The Lesson

Written in vernacular from the point of view of a pre-teen inner city girl, Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson" speaks to the disparities between rich and poor in the free world's most powerful economy. A hord of children, most of whom sport "ghetto" monikers like Junebug, Big Butt, QT, Flyboy, Sugar, and "I," are escorted by a college-educated young black woman and descend on a very expensive toy store set in what may be New York City, judging from the toponyms: Alley Pond Park, Gentral Park, West End, Drive, F.A.O. Schwarz. The purpose of the excursion is to teach the children a lesson about the socio-economic climate they inhabit. Now, just what each child actually "learns" seems different in each case. Is the answer that Sugar gives her "teacher" compartmentalized, so that she "says-what-the-teacher-wants-to-hear" without really believing her own words? Does Rosie Giraffe really learn that "white people are crazy," and if so, what is the value of the lesson? Does the lesson breed resentment of the rich? Does it "open their eyes" to the inequalities inherent in a free-market economy? Does it "equate" happiness and material wealth, and if so, was that Ms. Moore's intention? Does Flyboy's nonchalance sum it up? Or does it foster a sense of shame and defeatism? Or does it spawn a sub-culture of "privilege" (as with Mercedes) among the underclass? Does the narrator use it to justify the fact that she stole four dollars from Ms. Moore? To become as Hobbesian or Machiavellian as those who made it rich, trying as she does to do better that her parents? Or does it inspire her to struggle to level the playing field for herself and her peers, thus giving back to her community as Ms. Moore does, and subsequently attempt to compete on equal terms with everyone else?

A & P - John Updike

A breath of fresh air kind of story, light and yet with a good grip, like a fancy jump rope with five-pound handles encased in rubber. But seriously, folks, A & P is told from the point of view of a nineteen year-old boy (man?) who happens to work at the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company in his neck of the woods. Enter girls. That's it! We focus (enargeia) with hollow-pitted stomachs on the loving description of three curvacious semi-nude female bodies dancing (wafting?) down the store aisles lined with cardboard boxes and cellophane wrapped merchandise. The image Updike creates is that of a pinball machine, and the narrator is waiting to see out of which tunnel the balls will fly in a bee line toward the flippers. Suntan lines, the complexion of luscious vanilla breats, an ethereal gait in the making (think teenage goddess), jiggling cans (ahem!), the soft and clicking inflexion of a young voice. Voyeurism? Sure. Coming of age narrative? Sure: Sammy quits his "swell" job over a flap with his manager. His manager, it seems, embarrassed the girls with his no-shirt, no-service policy enforcing mien. The leader, Queenie, had persuaded the other two to accompany her wearing nothing but bikinis into the supermarket to pick up a vat of smoked herring in sour cream on an errand for her mother. And who should come along to burst Sammy's bubble but Lengel, the store manager, with his puritanical demeanor. And with no job, he realizes how hard the world will be with him from then on. A & P is also a critique of modern consumerism and the vapid, "gray" lifestyle that it spawns among American suburbanites.

Everyday Use

This is a story about sibling rivalry between two sisters told from the mother's point of view. This is also a story about coming to terms with one's own heritage, in this case an African American heritage. Like so many "evolved" black women, Dee changes her name to Wangero in the attempt to value her African roots. She takes up with a young man who has become Muslim, which further underscores their connection to Africa, although Wangero does not affect any dietary restrictions. And now she has come to reclaim her heritage from her mother in the form of a butter churn and her grandmother's quilts. The value that she reclaims from her African roots transfers, in her eyes, to the butter churn and especially her grandmother's quilts, articles that recall a rude 19th century lifestyle during slavery. She sees these items as having acquired monetary value as a consequence of her newfound Afrocentric consciousness. And she accuses her sister of putting them to "everyday use," rather than showcasing them in a museum. The irony here, of course, is that these items were intended for "everyday use. "Maggie, her sister, bears the symbolic scars of slavery on her hands and arms where she suffered burns when the house burned down. The cause of the fire may well have been action by the KKK, a racist group known for their violent tactics. Maggie is also a bit slow witted, and has always been in awe of her sister, to whom, in her eyes, nothing has ever been denied. Wangero, although evolved and more "aware" of the issues surrounding being black in America during the Civil Rights movement than either her mother or sister, treats them with cold calculation, as unenlightened victims whom she might justifiably exploit for the greater good and in the name of some abstract ideal. The mother wins a victory when she sides with Maggie and refuses to part with the quilts.

A Worn Path

Phoenix, as her name implies, rises from the ashes of her life to hunt down medicine for her only grandson who had swalllowed lye a few years before and still suffers from the burn. On her way to the dispensary, we learn that she is old, very old, perhaps a hundred. She is a living link to the past: she remembers the Surrender. She has one foot in the culture of the past, and one foot in the historical present. She seems to inhabit an animist belief system or world, and transforms even simple gestures like crossing a log bridge into mythical events imbued with spiritual significance. In that regard, she is very child-like, and in fact she does appear like a child to the nurse at the dispensary despite her extreme old age. Having grown up as a slave stunted her matrurity, and in fact she is diminutive in stature, as well. Her fears arise in response to the natural contingencies of making her journey on foot through the woods, alone: wild animals, her battle with a thornbush, the presence of a vulture, the dead, ghosts, a scarecrow, and a big black dog that makes her fall into a ditch; yet she is not afraid of stealing money under God's watchful eye, or having a gun pointed at her (the vestige of institutionalized racism), or of contradicting a white man and making such a long journey, or of asking someone to lace up her shoes once she reaches the town, or of begging for money to buy her child a toy. She seems to accept her role as her grandson's caretaker as her fate and expects the medication for him as her right. But for all her fears, she seems at home in nature, which she transfigures through her imagination to the point even of hallucinating being served a slice of cake by a little boy. The link between imagination and memory is very real for Phoenix, and this fact too may lend significance to her name, perhaps more real that the link between memory and intellect, for she even forgets for a moment why she made the journey. Her presense in the dispensary seems entirely anomolous and out of place, except for the fact that she must leave and return whence she came. And we don't know what awaits her once she reaches home.

The Death of Opposites

It's a well told story that turns my stomach. Sparkling detail utterly disjointed from the sorrow they portend. Such disparity between the grandmother's good intentions and the results of her actions. Such senseless divergence between the mood of the story at the start and finish. Yet the narrator's tone is even and steady and fateful. Such misfit between the spoiled childishness of John and Jane and their horrific end. Bailey, murdered for his clothes; the wife and the baby, euthanized. Such a difference between Georgia and Tennessee. Such stoicism demontrated by the grandmother in facing the death of her children; and such tenderness in comforting their killer. Such cold-blooded meanness versus middle-class sloppiness. Pity and terror for sure, but the only tragic death is the grandmother's, and as in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" the hero is a half-crazed, unrepentant fanatic, who kills when people get too close, whose humanity gives a shudder as he pulls the trigger.

Circus, anyone?

The hunger artist is a kind of circus freak whose true value has been co-opted by commercialization. The hunger artist is powerless to do as he believes because he must follow the dictates of his employer, the impresario, who tries to control the artist's act by using logical fallacies that dishearten the artist. He cannot resist the force of that propaganda machine which aims to keep him in business, regardless of the loss of "truth." Subjectively, the artist feels like a martyr to this form of commercialization. Howeer, it ironically enables him to starve himself, albeit for a "greater purpose." We seem to arrive at a point of intersection between two major paradigms: art, spirituality, and the moral life, on the one hand; and the profit motive, on the other. The conflict is born between the artist’s desire to overreach himself and break his old record in order to further develop his inner spirituality, a course which however does not garner him any militant “power;” and the changing tastes of his audience, to which the impresario caters, that make him appear as an old washed up artist whose ambition pushes him further and further into a world of fantasy. The clash of these two paradigms creates the hunger artist's conflict and may imply that the artist’s practice is ill-suited, not only for the times, but for his spiritual purpose as well. Of this, the hunger artist is painfully aware, in stark contrast to a character like Young Goodman Brown. Moreover, his inchoate awareness of history leads him to make a deathbed confession that undermines the reason for which he should have been admired as a great hunger artist, namely that he couldn't find the food he liked, so consequently fasting came easy for him. Therefore, he acknowledges that he is unworthy of admiration. He is a fraud, not because he ate when he shouldn't have, but because he didn't when he could have. But this is not the reason that his audience's tastes changed.

Gloom v. Cheerfulness

Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown" strikes me today as a spooky Halloween morality tale. He may just have written it for fun, to entertain a room full of children around a holiday hearth. Of course, we are probably right to read it also as commentary on the dislocations of the Puritan temperament which led to the abuses of the Salem Witch Trials. But, Hawthorne may in addition have thought to make a case against the affectation of a gloomy disposition in response to the presence of evil in the world. Therein lies its anagogic value as a morality tale. Hawthorne is reminding us of the importance of cheerfulness, of lightness, much as Nietzsche did later.