Heracles vs. Bob Dylan

Recall Edmund Wilson's "Yet it is also decreed that he shall be cured when he shall have been able to forget his grievance and devote his divine gifts to the service of his people." Whitehead’s ironies, particularly in having the consultant expect but not experience a recovery from his pain when he devotes his creative gifts to the service of his own people, suggest that the novel, like much recent Sophocles criticism, disavows the Wilsonian view. David Gates, a big fan of Apex Hides the Hurt, learned in a 1997 interview the perils of the romantic assumption that a creative person has been granted insight by illness:

Bob Dylan is fifty-six. Last May, when he almost died –of a viral infection in a sac around the heart . . . the death scare reminded us that Dylan is a major cultural figure –and that we won’t always have him with us. But for Dylan himself, deep thoughts about mortality had to take a back seat. “Mostly I was in a lot of pain. Pain that was intolerable . . . ”

As with Neoptolemos, it is the observers of the anguish who found it to generate insight. The sufferer himself did not find that pain automatically provided transcendence; and no Heracles descended from heaven to help him make sense of his pain. Now, the consultant of course does associate his pain with insight and possibly even with his ability to connect with historical suffering; but the novel ends up reminding us that, however much power we attribute to our words and our stories, however much we expect that "There must be obedience in this," nature and the body are outside the reach of the power we have over language.

Hiding the Hurt

WE WEAR THE MASK

by: Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

E wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes--

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries

To Thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

More Seriously, Here Are Two Singing Activists

You can access a brief video of Cheryl Marie Wade here.

And it turns out (I wish I'd known this earlier) that singing English disability activist Johnny Crescendo has a myspace page where you can listen to five or six of his songs and read his blog! Whoa!

Just for Fun

In the category of disability performance, I found this guy who is living with Swedishness and cerebral palsy and does popular song parodies about disability. Here's a medley that starts out in Scandinavian but continues in English:



Here's a touching song about a failed relationship:



And here's a Swedish drag performance (warning --contains strong language, could be interpreted as transphobic, and I'm not sure the backup performers aren't AB):

Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back

Open thread for questions about and discussion of Vital Signs. In a movie from an activist perspective, there's always a risk that some people will preach to the converted and end up looking unsympathetic to those who are not already on their side: you could discuss whom you found to be most sympathetic in those terms. But you could also talk more generally about whose perspective you found to be most thought-provoking, entertaining, stupid, or relevant to other themes we've discussed. I'm most interested in what worked best for you and in what perplexed you; but you're welcome to mention what you found grating as well.

O'Connor and Moral Judgments

Flannery O'Connor spoke and wrote at some length of how her stories exemplified her conservative Catholic perspective, with their focus on such unfashionable themes as evil, grace, and free will at a time when, in her view, fiction was expected to be nonjudgmental and to consider how its subjects were constrained by personality or society. One of the key statements in her "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" is "It's considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion . . . Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion demanded by the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything. Certainly when the grotesque is used in a legitimate way, the intellectual and moral judgments in it will have the ascendancy over feeling."

1) The liberal Episcopalian Philip K. Dick was a very different breed of Christian; but he was very serious about his Christianity. How do the ideas of evil, grace, and moral judgment show up in Dr. Bloodmoney or in Dick's late discussion of it?

2) How do those moral judgments and suspicion of compassion work out in "Good Country People"? Whom does the story judge and why? What attitude do you feel the story takes?

3) Do you get an idea, from the essay and story, of what O'Connor wants to use disability in fiction for? Do you see any connection with that and the fact that she was herself disabled?

Motivation and Emotion in Dr. Bloodmoney

Although science fiction, historically, has tended to gloss over character depth in favor of other issues, we do get a glimpse of many characters' inner thoughts in a novel such as Dr. Bloodmoney. Who is motivated by fear? Disgust? Anger? Which characters did you find to be psychologically interesting thanks to the account the novel gives of their emotional states? Or did they all seem pretty flat and thinly sketched-out?

Bodies in Okada

People with disabilities only appear in about half the chapters of No-No Boy; but throughout the novel, Okada sets the tone and characterizes people, in part, by the way he describes their bodies. When first we see Mama, for example, we quickly learn that "Hers was the awkward, skinny body of a thirteen-year-old which had dried and toughened through the many years following but which had developed no further" (10) --later, we learn about her arms and what their shape, color, and movement means to Ichiro. Indeed, the second paragraph of the novel establishes "ineradicable" physical difference --rather than, say, ancestry-- as a defining feature of the stigmatized Japanese-Americans. And although the rest of the novel is devoted to complicating that equation, we still see a great deal of energy spent on people's shape, color, posture, size, dress, and movement that not all fiction considers. Where did that kind of description make an impression on you?

Clarification

There has been some confusion expressed about who is writing these posts and who is commenting as "Josh" in the comments. It's your instructor, The Lukin, okay? Your classmate Josh Keton is not the type to say "Great idea! I will lead a discussion of it when next we meet."

Have a great break; I will probably post another entry soon.

The Men

I've been asked (below, in the comments for "WTF Is Happening in Class?") to initiate a thread for discussion of The Men. There's way too little in fiction about disability community: most often the person with a disability in a novel is an isolated hero or villain. Movies, however, sometimes can show community a little better; and I find that The Men is one of those rare movies that doesn't use disability in a tragic or negative way.

A couple of you indicated in that thread below what you liked about it --anyone else want to chime in on what impressed you or ask about parts you found obscure?

Randolph Bourne II

A couple more issues from yesterday's class discussion:

3) Bourne's "The magical good fortune of attractive personal appearance marks its way almost without effort in the world, breaking down all sorts of walls of disapproval and lack of interest" elicited a big chunk of conversation in the class, with Lukas saying that there are many areas of life in which personal appearance makes no difference and about five other people arguing that looks are exceeded only by money in their power to ease your way through the world. Look at the paragraph in which Bourne makes that point, and the one following --what do you think of his argument, which specifically arises in his discussion of "business and the practice of a profession"?

4) The middle section of the essay talks about "the handicapped man" in confrontation with society's habit of victim-blaming: "If he could only more easily separate the factors that are due to his physical disability . . . he would realize what he is responsible for, and what he is not. But at the beginning he rarely makes allowances for himself; he is his own severest judge." Later, if he is resilient in the face of obstacles that might otherwise destroy his personality, he ends up with the potential for a bigger-than-average circle of compassion: "He will be filled with a profound sympathy for all who are despised and ignored in the world. When he has been through the neglect and struggles of a handicapped and ill-favored man himself, he will begin to understand the feelings of all the horde of the unpresentable and the unemployable, the incompetent and the ugly, the queer and crotchety people who make up so large a proportion of human folk." What is Bourne doing with that claim? What do you think of the language? What do you think of the argument that suffering might build compassion greater than that possessed by those who have not been stigmatized?

Randolph Bourne

I want to review some points about Bourne's "The Handicapped" and follow up on some issues that our class discussion raised. As ever, use the comments section to respond not only to the post but to one another.

1) Are there any more initial comments, evaluations, or responses to bits of the essay that particularly struck you?

2) Lukas raised the issue that there were extremes of positive and negative thought in Bourne's piece; Josh K was struck by the fact that he found the sunny, happy portions easy to dismiss; I suggested that there's a cultural norm at issue there --American men, interested in books, born since 1960, are cynical or mistrustful when faced with the happy, the comedic, the upbeat, the optimistic. Seriousness ends up getting equated with pessimism. Do you think that's true? Are there reasons for it?

A Rebecca Harding Davis Question

How does Deborah in Life in the Iron-Mills perceive herself and others? Does her disability play a role in that?

WTF Is Happening in Class?

The comments thread below is a place for you to post questions about material you want clarified from class discussions.