this nerding life

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Six: Gone With The Wind (1936) – Part Two

This is the second part of my review of Gone With the Wind. For the first part, go here.

“Everything in their old world had changed but the old forms. The old usages went on, must go on, for the forms were all that were left to them. They were holding tightly to the things they knew best and loved best in the old days, the leisured manners, the courtesy, the pleasant casualness in human contacts and, most of all, the protecting attitude of the men toward their women. True to the tradition in which they had been reared, the men were courteous and tender and they almost succeeded in creating an atmosphere of sheltering their women from all that was harsh and unfit for feminine eyes.” (p. 569)

Wow, what a book! Gone With the Wind is an epic read in the truest sense, in that it is big and contains multitudes of different stories within. You get Antebellum South romantic fiction, harrowing Civil War adventure, sociological examination of the dying courtly classes of the Georgia region, kitchen sink melodrama, political intrigue, and more. It had no real low points, except for one glaring omission that I started to talk about last time but couldn’t really get a handle on. More on that later.

Scarlett O’Hara is a fascinating character, one who changes a lot throughout the course of the novel’s twelve calendar years. She’s ultimately a very pitiful person, with a mind incapable of the sort of “great love” she continually moons over, and definitely not someone who should have become a mother, much less to the the three children she eventually has. For a while there, it was pretty irritating how she kept mooning over Ashley Wilkes and ignoring Rhett Butler, but once you realize that Scarlett’s love is an incredibly toxic one, I quit feeling like she should just read He’s Just Not That Into You and felt even more sorry for her (and everyone around her) than I did before.

My favorite incarnation of Scarlett’s character was once she’d moved back to Atlanta to try and raise money in hopes of keeping her ancestral home, Tara. I came to refer to this era as her “Scarface” period in my head, as from this point onwards she becomes incredibly cruel and calculating with regards to accumulating wealth. It’s fun, though a little harrowing, to see the techniques and drive she once used in trying to steal away the beaux of other girls back in the County used instead to buy lumber mills, saloons and the debts of her fellow Atlantans (Atlanteans?). She eventually resorts to another kind of slave labor to make up for that lost the Emancipation of black people: convict labor. This, in addition to numerous social transgressions against the old guard of Atlanta society, results in her becoming effectively ostracized from the gentlemanly community she was bred to rule as a Southern Belle. I think this meme I made describes it best.

The other reason I thought of this as the book’s Scarface period was that she eventually builds an elaborate mansion after marrying a rich business partner, and then proceeds to decorate it in what I could only assume was an incredibly gaudy style for the time (my knowledge of home furnishings from the era is somewhat less than it could be):

“Within the house was furnished as Scarlett had desired, with thick red carpeting which ran from wall to wall, red velvet portieres and the newest of highly varnished black-walnut furniture, carved wherever there was an inch for carving and upholstered in such slick horsehair that ladies had to deposit themselves thereon with great care for fear of sliding off … on the walls were gilt-framed mirrors and long pier glasses … steel engravings in heavy frames, some of them eight feet long … [t]he walls were covered with rich dark paper, the ceilings were high and the house was always dim, for the windows were overdraped with plum-colored plush hangings that shut out most of the sunlight.” (p. 806)

See, add a few hot tubs and televisions and you’ve got Tony Montana’s ostentatious pad from the 1980s remake, don’t you think?

I’m getting a little off topic here. Gone With the Wind does an excellent job of evolving its main character from an empty-headed nobody at sixteen to a hard-headed pragmatist at twenty-eight. As she increases her power in business dealings, she’s blithely unaware of the fact that she’s pounding nails into the coffin of the South she grew up in; Atlanta society matrons scorn her though, knowing all too well what she’s doing.

So while Scarlett, Rhett Butler and to a lesser extent, continual crush object Ashley Wilkes, are quite rounded characters, the black servants they surround themselves with are definitely not. As I sort of got at last time, I feel that even by Gone With the Wind’s publication date in 1936 the way Mitchell characterized the slaves (soon to be the free people) in Scarlett’s world was a little much. It’s not like this was a true story with transcriptions of their speech habits and mannerisms to go by (like those William Styron had to go by when writing The Confessions of Nat Turner), Mitchell must have been playing up hateful stereotypes on purpose. Maybe sometimes it was done for comic relief, as the book needed it at some points, but reading dialogue from Mammy, Pork and Prissy was cringe-worthy a lot of the time. I don’t really have much more to say on that, other than it’s almost like Mitchell used all her writing prowess up on Scarlett and didn’t have any left for anyone else? Seems somewhat fishy though, I think.

I still would like to watch the film and compare it to the text, and I should hopefully have a brief review of that coming up this weekend.

“The Lost Cause was stronger, dearer now in their hearts than it had ever been at the height of its glory. It was a fetish now. Everything about it was sacred, the graves of the men who had died for it, the battle fields, the torn flags, the crossed sabers in their halls, the fading letters from the front, the veterans.” (p. 814)

Who would I recommend this book to?: People who are interested in American history, especially people like me who had no reason to learn about the Civil War up until now, as it wasn’t really that important in the overall scheme of things. People who enjoy books with strong, flawed female leads. People who are interested in narratives about the collapse of civilizations, and what arises from the ashes.

Total pages read since January 1st: 12535 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read since January 1st (not including ones read before 2011): 29

Next up on the Resolution Project: Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone (1974)

Tagged 1860s, bad parenting, Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, movies, Pulitzer Prize, review, Scarface, The American South, Time 100

Oct 04 2011

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the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Six: Gone With the Wind (1936) – Part One

“It was this happy feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land where men were contented, uncontradicted and safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave the ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence.” (p. 163)

Scarlett O’Hara is a young member of Georgia’s landed gentry in the waning days of the Confederacy. As such, her life revolves around balls, barbecues, dancing and dresses. She loves a young gentleman named Ashley Wilkes, who, strangely enough, would rather read a book than drink and ride horses like the rest of the men his age. But trouble’s a brewing in the land of King Cotton. The War Between the States looms as Scarlett moves to Atlanta, encountering along the way Rhett Butler, a scandalous man whose spoken thoughts resonate in Scarlett’s mind somehow.

I’m enjoying Gone With the Wind a lot more than I thought I would. As such, I’m going to end up devoting two posts to it, also because it is pretty long. Anyway, I think I had some misconceptions about the book coming in. I thought it was a sort of trumped-up romance novel, notable mostly for its massively successful film adaptation in 1939.

I was wrong, though.

While the romance element in Gone is still a pretty big part of it, it’s closer to that found in something like Jane Eyre or an Austen novel. While the main narrative thrust of the novel is “who will Scarlett end up with?”, it uses that as a base to examine Confederate society, and specifically women’s role in it, far more than your average bodice ripper does. Consider the way being a widow is treated. I had no idea just how intense it was at this point in time.

“A widow had to wear hideous black dresses without even a touch of braid to enliven them, no flower or ribbon or lace or even jewelry, except onyx mourning brooches or necklaces made from the deceased’s hair. And the black crepe veil on her bonnet had to reach to her knees, and only after three years of widowhood could it be shortened to shoulder length. Widows could never chatter vivaciously or laugh aloud. Even when they smiled, it must be a sad, tragic smile. And, most dreadful of all, they could in no way indicate an interest in the company of gentlemen. And should a gentleman be so ill bred as to indicate an interest in her, she must freeze him with a dignified but well-chosen reference to her dead husband.” (p. 144)

That sort of stuff is fascinating to me, and while I haven’t really researched the veracity of this description, it feels real to me. That’s why when all three of Scarlett, Ashley and Rhett chafe under the yoke of a society this calcified, I really started to empathise with them.

Another thing I’m enjoying is the main characters’ attitudes towards the Civil War. Again, I don’t really know what I was expecting here, but one thing I wasn’t expecting was for all three of them to have different, well thought out problems with the ideological underpinnings behind the conflict. Ashley Wilkes is a self-made scholar, and as such would rather stay home at Twelve Oaks than go out and die for his newborn country, even though he eventually does do so as he is one of the best riders in the County. He objects to the war on the same moral basis that sensitive people usually do, he just hates to see human life wasted for any “Cause”. Still, his love for his country gets him mired in the battlefields North of Georgia, as he is not able to reconcile his somewhat pacifistic nature with the danger posed by Yankees who would do away with the lifestyle that fostered it.

Rhett Butler, on the other hand, is an opportunist who sees in the War a chance to make a killing (not literally). He thinks the idea behind the War is a stupid one, as the Confederacy has not got the resources to fight the industrialized North for any great length of time. That’s why he stays back home and runs the blockade to bring supplies to Southern towns, as he knows the conflict’s not worth risking his own skin over. While the South runs high on valour and excellent commanding officers, it lacks factories to make things like boots and guns, aka. the very materiel needed for any modern conflict.

Scarlett has perhaps the most honest reason to hate the war, if not the best thought out. She hates the inconvenience it brings to her, she hates how it plucks marriageable men away from the County she lives in and spits them back shell-shocked and minus some limbs. She hates how the simple amenities that any Southern belle of her stature takes for granted are made much more difficult to come by in wartime, as well as more expensive.

So yeah, I wasn’t expecting all of the main characters in the book to see through the hypocrisy of the War so soon, so that was a good surprise. One thing I figured would be difficult for me would be the treatment of Black people throughout the book. It is, suffice it to say, somewhat regressive, especially coming in the wake of my having read The Confessions of Nat Turner and Beloved earlier on in this project. I’m going to try and talk about this subject at more length in my next post on Gone With the Wind, though.

I’d also like to compare the film version of Gone With the Wind to the book next time. I’ve actually been surprised, almost shocked a few times while reading the book by some of the things that happen, so I’d like to see if a Hays code-era film was able to bring some of these things to the screen. From what little I know about the movie, it’s that Clark Gable gets some pretty sweet lines and that the burning of Atlanta sequence is pretty well done, so right there that’s two things the movie and the book did equally well. I hope that the film version of Wade Hamilton is better than he is in the book, because I’d like nothing better than to smack that kid every time he shows up in the text. He’s annoying, and makes me think that Margaret Mitchell never came in contact with a real human child before deciding to write about one.

“Then you aren’t a nice girl, Scarlett, and I’m sorry to hear it. All really nice girls wonder when men don’t try to kiss them. They know they shouldn’t want them to and they know they must act insulted if they do, but just the same, they wish the men would try … Well, my dear, take heart. Some day, I will kiss you and you will like it. But not now, so I beg you not to be too impatient.” (p. 301)

- Rhett Butler

For the second part of my review of Gone With the Wind, go here.

Tagged 1860s, bad parenting, Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, movies, Pulitzer Prize, review, The American South, Time 100

Jul 08 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Five: Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

“There was a stiffness in him that would be hard to break, but that, nevertheless, would one day surely be broken. As hers had been, and Richard’s — there was no escape for anyone. God was everywhere, terrible, the living God; and so high, the song said, you couldn’t get over Him; so low you couldn’t get under Him; so wide you couldn’t get around Him; but must come in at the door.” (p. 226)

The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.

John Grimes is a young man growing up in the poverty-stricked Harlem of 1935, continually being told that he is destined to become a man of God. His father, Gabriel, is a tyrant who preaches fire and brimstone every Sunday at the Temple of the Fire Baptized Church. Gabriel makes his son’s life a living hell, so much so that John even daydreams about killing him. One night, when John, Gabriel, John’s mother Elizabeth and his aunt Florence are at the Church, all are caught up in a religious rapture through which the reader learns about their pasts. At the end of this sequence, John undergoes a series of horrific visions and emerges from this ecstasy with a revitalized furor for the Church.

The majority of this book is taken up by the “Prayers of the Saints” scenes in which we learn about the three older peoples’ pasts, and through them learn about how John came to be. I thought the back-stories of the gathered faithful were far more interesting than the framing story about John. It was an interesting way to read a story, almost Rashomon-ish in the way it moved around through time and space, although without that film’s use of unreliable narration. You ended up putting the pieces together as to why Gabriel hated his son, why Gabriel’s sister hates him, etc. So that was kind of fun.

John’s father Gabriel is by far the most interesting character in the book. I liked how he was a complete asshole the entire time, who barely even paid lip service to the ideas of repentance he preaches to his flock. What did begin to wear on me after a while were the sermons. There is a lot of sermonizing and moral lessons and stuff in this book, and it got pretty boring after a while. While I did recognize some of the allusions to Biblical imagery that were to be found in the intertwined stories of Gabriel and his son, I really felt like I was being pounded over the head with it.

It actually put me in mind of Canadian author Timothy Findley’s excellent book Not Wanted on the Voyage, which actually just explored the lives of Noah and his kids (to name an example from Mountain), rather than preaching it at me. Maybe all of this sermonizing wouldn’t have been so boring to me if I were even remotely religious? Who knows. I just know that quotations like the one above, how John’s will must be broken before God, read more to me like dispatches from Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four than any sort of belief system I’d like to adhere to.

I learned later that this book is semi-autobiographical, which explains to a certain extent why the character of John is such a cipher. It’d be difficult to examine yourself at the age of fourteen with anything resembling objectivity, so that’s why Baldwin chose to focus instead on John’s family members. That’s my take on it anyway.

“To ‘come along’ meant that he would change his ways and consent to be the husband she had traveled so far to find. It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom ‘coming along’ is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.” (p100-101).

Total pages read since January 1st: 9268 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read since January 1st (not including ones read before 2011): 24

Next up on the Resolution Project: San Diego Comic Con Vacation!

Tagged 1930s, bad parenting, Christianity, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Harlem, James Baldwin, New York City, non-protagonists, racism, review, The American South, Time 100

May 26 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Thirty: Deliverance (1970)

“What I thought about mainly was that I was in a place where none – or almost none – of my daily ways of living my life would work; there was no habit I could call on. Is this freedom? I wondered.” (p. 93)

Ed Gentry is a founder and art director for a small advertising agency in Georgia who decides to go on a canoe trip down the Cahulawassee river, which is scheduled to be dammed up and turned into a lake. The impetus for the trip comes from his friend Lewis, an outdoorsy athletic type, and two other men, Drew and Bobby come along for the ride. While the scenery is gorgeous and the river exciting, the group soon finds out that they are way over their heads in this backwoods setting. After a fateful run-in with a pair of hillbillies, Ed must sacrifice all his civilized ideals if they are to make it out of the woods alive.

This is a pretty solid thriller narrative, definitely fulfilling the task of making me never want to go on a canoe trip ever again (which I’m assuming was the intention). Dickey does a very good job at getting someone like myself, who, despite putting in a few years as a Cub Scout, would never classify as a great outdoorsman, into the mindset of men fending off the wilderness just to stay alive. The descriptions of white-water canoeing are pretty good, and he also does good work in helping the reader understand the mechanics of bow-hunting, as well as the mental state you get into with a target in your sights. I feel like I learned a bit while reading Deliverance.

The book, though, is so fraught with homosexual subtext that I almost felt embarrassed for it at points. It’s almost not even “sub” at this point, it’s basically just the text. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but it was a little distracting for Gentry to keep describing how good of shape Lewis was in all of the time:

“Everything he had done for himself for years paid off as he stood there in his tracks, in the water. I could tell by the way he glanced at me; the payoff was in my eyes … [y]ou could even see the veins in his gut, and I knew I could not even begin to conceive how many sit-ups and leg-raises- and how much dieting – had gone into bringing them into view.” (p. 102)

They went with Burt Reynolds for the movie.

It goes on like that at many points. You could make a case for it being symptomatic of Gentry’s distaste for his own 40-year old, balding, flabby self, that maybe he’s trying to live vicariously through Lewis’ great body, but it feels deeper than that. Lewis doesn’t seem like that great of a guy to be honest, he’s a proto-survivalist who envies the mountain folk in the Georgia backwoods the simplicity they have there. He’s the reason the group gets in this situation, as he stakes out the stretch of river they are to go down, not knowing of course that some of the rapids and rocks in that area basically make it impassible, and that the hillbillies he has such a fondness for are a bit psychopathic.

The sons of the soil in question are the thing that I feel left the biggest impression on pop culture through the 1972 film (the infamous “Squeal like a pig!” line doesn’t actually appear in the book, it was apparently something Ned Beatty thought up on set). I appreciated bringing some human villains in to get the book out of the Boy’s Own adventure mould, but having them within the space of maybe two minutes start raping one party member and threaten another with the same seemed a little abrupt to me. Perhaps they should have kicked a dog first, that’s a good way to establish villain cred, but going straight to sodomy was a little excessive, and added to the strange mix of machismo-homosexuality that permeates the text. Not to mention that the combination of the book and the film have probably set city slicker/hillbilly relations back a hundred years.

As I mentioned before, the book was made into a highly successful feature film in 1972, starring Ed Voight as the protagonist, and Burt Reynolds’ abs as Lewis. I saw it maybe 5 years ago, and while the book made me want to check it out again, it’s not super urgent. I’d honestly rather watch director John Boorman’s follow up feature, Zardoz (I’m starting to suspect he’s got a thing for hirsute men):

The List:

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. ~~The Blind Assassin~~

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

17. ~~The Bridge of San Luis Rey~~

18. Call It Sleep

19. ~~Catch-22~~ (read before 2011)

20. ~~The Catcher in the Rye~~ (read before 2011)

21. ~~A Clockwork Orange~~

22. ~~The Confessions of Nat Turner~~

23. ~~The Corrections~~

24. ~~The Crying of Lot 49~~ (read before 2011)

25. A Dance to the Music of Time (1st Movement)

26. ~~The Day of the Locust~~

27. ~~Death Comes for the Archbishop~~

28. ~~A Death in the Family~~

29. The Death of the Heart

30. ~~Deliverance~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 7076 pp.

Next up on the Resolution Project: John Cheever’s Falconer (1977)

Tagged 1970s, Deliverance, hirsute men, homoerotic subtext, homoerotic text, James Dickey, John Boorman, movies, review, The American South, Time 100, trailers, Zardoz

May 18 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Twenty-Eight: A Death in the Family (1958)

“Look at me, Poll,” he said. She looked at him. “That’s when you’re going to need every ounce of common sense you’ve got,” he said. “Just spunk won’t be enough; you’ve got to have gumption. You’ve got to bear in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or regard for justice. You’ve got to keep your mind off pitying your rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. You’ve got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they’ve come through it and you will too. You’ll bear it because there isn’t any choice – except to go to pieces.” (p. 141)

Family man Jay Follet is called to his father’s bedside in the dead of night in the summer of 1915. Fearing the worst from his ailing father, Jay speeds through Tennessee backroads only to find a false alarm waiting for him at his childhood home. On his way back to Knoxville, however, his car malfunctions while on bad terrain and Jay is killed instantly by hitting his chin on the steering wheel. A Death in the Family, then, is about how his family deals with the grief of his loss. The narrative floats between his now widowed wife, his atheist brother-in-law and his eager-to-please son Rufus, as they come to terms with Jay’s death over the two or three days following the accident.

The thing I liked best about this book, in addition to how real it felt (author James Agee lost his father to an accident when he was six, some have called this novel autobiographical), was how good a job it did at putting you into the mindset of a child. There are flashback sequences from young Rufus’ point of view scattered throughout the book, delineated from the rest by way of being italicized. In these parts, Agee deftly captures the feeling of being a small child, a precocious child who only half gets things that he is told and ends up extrapolating meaning for words like “instantly killed,” “drunk,” and an “eightfoot embankment.” Rufus is an excellent reader surrogate as, through a child’s eyes, we have to look again at the world to see what is trying to be imparted to the boy. It’s also helpful given the time period the novel is set in, 1915, to have an inquisitive mind that wouldn’t take for granted some of the social mores and taboos of the era, allowing us to experience a way of life that has since moved on.

Agee is also blisteringly critical of organized religion and its role in helping grieving families. Most of this work is done through the character of Andrew, who is what we’d call either an atheist or more likely an agnostic, and for this reason is set apart from Jay’s wife Mary and her aunt Hannah, who are very devout. He warns her that if she starts falling down the hole of religious fanaticism after her husband’s death, it’s not likely that she’ll ever make it out again. Christianity is also demonized in the form of Father Jackson, who comes to officiate the funeral. Rufus and his little sister Catherine never really hear what the priest tells Mary and Hannah upstairs; they instead intimate through everyone’s tone of voice that she is subsuming her grief into devotion, rather than having it out in the world to be dealt with:

“And they felt that although everything was better for their mother than it had been a few minutes before, it was far worse in one way. For before, she had at least been questioning, however gently. But now she was wholly defeated and entranced, and the transition to prayer was the moment and mark of her surrender.” (p.272)

A lot of people seem to use their devotion like that, like a crutch that explains every single thing that happens. It’s defeatist. But enough about that. A Death in the Family is by no means a fun novel, but it is a very interesting one. Agee pours his real-life grief into the story, and it feels palpably real as a result. Definitely a must for someone who wants to understand how death changes people.

“That’s what they’re for, epitaphs, Joel suddenly realized. So you can feel you’ve got some control over the death, you own it, you choose a name for it. The same with wanting to know all you can about how it happened.” (p.158)

The List:

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. ~~The Blind Assassin~~

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

17. ~~The Bridge of San Luis Rey~~

18. Call It Sleep

19. ~~Catch-22~~ (read before 2011)

20. ~~The Catcher in the Rye~~ (read before 2011)

21. ~~A Clockwork Orange~~

22. ~~The Confessions of Nat Turner~~

23. ~~The Corrections~~

24. ~~The Crying of Lot 49~~ (read before 2011)

25. A Dance to the Music of Time (1st Movement)

26. ~~The Day of the Locust~~

27. ~~Death Comes for the Archbishop~~

28. ~~A Death in the Family~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 6798 pp.

Next up on the Resolution Project: James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970)

Tagged 1910s, A Death in the Family, Catholicism, Christianity, James Agee, Pulitzer Prize, review, The American South, Time 100

Apr 19 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Twenty-Two: The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

“I had for going on to several years now considered the necessity of exterminating all the white people in Southampton County and as far beyond as destiny carried me, and there was thus available to me more time than I had ever had to ponder the Bible and its exhortations, and to think over the complexities of the bloody mission that was set out before me.” (p.48)

This book took a while to get going, but once it did, it was pretty gripping. As the story opens, Nat Turner is sitting in a Virginia jail cell waiting for his certain death. His state-appointed attorney, Gray, asks him to dictate all of the actions and events that led to his bloody uprising, which was to be the biggest sustained slave revolt in the history of the United States (this was an actual document by the way, used by author William Styron as the starting point for his narrative). Gray takes that narrative and argues it in court, but we as readers are privy to the version of events as Nat himself would have laid them out. The novel goes over most of the young man’s life, becoming both an indictment of the South’s “peculiar institution” as well as a detailed character study of a man who believed angels told him to murder every white person in Southampton County.

In his afterword to the book, Styron notes that while he was initially critically lauded for the book, eventually it became held up as being a racist and misleading work. Which is a little strange to me, but it does seem a little weird for a white author to try and tackle what most people would consider to be a quintessentially black story. I felt he was pretty successful though, given the scarcity of primary sources dealing with Turner. I haven’t read the real confession booklet (which was apparently a huge seller back in the day, as Turner’s rebellion scared the slave-owning states absolutely shitless, and with good reason), but then again, I didn’t really have a bias either way going into it.

To be honest, actually, the historical figure that Nat Turner as presented to us in this text actually reminded me most a Canadian man, Métis leader and Father of Confederation Louis Riel. Riel, like Turner, also used his religious conviction and personal magnetism to essentially wage war, his of course being the Red River Rebellion of 1869. I thought Styron did a great job of getting us into the headspace of a religious zealot, which is something I don’t really have too much knowledge about. I really liked the scenes when Turner has visions of how to decimate the white population, an idea imparted to him by armored angels (not to mention days spent fasting in a forest, those helped too).

Styron also does a great job setting up the social-economic and religious conditions that drove Turner into a life of nigh-celibacy. His vaguely-privileged status on the farm of his first owner plus the emphasis on religion delivered by only really having a bible to read most of the time, it really makes sense why the furtive sexual encounters he has over the years are awkward and weird. He’s all twisted up inside, and this makes his only confirmed murder during the rebellion have an additional emotional power (I’m not going to tell you why though, go read the book to find out!)

Here’s what Time’s Richard Lacayo has to say about the book: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1951793_1951939_1952251,00.html. This is a pretty challenging book for a great number of reasons, but it’s definitely worth seeking out if the themes of slavery, religion and violence sound up your alley.

The List:

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. ~~The Blind Assassin~~

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

17. ~~The Bridge of San Luis Rey~~

18. Call It Sleep

19. ~~Catch-22~~ (read before 2011)

20. ~~The Catcher in the Rye~~ (read before 2011)

21. ~~A Clockwork Orange~~

22. ~~The Confessions of Nat Turner~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 5393 pp

Next up on the Resolution Project: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001)

Tagged 1830s, Christianity, Louis Riel, peculiar institution, Pulitzer Prize, Red River Rebellion, review, slavery, The American South, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Time 100, William Styron

Feb 15 2011

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the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Eleven: Beloved (1987)

The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers lie ahead, so be warned.

“It’s gonna hurt, now,” said Amy. “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” (p. 35)

Beloved cover

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

This book is a ghost story that takes place after the end of the American Civil War. Sethe is a former slave who escaped north while very pregnant. Some years after her ordeal, her house at I24 is continually haunted by a malevolent spirit whom she and her daughter Denver believe to be the ghost of her youngest daughter, known only by the name on her headstone, “Beloved”. Later, Paul D, another former slave from Sethe’s old workplace Sweet Home, shows up after many years spent on the run, and proceeds to force the spirit out of the house. Finally, after this is done, a nameless girl of Denver’s age shows up at Sethe’s door, claiming to be the reincarnation of the dead child. What happens next is a psychological drama of the highest order, as all of the house’s inhabitants must come to terms with their pasts, and with the girl whose coming seems to herald a dark future.

This was quite the book. I felt as I was reading it that I was developing a contentious relationship with it, with a little too much postmodern fuckaroundery near the middle for my tastes, but it really picked up by the end and I quite liked it. Beloved is definitely not a plot-driven book; rather, in typical postmodern style, it focuses more on the points of view and histories of all the characters in the plot, at that exact moment in time and beyond. Much of the book is taken up by stories and “rememory”, people telling each other of harrowing escapes and the trudgeries of a life spent born into servitude. The indignities suffered by the main characters really make you think about the psychological torment that would come from being a slave, and having your very person be measured in monetary value rather than any sort of human quality. Some of the passages seared my mind; Paul D’s remembering a prison camp (I think anyway) in Alfred, Georgia, is absolutely horrifying, as is the ultimate fate of Sixo, another slave.

The book also possessed another trait, one I’d consider postmodern, but this may be my own personal interpretation, a character who is referred to all the time but never really shows up for more than a moment. This is Sethe’s husband Halle, who is alluded to constantly by those who knew him (and imagined about by those who didn’t get the chance to), but is only briefly used as a narrative element on his own, and his eventual fate is never resolved.

Beloved, too, is a fascinating character. Is she a crazy person? An actual reincarnation? Some sort of demonic possession? You never really find out for sure, and by the end, I feel I was imagining her to be all of them at the same time. I also quite liked Morrison’s depiction of what I’m assuming is the underworld, or limbo, somewhere where dead things are anyway. It’s creepy as all get out. The schoolteacher is also used really well, never really elaborated on more than being a figure of absolute evil intentions, which is powerful as hell. Although I could have done with a little less of the wacky antics of Beloved as she begins to come into her power, I quite liked this book by the end.

Beloved Movie Poster

I knew that Oprah Winfrey had made a movie of the book in 1998, and I’m kind of curious to see it now. To be honest, I didn’t see Paul D as being old enough to be played by Danny Glover, but that wasn’t really my decision to make. Hopefully I’ll be able to track it down once my great work for this year is finished.

Here’s what Grossman had to say about the book: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1951793_1951936_1952111,00.html

“For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.” Paul D (pp. 45)

The List

4. An American Tragedy

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. At Swim-Two-Birds

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 2438 pp

Next up on the Resolution Project: Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1938)

Tagged 1860s, Beloved, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey, peculiar institution, Pulitzer Prize, review, slavery, The American South, Time 100, Toni Morrison

Jan 07 2011