An (unusual) Toomer sandwich!

It is interesting that we are close reading these Jean Toomer excerpts at the end of the semester because I find his style to be among the most obvious and overt that we have read. Therefore, it is pretty easy to close read, but no less interesting. As others have noted in their blogs, "Becky" opens and closes with the same three evocative sentences. The story expands from this opening, and ends with it, forming a sandwich. Actually, it is not really a traditional sandwich, because sandwiches are usually made with two pieces of the same bread and, while this story appears to begin and end with the same slices of bread, it actually ends with the same piece of bread transformed. The top slice is straight from the bread box, the bottom slice is toasted, if you will.

In the opening, "The Pines whisper to Jesus. The Bible flaps its leaves with an aimless rustle on her mound" is taken as a metaphor. Obviously, the pines have been personified, and we assume that the whispering of the pines in the wind is interpreted by the narrator through his own religious conviction. The next sentence must be interpreted as following the former. If the pines are in fact 'whispering' in the wind, then it would seem that there is not really a Bible lying on top of the grave, not 'leaves' of a book but leaves rustling on the ground, again being interpreted in a religious context. We also assume that the mound is a proper grave, and the religious overtones support this assumption, despite their gothic nature. By the story's end, the opening has been transformed. We understand that Becky does not have a grave, but has in fact been buried in her cabin under her collapsed chimney. The bricks have formed a mound, on which Barlo throws a Bible. The haunting scene has been left there, the Bible continuing to flap in the wind, the pines whispering to Jesus as they have done since time immemorial.

This structure informs the rest of the narrative, the latter sentences following on the former sentences and transforming them. "Becky was the white woman who had two Negro sons" becomes in the second paragraph, "Becky had one Negro son." The second sentence has simplified the first. Not only is the qualifier "was the white woman" removed, making the verb 'had' to emphasize Becky's action, but the number of sons is reduced. Interestingly, Becky's race is removed in the second sentence, but the Negro race of the son is repeated. Toomer constantly plays with the action of his sentences in this story, giving the characters agency and denying it to them. In the first sentence, Becky's action becomes her identity, although the syntax removes Becky's agency from the action. In the second, simplified version, Becky performs the action, she 'had one Negro son,' but the verb is not active. Rather than connoting a violent birthing or an active possession, it seems to say that she simply had the son, as one would have a teakettle on the stove. When the townsfolk opine about Becky's situation, Toomer does not allow them to give voice to their own opinions; it is only their mouths that do, as disembodied creatures, making the vitriolic words even more sinister.
"Who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger, said the white folks' mouths." By posing the first part of this idea as a question, Toomer again removes the action from the actor. He could have written this as, "The damn buck nigger gave it to her, said the white folks' mouths" but that would have meant that the nigger would have actually acted in the sentence. In the Toomer way, the question becomes accusatory of Becky, since the actor has been removed, and in the following explanation, the only actor is the 'white folks' mouths,' making the sentences really an argument between Becky and her fellow 'white folks.' The point is clearly that whoever 'gave' her the son is unimportant, insofar as the white folks will find someone to blame, rightly or wrongly, and inflict punishment. In the story, the focus is on Becky as the more punished, since she is not only exiled by the townspeople, but also bears the cross of God, who has cast her out of his kingdom, as indeed in her death she is not buried properly in the earth. These two sentences are repeated and transformed again,
"Who gave it to her? Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the black folks' muths." The same structure is repeated, only this time the 'nigger' has been qualified by 'with no self-respect.' Essentially, the judgment is the same from both side of the town.

"The pines whispered to Jesus" becomes a dramatic refrain that builds throughout the story, as the action proceeds. The refrain moves from despair, to compassion, to desperation, "Pines shout to Jesus!" Finally, the story ends with the Pines again whispering, and they seem totally ineffective in reaching the divine.

"Seventh Street" also uses the sandwich beginning and ending technique, which seems like a very effective structure for a short story. In both, everything operates on multiple levels. Language has literal and figurative meanings always, and in this way, the stories play with our perception.

Circles and Heroes

The beginning of Phillip Roth's American Pastoral begins with the Swede. Then it becomes about the Swede's brother, Jerry, his sort of violent antagonist. Then it becomes about the narrator, in a more focused way, since the whole story is invariably about the narrator's perceptions of these two brothers. Finally it becomes about the book that seems to connect and yet divide the narrator from the Swede. Literature that is self-referential is so satisfying. The improbable journey of the chapter ends with a smile.

Ultimately, the chapter is about how people interpret their lives through icons. The ten-year-old narrator idolizes the Swede and can only interpret the other characters in his life through his worship of the Swede. Therefore, Jerry is necessarily formed in reaction to his brother, and the most important thing is how the Swede reacts to the Kid from Tomkinsville, not the narrator's own reaction. The chapter is circular. For the townspeople, the Swede signifies a heroic example of innocence and hope during the war.

Here is one of my favorite, and I think remarkable, sentences from the first chapter:
"It was a cheer that consisted of eight syllables, three of them his name, and it went, Bah bah-bah! Bah bah bah . . . bah-bah! and the tempo, at football games particularly, accelerated with each repetition until, at the peak of frenzied adoration, an explosion of skirt-billowing cartwheels was ecstatically discharged and the orange gym bloomers of ten sturdy little cheerleaders flickered like fireworks before our marveling eyes . . . and not for love of you or me but of the wonderful Swede. "Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'! . . . Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'! . . . Swede Levov! It rhymes with . . . 'The Love'!" (Roth, 2)

This sentence has such different moods and such sudden changes in energy. The first description of the cheer, "eight syllables, three of them his name..." and the bahs are so clinical, the choice of sound to beat out the rhythm of the cheer so boring, that the cheer sounds more like a resentful dirge. This has a sense of the narrators voice, a worship that is so ordinary to him it is at once boring, and yet reverential. After the exclamation point, the tempo of the sentence picks up in accordance with the cheer. The first three clauses of the sentence feel like a recollection in absentia; after the exclamation point, the flashback is fully realized. We are transported to the center of the football-fan crowd. This transportation and build-up are achieved through a cascade of clauses. The prepositional phrases and commas cause jarring interruptions in the sentence flow, building to the explosion of cheerleader skirts. The cartwheels seem to discharge from outerspace, appearing on the field like fireworks in the sky. The actions of the cheerleaders are disembodied, and the movement of their skirts fuctions as a metonym for the whole of their performance. The language, "explosion" and "discharged" has a violent connotation, again linking the Swede's success in sports to the war being fought in the outside world. The sentence finally ends oddly, with "not for love of you or me..." as if cheers are supposed to celebrate the lowly crowd rather than the exceptional athlete. The many clauses of the sentence, and its two contrasting moods, require the reader to constantly go back to understand the sentence as a whole. When the words of the cheer are finally revealed, the reader must go back to the "bah" syllables in order to get the rhythm of how it is cheered.

'We call it "unheimlich"; you call it "heimlich"'

Let me begin my post by pointing out the excellent statement Freud makes in his self-effacing introduction:
But I must confess that I have not made a very thorough examination of the literature, especially the foreign literature, relating to this present modest contribution of mine, for reasons which, as may be guessed, lie in the times in which we live; so that my paper is presented to the reader without any claim to priority. (Freud, 1)
This is an excellent excuse, and one which I will now use with Freud's inspiration. I am completing this blog entry five days late, for reasons which, as may be guessed, lie in the times in which we live. I present this post to you, oh reader, without any claim to having made it a priority. Actually, this excuse is so excellent, because it rhetorically relates the reader to Freud's experience. While Freud's reader may not have read any of the literature, foreign or domestic, on the topic of the uncanny, Freud assumes that his reader will be familiar with how difficult it is to get a hold of such research and be sympathetic toward Freud's rather undiverse body of source material. Freud extends his readers an opportunity to feel critical and educated in their response to his work, and then to be prepared to be enlightened by his brilliance.

Freud's lengthy discussion of the etymology of heimlich and its equivalents in other languages is quite interesting, and serves a much greater purpose than simply to endow the reader with a better understanding of the origins of the word. In fact, Freud purposely muddles our understanding of the word, so that by the end of his exhaustive etymological tirade we have begun to have very unheimlich feelings about the heimlich. Truly, it seems that the word can mean almost anything, and the etymology demonstrates to us how such a seemingly strange topic lives at the border of our reality and how easily that which is familiar, which we think we know, can slip into the uncanny without our understanding.