitive to his own intellect.

What is "Coming of Age"?

Despite what its name suggests and how often we associate its occurrence with adolescence, “coming of age” does not necessarily discriminate with age; the transition can happen at any time, however many times, and more often than not it will catch you off guard. Given that such “milestones” may not always be voluntary, they become very hard to predict and even harder to prepare for. It could be as mundane as getting your first job or as sudden as a first heartbreak. It could involve a sacrifice, a change of priorities, a shift in perspective, or in the case of Stephen, a disillusionment; once devoted to his father’s counsel, Stephen gradually begins to lose respect for him as the family plunges deeper and deeper into debt. The point is that a coming of age is not always marked by a specific event but rather the reaction it triggers in you, and that while the impact may not be apparent until you look back, the change is irreversible. We see this with Stephen as he attempts to purge himself of his sinful thoughts or at least compensate for them by establishing abstemious habits, yet cannot help but continue to suffer from the ills of his mind. Our minds are always changing -- for example, while young Stephen seemed rather naive to his “specialness”, his ego eventually blooms in congruence to his awareness and vocabulary. The fact is that while we continue to evolve, some changes happen to be more profound or surprising than others, causing us to label them as “coming of age”.