Endings: happy or not

As we approach the end of the school year, it seems only fitting to talk about endings. At the end Maus by art Spiegelman we encounter a part where we see photos of the relatives in Vladek’s family and receive a brief description of what happened to each of them. From what I noticed, the overwhelming majority did not have a happy ending. Even for Vladek, his life was far from a happy ever after. Generally when reading books, I don’t like having to deal with suspense, so I flip to the end and make sure that everything is fine and dandy. However, as we have seen often in history, there is not always a cheerful conclusion. Thus I want to explore an interesting pattern I found among the books we read versus the young adult books of today. It seems that all of the books we read this year have an unhappy closure. Billy Budd, Vere, Gatsby, Tea Cake, and Vladek all die. Additionally, Laura and Jim turn out not to be a couple, and Tom runs away yet remains unhappy. On the other hand, contemporary young adult books end happily: Voldemort dies, Catniss and Peta get together, and good triumphs over evil once again. So why is it that the “great literature” has a sad ending while the “kid’s literature” has a happy ending? My hypothesis is that it has to do with realism. As we have seen in history with issues like civil rights, things are never perfect, and life doesn’t always end on a positive note. Thus, the not entirely happy ending is more realistic. The authors we have looked at seem to be making statements about the world. If the setting is not relatable, then the point would not have been articulated to the full extent. Thus, meaningful texts cannot always end with a smile. However, this doesn’t mean that they can’t. Good things do happen in real life, and thus books can be meaningful representations of the world without being sad.

Holes in literature and why they are important

In American Literature, we have recently been talking about the idea of metaphor, and how no metaphor encompasses the whole picture. I agree that there are always holes in a metaphor. However, I would like to extend this beyond that one figure. To do this, I am going to take a look at some of the texts we have read this year: Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, and finally Maus to see where each respective figure falls short. In Billy Budd by Herman Melville, we discussed how the characters were more archetype than human. While this was mostly true, occasionally they would become more human. For instance, when Budd hit the sailor in the very beginning of the book. The second book we read this year, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, had east egg and west egg representative of the bourgeoisie and proletariat respectively. What pokes holes in this idea is the definition of the “proletariat” in west egg. While they did technically make their own fortunes by being actors and such, in today’s society it would be easy to classify actors as bourgeoisie due to the appearance that famous actors get paid more for their name than for their talent. In Maus by Art Spiegelman, holes are opened up in the metaphor of cats and mice when people are depicted wearing animal masks, and actual animals are brought into the story.

            So metaphors and other literary thing have holes, well so does Swiss cheese but we don’t seem to care all that much. Why are these holes in the literature so special? My answer to this is that these holes make the text worthwhile reading. If each text was comprised of a metaphor and no holes, all one would have to do is to say “the metaphor is _______” and thus put all of the meaning of the text in a single sentence, rendering the actual text useless. A text’s job is to explain the holes in the metaphor in such a way as to convey the story. In conclusion, texts contains holes everywhere and that is what makes them worthwhile.

Laura's Physical Crippledness in Repfrence to Movies and Scripts

In The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Laura, the daughter is said to have "one leg slightly shorter than the other and held in a brace” (Williams xvii). While the stage directions dictate that her leg defect is only suggested on stage, other things are also said to only be on stage through pantomime and acting. This includes Tom’s “imaginary fork” and the rest of the silverware (Williams 6). Clearly, Laura’s leg not being in a brace does not mean that she is not crippled in the physical sense. While I agree that she does have an emotional crippling as well it irks me that it her physical impairment is perceived as so small. Yes, she is not paralyzed, but she does have a physical impairment large enough to warrant her leg being in a brace. In class we watched a movie interpretation of the play. The fact that the actor playing Laura did not walk with much of a limp does not mean that the character in the text of the script does not have a significant limp. It is imperative that we remember that the movie we saw is just another interpretation, and not the script itself. In fact, many parts of the lines and stage directions were changed to fit the interpretation. Thus, I cannot bring myself to use the choices made for the movie as a means to draw substantial information about the characters. If we are looking at a text, then film adaptations must be seen as possibilities for interpretation and not as a part of the text itself. To enter the idea of caesura, interpreting the movie as the text would be like playing telephone with more people. Instead of having the original phrase whispered in your ear and going off of that, you would be trying to decode someone else’s interpretation of the original word. For instance, if you start with the phrase “It’s raining cats and dogs” and the next person hears “It’s raining peas and carrots”, then they will tell you “It’s raining peas and carrots”. Hence, you will not be interpreting the original phrase, but something completely different. Thus, if you were trying to analyze the phrase “It’s raining cats and dogs”, you would not want to use the other person’s “It’s raining peas and carrots” instead. While the two phrases may be related, an analysis of the second is not equal to an analysis of the first. Both can lead to valid conclusions about the time in history or the speaker’s feelings about rain, but they will not be the same. In conclusion, the movie version of The Glass Menagerie we saw in class, was interesting in terms of seeing an interpretation of the script, but not justification for Laura’s physical defect being miniscule.

 

Race and Economic Class in Literature

In American Literature, it seems that the past two books we have read have been from completely different sides of the spectrum. In The Great Gatsby the culture and population discussed was the white upper class. In Their Eyes Were Watching God the culture and population are the black lower class. This Racial segregation strikes me as interesting especially when looking at the economic and racial segregation of the time period. As we spoke about in class a while back. African Americans were stuck in a vicious cycle of poverty brought on by sharecropping and segregation. These prohibited advancement in society which kept generation after generation of African Americans down. Hence, it seems fairly reasonable that economically, Caucasian Americans and African Americans would be in different social classes. Now, that does not mean that this divide was okay, simply that it was present. While this divide is certainly present today, it was highly present in the time period we are studying as well. This explains why books written about or during the early 1900s would contain an economic and racial divide. Next, let’s take a look at why the books we have read almost exclusively stay in one such class. First, The Great Gatsby, this book looked at the picture image of “the American dream” and what that may entail, also exploring ideas of collapse. In order to portray this, successful Americans such as Jay and Tom needed to be portrayed. Due to the previously mentioned vicious cycle, in order to include an African American character, it would have to go on a tangent to explain how they got to the position of fulfilling the American Dream, this may cloud the meaning of the book, and hence the characters were mainly white, upper class people. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston aims to record African American Life and hence it makes sense that in this book the majority of characters would be African American. By looking at the vicious cycle behind the economic and racial divide as well as the individual motives for the books we have read to have such a divide, we can reason that the segregation in literature represents a combination of a preexisting condition as well as the individual motive of the book.