September 27, 2016: Legends of the Fall: American Pastoral

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, in comments!]

On a novel with over-the-top moments that practically scream “loss of innocence,” and the quieter scene that much more potently captures it.

To follow up the main idea from yesterday’s post, I experienced a very different kind of teenage literary loss of innocence when I decided to read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) for pleasure in early high school (what can I say, I was a nerd and the son of an English professor to boot). I can still quite distinctly remember arriving at Chapter 2, “Whacking Off,” and encountering for the first time just exactly how far Roth is willing to go—how obscene, how graphic, how flagrantly over-the-top. For reasons not quite known to me, in my second semester at Fitchburg State I chose to put Portnoy on the syllabus of a junior-level seminar on “Major American Authors of the 20^th Century,” and got to see 25 undergrads—24 women, by chance—having their own such encounters with Roth, the novel, and that chapter in particular. Let’s just say it wasn’t just me.

Roth’s late masterpiece American Pastoral (1997) is a far more realistic and restrained work than Portnoy, but nonetheless Roth includes a couple of distinctly Roth-ian over-the-top scenes, both symbolizing quite overtly his novel’s overall themes of the loss of innocence that accompanied the late 60s and early 70s in American culture and society. In the first, the novel’s now middle-aged protagonist, Swede Levov, meets with a seemingly innocent young women to try to learn the whereabouts of his missing daughter Merry; the woman turns out instead to be a brazen and cynical 60s radical, and she meets the Swede naked, graphically exposing and probing herself in front of him (while daring him to, in essence, rape her). In the second, the tour-de-force set piece with which Roth concludes the novel, a family dinner full of shocking revelations and betrayals is set against the backdrop of the televised Watergate hearings, and culminates with a crazy drunken woman stabbing an elderly man in the head with her fork.

These scenes are as surprising and shocking as intended, and I suppose in that way they make Roth’s point. But if he intends the theme of the loss of innocence to be tragic as well as disturbing and comic (which those two scenes are, respectively), then I would point a far quieter and to my mind far more potent scene. In it, the Swede finally finds Merry and sees her again, for the only time between her teenage disappearance (after she bombs a local post office in political protest and kills an innocent bystander) and his own later death. He asks a few questions, but mostly what he does is listen (to her stories of all the horrors she has experienced in the years since the bombing) and observe (her literally fading life as a converted Jainist, one for whom any contact with the world is destructive and so self-deprivation and -starvation comprises the only meaningful future). As a parent, I can imagine nothing more shattering hearing and seeing such things from one of my children—and in the Swede’s quiet horror and sadness, Roth captures a far more powerful and chilling loss of innocence.

Next fall tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 26, 2016: Legends of the Fall: Young Adult Lit

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American images of the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn. Add your thoughts on falls, seasonal or symbolic, in comments!]

On two iconic YA novels that fractured my innocence right alongside that of their characters.

The early teenage years—those of late middle school into the beginning of high school—seem to resonate particularly well with the idea of a loss of innocence. I’m sure that kids who grow up in far more difficult situations than I did, or who have to deal with loss at a young age, or otherwise are confronted with the world’s darker realities experience the shift from innocence to experience, naivete to maturity, earlier. But even those of us who make it through childhood unscathed are going to come up against the harsher sides to life at some point, and ages 12-15 seems like a pretty common such milestone. I say that partly as a kid who was badly hazed by his cross country teammates during his freshman year of high school—but also partly the one who read John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (1959) and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) and Beyond the Chocolate War (1985) in 8^th grade.

I’d be lying if I said I remember much at all of the three books—that’s about 25 years, and a whole lot of books, under the bridge. But what I do remember are a couple of specific and very dark moments, of literal and symbolic falls: the seemingly accidental fall that Knowles’ protagonist Gene purposefully causes his friend Finny to take, a fall that eventually leads to Finny’s death (among other destructive effects); and a profoundly disturbing suicide scene in Cormier’s sequel, one that locates readers in the perspective of a young student leaping to his death after being ostracized and abused for his homosexuality by his peers and even a teacher. Obviously those weren’t the first literary deaths I had encountered—in 6^th grade English I read Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None (1939), for crying out loud!—but they might have been the first in which kids my own age were killed, at least in such purposeful and brutal ways (ie, not the accidental drowning in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia [1977], traumatic as that was for this young reader).

Perhaps it was that sense of proximity and (in a way) threat to myself that led these particular moments, and the novels in which they occur, to hit me as hard as they did. Perhaps it was that all three books are deeply concerned with what it means to be a teenage boy, in some of the better but (I would argue) mostly some of the worst senses. And perhaps it’s a tribute to their interesting and almost entirely implicit engagement with the wars during which they’re set—Knowles does have his characters engage with World War II toward the end of his novel; I don’t believe Cormier mentions Vietnam at all, certainly not at length, but his titular war certainly gestures in that direction. War, after all, has long been one of the most overt and catastrophic ways in which young men—and their societies—lose their innocence; in my reading of these young adult novels and their effects on me, I was led to feel such effects far more intimately than might otherwise have been the case.

Next fall tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?

September 24-25, 2016: Rhode Island Colleagues

[Other than a weeklong series inspired by a visit to Newport’s historic mansion The Breakers, I hadn’t had the chance to write much in this space about my neighbor to the south. That all changed this week, leading up to this special post on some of my many wonderful RI colleagues!]

Highlighting five of the many wonderful Rhode Island scholars I’m proud to call AmericanStudying colleagues.

1)      Nancy Caronia: As that hyperlinked academia.edu page reflects, Nancy has recently started a job in the West Virginia University English Department (and they’re very lucky to have her!). But I met her while she was a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island, an institution to which she gave a great deal during her time there, including her vital work in developing the Diversity Week at which I was honored to give a book talk a few years back. She’s also one of our best scholars of Italian American literature, as this Guest Post illustrates. I’m sure she’ll carry a lot of Rhode Island with her as she brings all those talents and much more to WVU!

2)      Laura Mattoon D’Amore: An Assistant Professor of American Studies at Roger Williams University (located in Bristol, RI), Laura has contributed immensely to the New England American Studies Association, including helping direct (along with colleague #5 below) our 2014 Conference at RWU. She’s also one of our best scholars of motherhood, gender, and family (among other topics) in 20^th and 21^st century literature and popular culture (especially the crucial contemporary genre of superhero culture). Can’t wait to see where she takes those profoundly AmericanStudies interests next!

3)      Beazley Kanost: Now an adjunct professor of English at Roger Williams and Film/Media at URI, Beazley joined the New England ASA while still a grad student at URI, when she proposed a paper for the 2011 conference at Plimoth Plantation that I directed. That paper was part of her work toward her phenomenally titled and in-all-ways impressive dissertation, Off the Hip: a Thermodynamics of the Cool. Her work on James Baldwin (part of this great collection of essays) taught me a lot about that vital 20^th century figure. And she did great work for years in the thankless but crucial role of NEASA Treasurer.

4)      Jon Marcoux: I met Jon, an archaeologist in the Cultural and Historic Preservation Department at Newport’s Salve Regina University (one of the most spectacularly located universities I’ve ever visited), when he joined the NEASA Council and helped plan our third annual Colloquium. Along with NEASA colleagues like Akeia Benard, he helped bring archaeology, cultural anthropology, and their engagements with Native American Studies to NEASA, as he’s a leading scholarly voice in all those disciplines. His book Pox, Empire, Shackles, and Hides: The Townsend Site, 1670-1715 (2010) contributed immeasurably to all of them, and fundamentally changed my understanding of the Cherokee and of US-Native American relations.

5)      Jeffrey Meriwether: A Roger Williams History Professor, Jeffrey served as the 2014 NEASA President and directed that 2014 conference at RWU (along with his colleague Laura). He also has one of the most interesting hobbies/passions I’ve ever encountered in an AmericanStudier: he reenacts Revolutionary War battles from the English side as part of the famous Boston group His Majesty’s Tenth Regiment of Foot, including taking part in the annual reenactment of the 1775 Lexington conflict on Patriot’s Day. He’s also such a dedicated military historian that, having started but not completed a Navy ROTC program in college, he enlisted in the Navy Reserve in order to better understand his discipline. One more detail that illustrates how great a group of Rhode Island colleagues I’ve got!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Colleagues (anywhere) whose work and voices you’d highlight?