relatable

Judging by the amount of ambivalent feelings toward Odysseus in all the blog posts about the slaughter (mine included), it’s pretty clear that in the 2000 years that have elapsed since it was first published, we are all hopeful our moral ideals have advanced somewhat. And it’s true, they have: like Telemachus, we've all experienced the soul-crushing despair of someone stealing all of your food, but it is no longer a societally acceptable response to murder them in retaliation. And yet there are still parts of the Odyssey that are strangely familiar to all of us, even in a world so alien to what Homer experienced. One obvious example of this is the heartwarming reunion of Homer with his beloved Argos, who still recognizes his master after 20 years of his absence: Odysseus sheds a single tear, and the faithful dog can finally die in peace at last. There’s other elements, too, that make it a satisfying and familiar read for our modern times: the theme of homecoming and reuniting as a family, and Telemachus’s abbreviated coming-of-age story as he tries to measure up to his father’s example.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou as an adaptation of The Odyssey, these same ideas come into play as Ulysses tries to get back to his family and Tommy (even though he’s not really a Telemachus parallel as I’m implying) tries to make it for himself in the world. But one of the most striking things about O Brother is how it goes beyond these broad themes to still mean something to us today. Just like The Odyssey is a representation of Ancient Greek heroic mythology and a cultural cross-section of the times, O Brother does the same thing, albeit humorously, for the American viewer.

The world of The Odyssey didn’t spring from Homer’s imagination fully formed (get it?) just for the purpose of this one epic poem; Odysseus instead finds himself in the same Greek mythological universe we’re all familiar with, facing the same belligerent gods and deadly monsters as every other classic Greek hero. At first glance, it might seem like this elaborate, complex universe is the antithesis of American entertainment: this country has only been around for a fraction of the time of the Greeks and an uncomfortably large amount of that time was spent squashing other people’s cultural traditions instead of creating our own. But in O Brother, we do see many examples of American semi-mythological motifs that, although we don’t realize it, might play a similar role in the American collective unconscious as Scylla and Charybdis did for the Greeks.

One of the most obvious examples of this is George “Babyface” Nelson, who was actually based on a real figure, but whose character in O Brother goes beyond that. It’s kind of a weird dynamic, but it come up in a lot of other movies and books: the bank robber who is simultaneously the unambiguous default criminal, and inflated into a larger-than-life semi-hero. Every wild west movie and a lot of current hero movies as well feature one of these figures, and although the hero is usually the one defeating them, there’s also an enviable air of mystery and power around this villain themselves too. Think of The Dark Knight. It obviously features Batman as the classic hero, but the Joker’s ingenious plan to rob a high-security bank is also set up as an impressive and admirable feat. In less recent movie examples, there’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), with two outlaws as the actual main characters, and Jesse James (1939) about another bandit. In both films, the outlaws are dangerous criminals, based on real people but inflated to heroic proportions.

There’s also the music in O Brother, much of which comes from adaptations of real american folk songs passed down for generations. Traditional American folk music serves many of the same functions as bards in The Odyssey and ancient Greece: entertainment, bonding, and passing traditional stories -- and, by extension, traditional ideals -- down to the next generation. Like The Odyssey and other Greek myths reinforce the value of hospitality and following the gods, the folk songs in O Brother refer back to American traditional ideals, whether that’s being a hardworking “Man of sorrow” who longs to return to his homeland, or a respectable (respectability dynamic!!), pious person “going down to the river to pray, studying about that good old way.”

O Brother is, at times, a clear adaptation of The Odyssey to fit into the world of the depression-era American South. But it's also an adaptation of the hero's journey itself for an American audience, and it's interesting because it brings out some of the ways that even now, 2000 years later, we’re not so different from Homer and the ancient Greeks. We have our own mythology with figures that we inflate, idolize, and let shape our ideals and visions of the world. Like the Greeks had their Achilles and Odysseus, we have heroic bank robbers, downtrodden convicts who overcome all the odds, and musicians who sell their soul to the devil. And as the Greeks’ ideas of justice were steeped in bard’s tales of hospitality and obedience to the gods’ will, so are ours shaped, maybe, by the echoes of American traditional culture that, even if we don't realize it, still mold our visions of heroes and morality today.

fate and free will

One of the most prominent motifs in the scenes of Odysseus’s homecoming is the idea of testing people to prove their loyalty. When he arrives back to Ithaca, Odysseus doesn’t tell anyone who he really is until he tells a long, elaborate lie about his identity and tries to suss out their allegiance to him first. He and Athena collaborate in testing the suitors, and Odysseus goes to meet them, disguised as a beggar, to see who will offer him some of their food. But passing the test doesn’t promise safety: Athena makes it clear that even the suitors who give Odysseus food will still be slaughtered in the end. The scene is confusing, but it brings out one of the most interesting aspects of The Odyssey: the complex relationship between individual free will, fate, and the gods’ influence.

Personal morality clearly plays an important role in the Odyssey. The importance of being kind to strangers, for example, is a driving force in the main plot: the suitors are the bad guys because they are abusing Telemachus’s hospitality, and in Odysseus’s travels, we hear the saying “every stranger comes from Zeus” more than once. Individual choices are also significant: the sailors met their fate because “the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all.” It’s clear throughout the epic that Homer doesn’t feel any sympathy toward them, and the reader shouldn’t either: not only did they deserve what they got, they did it to themselves, too. Odysseus’ identity as a hero stems not just from his exploits in the Trojan war but also from his bright ideas, determination, and loyalty to his beloved wife Penelope: heroic traits because they are moral, and require great personal willpower to achieve.

But the impact of free will is complicated because “doing the right thing” doesn’t always depend on doing what’s compassionate or logical, but instead on following the will of the gods. And the will of the gods is often fickle. While marooned on the island of Helios, Odysseus’ men are starving, and only eat one of the sacred cattle as a last resort. They promise Helios a great temple with heaps of sacrifices once they return home: but he kills them all at sea anyway. When Poseidon returns from Ethiopia to see Odysseus safely returned home, he has no qualms about transferring his wrath to the innocent Phaeacians instead, and after a quick and lighthearted brainstorming session with Zeus, he not only turns their best sailors to stone but surrounds each port with mountains that will destroy the Phaeacians’ entire livelihood as well.

There’s also the question of fate, which at times seems to be driven by the gods and at times beyond even them. From the beginning of the Telemachiad we see Athena carefully molding Telemachus into the hero that best completes her story, and she does the same thing to Odysseus, helping him to succeed outright and twisting events to make the story more exciting behind the scenes. The reader might wonder how much of either person’s heroism is their own and how much is Athena’s creation. But then there’s also the numerous prophecies that come true regardless of how much people try to thwart them, and that not even the gods can change. In the case of the unfortunate Phaeacians, Zeus and Poseidon smiting them fulfilled a prophecy they had known for years, and the gods weren’t even aware of it.

All of these elements make Odysseus’s hero’s journey more complex: It’s hard to tell how much of his success is due to his own actions, and how much is Athena, or fate, or those same influences acting on his unfortunate adversaries. It all lines up to make Odysseus the hero, but at the same time, it’s a little harder to root for him when it seems like so much of his success isn't really his own doing.

Ender's Game and the Hero's Journey

I never really liked hero stories. For me, every story was the same: the hero always did the right thing, the hero was brave enough to save the day, the hero had a happy ending. He (or, occasionally, she) ignored rules and laws, but it didn’t matter because their morals were never in question, and they saved the day anyway. It was the good guys vs. the bad guys and the good guys always won. Maybe if I had looked at it differently, I could have seen inspiration or at least reassurance in that, but I didn't. Instead, it always seemed fake. I felt like I was being lied to.

The problem with hero stories is that it all works out on paper, the good defeats the evil, but in real life it's never that simple. In real life, everyone thinks they’re the hero, and someone is inevitably going to be wrong. As a kid I was always worried that person would be me --- that I would grow up and think I was the hero, give my life to a cause or an idea but eventually, far too late, realize it was the wrong one. Or worse, never realize at all, and be laughed at in a future classroom as another poor sucker on the wrong side of history. I would read historical fiction, or stories about a dystopian future world, and every time, I wanted to see myself in the war hero, the revolutionary, the underground spy. But I couldn’t help worrying that instead, I would find myself in the blind crowds following the corrupt dictator. Because just like any hero, they too must have thought they were doing the right thing.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t read hero stories: I sped through Harry Potter and Percy Jackson just as quickly as everyone else. But I didn't like the heroes themselves. People like characters they can see themselves in, and I, the awkward middle school nerd who questioned everything I did, could never see myself in a hero that always had the right choice laid out so neatly in front of them. So when I read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, I approached it with exactly the same skeptical worldview that I threw at every other hero story I encountered. But as I soon realized, Ender was a very different hero than the others I had encountered.

The story is set in the distant future, after Earth had already once defended itself from a murderous alien race but was deep in desperate preparations for another war. In the beginning, Ender is the classic “chosen one,” born at the request of the International Military Federation (IMF) to be the military commander that would save the human race. His early life is shaped by his loving sister Valentine and his brother Peter who is cruelly manipulative and explicitly capable of killing his siblings. All three siblings are geniuses, and all three were born for the purpose of saving the human race but only Ender was accepted: the idea was that he needed to be part Valentine, part Peter to succeed. Ender’s story fits the arc of the hero’s journey well: at the request of a senior IMF officer, Ender must leave his family to train on a space station to be a military officer for IMF, and after much personal effort and transformation he eventually succeeds in killing the aliens and returns home victorious. But the character of Ender is much more complex than it might seem.

Ender is the hero, and at heart he is a very moral person, but he is forced to become like his brother Peter in order to succeed. As the story goes on, Ender is torn apart and always unsure of whether what he is doing is justified. Everything he does is supposed to be for the greater good, but as he is manipulated into getting increasingly ruthless he, and the reader, are left unsure of whether it was worth it. And in the end, (spoiler alert, even though it was published in 1985 and you’ve all had 32 years to read it) he does launch a bomb into the home planet and kill the alien race but in exchange for succeeding in his hero’s journey he is rewarded with the knowledge that he extinguished an entire species that wasn’t even intending to attack Earth in the first place. As a spoil of war, he receives the last remaining offspring of the species, and a responsibility to find a place they can live in peace.
I was really captivated by the book for a while, and looking back, I think it was because Ender was the kind of person I was afraid of becoming, the hero who succeeds only to find they were on the wrong side. I revisited the novel again and again because the moral dilemmas Ender faced, and the constant internal struggle of whether he was doing the right thing, fascinated me. Ender was manipulated into doing something horrible, but in the end he found the truth and the novel ends with him going on another journey, for the right reason this time, and making amends. I didn't like hero stories because they were too fake and straightforward. Ender was the opposite, and in a weird way it was reassuring to twelve-year-old Elizabeth when I read it because it meant that someone who did, in the end, do the right thing didn't have to come to it by some unshakable moral compass that let them paint the world black and white and always choose the right side: instead, the hero could face the same doubts and ambiguity that everyone has to face and yet still complete the journey and still, somehow, save the day.

beloved, by any other name?

Beloved centers on Sethe’s struggle to make peace with the choices in her past, and in the process we see Denver and Paul D. trying to come to terms with their own past as well. Even though none of them are still enslaved, the memories of Sethe’s and Paul D’s experiences at Sweet Home still haunt them both literally and figuratively. As they try to reclaim and understand the past, one of the most significant motifs in the novel is the importance of names and language.
           One of the first scenes in the novel shows how Beloved got her name, when Sethe heard the preacher address of the “dearly beloved” mourners and thought he meant her child. We never hear the real name of the child (if there is one), and she is known as “Beloved” by all of the other characters. It’s the most prominent example of a symbolic name in the book: she has no identity except for Sethe’s love for her, and, like the name, Sethe gave her that identity. The irony and truth in the name is a continuing theme throughout the novel, and the reader is always left wondering what it really means that the child is nothing apart from beloved.
         There are many other examples of the power of names and definitions in the novel as well. Sweet Home, the plantation Sethe and her family grew up on has an ambiguity that is amplified by its name. It was the site of horrific abuses, but at the same time, it was some kind of home in the sense that Sethe was together with friends and family there. The owner, Garner, said his slaves were “men,” but they were still slaves, and in a way his treatment of them only increased his own power. As the owner of the plantation, he got to decide how to define them and it became increasingly clear that their name -- the “Sweet Home Men” -- was seemingly dependent upon Garner to be true.
            For Stamp Paid and Baby Suggs, choosing their own name was a way to reclaim their life. Stamp Paid changed his name after his wife was taken because it was the only thing he could do to have some control over his life. Then as his life went on, it became the way he defined himself, and he dedicated himself to helping other people because of his name’s meaning. Baby Suggs was named “Jenny Garner” on her bill of sale, but she chose to be called Baby Suggs instead because that was what her husband called her. 
          The significance of choosing one's own name is even greater in the context of slavery. For slaves, literacy was discouraged, because it gave slaves the power to read the bible, news, and everything else that challenged the slave-owner's picture of reality. Slaves were often forced to take the last name of their owner, and slurs, especially the n-word, were used as a way to oppress and control them. In Beloved, we see examples of this, but also ways reclaimed names and language allowed many characters to have some measure of control over their own lives.

The trippy part

“...when you really think about it, me and America aren’t even enemies. I’m the horse pulling the stagecoach, the donkey in the levee who’s stumbled in the mud and come up lame. You may love me, but I’m tired of thrashing around in the muck and not getting anywhere.”

After reading the prologue of The White Boy Shuffle, the reader has the entire book to prepare for the (literal and figurative) nuclear bomb that will inevitably be dropped, but the last few chapters of the novel are still difficult and unnerving to read. Gunnar, Scoby, Yoshiko and Psycho Loco are the kind of characters that are fun to read about, and it seems like the prestige and influence Gunnar gained after growing up in poverty is something to be proud of.  The narrative itself, laced with Gunnar’s dry humor and compelling poetry, seems like a deeply honest social commentary but not a pessimistic one. All in all, even though you know how it’s all going to end up, it’s hard to comprehend why exactly Gunnar gave up all the advantages he seemed to have.  

It isn’t until reading the epilogue that the motivation behind Gunnar’s drastic decision comes to light, and even then, it still seems like it’s the wrong thing to do. But after reading the epilogue and reconsidering the rest of the novel from that point of view, another way of looking at the events of the novel is revealed.

Like Gunnar explains to Psycho Loco, his frustration doesn’t just stem from being “enemies” with America. It’s clear that on some level America is opposed to black people, but in the novel, it seems like the oppression Gunnar faces because of his race is often met with snide humor and sharp poetry rather than despair.

It isn’t outright discrimination that drives Gunnar to desperation but instead, the loss of his own agency and identity. From the very beginning, he wasn’t his own person, but instead just the latest in a series of Kaufmans whose lives all followed the same script: laughing at racist jokes in an effort to please the white people. As he grew older, he was defined by the incredible natural talent for basketball he had, but it was still the same idea: he became almost a mascot, and he was valued only as a novelty and a tool to keep the team on top. His poetry, at first, might seem like an escape from the same patterns, but it, too, became a tool for other people to use in their own ways, whether by publishing his work in a “coffee-table book of photographs” or reading it at a political rally.

As a reader, it’s easy to look at Gunnar as a basketball player and poet and see how successful he was, but by doing so, it’s almost like we’re proving the point he was trying to make. When we read his poetry, are we just like the stagecoach riders, watching him struggle and enjoying it the art of it? If we are, then his choice to wait for a nuclear escape seems almost justified. Gunnar’s poem, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Crib Death,” warns “ “caveat emptor,”/let the buyer beware,” and by the end of the novel the reader is left wondering if we are that buyer. We’re the ones who regret Gunnar’s death. But are we mourning Gunnar, or his poetry: our “property, permanently damaged?”

would she actually care what Wright thinks though

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is widely recognized as an important piece of literature today, but at the time it was published, it was the subject of controversy among other contemporary black authors. Unlike Native Son or Invisible Man, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, the struggle of racism is secondary to the main love story of Janie Crawford, and because of this many felt Hurston wasn’t fulfilling her obligation as a black author: for Their Eyes Were Watching God to be a serious novel, it had to deal with the real social issues of the time.

Not only were many people opposed to the lack of serious social criticism, many also felt that Their Eyes Were Watching God pandered to white audiences and was too reminiscent of the long history of minstrelsy. Hurston’s portrayal of black life and traditions could seem far too idealized, particularly in the migrant worker community of the Everglades, where she downplayed the struggles black people faced working in oppressive conditions. And the scenes of Eatonville seem theatrical, almost as if the black characters are parading around for the amusement of the white audience.

When I first read Their Eyes Were Watching God, it seemed to me that these critics were probably right. It’s a really enjoyable book to read, but it seemed so quaint, so idealized, that I felt like I shouldn’t be enjoying it at all. I kept waiting for the penny to drop and the real narrative of racial struggle to come out, and then when it didn’t, there was the uncomfortable feeling that I just read and enjoyed a book justifying a docile, happy caricature of black history.

But while we watched the documentary about Zora Neale Hurston, it seemed like her novel wasn’t that at all. She spent most of her adult life documenting and researching the traditions of black communities in the South, and during the rest, she seemed to do whatever she wanted without regards to what other people might think. My interpretation of the novel slowly unraveled, because Hurston didn’t seem like the kind of person to write a minstrel story at all.

Now, the more I reread the novel, the more it seems to be a novel illustrating Hurston’s love for the community and traditions she spent her life documenting. The poetic dialogue, written in a non-standard dialect, draws in the reader and shows the beauty of long oral traditions. The portrayal of life in Eatonville shows the rich music and culture that developed in black communities in the deep south. There are elements of the story that are undeniably problematic, especially reading it from a modern point of view. But it doesn’t completely deserve the harsh criticism from Wright and others. Their Eyes Were Watching God may not confront the same issues as Invisible Man or Native Son, but that doesn’t mean it is somehow less valuable, or that Hurston is betraying the black community by writing it. The novel isn't supposed to be a protest novel. It's a love story, between Janie and Tea Cake, and between Hurston and the culture she spent her life immersed in.

the mule of the world?

Reading Native Son and Invisible Man, it seems unnervingly easy to forget about women entirely. The real characters, the real struggles, the real search for identity seems to be always with the men. Bigger and Clifton and the nameless narrator and Dr. Bledsoe are the ones who matter, while the women are at best homemakers and at worst just a tool to influence men. It’s the brotherhood, after all. The “Women Question” is just a way to get the narrator out of the way of the real issues.

So it’s kind of strange to start reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, written by a woman about a woman, and even stranger to see how in just the first seven chapters there are probably more women than in Native Son and Invisible Man combined. But it’s immediately obvious that the main character Janie Crawford is very different from every woman we’ve encountered so far this year, and it’s interesting to consider how her struggles to live in a racist society will compare to those of the male protagonists we’ve already read about.

In just the first few chapters, it’s clear how Janie’s life is dictated by both race and gender. She marries Logan Killicks not because she loves him, but because it’s her grandmother’s dying wish to protect Janie from being raped like so many other women in her family. Even after she leaves Killicks to marry Jody, who she thinks she loves, Jody just becomes more and more controlling to try and make her fit his vision of a perfect wife. And no matter what she does, the male gaze is always there to watch her, judge her body and make her into an object of competition between men.

It’s hard to say so early in the book what will happen to Janie over the course of her life, but it’s clear that although the challenges she faces will undoubtedly be similar to those in Invisible Man, being a woman will also heavily influence her struggles. And judging by the character of Janie as she walks into town in the beginning of the novel, she ends up far from the passive and insignificant female character so common in other novels.