Long Pauses

Category: Words

  • The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971)

    By David Rabe

    That’s just this whole damn army messin’ with me and it ain’t ever gonna end but in shit.
    — Pavlo Hummel, before attempting suicide

    I am in a world of shit.
    — Private Pyle, before committing suicide in Full Metal Jacket

    I began to think about Kubrick’s film long before I reached the end of the first act of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. I knew little about Rabe’s play, other than what I had picked up from reading his own introduction. Most notably, I knew that it was built in two sections: a first act that showed Hummel’s development from raw recruit to “Regular Army,” and a second that took place in Vietnam. It’s that same structure that so struck me the first time I saw Full Metal Jacket. By the time Hummel began equating his world with shit (seen most clearly in the drama’s finale), I found it difficult to ignore his connection to Pyle. There are other similarities as well—the “blanket party” both young men suffer, the “friend” who tries to help (Pierce in the play, Joker in the film), and, of course, the gruesome death that both men meet. Of more interest to me though, is that Pavlo Hummel, again like the film, is difficult to neatly classify into any one particular genre. In his introduction to the Viking edition of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, Rabe responds to the label “antiwar” which has been frequently applied to his work:

    I have written them to diagnose, as best I can, certain phenomena that went on in and around me. It seems presumptuous and pointless to call them “antiwar” plays . . . I think these labels [antifamily, antimarriage, antiyouth, and anticrime] do not exist because family, marriage, youth, and crime are all viewed as phenomena permanently a part of the eternal human pageant. I believe war to be an equally permanent part of that pageant. (xxv)

    As is the case when I watch Full Metal Jacket, I find Pavlo Hummel much more interesting when viewed in this light—as an examination of “the eternal human pageant,” that constant process of interaction, performance, and construction.

    Rabe bookends Pavlo Hummel with Hummel’s death scene. It’s an interesting device. I’ve read several novels (most recently Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies) and seen a few films (Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures and, of course, Citizen Kane) that use the structure to reinforce the development of a character, either by building a mystery (“Rosebud”) or by creating a suspenseful, and at times melodramatic, sense of inevitability. Pavlo Hummel, though, seems to do the exact opposite, pointing out how little its main character is capable of developing. As the play opens, Hummel is a loud-mouthed kid, boasting loudly of his own sexual prowess and jumping blindly to retrieve a live grenade. Two hours, and more than a hundred pages later, he is unchanged. It’s a great manipulation of our expectations. We come to the play expecting to see a green recruit, one stupid enough to volunteer for firemen duty, grow into manhood—a nice, typical bildungsroman. Instead, we watch his journey knowing that he will be blown to bits. “You had that thing in your hand, didn’t you?” asks Ardell in the opening scene. “What was you thinkin’ on, you had that thing in your hand?” Even after his “basic training” and a tour of combat duty, Hummel, still the green recruit, is capable of only jumping into action. He is oblivious to any causal relationship. “[I was thinkin’] About throwin’ it,” he replies, as if the explosion were in no way inevitable.

    On one level then, the play does criticize the basic training, as seen in act one, as a failed means of constructing some cookie-cutter-like masculine identity. For Rabe, the training is nothing but hollow ritual. (Though Rabe throws off the label “antiwar,” the political ramifications of this, particularly when situated in early-70’s America, are obvious.) As the act closes, Hummel, reeling from his failed suicide attempt, is chastised by Ardell for consistently proving himself to be a fool. “What kinda shit this?” he yells, after seeing Hummel’s uniform lying on the floor. “Your poor ole Sarge see this, he sit down on the ground and he cry, man. Poor ole Sarge, he work himself like crazy tryin’ ta teach you so you can act like a man.” But the Sarge’s lessons are lost on Hummel. His attempts all end in failure—he drags his pants across the floor, oblivious to the dirt they collect. Finally, Pierce and the other men come to his aid. “All is ease now,” writes Rabe in the stage directions. “It is a ritual now: Pavlo must exert no effort whatsoever as he is transformed.” That passive verb is interesting. The act ends with Hummel in full dress uniform, complete with sunglasses, staring at himself in the mirror. “Who you see?” asks Ardell. “That ain’t no Pavlo Hummel. Noooo, man. That somebody else. An’ he somethin’ else.” But Hummel’s transformation has been passive. He has relied on others to define himself as “Regular Army,” just as before he had relied on lies, foolish boasting, and empty quips to define himself as a streetkid. As Rabe mentions in his “Author’s Note,” “real insight never comes [for Hummel] . . . he will learn only that he is lost, not how, why, or even where.”

    Questions of masculinity inform nearly every scene in Pavlo Hummel. After Hummel’s transformation at the end of Act One, the play shifts dramatically, moving to the “real” world of Pavlo’s home. There he is united with his half-brother, Mickey, and the two share stories over drinks. Their conversation is littered with verbal attacks and retaliations. Mickey calls Hummel a “fuckin’ myth-maker” and a “goddamn cartoon.” Hummel protests, screaming, “I’m not an asshole anymore!” and “I don’t need you anymore.” But Hummel’s reliance upon his new-found identity as a soldier is unconvincing. He imagines himself part of a new fraternity, referring to his fellow soldiers as “real brothers.” But Mickey doesn’t allow Hummel any victory, calling him a bastard and their mother a whore, and playfully mentioning Joanna, thereby reminding Hummel of his virginity.

    These questions of masculinity are only intensified once Hummel reaches Vietnam. The first scene “in country” is a disorienting collage of images:

    Hummel and Brisbey. Brisbey has been literally emasculated—”got seventeen years in the army; no legs no more, no balls, one arm.” It’s only beside him that Hummel appears virile.

    Hummel and Jones. Hummel is pure green compared to Jones, the man who brokers Hummel’s first sexual experience.

    Hummel and Yen and Sgt. Tower. Yen undresses Hummel while Tower holds up an M-16 and chants, “You got to love this rifle, Gen’lmen, like it you pecker and you love to make love.” Rabe’s phallic imagery is none-too-subtle. (I can’t help thinking of the recruits in Full Metal Jacket who sing, “this is my rifle, this is my gun” as they marched, their hands grasping their M-16’s and their crotches.) It’s no surprise that Brisbey asks to hold a rifle or that Hummel describes his first lay as: “I just about blew this girl’s head off.”

    Hummel and the Captain. Again, Hummel attempts to define himself by emulating the examples he sees around him. “I want to feel,” he says, “that I’m with a unit Victor Charlie considers valuable enough to want to get it.” The consequences of such a request are lost on him.

    Hummel’s combat duty is further proof of his emptiness. He is injured repeatedly, but is so mesmerized by the idea of being a soldier that he passes up a chance to go home. “How many times you gonna let ’em hit you?” Ardell asks. “As many as they want,” Hummel replies. But he is never able to define himself in his own terms. I love that image of the men looking to the North Star to find their own place, their own direction. Ardell asks Hummel if he’s ever seen the North Star in his life and Hummel can only say, “I seen a lot of people pointin’.”

  • Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (1992)

    By Tony Kushner

    Note: These are my initial thoughts on Millennium Approaches, written as a journal assignment in the fall of 1998. I’m tempted to revise it or pull it down altogether, but I’ve decided to keep it up here as an artifact of sorts.

    – – –

    A copy of Perestroika is sitting within my reach. I refuse to open it until I finish this journal. In this first part of Angels in America, Tony Kushner offers a modern deconstruction of the American family drama, along with political/social commentary (and humor!), united perfectly in a crosshatch of formal realism and fantasy. Quite a feat. I’m not sure where to begin.

    “I took the bus that I was told to take and I got off — well it was the very last stop, so I had to get off.” — Hannah

    That Millennium Approaches references Tennessee Williams should not be a surprise. Kushner, a gay playwright whose work addresses issues of family, love, acceptance, and destruction, is obviously indebted to his predecessor. That his play so often references A Streetcar Named Desire specifically is of a bit more interest. The allusions are hardly subtle. In Harper, for instance, Kushner paints for us a portrait of what Blanche DuBois may have looked like while she still struggled for life at Belle Reeve. Like Blanche, Harper has genuinely fallen in love with a man whose homosexuality, admitted or not, has ruined both their relationship and her sanity. And also like Blanche and her desire for “magic,” Harper prefers “pretend-happy” to the ugly truth. “[It’s] better than nothing,” she tells Joe.

    Near the end of Millennium Approaches‘ first act, Harper finally confronts Joe about his sexuality. Her words are biting, laced with religious condemnation. “I knew you . . .” she tells him before stopping herself. “It’s a sin, and it’s killing us both.” I can practically hear the strains of music drifting through Blanche’s mind, stopped suddenly by a gunshot. Although Joe does not end his own life (reflecting, I think, some social change in America over the last forty years — the gay man musn’t necessarily be punished), Harper’s accusations do effectively end their admittedly superficial marriage. For Harper, as was famously the case with Blanche, the truth is too difficult to face. So instead, she slips into the darkness, both literally and metaphorically.

    Perhaps the most obvious allusion to Streetcar (aside from Prior’s and Belize’s quoting of it in Act 2, Scene 5) occurs near the beginning of Act 2. Joe returns to the apartment to find Harper “sitting at home, all alone, with no lights on. We can barely see her.” When Joe asks her why she sits in the dark and then turns on the light, Harper screams, “No,” and shuts them off again. By the end of Millennium Approaches, Harper, again like Blanche, has fled reality completely. It is only when she travels with Mr. Lies that Harper is able to survive in a “very white, cold place, with a brilliant blue sky above.”

    “Eric? This is a Jewish name?” — Rabbi Chemelwitz

    You’ve got to love any work that begins with a Rabbi eulogizing in a very Woody Allen/Mel Brooks kind of way, his sentiments alternating between moments of divine wisdom and hilarious asides. In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud exposes the genealogy of the Jewish joke, noting its remarkably long and often self-critical history. The Jews, according to Freud, have developed such a rich comedic tradition as a response to centuries, millennia actually, of persecution and anti-Semitism. What better catharsis is there, he might say, than a good laugh?

    In Millennium Approaches, Kushner uses jokes in a similar manner, expanding their range, however, to encompass not only issues of anti-Semitism and Jewish stereotypes, but also of homophobia. The result, I think, is the formation of living, breathing, and oft-suffering characters, as opposed to the two-dimensional cutouts who often inhabit Gay and Jewish roles. Kushner acknowledges stereotypes, then undercuts them. “My grandmother actually saw Emma Goldman speak. In Yiddish,” Louis tells Prior. “But all Grandma could remember was that she spoke well and wore a hat.” Henny Youngman would be proud. “It’s an old Jewish custom to express love,” continues Louis. “Here, Grandma, have a shovelful. Latecomers run the risk of finding the grave completely filled.” The lines echo with Borscht Belt rim-shots. But instead of allowing the jokes to flatten Louis into a stereotype, Kushner uses them to expose other forces which have contributed in varying degrees to the formation of his identity — Louis is not just gay, not just well-educated, not just a word processor. Being aware of his identification as a Jew helps us better understand the many conflicts in Louis’ life. Jews aren’t supposed to be gay. The importance of this conflict is, of course, echoed in Joe’s and Harper’s struggle. Mormons aren’t supposed to be gay either.

    Jokes, I think, are used in a similar manner to humanize the homosexual characters in Millennium Approaches. Again, Kushner acknowledges stereotypes — Prior exposing Louis’ embarrassment about his sibilant S, for instance. But he also moves beyond those stereotypes and confronts the audience with casual, though often graphic, references to homosexual sex. “Oh and by the way, darling, cousin Doris is a dyke,” Prior tells Louis. “You don’t notice anything. If I hadn’t spent the last four years fellating you I’d swear you were straight.” The discomfort lines like this would cause in a large audience would, I’m sure, be lessened somewhat when relieved through laughter.

    And that same laughter is also used to release the terrifying tension created by the play’s greatest threat: AIDS. During research for my thesis, I was surprised to learn that most within the Jewish-American community were unwilling to even mention the Holocaust until the mid-1960s. Much of that silence seems to have been broken by people like Mel Brooks, whose Oscar-winning screenplay for The Producers featured the notoriously hilarious “Springtime for Hitler” song and dance scene. Millennium Approaches must have had much the same impact. Nearly a decade after its original production, and I was still shocked to hear Prior’s light-hearted resignation:

    K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death . . . I’m a lesionnaire. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion. Lesionairre’s disease . . . My troubles are lesion . . . Bad timing, funeral and all, but I figured as long as we’re on the subject of death . . .

    I noticed that in the notes which accompany Perestroika, Kushner calls the play “a comedy,” distinguishing it from a “farce” and forbidding any amount of sentiment. Making a joke of “the subject of death,” I think, is this play’s greatest accomplishment, not because it makes light of a serious matter, but because it forces us to acknowledge — without the safe distance allowed by farce and sentimentality — the painful, human reality of that matter.

    “You have all these secrets and lies” — Harper

    I’m fascinated by the idea of trying to place Millennium Approaches in the tradition of the American family drama. It explores similar themes, particularly the destructive effects of secrets and the breakdown of communication. The obvious problem with this type of reading, however, is that, aside from Joe’s mother and Louis’ dead grandmother, there are few references to traditional, multi-generation families. But that, I think, is also the point. In writing the homosexual American experience, Kushner has, by necessity, thrown off common notions of family. Instead of the matriarchal “Mama” from A Raisin in the Sun, Kushner gives us Belize, a mothering drag queen, and Harper, a de-sexed woman who can only imagine fertility. Instead of offering unity within the biological family, Kushner shows us the isolated lives of gay men, first in Roy Cohn, then in the abandoned Prior. Instead of allowing an imagined familial bliss, Kushner exposes its failings. For some reason, I find the play’s saddest lines belong to Joe, who describes to Roy his inability to pass for someone “cheerful and strong.”

    Those who love God with an open heart unclouded by secrets and struggles are cheerful; God’s easy simple love for them shows in how strong and happy they are . . . I wanted to be one of the elect, one of the Blessed. You feel you ought to be, that the blemishes are yours by choice, which of course they aren’t. Harper’s sorrow, that really deep sorrow, she didn’t choose that. But it’s hers.

    As is often the case in American family dramas, the tragedy of Millennium Approaches stems from the inability of its characters to live honestly. Blanche DuBois’ husband committed suicide instead. Joe and Harper lived a loveless life together instead. Roy Cohn ignored the truth and sought power instead.

  • July’s People (1981)

    By Nadine Gordimer

    Note: The following was written for a graduate seminar on Postcolonial literature, but, aside from the first few paragraphs, it is a fairly straight-forward reading of what might just be my favorite novel.

    – – –

    How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.
    — Kate Chopin, The Awakening

    Nadine Gordimer prefaces July’s People with a passage from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” The line serves as both a warning — preparing the reader for the disorienting journey he or she is about to begin — and as the thesis of the novel. In a 1987 interview, Gordimer addressed those readers whom she felt had “misread” her work. “People always say that July’s People is about what happens after revolution in South Africa. But it isn’t. . . . it is during. . . .it’s about a time of civil war” (Bazin, 294). July’s People inhabits a world where traditionally assumed roles and rules are in a state of flux, where relationships and stations have become undefined, where everything, even vocabulary and language, has come into question. The novel is rife with the “morbid symptoms” of post-colonial nationalism: miscommunication, alienation, anger, and, ultimately, violence.

    In “Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation”, Homi Bhabha discusses the Western nation as the “locality of culture”, which he describes as being “more around temporality than about historicity” (140). He contends that the space of the modern nation-people is never horizontal — a simple, linear sequence of determining events — and in doing so, he deconstructs political, social, and literary terminology. Bhabha’s representation of the nation as a temporal process assumes a form of living that is:

    more complex than ‘community’; more symbolic than ‘society’; more connotative than ‘country’; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of State; more mythological than ideology; less homogeneous than hegemony; less centered than citizen; more collective than the ‘subject’; more psychic than civility; more hybrid than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism. (14)

    Like Gramsci and Gordimer, Bhabha views people/nations as being constantly between the dying old and the new which cannot be born. He describes the struggle as a “contested conceptual territory” where people must be both “objects” of the past — stereotypes based on a nationalist pedagogy — and “subjects” of the present — proof of a nation’s vitality (145). “It is through this process of splitting,” writes Bhabha, “that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation” (146).

    The ambivalence of the South Africa that Gordimer writes in July’s People is jarring. The first voice we hear belongs to July, a servant beginning his day “for them as his kind has always done for their kind” (1). However, the narrative does not allow us to settle comfortably into a world of established roles and easily recognizable caricatures. Instead, we are given four pages of unidentified pronouns, names without faces, and a setting that only slowly begins to come into focus. As if gradually waking us from a nightmare-filled sleep, the narrator forces us to struggle as we order our reality. Past and present. Here and there. Us and them. Binary oppositions are compressed, making us question their significance.

    The first paragraph of the second chapter, a description of an automobile which sounds as if it were cut and pasted from a tourist’s South African Cultural Guide, grounds the reader in fact. It is in the second chapter that the narration provides some of the back story. We learn that Bam Smales, a successful white Johannesburg architect, his wife, Maureen, and their three children have been rescued from violent revolution by their servant of fifteen years, a black man named July. In order to escape the burning, looting, and killing in the city, the six huddled together inside the Smales’s “bakkie” and rode dirt roads into the bush. The journey, lasting three days and covering more than 600 kilometers, ended at July’s home, the home of his people, the home he had been allowed to visit only every other year.

    Gordimer devotes most of July’s People‘s 160 pages to the development of the relationship between Maureen and July. Early in the novel, July comes to the Smales’s hut to fetch their clothes for his women to wash. The scene, which is the first to feature private interaction between July and Maureen, establishes the complexity of their association. Maureen, a woman who prides herself on her liberal beliefs and conscientious treatment of others, first responds by taking responsibility. “I can do it myself,” she says (27). July, a proud man who has served in order to provide for his family, denies her. Their conversation quickly becomes one of payment for services provided. A mutual, though unspoken, agreement is made: both will attempt to maintain their familiar roles. The result is an awkward moment when both realize July’s practicality and foresight, both understand that he is their savior. Despite her progressive politics, Maureen gives him the clothes, agrees to pay, and then seems surprised to find the villagers carrying their crumpled money with them; surprised, actually, to learn that they are “able to make the connection between the abstract and the concrete” (28).

    The narration of July’s People speaks most often from Maureen’s perspective. As the novel begins, she imagines a bond between July and herself; “he and she understood each other well,” she thinks (13). But time in the bush strips away all certainties. Reading a novel, a past-time of hers, becomes impossible: “She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete” (29). She admits to looting (38). She chides herself for the superficiality of her experience: “Fangalo would have made more sense than ballet,” she tells Bam (45). Finally, Maureen rises one night, literally strips herself of all that belonged to her past, and stands nude in the rain. In this baptism, Maureen is described as being close to the night, her body the same temperature as the rain, as if she had been transformed into a living representation of South Africa’s confused present (48).

    But like Bhabha’s deconstruction of terminology, Gordimer’s baptism reveals the complexities of the archetype. Maureen is transformed — made new — but she is not awarded the assumed salvation. Instead, she becomes only more aware of her past self. Soon after Maureen’s re-birth, the narration becomes one with her, offering the reader Maureen’s “humane creed” (64). “[It] depended on validities staked on a belief in the absolute nature of intimate relationships between human beings. If people don’t all experience emotional satisfaction and deprivation in the same way, what claim can there be for equality of need?” (64-65). This creed, however, is problematized by Maureen’s new awareness. “The absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody,” she realizes, “was no more than the price of the master bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff” (65). Her roles — wife, mother, master — are suddenly as arbitrary and predetermined as that which she had assigned to July.

    It is interesting to note that Maureen’s thoughts about her creed are brought on by her preoccupation with July. She tries to imagine him. She wonders about his town woman, whether he loved her, whether he would have liked to have brought her to his home instead. Maureen’s thoughts are like those of a jealous lover. Although Maureen and July never literally share a sexual experience, the language depicting their private interaction is laced with a conscious eroticism. As Maureen stands nude in the rain, she sees and hears July. There is a “dimension between her and some element in the rain-hung darkness” and he is described as “savouring” and “burning” (48). When they meet to discuss who will hold the keys to the bakkie, an obvious symbol of power, they share the shame of their “affair.” “His chin was raised, trying to sense rather than see if Bam was in the hut behind. Her silence was the answer: not back; they both knew the third one had gone off” (69). Removed from the politically and socially accepted ideology which had governed her thoughts and actions, Maureen imagines herself as the peak of a triangle, her loyalties and desires torn between the blond man “back there” and her “frog prince, savior, July.”

    Their conversation dissolves into mean-spirited insults. Again like lovers, Maureen and July seem to know exactly which words will strike deepest. July chastises her for her dehumanizing lack of trust. “You looking everywhere, see if everything it’s still all right. Myself, I’m not saying you’re not a good madam — but you don’t say you trust for me. — It was a command” (70). He throws “boy” at her, a term of contempt for them both, and again shifts the topic to money, “refusing to meet her on any but the lowest category of understanding” (71). Truly hurt, Maureen retaliates by mentioning Ellen, the town woman, a rival. In doing so, “they stepped across fifteen years of no-man’s land, her words shoved them and they were together, duellists who will feel each other’s breath before they turn away” (72). But again, Gordimer refuses to allow Maureen’s “triumph” to simplify their relationship. Although some ideological boundaries between the two have been blurred, others are drawn with each of Maureen’s awakenings. In a beautifully effective narrative shift, Gordimer shows Maureen — and us — the consequences of her transgression (I love this line): “A servant replied uninterestedly to a dutiful enquiry on the part of the good madam who knows better than to expose herself to an answer from the real facts of his life” (73).

    The two separate, but Maureen again searches July out a few days later. She is drawn to him, leaving her husband behind. “Maureen felt it had been decided she had to come look for July; helpless before the circumstantial evidence that they were now alone, again” (95). Like reconciling lovers, they speak casually of mundane topics, both hoping to ignore all that had passed between them. But their civility is short lived. When July denies her any interaction with the women of the village, Maureen surprises them both with a venomous threat: “Are you afraid I’m going to tell her [your wife] something?” (98). Again Maureen fires back her knowledge of Ellen; again she is surprised by July’s response. “Before her,” Gordimer writes, “he brought his right fist down on his breast. She felt the thud as fear in her own” (98). It is the first time that Maureen ever fears a man. Her husband, “the architect lying on a bed in a mud hut,” is an anachronism, “a presence in circumstances outside those the marriage was contracted for” (98). But July threatens something within her, awakens another part of herself which she fears:

    How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself, the one thing that was to say between them that had any meaning.
    Fifteen Years
    your boy
    you satisfy (98)

    Gordimer emphasizes place and time. It is only here and now, “in this interregnum,” that it is possible for Maureen to recognize any of the complexities which make it impossible for her to ever really know July.

    Maureen also recognizes that her interaction with July is effected greatly by language, by their inability to discuss “even the most commonplace of abstractions” (96). Gordimer describes July’s English as that which is “learned in kitchens, factories and mines. It was based on orders and responses, not the exchange of ideas and feelings” (96). In his discussion of the “national narrative,” Bhabha finds language to be the most appropriate analogy for the ambivalence of modern society. He cites at length the work of Claude Lefort:

    The enigma of language — namely that it is both internal and external to the speaking subject, that there is an articulation of the self with others which marks the emergence of the self and which the self does not control-is concealed by the representation of a place ‘outside’ — language from which it could be generated. (146)

    Defined by a language external to his self and outside of his control, July is a construct, a patchwork of stereotypes and naïve assumptions. Conflicts arise in July’s People when Maureen becomes aware of her role in his construction, and when she realizes that her role is changing. Lefort acknowledges the contradiction inherent in his enigma. “Only the authority of the master allows the contradiction to be concealed, but he is himself an object of representation; presented as possessor of the rule, he allows the contradiction to appear through himself” (146-47). As Steven Clingman points out in The Novels of Nadine Gordimer, Maureen’s fear of July is simply the horrifying realization that even her language is a daily medium of his oppression (200). Removed from an ideology which has arbitrarily assigned power to her and those like her, Maureen is exposed, shown to be as much an “object of representation” as July.

    The final meeting between July and Maureen is also the most poignant. By the end of the novel all authority and power, symbolized by the bakkie and the gun, have been transferred to July’s people. Bam weeps openly in front of his children. He and Maureen interact “as divorced people might” (140). Their relationship becomes one composed of indeterminate pronouns — “Her. Not ‘Maureen’. Not ‘His wife’” (105). Maureen goes to July and demands that he return the weapon. This time she approaches him as one conscious of a shared past that can never be reclaimed. She flings “back at him his uprightness, his moralizing — whatever the rigmarole of form he had always insisted on establishing between them” (149). But like dry ice that evaporates instantly when removed from its secure environment, their posturing dissolves quickly in the bush. Again, each becomes frustrated with the other. Clingman calls the language of the scene a battlefield — “as much a battlefield as the realm of private and political relations it helps both constitute and conceal” (200). Maureen accuses July of stealing rubbish from her home, then tells him of the shame she felt because of it. All he can manage in response is, “You” before slipping into the eloquence of his native tongue. Clingman aptly characterizes July’s furious venting as a “machine gun barrage” of words (200). July’s weapon hits its mark.

    [Maureen] understood although she knew no word. Understood everything: what he had had to be, how she had covered up to herself for him, in order for him to be her idea of him. But for himself — to be intelligent, honest, dignified for her was nothing; his measure as a man was taken elsewhere and by others. She was not his mother, his wife, his sister, his friend, his people. (152)

    Gordimer completes the scene by surrounding Maureen and July with the evening,”as if mistaking them for lovers” (153). Maureen strikes a grotesque pose against the hood of the bakkie, another message which means nothing to him. Defeated, she returns to Bam and asks, “Was it like this for him?” (154).

    Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier is reborn as a new creature, “opening [her] eyes in a familiar world that [she] had never known before” (124). Her awakening comes as she begins her swim towards death. Maureen Smales’s final destination is slightly more ambiguous, but no more promising. July’s People ends when a helicopter of unknown origins flies over the village and lands nearby. Maureen, acting on instinct like an animal, runs toward the sound, although she is unaware “whether it holds saviours or murderers; and — even if she were to have identified the markings — for whom” (158). Gordimer has referred to the finale as a Pascalian wager, “Salvation exists or doesn’t it?” (Wagner, 112). Stripped of all certainties, removed from all roles and expectations, and armed with only a new self-awareness, Maureen flees both the old which is dead and the new which has just been born.

    Works Cited

    Bazin, Nancy Topping, and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, eds. Conversations with Nadine Gordimer. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990.

    Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

    Chopin, Kate. The Awakening and Selected Stories. New York: Signet, 1976.

    Clingman, Stephen. “The Subject of Revolution: Burger’s Daughter and July’s People.” The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986. 170-204.

    Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People. New York: Penguin, 1982.

    Wagner, Kathrin. Rereading Nadine Gordimer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.

  • Fefu and Her Friends (1977)

    By Maria Irene Fornes

    To be quite honest, I don’t get Fornes’s play. But in this case (as opposed to a few other works I’ve read which have left me similarly perplexed), I feel somewhat driven to figure it out. I’ve decided to begin with the first clue Fornes gives us, the title. Following are my general impressions of Fefu and her friends:

    Fefu

    Fefu’s is the first voice we hear, and quite an opening line it is. “My husband married me,” she tells Cindy and Christina, “to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are.” This comment is very much at the heart of Fefu’s own conflict. In the opening act, she explains her fascination with revulsion, contrasting a “smooth and dry and clean” exterior with the slimy, fungal, worm-infested underside hidden beneath. Despite her attempts to disguise her own self-loathing — “Well, who is ready for lunch?” she asks, quickly changing the subject — it is the exposure of that dangerous underside that determines so much of the action in the play. Fefu describes this danger that she feels threatening her: “It is another life that is parallel to the one we manifest . . . If you don’t recognize it . . . it eats you.” It’s in these moments of honest reflection that Fefu speaks most eloquently, as if Fornes is representing Fefu’s divided identity along linguistic lines. Her “smooth exterior” operates in the meaningless language of small talk — Did you have enough coffee? Did you find the sugar? Blah blah blah blah. But when admitting her own pain and fears, Fefu’s language takes on a noticeable mechanical formality — that which is exposed to the exterior. it comes forth with bitterness and it’s erratic. they can put themselves at rest, tranquilized and in a mild stupor. The ideas expressed here are almost too eloquently articulated to sound natural on stage, as if they had been carefully rehearsed again and again. This reveals, I think, Fefu’s internal preoccupation with her other “life.”

    Fornes makes it clear, however, that Fefu’s conflict is not entirely internal. That double-barrel shotgun, described even in the opening stage direction, is a very real, violent presence throughout the play. It reappears periodically. Fefu fires it at Phillip, a man who, though never seen, is an important character. Cindy tells the story of how a similar gun put Julia in her wheelchair. And, of course, Fefu and Her Friends ends with Fefu’s killing of both a white rabbit and Julia with a single shot. The shotgun adds a terrifying inevitability to the play — “I feel danger lurking,” says Christina; “She’s been hiding all day,” answers Cindy. When Fefu fires the weapon at her husband, we are set on edge, waiting for it to be fired again, guessing who its target might be. And Fefu’s explanation of her and Phillip’s game only raises more questions: What is at the root of such violent “play”? Are those slugs real, blanks, or possibly strictly metaphoric? Does her firing of the gun help Fefu combat the danger of her hidden life? Fornes’s use of the shotgun, the play’s only step away from fairly strict realism, seems to reinforce the reality of the threat posed to women. Self-loathing. Self-Doubt. These traits which, at least in this play, are particular to women, are viewed by Fornes as the real danger, a danger worth combating at all cost.

    Cindy

    Cindy is the lone eyewitness to Julia’s accident. She is genuinely confused by the event, grounded as she is in reality (perhaps acting as a surrogate for us and our own confusion). She even asks Christina, “How do you know if a person is hit by a bullet?” in an attempt to explain away Julia’s suffering. Cindy has her only moment on center stage during the “In the Study” scene. There, she delivers a long, detailed description of a dream, one filled with powerful, authoritarian men who pursue and violate her. Finally, she finds the strength to scream at the men. “Stop and listen to me,” she yells, garnering the attention and “admiration” of those around her. But she is unable to maintain that strength:

    Then, I said to him, “Restrain yourself.” I wanted to say respect me. I wasn’t sure whether the words coming out my mouth were what I wanted to say. I turned to ask my sister. The young man was bending over and trembling in mad rage. Another man told me to run before the young man tried to kill me.

    Again, Fornes intertwines masculine violence and a woman’s inability to say what she wants to say, admit what she wants to be, or acknowledge how she really feels. Here, the uniqueness and brilliance of Fornes’s staging is on display. Rather than allowing Cindy and Christina to discuss the significance of the dream, Fornes interrupts them with Fefu’s false front. “Who’s for a game of croquet?” she asks. Cindy and Christina follow Fefu’s example, making a joke of the nightmare.

    Christina

    “We are made of putty. Aren’t we?” I’d love to hear Christina’s comment performed. So much of its meaning is tied to the actress’s inflection. Equal parts statement and question, Christina’s line can be read as a hopeless admission of an individual’s inability to shape herself. It can also be read as a sudden realization, as if the play’s events have awakened in Christina an understanding of the forces working against her. If “Aren’t we?” were stressed, the line might also offer the possibility of an exception, an opportunity to mold one’s self. I’m not even sure what to make of the “we” in both sentences. Is she referring to all of humanity? To women specifically? To only Cindy and herself? As with her line, I’ve had difficulty understanding Christina’s role. Throughout most of the play she operates as a plot device, a character whose main function is to elicit the comments of others and to advance the story. Even her longest speech tells us as much about Fefu as it does about herself. Her attempt to explain her impression of Fefu is punctuated with starts and stops, as if she is unable to even describe someone whose “mind is adventurous.” She is a “conformist,” perhaps simply a reflection of the status quo. Again, Fornes doesn’t allow her characters to move beyond their first impressions. When Christina finishes her speech, she asks Cindy if she understands. Cindy simply replies, “Yes, I do” and the subject is quickly changed.

    This inability (unwillingness?) of the women to move beyond a superficial explanation of their feelings is emerging as a central theme of my reading. It has reminded me of one of Fefu’s opening speeches, a speech which until this moment I have been unable to explain:

    [Men] are well together. Women are not . . . Women are restless with each other . . . either chattering to keep themselves from making eye contact, or else, if they don’t chatter, they avert their eyes . . . as if a god once said, “and if they recognize each other, the world will be blown apart.”

    It’s interesting that Christina is the only character given an opportunity to respond to Fefu’s criticism of women. “I too have wished for that trust men have for each other,” she says. “I know I don’t have it.” Christina seems to be the character most willing to “avert her eyes,” to ignore her own problems and the problems of others. Fefu’s response to Christina’s sincere admission of an emptiness in her life is simply, “Hmm. Well, I have to see how my toilet is doing.”

    Julia

    Julia can perhaps best be described as a victim, a poor creature destroyed by forces beyond her control. Fornes seems to use her as a warning of what fate potentially awaits all women. It is in her depiction of Julia (closely tied as she is to the shotgun), that Fornes slips most comfortably into the surreal. One stage direction for “In the Bedroom” states, “there are dry leaves on the floor although the time is not fall.” Fornes offers no explanation, although the direction is laced with standard symbolic references — death, the end of a cycle, the inevitable result of life. Julia’s hallucinations offer a similar dream-like surrealism. The scene is like a battle between Julia and the gender messages she has received throughout life. “The human being is of the masculine gender,” she cries:

    Woman is not a human being. She is: 1 — A mystery. 2 — Another species. 3 — As yet undefined. 4 — Unpredictable . . . Women’s spirit is sexual. That is why after coitus they dwell in nefarious feelings. Because that is their natural habitat . . . And [women] take those feelings with them to the afterlife where they corrupt the heavens, and they are sent to hell where through suffering they may shed those feelings and return to earth as a man.

    Julia’s self-loathing becomes violent — her head moves as if she were slapped — and illustrates the similarities between her and Fefu.

    Obviously, it would take me another five or six pages to discuss each character in depth (and I was really looking forward to doing Emma). So instead, I want to shift focus here to the play’s final scene. I’ve reread the final four pages several times, but am still having great difficulty reconciling everything. The finale begins with Julia’s and Fefu’s conversation. Fornes again reinforces the similarities between the two characters. Fefu tells Julia, “I think you know . . . I look into your eyes and I know what you see. It’s death.” Fornes alludes repeatedly to Fefu’s earlier comments about “averting eyes.” Fefu grabs Julia, forcing eye contact, but Julia just turns her head or closes her eyes. The scene becomes increasingly dramatic, Julia taking on the epic proportions of a martyr. And imbedded in their dialogue are comments about Fefu’s marriage to Phillip, about their problems, about her need for him. There seems to be some connection there — Fefu’s self-loathing is a product of her reliance on someone else to bring her happiness, to mold her. But that still doesn’t answer the bigger question, which is why shooting the rabbit saved Fefu and finished Julia. My only answer right now is that her action — her willingness to fight back, her desire to confront truth, her need to look Julia in the eye — is the key. Julia was perhaps destroyed by passivity. Dammit. I tried.

  • Man of Mode (1676)

    By George Etherege

    In the third act of Etherege’s The Man of Mode, Young Bellair is surprised to learn that Harriet has as little interest in him (her intended husband) as he has in her. “‘Tis not unnatural for you women to be a little angry, you miss a conquest,” Bellair says, “though you would slight the poor man were he in power.” His comment acknowledges a gender-based power struggle that drives much of the action in Restoration comedy. The conflict often takes the form of economics versus sexual favor—the men wielding the former and women the latter. In this case, upon first meeting his intended, Bellair seems capable of imagining Harriet only as a scheming tease, the stereo-typical Woman who uses her own sexuality—foregrounding, all the while, Man’s helpless subservience to it—as a means of manipulation. Harriet, likewise, views Bellair as only another in a long succession of dominant, patriarchal figures, a man who has simply purchased her future from Lady Woodvill, the woman who controlled her past.

    When both Bellair and Harriet discover that their preconceptions about the other are unfounded, they are forced to improvise. They struggle to create a discourse, one free of sexual tension and power conflict, within which a young man and woman might converse openly and honestly. Harriet’s response to Bellair offers a glimpse into their dramatic solution. “There are some it may be have an eye like Bart’lomew, big enough for the whole fair,” she says, “but I am not of the number, and you may keep your gingerbread.” Harriet’s allusion to Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair becomes more significant as the scene continues, for it demonstrates both characters’ familiarity with the stage and with its nightly demonstrations of the performance of Love and courtship.

    And it is, in fact, a performance that Harriet and Bellair act for their small audience, one consisting only of the two scheming parents. Both actors are well-studied in their roles; they move fluently through the gender-determined rituals. Harriet tells her ‘pretend’ lover, “I will lean against this wall, and look bashfully down upon my fan, while you like an amorous spark modishly entertain me.” Bellair responds with a slight tilt of his head, a nervous playing with his belt, and a “sparkish” smile. Their performance is a success, convincing its viewers of the players’ growing affections. Even Harriet and Bellair seem impressed with their new-found skill. After watching his partner fluctuate expertly between fits of laughter and moments of grave reserve, Young Bellair commends her, saying, “admirably well acted.” She responds with witty pride: “I think I am pretty apt at these matters!”

    Harriet is a fascinating character. She possesses the abundant wit of a Restoration ‘rake,’ along with the beauty and wealth of its traditional heroine. Significantly, she is also an outsider in London; but she is hardly the naïve Country Wife. Instead, Etherege uses Harriet’s perspective to comment on the superficiality of ‘high’ social interaction. In the third scene of Act III, Harriet, referring to High Park, says, “I abominate the dull diversions there, the formal bows, the affected smiles, the silly by-words, and amorous tweers, in passing.” Throughout The Man of Mode, the laughs come at the expense of such affectations, a trademark of the Comedy of Manners. But by staging his characters in a play within the play and by forcing his audience to oberve other observers, Etherege extends the satire, commenting directly on the Restoration stage itself. When Dorimant claims, “‘Tis not likely a man should be fond of seeing a damned old play when there is a new one acted,” (IV, ii) his metaphor again reinforces the similarities between the performances on stage and in the bedroom. But it also, I think, raises the question of what part the theater plays in supporting, if not actually determining, the roles of men and women in social interaction. Ultimately, the prospect of a platonic relationship leaves Harriet and Young Bellair with no option but play-acting. They slip into the only roles they feel are available to them. By showing this directly on stage, Etherege makes his play self-reflective, forcing us to acknowledge the influence of popular images on our own daily performances.

  • Nervous Conditions (1988)

    By Tsitsi Dangarembga

    I can’t seem to get an image from Michelle Cliff’s “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire” out of my mind. She tells a story from her school days of classmate who had a grand mal seizure during the morning singing of hymns. “While she flailed on the stone floor,” writes Cliff, “I wondered what the mistresses would do. We sang ‘Faith of Our Father,’ and watched our classmate as her eyes rolled back in her head.” The white mistresses offered only their typical response as aid: “keep singing.” The grotesque hypocrisy of these missionaries leaves me, as a Christian, frustrated and angry. Reading Nervous Conditions only makes me madder.

    Early in the novel, Tambu tells the story of her Uncle Babamukuru’s rise to success. In doing so, she makes her message clear: “endure and obey, for there is no other way.” By twisting the words of the popular Christian hymn, Dangarembga gives the reader a glimpse of the colonized view of faith. Christian love is replaced with obedience, hope is abandoned for endurance, and redemption is more like punishment. In Postcolonial Representations, Francoise Lionnet writes of how the Christian era transformed traditional representations of the body (the Greco-Roman emphasis on health and beauty) to those that emphasize suffering and death (Christ being the ideal representation). “The body,” writes Lionnet, “thereby becomes a text on which pain can be read as a necessary physical step on the road to a moral state, a destiny, or a way of being” (88). Necessary? It repulses me to think so.

    Yet throughout Nervous Conditions Lionnet’s thoughts are exemplified as Tambu, Babamukuru, and the other African characters are dehumanized by the whites. Baba is called a “good boy, cultivatable in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator” (such a beautifully detestable metaphor). He is forced to take his family to England so that his position might not be given to “another promising young African.” And he is taught to breed “good African children.” Similarly, when Tambu receives the great honor of attending Sacred Heart (the Roman Catholic Church being the one which creates the most virtue), she is quickly relegated to a cramped room with the other Africans. Those professing to be servants of God, charitable workers, treat the Other collectively. There is no Tambu, Nyasha, Baba, or even Zimbabwean. There is only African.

    The other snapshots of religion offered in Nervous Conditions are equally disturbing. Through Tambu we see a child’s image of God. She speaks of being caned on Monday mornings for not attending the previous day’s Sunday School class. She waits in line as she and the other Africans are inspected for missing buttons and dirty socks. She sees her beloved uncle chastise his daughter for the embarrassment she causes him at church. And worst of all, she accepts it.

    Tambu (representative, obviously, of all colonized) is a character fighting to find her place in two worlds. She struggles to reconcile the traditional beliefs of the homestead with the teachings of the missionaries (and their contradictions). Her family says grace to begin a celebration then offers “much clapping of hands” and “praising of the gods for their providence.” When Tambu eats dinner with her aunt and cousin she only knows that their prayer has ended when she hears “Amen.” This white God, it appears, only hears the white language.

    The results, unfortunately for the colonizer and colonized, are miscommunication, confusion, and damage. For Tambu, this means that she mistakes the message of the whites for the message of the Bible. (Actions, they say, speak louder than words.) It’s no wonder that she is unable to comprehend the stories of the Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene. Undeserved forgiveness is as alien to her as physical resurrection.

    Trinh T. Minh-ha redefines anthropology as “gossiping,”—us talking about them. She criticizes anthropologists for their “prejudices as well as scientifical-professional-scholarly-careerist hypocrisy” and recommends that they(we) write “close to the other.” In my discussion of religion, this means (I think) that it is ridiculous for whites to plan ways of converting the natives (to use a cliché). They(we) should instead examine critically what they believe and live accordingly. It seems that this is what Tambu begins to do at the close of Nervous Conditions. A dramatic change occurs when Baba decides that Jeremiah and Mainini must marry: Tambu disagrees. She struggles with her opinions of Baba and her understanding of sin (“It had to be avoided because it was deadly, I could see it. It was definitely black, we were taught”—wow). She struggles with the notions of witch doctors and marriages. But she is persuaded by her family pride, by the thought of her parents made comic relief, by the absurdity of the idea. In one passage, Tambu examines her beliefs and begins to grow:

    Babamukuru did not know how I had suffered over the question of that wedding. He did not know how my mind had raced and spun and ended up splitting into two disconnected entities that had long, frightening arguments with each other, very vocally, in my head, about what ought to be done, the one half maniacally insisting on going, the other half equally maniacally refusing to consider it. I knew it was not evil to have endured all that terror in order to be sure of my decision, so when Nyasha asked whether I would go, I was able to tell her clamly, ‘No.’ But I accepted that I had forfeited my right to Babamukuru’s charity.

  • In the Time of Butterflies (1994)

    By Julia Alvarez

    The film Heavenly Creatures begins with a terrifying scene of two young girls, both covered in scratches and blood, running through the woods screaming. “Help! It’s Mama!” one of the girls cries. I’m reminded of the film because, like In the Time of Butterflies, it manipulates its audience by introducing them to the tragedy of the story before developing its characters. As I sat, on the verge of tears, in the library finishing Alvarez’s novel, I was struck by how powerfully these two works had affected me. It would seem that by preparing the reader, or viewer, for the inevitable violence, that the blow would somehow be softened. “I saw the marks on Minerva’s throat,” recounts Dede, “fingerprints sure as day on Mate’s pale neck. They also clubbed them, I could see that when I went to cut their hair.” Only one paragraph is reserved for the murder. So why was I crying?

    Heavenly Creatures cuts directly from the young girls screams to a typical day in a 1950s New Zealand school. We instantly recognize one of the students, although she is now combed and cleaned and properly attired in her school uniform. She (we learn her name is Pauline) is then introduced to a new student. Juliet is the daughter of a noted Oxford professor and, like Pauline, has a penchant for story telling and trouble making. The remainder of the film is a disturbing look at the development of their friendship. We are told the story through Pauline’s diaries, which we are informed are not only true but were also the most damning evidence in the trial against the two girls. Knowing their fate, knowing that they would be convicted of killing Pauline’s mother, changes our perceptions as viewers. Instead of laughing at the bizarre, imaginary world of their childish games, we are repulsed by the dysfunctional homes that drove them to it. Instead of being charmed by the innocent love shared by the two girls, we are disgusted by its overt sexuality. The film’s ultimate and inevitable violence rivals that of A Clockwork Orange for its abhorrent realism. We have been expecting it for 90 minutes, but we’re still unprepared.

    “Why, they inevitably ask in one form or another, why are you the one who survived?” (page 5). Before meeting the sisters of In the Time of Butterflies, before even learning their names, we know that they have lived lives and died deaths worth telling. Then, through Dede’s stories and Mate’s journals, through Patria’s and Minerva’s voices, the women begin to take form. We see their home, their family. We hear them laugh and watch them play games. Each woman develops a unique personality, becomes an individual. There are jealousies and rivalries. There are volleyball games and graduations. Each woman loves and begins a family of her own, but their stories are tainted — “the one who survived.”

    Anxiously awaiting their tragic deaths, I became much more aware of the injustices in the Mirabal sisters’ lives. Lina Lovaton’s fall seemed their destiny. History books with “you-know-who’s” face on them and the mandatory portraits of him in every home made me claustrophobic, made their plight seem inescapable. The SIM smoking cigarettes outside the Mirabal home. The political sermons in local churches. The black Volkswagens around every corner. Even Lio and Manolo troubled me. “Stay away from them,” I kept thinking to myself. “Why must you kill them with your revolutionary ideas?”

    As an undergraduate, I took only the required Western Civ and geography classes. My interests rarely strayed from my own small world. Apathy, I guess. Boredom and comfort, as well. But I do believe that I was also driven away from world events by the lifelessness with which they were presented. Perhaps I’ve been desensitized to suffering (as many sociologists and politicians, I’m sure, would agree). But there seems to be a power in story telling which conquers that apathy. Though the Mirabal sisters are fictionalized, Alvarez’s one paragraph account of their brutal murders affected me more than countless hours of evening news coverage have. The piles of bodies and the weeping mothers become broadcast images from another world completely disconnected from my own. But Dede’s worry and hysteria and guilt become mine. Alvarez’s stories force me to confront the lives and deaths rather than switch the channel.

    Trinh, T. Minh-ha mentions a tale by Leslie Marmon Silko of a witch who, while at a contest of witches, frightens her audience by simply telling a story. “It isn’t so funny. . . Take it back,” they ask. “It’s already turned loose / It’s already coming / It can’t be called back,” she answers. Trinh writes that a story is not just a story. “Once the forces have been aroused and set into motion, they can’t simply be stopped at someone’s request. Once told, the story is bound to circulate; humanized, it may have a temporary end, but its effects linger on and its end is never truly an end.” Humanized. The answer. The power to know someone, “to revive. . . the forgotten, dead-ended, turned-into-stone parts of ourselves.” The Mirabals have become friends lost to a struggle that I know nothing about. Their story is a voice that I had never heard. And they’ve left me asking questions.