Week 8 Section

1. Week 8 Section General items (office hours and course evals) Theme: fire (as cleanser, for revenge, as threat/control) Continuities: Chopin (“Désirée’s Baby”), Wells (A Red Record), Hopkins (Contending Forces), McKay (“The Lynching”), Du Bois (“Jesus Christ in Texas”) New Texts: Faulkner (“Barn Burning”), Yamamoto (“A Fire in Fontana”), Le Guin (“The Word for World is Forest”) Theme: challenging and upholding paradigms/ideologies William Faulkner Carlos Bulosan Hisaye Yamamoto Philip K. Dick Ursula Le Guin

2. General Items • Do remember that I’m happy to talk about paper 1 and the midterm. • Paper 2 prompts should be distributed tomorrow. • Between now and next section, I’m free for open office hours: • Thursday after section from 3:30 to 6:30 PM • Monday from noon to 6:30 PM • Tuesday from 10:00 AM to 1:30 PM • Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM • And by appointment (I also reside at Starbucks on Regents during weekends) • Otherwise, at next week’s section I’ll post a bunch of specific office hours for the remainder of week 9 and all of week 10. My default location is Lit. 238, but I can meet elsewhere if you don’t like meeting there. • Course evaluation links should be e-mailed to you soon • The department will review any evals that are submitted for me, and I’ll use them on the job market so employers can review my teaching record. • I believe you have a separate eval for the professor versus for me and that they’re formatted differently/backwards from each other, so please take note of this. • If you make critical comments, please make them constructive. “Lisa is terrible” is not constructive, though I do respect individual opinions.

3. Fire: Continuities • Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby” • “Some weeks later there was a curious scene enacted at L’Abri. In the centre of the smoothly swept backyard was a great bonfire. Armand Aubigny sat in the wide hallway that commanded a view of the spectacle; and it was he who dealt out to a half dozen negroes the material which kept this fire ablaze”—a cradle, clothes, bedding, and letters (442-43). • Wells’sA Red Record • Remember how many bodies were not only lynched but also set on fire and made into spectacles. • Hopkins’s Contending Forces • “the committee on public safety, instigated by Anson Pollock to put down an imaginary insurrection . . . and to legalize the looting of the house, took possession of the mansion. Soon the crowd had stripped it of its furniture and all the articles of value. The house itself was fired, and Grace Montfort again became conscious of her misery in time to see the dead body of her husband flung amid the burning rafters of his dwelling” (499). • McKay’s “The Lynching” • “His spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven,” a star “[h]ung pitifully o’er the swinging char” (lines 1 and 8) • Du Bois’s “Jesus Christ in Texas” • “Behind the swaying body, and down where the little, half-ruined cabin lay, a single flame flashed up amid the far-off shout and cry of the mob. A fierce joy sobbed up through the terror in her soul and then sank abashed as she watched the flame rise. Suddenly whirling into one great crimson column, it shot to the top of the sky and threw great arms athwart the gloom until above the world and behind the roped and swaying form below hung quivering and burning, a great crimson cross” (103). *NOTE: We could, of course, go back further. Recall the Civil War re: General Sherman’s “scorched-earth policy” across the South, as Whitman describes it (Drum-Taps).

4. Fire: New Texts Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” • How does the narrator describe Sarty’sfather? What do you make of this text?

5. Fire: New Texts—Faulkner • Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” • The warning: AbnerSnopes sends a black man to warn his enemy (Mr. Harris at the beginning), “He say to tell you wood and hay kin burn” (1048). More than a warning against future conflict, though, Abner has apparently already decided to burn the barn, because he burns it that night. • Hesitation: “Likely his father had already arranged to make a crop on another farm before he… Again he had to stop himself. He (the father) always did” (1050). • “why should not a man who had not only seen the waste and extravagance of war, but who had in his blood an inherent voracious prodigality with material not his own, have burned everything in sight? Then he might have gone a step farther and thought that that was the reason: that niggard blaze was the living fruit of nights passed during those four years in the woods hiding from all men, blue or gray, with his strings of horses (captured horses, he called them). And older still, he might have divined the true reason: that the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father’s being, as the element of steel or of powder spoke to other men, as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing, and hence to be regarded with respect and used with discretion” (1051).

6. Fire: New Texts—Faulkner • Caught setting Major de Spain’s barn on fire: • “Behind him the white man was shouting, ‘My horse! Fetch my horse!’ . . . [T]he galloping mare was almost upon him before he heard her . . . knowing it was too late yet still running even after he heard the shot and, an instant later, two shots, pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying ‘Pap! Pap!’, running again before he knew he had begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run, looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, ‘Father! Father!’” (1059). • Compare to Hopkins: • “The hoofbeats drew nearer and paused on the graveled walk. . . . She heard a number of voices speaking together in an excited jumble, then a shot, followed by a heavy fall. Little Jesse ran from his station by his mother’s side through one of the long windows opening upon the piazza. She heard his scream of ‘papa, papa!’ and then again the jumble of excited voices. . . . Through it all she realized . . . that the lifeless object lying there so still was the body of her husband” (498).

7. Fire: New Texts—Hisaye Yamamoto • “A Fire in Fontana” • “He said his name was Short. Urgently, he told us a disturbing story. He said he and his wife and two children had recently purchased a house in Fontana. They had not been accorded a very warm welcome by the community. In fact, he said, there had been several threats to get-out-or-else, and his family was living in fear. He wanted his situation publicized so that some sentiment could be mustered in support of his right to live in Fontana” (153). • Of course there’s a problem with trying to muster sentiment from the supposedly objective press (as the professor discussed). • On Miss Moten’s reaction: “But now her eyes were blazing with fury” (153). • “Then, later the same week, there was a fire in Fontana. Dead in the blaze, which appeared to have started with gasoline poured all around the house and outbuildings, were the young man who had told us his story, his comely wife, and their two lovely children, a boy and a girl (one of the other newspapers had obtained a recent portrait of the family, probably from relatives in the city).” • Now another newspaper includes this story and a photo—sentimentalizing and personalizing (though a bit late).

8. Fire: New Texts—Hisaye Yamamoto • “A Fire in Fontana” Cont. • “There was an investigation, of course. The official conclusion was that probably the man had set the gasoline fire himself, and the case was closed.” • Literal blame, but also figurative: the rhetoric of bringing something onto yourself. • “Among those who doubted the police theory was a White priest who was so skeptical that he wrote a play about the fire in Fontana. Trial by Fire, he called it. Not long after it was presented on stage, the priest was suddenly transferred to a parish somewhere in the boondocks of Arizona.” / “And that was the last time I heard mention of the conflagration” (153-54). • We might ask who’s on trial when we think of the title of the play (can be read different ways—the public may be on trial for what they’ve done, the church may be on trial for its complicity, and the townspeople in Fontana have put the family on trial for their race by literally firing their house). Importantly, though, there’s not a real trial in a court of law. One priest perhaps puts whites and his congregation on trial and is then sent away. Congregation ignores conflagration. • It’s thinking about these events that causes her to say early in her story: “Yet I know that this event transpired inside me; sometimes I see it as my inward self being burnt black in a certain fire” (150).

9. Fire: New Texts—Hisaye Yamamoto • The Watts riots of 1965—African American rioters burned a lot of white-owned businesses, in particular • “Appalled, inwardly cowering, I watched the burning and looting on the screen and heard the reports of the dead and wounded. But beneath all my distress, I felt something else, a tiny tickle of warmth which I finally recognized as an undercurrent of exultation. To me, the tumult of the city was the long-awaited, gratifying next chapter of an old movie that had flickered about in the back of my mind for years. In the film, shot in the dark of about three o’clock in the morning, there was this modest house out in the country. Suddenly the house was in flame and there were the sound effects of the fire roaring and leaping skyward. Then there could be heard the voices of a man and woman screaming, and the voices of two small children as well” (157). • NOTE: This is the last paragraph of the story. Watching the riots on TV conjures up memories of the Fontana fire as though they’re on a screen, too, as part of a graphic and tragic movie. There’s kind of a surreal quality to this. Perhaps there’s closure, but the final image is still awful and haunting.

10. Fire: New Texts—Ursula Le Guin • As you read Le Guin, note the references to fire and how it seems to be the main weapon for destroying the land and even the bodies of the Athsheans (creechies) and the earthling colonists (people from Terra). Fire for the character Davidson is about destruction, control, and race/species-based hatred. • Think about the Athshean/creechie god Selver and the imagery of the phoenix (rising or not rising from the ashes) that surrounds him. He is “of the Ash” people, in reference to the Ash tree (45).

11. Paradigms and Ideologies: Faulkner Sartoris/Sarty knows what’s expected of him and tries to perform those expectations: • Colonel SartorisSnopes(son): “He aims for me to lie, he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair. And I will have to do hit” (1049). • Sartoris: “Enemy! Enemy!he thought” (1049). • To his father after he gets in trouble for the rug: “Suddenly the boy went toward him, fast, stopping as suddenly. ‘You done the best you could!’ he cried. ‘If he wanted hit done different why didn’t he wait and tell you how? He won’t git no twenty bushels! He won’t git none! We’ll gether hit and hide hit! I kin watch…” (1055). • To Major de Spain when his father sues him over the bushels: “he sent one glare of fierce, exultant, partisan defiance at the man in the collar and cravat now . . . . ‘He ain’t done it! He ain’t burnt . . .’” Nothing has been burnt yet, so the Justice of the Peace asks, “Do I understand this rug was burned too?” (1056). Sartoris has gotten carried away with his usual performance.

12. Paradigms and Ideologies: Faulkner Sartoris keeps hoping: • On the house of their new employers: “Hit’s big as a courthouse . . . They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he no more to them than a buzzing wasp: capable of stinging for a little moment but that’s all; the spell of this peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive . . .” (1052). • “Maybe this is the end of it. Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to have to pay for just a rug will be a cheap price for him to stop forever and always from being what he used to be . . . Maybe he even won’t collect the twenty bushels. Maybe it will all add up and balance and vanish—corn, rug, fire; the terror and grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses—gone, done with for ever and ever” (1056). Father is vague, and Sartoris echoes this: • Abner (father): “‘I don’t figure to stay in a country among people who…’ he said something unprintable and vile, addressed to no one” (1049). • Sartoris: “Maybe he’s done satisfied for now, now that he has…stopping himself, not to say it aloud even to himself” (1050).

13. Paradigms and Ideologies: Faulkner The moment when the father is clearest and also uses violence to uphold his demands: • Abner (father): “‘You were fixing to tell them. You would have told him.’ He didn’t answer. His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat . . . his voice still without heat or anger. ‘You’re getting to be a man. You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you.’” The narrator remarks that Abner often hits his son, “but never before had he paused afterward to explain why” (1051). • Abner seems to resent having to work for anyone, expending his sweat along with black men (whom he also seems to resent despite their connections re: labor and class) for people like Major de Spain (1053). Sartoriseventually contemplates and then enacts defiance against his father, but then he defends him again: • “I could keep on . . . I could run on and on and never look back, never need to see his face again” (1058). • Warns de Spain that his barn is being set on fire (1059). • “Father. My father, he thought. ‘He was brave!’ he cried suddenly . . . ‘He was! He was in the war!’” (1059). The narrator indicates he doesn’t know his father was just a horse thief during the Civil War (so this doesn’t seem to just be denial).

14. Paradigms and Ideologies: Faulkner What’s the treatment of women in Faulkner’s text?

15. Paradigms and Ideologies: Faulkner • Women in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” • The twin sisters are very flat and unflatteringly depicted, often collapsed into one: • “His two hulking sisters” (1050). • “the first said,” “the second shouted” (1053). • “The two sisters stooped, broad, lethargic” (1053). • Mother offers to help clean the rug, but father says he’ll do it and orders mother to make dinner—but he really stands over the daughters while they do it: “the two sisters stooping over it with that profound and lethargic reluctance, while the father stood over them in turn, implacable and grim, driving them though never raising his voice again” (1054). • “But that was too late too, the sister (the sisters were twins, born at the same time, yet either of them now gave the impression of being, encompassing as much living meat and volume and weight as any other two of the family) not yet having begun to rise from the chair, her head, face, alone merely turned, presenting to him in the flying instant an astonishing expanse of young female features untroubled by any surprise even, wearing only an expression of bovine interest” (1059). • Mother is often frantic but seemingly powerless against her husband • Ordered not to help Sartoris when he’s bleeding after being attacked while leaving the first trial (1050) • Agreeing to restrain Sartoris so he can’t warn de Spain: “‘I’ll hold him,’ his mother whispered.” When her sister says to let him go, she responds: “‘Don’t you see I can’t!’ his mother cried” (1058). • Aunt would defy Abner by having Sartoris freed from his mother’s grasp to warn Major de Spain, though when he breaks free, she tries to grab him like everyone else (1058).

16. Paradigms and Ideologies: Hisaye Yamamoto • Recap of “Yoneko’s Earthquake” • What are some tensions in this text regarding: • Race • Gender • Religion • Generational differences • Recap of “A Fire in Fontana” • What are some tensions in this text regarding: • Race • Memory and storytelling

17. Paradigms and Ideologies: Carlos Bulosan • What is the central ideology that Bulosan is examining in “Be American”?

18. Paradigms and Ideologies: Philip K. Dick • “Service Call” • What is a swibble? What’s its significance? • “The Mold of Yancy” • Who is Yancy? What’s his significance? • “The Minority Report” • What are the characters/factions fighting about in this text?

19. Paradigms and Ideologies: Ursula Le Guin • What are some beliefs/ideologies that the characters in “The Word for World is Forest” are fighting about that we should note?

20. Looking Ahead • As of right now, for the last class the professor wants you to watch Smoke Signals, a 1998 film based on a Sherman Alexie story. It should be on film reserve at the library, but it’s also on Netflix if you want to add it to your queue. As of June 1st—the day before that last lecture—it’s supposed to be available through Netflix for instant access on your computer or videogame console, too.