October 2010 Archives

My selected book for this week was Lois Lowry's The Giver. Unlike our required book for the week, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (which I ranted about extensively in my other response), The Giver is a classic which I've read several times and enjoyed every single time. Not only is it fun to read, but I also think it raises some important questions for kids to ask about individuality and the importance of asking hard-hitting questions.

I talked with my roommates about this book quite a bit over the weekend. All of them had read it at some point or another in school (I read it for the first time as a freshman in high school), but not within the last five years. I was excited to revisit it for this class because a) I described it to my roommates as "Nineteen Eighty-Four for kids," and b) I've matured as a person since the first time I read it, and my attitudes on being an individual (as cliché as that sounds) are pretty firmly cemented on the side of "free expression for all." Jonas, the protagonist, lives in a world without memory or strife, where everyone is happy but identical to one another. All emotional depth has been eradicated from this seemingly idyllic world where society has taken the act of "blending in with the crowd" to an extreme with the Sameness doctrine, and Jonas becomes the apprentice to the Giver, the old man who stores everyone's memories from before Sameness. When Jonas experiences vivid pre-Sameness memories via the Giver's telepathy, he realizes that the world he lives in is devoid of everything beautiful: love, music, even color. He must then make the decision of staying and acting out his place in society as he is told, or breaking out and living life as it was meant to be lived. Ultimately, he chooses the latter, and that's why I love the book: it's a snapshot of a kid (Jonas is only twelve) standing up and making a conscious decision not to follow the herd, to make his own way.

If you went to a private Catholic school like I did, then I'm willing put money on the fact that, like me, you had a dress code or uniforms at your school. I grew up wearing nothing but navy blue, white, and red shirts, the only colors we were allowed to wear in elementary school. In middle school, it became green and white. In high school, we could wear any color, but it had to be a tucked-in collared shirt or sweatshirt, and khakis were a must. Guys' hair could not be longer than their shirt collar, and piercings and facial hair were out of the question. Girls were allowed only one piercing per ear, were not allowed to wear skirts above the knee, and could not dye their hair any unnatural colors (not even black). No one could wear clothing deemed "offensive" by the dean of students and principal, which could be whatever they wanted (I thought I was being rebellious by wearing AC/DC and Led Zeppelin T-shirts under my collared shirt to class every day). Basically, everyone had to look more or less the same. One girl in my class actually transferred schools in our sophomore year because she dyed her hair bright red and would not dye it back to her natural color when ordered by the principal; we had to sit through a long, school-wide assembly where the principal told us (and this is a direct quote) that "if you want to be an individual, go somewhere else." That really stuck with me, and having read The Giver the previous year for freshman English, I thought it was really ironic that a school so obsessed with conformity would require all its incoming freshmen to read a book that did nothing but rail against conformity.

Jonas was easy for me to relate to in high school. He had the special gift of being able to hear music and see color when no one else in his society could; my talent was being a natural on the drumset in a school that placed much more emphasis on sports than music. He began as a regular kid in his conformist society, while I conformed to the fashion and religious practices of my school. Finally, we both made a conscious decision to leave that conformity behind after experiencing something that opened our eyes to how hollow that life was: his impetus was experiencing memories through the Giver, while mine was listening to heavy metal for the first time.

That said, I believe that Lois Lowry fully intended to write this book for disaffected adolescents like me. While The Giver is not a feel-good story, she forces readers to ask themselves how they may be conforming to whatever society they live in. In other words, she uses Jonas to turn the mirror around and show it to the reader, which (in theory) should make them wonder: if that were me, how would I react? I think the message is especially powerful when the reader is under the age of 18. It's a well-known fact that kids are easily swayed by the herd mentality; it's hard to stand up and be an individual at a stage in development when not following the crowd is seen as weird or uncool. I know--it happened to me. But Lowry's choice of a 12-year-old boy for her protagonist is a telling reference to her intent in writing this book (at least in my opinion). The way I see it, Lowry chose to make Jonas a preteen and put him through the worst crisis a preteen can go through--being viewed as "different"--in order to show that, yes, it is possible to not only buck the trend everyone else follows, but also to make your own way. Jonas' choice to flee his home with baby Gabriel at the end of the book represents the final break between him and his old life; he has fully separated from the herd and, for better or worse, makes his own way. The ending is ambiguous--does he or does he not freeze to death? But there is a glimmer of hope in the music that floats from the houses Jonas sees through the snow--the promise that the grass is, indeed, greener on the other side of the fence.

Our required book for this week was Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. I have to be honest, reading this was like reading the screenplay of a Tim Burton movie. And since I can count the number of Tim Burton movies I enjoy on one hand and have fingers left over, you can safely assume that I didn't really like this book.

I've never read any of Neil Gaiman's other books (I've seen the Coraline movie but that's it), but if they're anything like this, he may be the biggest closet Nightmare Before Christmas fanboy ever. The protagonist is Nobody "Bod" Owens, a young lad whose entire family was wiped out in a brutal triple murder when he was just a toddler (which carried out by a mysterious figure identified only as "the man Jack"), and who ends up being adopted by the ghosts of a friendly (of course) Victorian couple in an abandoned graveyard. He grows up learning ghost tricks like fading into invisibility, befriending various graveyard denizens, and having various morbid (but kid-appropriate) adventures. Looks to me like someone watched Corpse Bride a few times too many.

It doesn't surprise me that The Graveyard Book came from the same man who wrote Coraline, which was adapted into a Tim Burton-style 3D movie directed by Henry Selick, the same man who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas. In my opinion, that's not a coincidence. There seems to be an enormous market out there these days for macabre literature and movies marketed towards children and adolescents. The Twilight craze is only the latest manifestation of this fad; fangirls were drooling over Nightmare and Edward Scissorhands way back in the early 1990s. Now that Twilight is at the apex of its popularity, with new adolescent-themed books with cheap knockoff plots appear in bookstores almost monthly, Gaiman is cashing in on his success with Coraline, and giving Twilight fans something to read while waiting for Stephanie Meyer to finish her latest thesaurus-abusing novel in the process.

I may be a bit strong with my opinion here, but authors like Neil Gaiman do very little to help adolescent literature. I don't think that because I think macabre children's books are bad for their moral development or something equally crazy; that's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that The Graveyard Book came out during the peak of the biggest surge of horror-related children's media yet in American pop culture history, and in my opinion, The Graveyard Book and its contemporaries (every teen vampire novel ever written, for example) are transparent cash-ins, attempting to get their slice of the pie before the kids get bored and move on to something else. It's not that Gaiman is a bad writer (whereas Stephanie Meyer couldn't write her way out of a wet paper bag, and even Stephen King said so); it's that, at least in my eyes, he is wasting his talent. Robert Cormier managed to be edgy and even downright morbid without being kitschy in his books. Why is it so hard for Gaiman?

I suppose it's time for me to stop ripping on the author and get down to an analysis. Gaiman makes extensive use of sequential, but not always related, vignettes to portray Bod's upbringing in the graveyard. Some have likened this to Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book; in fact, Gaiman himself admitted that he thought it would be fun to write The Jungle Book as if it took place in a cemetery. Here again, though, I have to interject my opinion that Gaiman could make much better use of his talent than "updating" a literary classic for the MySpace generation. I knew Hollywood was running out of fresh ideas for movies, but I never thought I'd see the day where novelists would do the same.

I found a lot of literary parallels to Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events books as well. Having read much of that series myself, and realizing that the plot devices get more and more repetitive with each successive book, I can say this for a fact. The protagonists of both books suffer traumatic events early in their lives, are taken in by various kooky and spooky characters, get into all kinds of macabre mischief, and all the while are pursued by a mysterious murderer with a network of agents who is bent on eliminating them. Gaiman's writing is again highly derivative here; although Lemony Snicket did not invent the "clever child outwits evil mastermind" by any stretch of the imagination, and although he too is guilty of a variety of miscues in his books (repeating plot devices, recycling characters/situations/lines, etc.), he did it before Gaiman.

I don't mean to offend anyone who liked this book with this response. I'm just not a fan of this kind of literature. I'm sure at least a few people in the class enjoyed it, but I'm very choosy when it comes to supernatural-themed adolescent media. I will admit that I liked the film version of Coraline, but that choosiness comes out especially in books. Authors like Gaiman are fantasy writers, and I'm a huge fantasy fan, but I just can't get behind something like this. I prefer "realistic fantasy" (it does exist, check out George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series), which is most often marketed towards adult readers. I wasn't even a fan of children's fantasy growing up; Disney movies and the like were not for me. Now, at 22, that choosiness has solidified into a deep suspicion of fantasy books that come out at the height of a fantasy craze, one that has lasted over a decade and is inevitably going to run out of steam. I wonder what Gaiman will jump to next.

Our required book for this week was Julie Anne Peters' Luna, a tale of a teenaged girl's struggles to come to terms with her older brother's transsexuality. This is a story about not just acceptance of others for their true selves, but also the revelations of character when faced with a monumental change. Needless to say, I really enjoyed reading this.

Regan is 15 years old, socially awkward, and has a big secret: her 17-year-old brother, Liam, is actually a transsexual named Luna. Though Liam is described as intelligent and handsome, and many of the girls at school have crushes on him, he is secretly tortured by having to hide Luna, his true identity, while in public. Regan lets him use her room to try on girls' clothes and has "girl talk" sessions with him, but she too is afraid of what the world might think if her brother's secret is revealed. Their parents are no help: their father, Jack, doesn't know Liam/Luna's secret, and pressures him to engage in manly activities (sports, dating, etc.); their mother, Patrice, is constantly drugged up on antidepressants and is obsessed with her job. She has known about Liam/Luna's secret for a long time, but chooses to ignore it because she can't cope with the reality of having a daughter in the body of a son. These factors, coupled with his already apparent desire to become his female alter ego full-time, pressure Liam/Luna to leave town in order to undergo the transition process without fear of harassment or prejudice, leaving Regan to contemplate her own life now that she is free of having to worry about her brother (sister?).

I had a textual analysis professor last year who self-identified as bisexual, and our class used to talk a lot about LGBT literature and how it's slowly but surely gaining more and more acceptance in the literary world. We never actually read a whole lot of LGBT literature though, and when it comes to that genre, I can count the number of books I've read on one hand and still have room left over (before Luna, the only book I'd read like this was Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home). Reading Luna was an eye-opening experience, to be sure: not only did it provide some insight into the mind of a transgender person, it also examines the effects of that person's transition on those around them, particularly their family. Regan is both supportive of and embarrassed by her brother's lifestyle, and the battle between those two emotions frames the whole narrative. While I have no gay, bisexual, or transgender family members, I likened this story a lot to my own experience of being a metalhead in an upper-middle-class suburban Catholic family. I went through a lot of inner turmoil as a teenager, trying to reconcile the positive message of the private Catholic high school I was attending with the extremely negative treatment I received (merely for being dorky) at the hands of my classmates, which in turn led to my own frustratingly fruitless search for God (which is still ongoing, if suspended). I contemplated an elaborate public suicide ritual at least once, and in my despair, I turned to heavy metal as a way to channel my anger, aggression, and disgust into something more productive.

Seven years later, I'm as happy as I've ever been. I say now that my music is an enormous part of who I am, but in all honesty, I can tell it still turns a lot of people off--not the least of whom are my parents. I remember my dad expressly forbidding me to listen to Ozzy Osbourne when I was in middle school; now I play in my own death metal band, which makes Ozzy seem pretty tame by comparison. It says a lot about my parents that they eventually became tolerant of my activities; they were at least willing to put up with my vitriolic opinions about life, people, religion, and sociopolitics, and now they even make the effort to listen to the noise I blast from my car speakers and headphones every day. But it wasn't easy getting them to that point, given their rock-ribbed Catholic backgrounds and the fact that metal has long been misunderstood as "the devil's music." I used to get into shouting matches with my dad at least once a week, and my mom was forever asking me why I was so angry. The simple answer to that question is that it's a lot more complex than that, but my parents didn't realize that, which only made me feel worse. Luna operates under the same principle: Liam/Luna and Regan's parents don't understand what their children are going through, and the ways of dealing with it (or not dealing with it) have adverse consequences on their kids' lives. I won't go so far as to say that I know what Liam/Luna is going through, but at least I can relate.

Some authors like to be subtle when it comes to themes of acceptance or tolerance, but Peters really hits you over the head with it. Regan and Liam/Luna's parents are either unaware or unsupportive of their son's mindset, and thus their children must rely on each other to cope with their situation. But even then, Regan is uncertain about her feelings towards her brother's transition. Despite the fact that Liam always seemed more like a sister to her, she still finds it hard to picture him as a woman. In one particular scene, for example, Liam shows up at the house in full drag in front of Regan's new boyfriend; Regan, being the teenaged girl she is, is understandably embarrassed. She maintains an overall supportive attitude towards the woman that lives in her brother's body, but it's obvious that Regan still feels at least a small level of discomfort when talking about it, even at the end of the book. I read one review online that said Luna does not have a happy ending; it's hopeful, but not happy, which I agree with wholeheartedly.

While being true to oneself is extremely important in my opinion, one also has to consider the effects one's actions might have on others. I applauded Liam/Luna's decision to let the Luna side out rather than keep it bottled up, but that decision showed the people around him/her for who they really were. Regan is revealed to be a supportive, if not always understanding, sister, while their parents are shown to be selfish and concerned only with how having a transgender child makes them look in the public eye. I'm sure the same things occurred to my parents when I told them I was a full-on metalhead and no longer considered myself a Christian: "How will this make us look? Our son could be a Satanist!" While Satanism is just as much of a joke as Christianity in my opinion, I can see where they're coming from. Monumental changes in home life lead to a wide variety of reactions, which, it must be said, are often based on misconceptions. Metalheads are perceived as devil-worshipping misanthropes; transgendered people are seen as confused sexual deviants. As Peters points out, though, nothing could be further from the truth. Misconceptions lead to prejudice, and prejudice only causes turmoil and angst for those against whom it is directed.

Our required book for this week was The People Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton, a collection of African-American folk tales. As a student of American history and an enthusiast of mythology, I was pretty interested in this book and went to the Minneapolis Public Library to check it out. Unfortunately, once I got home, I discovered that the librarians had given me the wrong book: the edition I checked out was the picture book version, which is only about 30 pages to the original version's 200. Therefore, with no other option and my class blog and professor waiting for the assignment, I'm forced to write my response based only on the picture book, rather than turn nothing in at all. So apologies to Beth and my blog partner, but it is what it is.

The People Could Fly (the picture book version of the story, anyway) immediately got my attention with all its biblical undertones. The black slaves, working in terrible conditions under heartless overseers, put me in mind of the Israelites in Egypt right away. Of course, slave spirituals from the time period often included Christian references, reflecting the religion of the slaves' new country, but The People Could Fly almost hit me over the head with it. Old Toby, the slave who speaks the ancient magic incantations over those his fellow captives who still remember the old magic so they can fly away from their plight, is an amalgam of all the saviors of the Bible: Moses, Aaron, even Jesus himself. When he himself flies away at the end of the story, there are other slaves left behind (get it? Left Behind?) at the plantation who can't fly away themselves. Toby has performed a sort of Rapture, and those left on earth (literally) must endure the trials and tribulations (continued brutality at the hands of their masters) until the End of Days (in this case, 1865, the year the 13th Amendment was passed), when all will be set free.

Even the illustrations in the book support the biblical references. The paintings depicting Toby chanting over Sarah, the young slave mother and the first person to fly away from the plantation, show him as a bearded old man, almost like the stereotypical portrayal of God as the same. Toby is obviously black and his clothes are those of a slave, but the connection is there. He lifts his fellow slaves to their feet, speaks the words, and away they go. Towards the end of the story, Toby suddenly grows to hundreds of times the size of a normal human being, reinforcing the God connection. All Christian references aside, though, I did notice one thing: there's an illustration on one page of all the slaves Toby has freed, joining hands and rising into the sky in one long train that disappears into the distance. This immediately put me in mind of the Wild Hunt, a ubiquitous myth in Norse, Germanic, and Celtic mythology about a long train of either dead souls or fairies riding across the sky (and the subject of one of my favorite paintings, Peter Nicholai Arbo's Åsgårdsreien). Maybe the legend of people who use magic to fly is a little more widespread than we thought, like the flood myth or anthropomorphic animal tricksters or creation stories (and that's a whole other category right there).

As I said before, this is only the picture book version, so unfortunately I can't say what the other tales in The People Could Fly are like. However, I'll try to dissect Hamilton's literary methods (such as they are, this book being just over 30 pages) as best I can. The entire story is told in black vernacular. There are a lot of sentence fragments and what hoity-toity grammar Nazis would call "rampant grammatical errors," but having taken Genevieve Escure's 3000-level English linguistics class here at the U, I've learned that grammar is relative; that is, there's no such thing as "bad grammar," just grammar that's appropriate for whoever you're speaking or writing to at a given time. Hamilton knows this, and her use of black vernacular and intentional grammatical errors lend an air of authenticity, as if some grizzled old Uncle Remus type of character was telling me the story while it unfolded in the illustrations. Is it bad that I heard Morgan Freeman's voice in my head while reading this?

The story ends not with the slaves flying away from the plantation to freedom, but with the storyteller's explanation of how the story came to him or her: "The slaves who could not fly told about the people who could fly to their children. When they were free. When they sat close before the fire in the free land, they told it. They did so love firelight and Free-dom, and tellin. They say that the children of the ones who could not fly told their children. And now, me, I have told it to you." This is, in my opinion, the most important aspect of the story. All folklore descends from an oral tradition. People in ancient cultures, and in cultures enslaved by other cultures, obviously did not have nearly as much access to education as we do, if any at all. Therefore, with no means to write down their stories, they told them over and over in order to preserve them. Every culture had designated storytellers who also served a spiritual function: Native American tribes had medicine men, African tribes had griots, Hindu kingdoms in India had gurus, and so on. The beauty of oral tradition, though, is that literally anyone could tell a story. The term "old wives' tale" was coined for a reason. The People Could Fly might have been narrated by Morgan Freeman in my head, but it just as well could've been any African-American person.