Today’s topic: works of art which raise hard questions, only to offer disappointingly easy answers. It is not entirely about Ernest Gaines, though it may seem that way at first.
So, in one of my classes this week, we’ve been discussing Ernest Gaines’s 1983 novel A Gathering of Old Men. Maybe you’ve read it, or seen the tv-movie adaptation.
I’ve always been ambivalent about Gaines’s work. Some of it I love, especially Of Love and Dust and the title story in the short fiction collection Bloodline, and I remember Miss Jane Pittman fondly. But some aspects of his other work—indeed, some of his more celebrated and frequently read work—leave me frustrated. So it is with Gathering. This was my third time through, having read it once for pleasure and once because when we lived in Knoxville, it was chosen as the “One Book, One Community” text for the whole town to read. I imagine it was chosen because someone on the committee said “get something Southern!” So, you know, this novel about racial tensions in post-plantation sugar country was the perfect thing to read in the foothills of East Tennessee. Anyway, this time, some of the problems I have with it became clearer.
A re-cap (or first-cap, if you haven’t read it; if you’re reading this in the evening, I suppose it could be a night-cap): set on a Louisiana plantation in the 1970s, the novel tells the story of a group of elderly African-American men who, after a lifetime of oppression and abuse at the hands of the Cajuns whose tractors now dominate the land that they and their families once farmed, band together to protect one of their own. It seems that one of the men, Mathu, the only one of them ever known to stand up to a white man, has killed Beau Boutan, a particularly arrogant and violent fellow known for beating the black men who work for him. The titular old men are convinced that, as tradition dictates, Beau’s family of marauding Cajuns will (and look, there’s a whole book to be written on Gaines’s depiction of Cajuns, so let’s just label it “problematic” and set it aside for now, shall we?) ride in, guns blazing, to lynch Mathu and kill anyone else in their path. So, sick of having to tolerate such atrocity their whole lives, they decide to make a last stand.
Except: here’s where it gets tricky. Beau’s brother is a football star at LSU, one half of a black-and-white backfield nicknamed “Salt and Pepper” by the press. He’s concerned that, if his family name appears in the media connected with a lynching, he’ll lose any chance of being selected All-American. (And one of the things I do like about this book is the way that “tolerance” is presented as a result of self-interest, not of community-mindedness or human compassion; I mean, I don’t really like that idea, but it’s interesting, at least). So, his father decides that the times, they are a-changin’, and they won’t storm the plantation after all.
So, suddenly, there’s this interesting dilemma. The sheriff tells the black men that they waited too late to make their stand, that the violence they’ve expected to sweep in as naturally and indifferently as the wind won’t be occurring after all. And it poses what seems to me to be a smart, complicated, uncomfortable question: with the old, familiar framework of violence and oppression suddenly crumbling, now can they come up with some new version of…dignity? masculinity? humanity? identity?...that’s not based in revenge, in violence (however justified)? Will they be able to think themselves into some new kind of identity, some new relation with the world and among themselves, now that the traditional system that oppressed and defined them has begun to come apart?
Well, they might be, but we’ll never know, because Gaines either isn’t or is unwilling to. Because, you know, there are some younger rednecks who don’t cotton to their patriarch’s newfound defeatist pacifism, and so they come in, guns a-blazing in the familiar fashion, and the old black men get their firefight after all, get to drown out all those nagging and uncomfortable questions in the sound of shotguns and screaming. Oh, and there are casualties—conveniently, the black man who killed Beau, and the young Cajun who led the raiding party. Well, that’s all very neat, isn’t it? No wonder this got made into a movie!
And look, just to be clear here, my quibble isn’t over whether their standing up for themselves is justified or not—clearly it is—or whether they’re better off for it, or whether violent racism still exists, which it clearly does. My quibble is with a novel that seems unwilling to grapple with the very complications and contradictions, the philosophical problems, that make it interesting in the first place.
Regulator and I have talked this over many times through the years in other contexts, this idea of books or movies or what have you that make you think hard, but then ask you to stop. And I would be interested to hear your own nominations for egregious offenders in this genre, from any medium—comics, movies, tv, novels, whatever. And I’m not talking about lazy, plot-related cop-outs, like “Oh, that was the killer? Well does that even make sense? They didn’t even introduce that guy until the third act!” (And yes, I know that the title of this post, which alludes to DC Comics’ Armageddon 2001, references just that sort of plotty cop-out, but look, just roll with me here). Rather, I’m talking about works that are unwilling to face up to their own complexity, that want to use a shoot-em-up or a romance to resolve (or deflect attention from) sticky ethical issues.
Your nominations?
Sadly, a book I really enjoyed up to the very end fell into this sort of trap. Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto is a lovely mediation on what it means to care about somebody, and how we do that when we are removed from the forms and stereotypes of our modern world. Can one love across the barriers of language, or culture, violence, or marriage?
It doesn’t end up mattering too much, because, you know, bullets. Those sort of endings make me think a-ha! The editor said ‘x’ had to happen.
“Body of a Girl” which was a murder mystery set in Memphis. Reporter spends the whole things learning about this girl and her relationships with her family and drug dealers and then learns things through this about her own boyfriend and herself and on and on and then…last chapter…oh, it was just some random guy who happened to be passing through whom she had never met. Complete deflation. I know it was trying to make a point about real world violence and such, but I’m reading a novel…I don’t want that. I want a killer who has a motive beyond “Oh look, a girl.” Bleh. I was very pissed at that book for days and days.
I’m not sure if I understand exactly what you mean, but your post reminded me of “Pantaloon in Black” from Go Down, Moses. The sheriff recounts events in which a beefy black dude goes on a drinking binge after his wife dies, slits the throat of a crooked gambler, then rips the door off of his prison cell and fights off a bunch of guys before they finally subdue him and hang him for the bell-rope of the black schoolhouse. Then the story ends really abruptly, with the sheriff’s wife saying, “I’m going to clear this table then I’m going to the picture show.”
Aw, but that’s the part I love about that story! The sheriff has been affected profoundly by the lengths to which the guy’s anger and grief have driven him, because it flies so totally in the face of everything he’s been taught to believe about black people, and he’s working it over in his head, trying only semi-articulately to convey his newly muddled understanding to his wife, and she’s just totally not having any of it—doesn’t care, doesn’t want to care, snug and comfortable in her prejudices and unwilling to take the plunge into confusion and possibility with her husband.
sure, i agree. i think it’s what makes the story work. if not for those last lines, i think a lot of readers would be willing to close the book without thinking about any of those themes the book raises—grief, masculinity, race, whatever—but when confronted with the wife’s callousness we’re hesitant to just toss the book aside on turn on the tube because we don’t want to be guilty of the same indifference.
you wrote about books that “make you think hard, but then ask you to stop.” i think the difference between Gaines and Faulkner (or the difference between these two examples, at least) is that Faulkner does it more intentionally and shows the consequences of not bothering to think through the issues. he asks you stop thinking, and as a result you don’t want to. it’s a clever trick, i think.
Oh yeah! Mistunderstood you at first. But you’re darn right. It seems to be that in A Gathering, at least, Gaines goes out of his way to give you every opportunity to head out to the movies with a clear mind and unencumbered conscience.
Alas, I have a worthy nomination from a novelist whose work I otherwise really like. Kazuo Ishiguro’s work has always explored the space between psychology and reality, particularly the ways in which psychological worlds are at odds with real worlds (and vice versa). So, in the beautifully subtle novel Remains of the Day (for those of you who have only seen the movie, you’re missing quite a lot of humor), we have a narrator who must face the troubling, even terrifying, realization that his carefully constructed psychological world can no longer be made to co-exist with a real world changing dramatically before his eyes.
In the disturbingly un-subtle The Unconsoled, the narrator’s troubled psychological world completely supplants the real world; we haven’t even the consolation of a recognizable reality against which to measure the psychological world of the narrator. Then comes When We Were Orphans, a novel that starts off with the subtlety of Remains (and really had me hooked—I’m always a sucker for any kind of detective novel, even a parody), and we recognize a character whose psychological world stands in great peril of smashing up against a contradictory reality.
But by the time this confrontation should roll around, Ishiguro switches to the mode of Unconsoled, where the real world doesn’t exist in ANY meaningful way. And so we’re left with a novel that fails to confront the problems that it raises by a legerdemain nearly as deftless as the old “and then I woke up to find it had all been a dream” trick. To make matters worse, the novel ends with a trite section where the narrator learns to appreciate his adopted daughter in ways he has failed to do in the past, nearly encouraging us to conclude that “Love Conquers All”, that paragon of the easy-out.