Native Son

Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.
Finished: 1/12/2011

I’ve taken several African American literature courses over the last 10 years but I had not read Native Son until now. I initially picked it up to get through it before the semester began since it was fairly long. I’m pretty glad I did so because it was difficult to get through—I found myself interested in the daytime but unable to read it in bed or when I was trying to relax. Not difficult in a Joyceian complexity (the prose is actually very clear and concise), but in its somber tone and inherent gruesome nature.

I’m most interested in the ways in which the novel switches between 3rd person and 3rd person omniscient, perspective playing a large role in what the novel is about. Perspective ends up being an extension of a preoccupation with vision, both psycho-social vision—man’s place in the universe, city, fate, and also physical vision—specifically blindness. There is great focus on the eye and whether or not it can see, see appropriately, honestly, authentically, and whether or not what the eye witnesses can be sensed in truth.

This makes sense since much of Bigger’s plight is described through his senses—taste, smell, touch, hearing and seeing. It really reinforces the sometimes-false division between man and society, body and world, and whether or not there is a place where the world or self stops and the rest begins. It seems Wright emphasizes the free movement of sensory information and how it affects the inner-self despite the imposition of artificial but powerful boundaries and limitations created by the government or society in power (in this case in response to race relations).

Another extension of the eye imagery may rest in the idea of an “eye for an eye,” wherein Bigger’s attorney more or less argues that Bigger’s crimes are a response to crimes committed against him. This same dichotomy exists in the conversations about rape, too—Bigger not only willingly commits this action, but claims that he too has been raped, but not in a physical-sexual way. This ties into the themes of helplessness and ambition that are repeated, still coupling with the eye motif in terms of seeing the future, wanting a future, knowing one’s fate or even being prophetic.

Books Read in 2010

This list was put together rather hastily upon the arrival of the New Year and seeing exhaustive lists like rikkicupcake's. I read a lot this year, some of which may not have made the list…not to mention the 2-3,000 pages I read of various articles and excerpts for the fall semester.


Here it goes:

Auster, Paul. City of Glass*
Ballenger, Bruce. Beyond Note Cards
Baudrillard, Jean. America*
Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas
Bidart, Frank. Star Dust
Bronte, Charlotte. Wuthering Heights*
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh
Clark, Irene L., ed. Concepts in Composition
Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim
Conrad, Joseph. Typhoon
DeLillo, Don. White Noise
Dethier, Brock. First Time Up
Dethier, Brock. The Composition Instructor’s Survival Guide
Didion, Joan. Year of Magical Thinking
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby*
Gaskell, Elizabeth. Cranford
Hejinian, Lyn. My Life*
Howe, Susan. The Midnight
Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler*
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road
Morrison, Toni. Beloved
Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature
Newkirk, Thomas, ed. Nuts and Bolts
Nicol, Bran. Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel
O’Hara, Frank. Lunch Poems*
Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread
Powell, Jim. Postmodernism for Beginners
Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker*
Primeau, Ronald. The Romance of the Road
Reynolds, Nedra and Rich Rice. Portfolio Teaching
Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping*
Ruskin, John. Selected Writings
Straub, Richard. A Sourcebook for Responding to Student Writing.
Tate, Gary, et al., eds. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord. Collected Works
Walcott, Derek. Omeros.
Wenderoth, Joe. Letters to Wendy’s*

*recommended


Promise for 2011:

To keep up with and post books as read! It’s not entirely fair since I am required to read 90% of these, BUT it will be a nice way for me to keep a running tally of what I did read, what I got from it, etc etc to prepare for my comprehensive exams. Neat!

Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking last year sometime. It was a bit beaten up from the shelves of Goodwill, but I knew I wanted it. Seeing it there reminded me immediately of how overwhelmed and stunned I had been driving to work one morning in 2005 when a conversation with Didion came on NPR. I drove that morning mouth agape, shoulders heavy with the idea of facing the belongings of loved ones after they've died.

Maybe that's how the book made it to Goodwill, after all.

I was reluctant to read it because I knew it would be heavy. My job is a constant state of stress, the holidays had finally ended, I had just survived PhD applications and our finances were topsy-turvy. On top of that, I got sick for 3 weeks. The last thing I needed to worry about was someone else's grieving process. I read the inside cover to my husband and he looked at me with wide-eyes and shook his head in a silent communiqué that it was, indeed, too intense for my present state.

Yet somehow I picked it up one night before bed and started in. I have been swimming around in theories about autobiography and memoir and it seemed like as good a time as any.

I had never read Didion before, but know that she is well respected by many. She has had a long career as a writer and I felt that she, of all people, would be able to carefully reconstruct a difficult time and make it meaningful to others. And it was...I felt bad for her throughout, but not as bad as I wanted. She didn't want a pity party, and perhaps that is why the collection of thoughts and feelings from her husband's death and daughter's illness is so overly calculated. Each moment of insightfulness and charm was just overruled by a cold, calculation that in a lot of ways appeared to lack sincerity.

Now, she talks about this compartmentalizing nature of the brain to deal with grief. With a loss of time and meaning. How logic kicks in and tricks reality because it has to. Perhaps writing this piece was what she needed to do to reconnect her own constructed reality with the more temporal and corporeal reality.

I wanted it to be as good as the interview. I suppose she could be more candid in speech, even though she is a writer. I heard once that her technique is to rewrite everything she has written in a piece over again at the start of each day before adding to it or editing it. It would explain a lot about this piece and the spinning of time and yarn that never has much trajectory but reviews and revisits in different shades of meaning.

Kudos? Sure. National Book Award? Not on my watch.

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

I can't remember the specifics of the Jeopardy clue, but it grabbed my attention: "This 19th century play by a Norwegian featured the psychological struggle of an intellectual as she navigates between her new academic husband and a mysterious man of her ambitious past, all ending in suicide" and the chime in of Hedda Gabler caused my brain to make mental note as a small, surprised gasp of air left my lips.

Since that moment, I made a special point to revisit Ibsen after all these years. I read A Doll's House in high school and though it didn't leave a bad taste in my mouth, it wasn't particularly memorable either. This was redemption, I thought. A resurgence of my ancestry in works of art that I can now appreciate. I picked up a used copy of Ibsen's plays containing Hedda Gabler and began it with great anticipation.



Redemption didn't last long and I soon remembered Ibsen remarkably as I had 12 years ago. Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance since I was reeling from the Jeopardy build-up the way teenagers do summer blockbuster movies. Is she miserable yet? When does the affair get revealed? Is she breaking down? When is the suicide?

Are we there yet?

I was mostly overwhelmed by the over-theatricality of the thing. Look, I know it's a drama and I'm a prose scholar, but there was something particularly overly projected and calculated that made it difficult to become invested in. It's sparse development made what little action that occurred jarring and a bit vacant. In addition to that, there was very little detail to the characters that I needed to carry me through the plot points.

It seemingly missed the style of the time, the mystery and intellectual prowess of Austen or Wilde's women and left Hedda no more than a hollow frame of a woman with some kind of intellect that is never demonstrated or founded apart from minute mentions of it with Ejlert.

I wanted the drama, the tempestuous struggle between former lovers and sordid pasts. I wanted her to navigate between the men, to assume her power as a woman and have some sense of self rather than be a sketch of a wife and former lover, a pinball character who never departs or arrives in any act. No real past or future.

But perhaps that's the point Ibsen is trying to make. Domestic purgatory, anyone?

People say Hedda is like a female Hamlet. I don't know. She doesn't expose any depth, any real sense of autonomy besides allowing people to sit and talk with one another, and though Ibsen suggests these things, she never really gets things moving the way Hamlet did with the death of Polonius, The Mousetrap or the duel with Laertes. That's more than a difference of power between men and women, methinks.

Or maybe it was just lost on me. But damnit, I'm Norwegian. It should be in my blood. Guess I'll go on eating my lefse and avoiding holiday Lutefisk with the love and admiration of a cultural significance I understand.

Book 15: The Polysyllabic Spree

I’ve fallen away from reading these last few months, partly because of preoccupation with exam materials and partly because I rather enjoy doing a whole lot of nothing in the summer.

Regardless, I’ve still managed to pick up a few books. This one is the first I’ve finished. I’m about 15 pages in two others that are rather complimentary to this one, but I can’t guarantee I’ll finish them (or even pick them up again).


The Polysyllabic Spree
by Nick Hornby

I first saw this at Powell’s and was drawn to the title. I don’t know much about Hornby apart from High Fidelity, the amazing movie adaptation with Mr. Cusack and that he’s put out quite a few other made-into-movie novels that were given more than liberal interpretation rights.

I was hoping, in some respect, that this would be Horby’s take on reading in general. The correspondence between what a writer reads and what he writes. A pocket-volume of rants and raves over what has happened to literature. Instead, it was a well organized series of monthly reads, purchases and an occasional excerpt.

I skipped all the excerpts.

It was good to see what he bought and actually managed to read. That others are obsessed with the collecting and gathering of texts despite having the time, energy, interest, sanity, etc to read them.

I found Horby charming and conversational, which was surprising considering how erudite and pretentious the Believer publication can be.

Here’s a selection of some of what grabbed me:

“I read 55 percent of the books I bought this month—five and a half out of ten. Two of the unread books, however, are volumes of poetry, and, to my way of thinking, poetry books work more like books of reference: They go up on the shelves straight away (as opposed to on the bedside table), to be taken down and dipped into every now and again. (And, before an outraged poets explode, I’d like to point out that I’m one of the seventy-three people in the world who buys poetry.) And anyway, anyone who is even contemplating ploughing straight through over a thousand pages of Lowell’s poetry clearly needs a cable TV subscription, or maybe even some friends, a relationship, and a job” (19).

“Just as frightening to anyone who writes (or who is connected intimately to a writer) is Yates’s willingness to cannibalize his life—friends, lovers, family, work—for his fiction: Just about everyone he has ever met was able to find a thinly disguised, and frequently horrific, version of themselves in a novel or a story somewhere” (32).

I’m particularly fond of the use of cannibalize here. Not so much a charming anecdote, but something I noted no less. And believe of many writers, truly.

“We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too” (53).

“Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agendy you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path” (63).

“...[A]ll the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. My music is me, too, of course—but as I only really like rock and roll and its mutations, huge chunks of me—my rarely examined operatic streak, for example—are unrepresented in my CD collection. And I don’t have the wall space or the money for all the art I would want, and my house is a shabby mess, ruined my children...But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not” (125).

And finally, I’ll link you to the Wikipedia entry. Honestly, you can save yourself the $9.50 and take a leisurely scan through this entry, which details it most accurately. Sure, you will not have contributed to the selected charities that split the proceeds, but in this economic climate you take what you can get.

Speaking of which—the library!