Young Adult Fiction and Where We're At These Days

 I have to admit I don't read Young Adult Fiction, but I love reading about it because perhaps more than any other type of literature, it points to where things are headed.  In theory, it is targeted at readers 12 to 18 years old but the experts tell us a great many readers are considerably older.  If true, that in and of itself says something about the nature of U.S. society at present and may help to explain certain electoral trends.

But anyway, who are the authors and what are they writing about?  A recent edition of the New York Times Sunday Book Review contained a summary of four books targeted at Young Adults by authors who hadn't written one previously.  They are illuminating.

The first, "Every Body Looking" is by first-generation Nigerian-American writer and dancer Candice Iloh and it is about a young Nigerian-American woman who isn't happy about her body, in part it seems because she was sexually abused as a child. Moving forward, thanks to a question posed by a dance teacher, we are told she explores such things as artistry, divinity and sexuality. That reminds me a bit of Dante's "Commedia" and especially because Ms Lloh's book contains poetry.

In the words of NYT reviewer Jennifer Hubert Swan, "this blazing coming-of-age comet will have everyone looking up."  How's that for a blurb?

The second book, "Cemetery Boys," is by Alden Thomas -- self-described as a queer, trans Latinx who prefers the pronoun "they."

"Cemetery Boys" is described as a "supernatural romance" set amid East Los Angeles Latinx culture and the chief protagonist is a 16-year-old gay-identifying trans boy. Latin American witchcraft (here identified as the brujx community, brujx being a word that apparently includes both the male "brujo" and the female "bruja" practitioners) is central to the story and, not surprisingly, there is a lethal secret "festering" within.

According to Ms Swann, the story's queer paranormal romance is depicted within a lavishly detailed blend of Latin American cultures and, among other things, deals with cultural appropriation -- definitely a timely topic in the age of cancel culture -- the stale, old culture, that is. 

"Windows into the intersecting Latinx and L.G.B.T.Q. experience are plentiful here and the opportunities for discovery and discussion are endless," says Ms Swan. 

"K-Pop Confidential," the third Young Adult title under consideration, was written by Stephan Lee, a Korean-American, and the chief protagonist is a Korean-American teenager named Candace Park who lives in -- oh, no -- New Jersey.  We'll she's not long for the home of Bridgegate when, after taking a tryout on a whim, she ends up in Seoul and the now dazzling world of K-Pop where the glitter is apparently at least somewhat offset by stalker fans and social media backlash. 

Ms Swan summarizes this one as "a frothy bubble tea of a book."  That's a drink that apparently originated in Taiwan as opposed to South Korea (is there such a thing as Tai-Pop?), but one gets the idea.

Lastly, there is "Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf," by Haley Krischer, a Jewish writer and journalist, about a high-school girl who is raped by a school sports star (soccer rather than football -- itself a sign of the times) upon whom she has had a crush.  Behind all of this, in an author's note, are the Congressional confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and a painful episode in Krischer's life.

In the end, according to Swan, the book is more about female bonding than about retribution for the crime of rape, but at the same time "this novel serves as a sobering reminder: the fact that consent is being discussed in the classroom doesn't necessarily mean it's being enacted in bedrooms."

I previously wrote about rape and YA fiction here.

So there you have it: a list commendably devoid of any white male authors and one that deals with topics you won't learn about watching re-runs of "Leave it to Beaver." This is presumably the new world in which American children are now growing up.

Tis the Season .. for "Mrs. Dalloway"

 First the The York Times and now The New Yorker: both in recent days have had essays on Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel "Mrs. Dalloway," and you can read what I had to say about the NYT piece in my preceding post.

The occasion for this appears to be a new edition of the book by Penguin due out Jan. 5, 2021 and, indeed, the New Yorker piece is a review of author Jenny Offill's forward to the new offering. The introduction to the book, by noted feminist Elaine Showalter, is not without merit, but it isn't new. It accompanied Penguin's 1992 publication of "Mr. Dalloway." 

While Showalter notes that Clarissa and Richard Dalloway first appeared (in about 50 pages) in Virginia Woolf's first novel, "The Voyage Out" (1915),  she doesn't mention Woolf's essay "Street Haunting," written in 1927 and published in 1930, that arguably sheds some light on how Clarissa Dalloway, the character, may have come into Virginia's head.

Offill's forward serves Penguin well in that it argues that readers can benefit from reading "Mrs. Dalloway" more than once -- indeed possibly several times -- because something new emerges each time one considers the text. In other words, if you don't have a copy on hand, buy another one and read it again.

Interestingly, she quotes the same passage from Woolf's essay "Modern Fiction" that I did in my preceding post in explaining the nature of the book as being about ordinary life.

Since "Mrs. Dalloway" is a book about which I have written extensively, I was eager to read what Offill might have to say.  It was a disappointment. Although she claims to have found something new every time she read the book (it appears she has read it three times), she offers no new insights on the work.

 

About Michael Cunningham's NYT Essay on Virginia Woolf

 Michael Cunningham, author of "The Hours," a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book built upon Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway" (itself named "The Hours" in draft form), has an essay in the Dec. 27, 2020, New York Times Book Review section entitled "How Virginia Woolf Revolutionized the Novel." 

One of the points he makes is that "Mrs. Dalloway," published in 1925, is set in a single day.  So was "Ulysses," published in 1922.

Another point he makes is that "a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly very ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life." 

That should come as no surprise.

In 1919, Woolf wrote an essay entitled "Modern Fiction" that was published in 1921. Within it, she says: "Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on a ordinary day. ... Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought of as big than what is commonly thought of as small."

The emphasis is mine and in part because such sentiments underlie my own first work of fiction, "Manhattan Morning," which is related to Woolf in another respect -- to her essay "Street Haunting" even though I didn't know of that work until after I had published my novella. 

Well, "Ulysses," too, traces the day of a very ordinary person, Leopold Bloom, on a arguably more ordinary day than that of Clarissa in one respect -- he's not hosting a party at which the Prime Minister is going to appear -- but less ordinary in another. Whereas Bloom knows his wife Molly is going to commit adultery that day, the closest Clarissa comes to that is feeling abandoned when her husband, Richard, an inconsequential member of Parliament, accepts a luncheon engagement with an elderly woman seeking advice on how to get a political letter published in The Times of London and then, feeling guilty about it, comes rushing home with flowers for his wife.

My only point: by the time "Mrs. Dalloway" appeared, the notion that a very significant novel could be written about an ordinary person on an ordinary day was not revolutionary. Indeed, some have argued Woolf was influenced in that respect by James Joyce's story, but I think her 1919 essay suggests otherwise.

Woolf praises Joyce, about whom she initially had mixed feelings, in "Modern Fiction," as a spiritual writer as opposed to what she viewed as the more materialist approaches of writers such as the hugely popular James Galsworthy. 

And there are indeed some significantly spiritual aspects to "Mrs. Dalloway" that go unmentioned by Cunningham in his NYT essay.  This is too big a subject to pursue here, but chief among the spiritual aspects of the book is just why Clarissa is giving her now famous party. It is not, as might easily be assumed, to help her husband's political career. 

One good point Cummingham makes is that "Mrs. Dalloway" is a book about choices, or, to put it another way, about life's Y-junctions: should one take the right branch or the left?  Would Clarissa's life have been better if she had married Peter Walsh, who has never been able to get her out of his mind, or pursued a same-sex relationship with Sally Seton?  Both turn up at her party -- uninvited in the case of Sally, now a mother of five boys and married to a wealthy industrialist. 

I suspect many of us in what are sometimes called our sunset years look back at our own Y-junctions and wonder what might have happened if we had gone left instead of right. Interestingly, Woolf in no way concludes her heroine's decisions in such respects were incorrect.

Cunningham goes on to say that the book's "most singular innovation" (not all that convincing in my humble opinion) is the manner in which it alternates the stories of Clarissa and a mentally disturbed World War I veteran named Septimus Smith. While they never meet in person, Smith in effect arrives at her party in the form of a doctor who saw him earlier in the day only to have Smith then commit suicide rather than accept what the doctor has prescribed. Clarissa is horrified by the news and is briefly dramatically impacted, but emerges apparently unchanged.  That, at any rate, is as far as we know because Woolf doesn't take the story any further than Clarissa seeing her guests out in very much the same fashion as she always has.

"Though seldom discussed as such, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is one of the great novels of World War I," Cunningham says,

Well, yes and no.  This is another big topic, but based on the available evidence, one can conclude that Woolf brought the war into the book only reluctantly. For instance, when she first wrote of the mentally disturbed Smith, in an unfinished short story, he wasn't a war veteran. Rather, he represented one side of her own bifurcated personality -- a powerful intellectual on one hand, and an episodically mentally and/or emotionally unbalanced person on the other. At one point, she very briefly depicted "Mrs. Dalloway" as an attempt to address that state of affairs.

Although Woolf lived through the war, she had no personal experience with its horrors. But she was mindful of a need to be relevant and especially after her second novel, "Night and Day," was criticized on that score. Her third novel, "Jacob's Room," can, and has, also been interpreted as being about WWI, but the evidence there is slim and indirect. It can also be interpreted as being about, or influenced by, the fate of her beloved brother, Thoby, who died of disease in 1906, or well before the war broke out.

Nonetheless, a work of art, once launched, becomes whatever the public thinks it is, a phenomenon that explains, in a closely related sense, how T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" came to be viewed as a great poem about World War I even if there is little evidence that was what Eliot intended, and indeed, some evidence he intended something very different.

It's Hard To Cancel Culture When It's The Real Thing

 In the current war by various aggrieved populations against white, Eurocentric culture, one sees in particular a strong desire to "cancel" (as the prevailing idiom goes) anything and everything associated with white males. But it is not so easily done when a particular artifact is, in effect, the real thing.

A case in point is a recent New York Times story entitled "A 'Messiah' for the Multitudes, Freed from History's Bonds." Therein, the Times reports on how a Canadian entity named the Grain Theater in cooperation with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has put together a version of "Messiah" aimed at celebrating the country's multicultural aspects and in some cases, grievances.

But hey, wait a minute. The music is still that written about 280 years ago by a white male, George Friedrich Handel, a German by birth but English by choice and eventually a British citizen. And for good reason: no one has since ever been able to do anything like it.

"Handel understands effect better than any of us -- when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt." That's an English translation of something Mozart said in German. And Handel's genius in that respect is ever-present in 'Messiah,' written as a secular oratorio despite the fact that it tells the story of Christ.

So the Canadian version referenced above features, among other things, a Muslim woman in a head scarf singing "She (as opposed to 'he' [Jesus]) was despised" to reflect her own family situation. And so forth and so on.

Handel, by the way did not write the words to "Messiah."  Rather, they were assembled from the Bible and the Book of Common prayer by a wealthy, but largely forgotten Englishman named Charles Jennens. So changing them does not in anyway strike a blow at the composer. In this case, it doesn't even strike much of a blow at Jennens. Rather, the soprano mentioned above, Rihab Chaieb, alters some Biblical words she doesn't happen to think are important in order to co-opt Handel's achievement for her own purposes.

"My reinterpretation of the 'Messiah' is about feeling despised and rejected as a first-generation immigrant in Montreal." she told the Times. "But by taking Jesus out of the equation and making it more personal, I have reclaimed the 'Messiah' as my own." In other words, "it's all about me" which is pretty much the mantra of the present.

I suppose she could have written or commissioned new, more politically correct or "woke" music, based on the racial, cultural or sexual status of the composer,  for her sentiments rather than relying on some old white male melody, but one suspects the impact would not be quite the same.

Going Everywhere But Going Nowhere: Eliot and Dante

One often-cited passage from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Four Quartets" is:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

One of Eliot's most important influences was Dante's "Comedia,"or "The Divine Comedy" as it came to be known.

Very early in his set of Yale University lectures entitled "Reading Dante," professor Giuseppe Mazzotta depicts "Comedia" as encyclopedic in nature, which he says means "a circle of knowledge" as originally conceived by Marcus Vitruvius, a Roman architect and engineer. 

Vitruvius most famously wrote a book known as De Architectura that was a lot more than the title might suggest. "Much more than a book on buildings and machines, the contents of De Architectura reveal the ancients' much wider concept of what exactly is 'architecture' and it describes such topics as science, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, astrology, medicine, meteorology, philosophy, and the importance of the effects of architecture, both aesthetic and practical, on the everyday life of citizens." That's from "The Ancient History Encyclopedia."

Picking up on that notion and applying it to "Comedia," Mazzota says:"

This idea of circularity is crucial, in the sense that to know something you have to have a point of departure, from which you will pass through all the various disciplines of the liberal arts, only to arrive right back where you started. The beginning and the ending in a liberal education must coincide, but you will find out things along the way that allow you to see with a different viewpoint or perspective."

The arts in question are called "liberal" for a couple of different reasons, Mazotta explains. First, to distinguish them from knowledge known in medieval times as mechanical arts. But far more importantly, knowledge gives mankind important freedoms. 

That could be a topic for another day.  The point of this posting is simply to illustrate some important linkage between Dante and Eliot.

An Ode to U.S. Post-Election Developments

 

If you lie, make it bold
Those who like it will behold
Their savior now a martyr made
To arms they call, a new crusade

He incites, they soon comply
On the hill, their flags do fly
Doors are breached, the sanctum stormed
Desecration of the norm

Associative Thinking

“I believe that we are all perpetrators and victims of one of the most evil and insidious social constructs in Western history: white male supremacy.” So said Ijeoma Oluo in her latest book "Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America."

I thought about that viewpoint today as I read an op-ed feature in the Dec. 12, 2020, New York Times entitled "These Girls are Being Cut and Married in Droves."

It's about underage girls having their genitals mutilated and being forced into marriage. While the account centers on a region in Northern Kenya and argues that such practices have greatly increased as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the author says similar practices exist elsewhere.

Ms Oluo, a Nigerian-American, was born in Texas and now lives here in Seattle. In 2018, she published a book entitled "So You Want to Talk About Race," which became a best seller.

How Female Wrestlers Illuminate Everyday Women

 As a male who has dabbled in writing fiction, I'm always interested the lives of woman -- what is important to them and what they want. Not long ago I published one take on this matter and now here is another.

On Dec. 3, 2020, the Arts section of the New York Times, carried a piece by Scarlett Harris lamenting the apparent premature end of a Netflix series about woman wrestlers entitled "GLOW." It ran for three seasons and was supposed to have one more, but that was cancelled. According to the NYT, Netflix cited production delays as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Harris said she liked the series because, along with women pummeling each other with such things as fly-tackles and face slams, the series dealt with subjects faced by "everyday women."  These, she said, include "motherhood, friendship, queer identity, ambition, reproductive rights, racism and eating disorders."

Racism was apparently one topic the show, created by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, both white women, didn't successfully address in the context of putting the series together.

"After the show was cancelled, it was revealed that the principal cast's women of color had asked the producers for more inclusivity, criticizing the show for sidelining their characters and making them feel like check boxes on a list," the NYT article said.  In other words, they wanted bigger roles. 

Well, OK, as Harris said earlier in her article, racism is one of the things contemporary women have to deal with.

On another front, it appeared GLOW didn't actually break much new ground.  Sex sells and the more transgressive, the better. Early in the series, one of the main characters discovers the other, a best friend, is sleeping with her husband. But, thanks to having to trust each other in the ring when both become wrestlers, they get their personal relationship back on track, leading Ms Harris to say that for her, GLOW was at its core a love story between the two women. Well, as we learned above, queer identity is one of the issues "everyday women" currently face.

Lots of ideas for aspiring writers here.

Nasdaq: It's OK to be a White Male if You're Gay

 Here's recent twist in the ongoing culture war here in the U.S.  Nasdaq, the world's second largest stock exchange, recently asked the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to require companies that list their shares on the exchange to either diversity their boards of directors or explain why that can't be done.

Specifically, Nasdaq, headed by Adena Friedman, a woman with a black belt in taekwondo, wants U.S. companies to have at least one woman director and another who is either a member of an underrepresented minority group or LGBTQ in terms of sexual orientation. Foreign companies listing on Nasdaq could get by with two women on their boards.

So it seems, being a white male -- an embattled species in today's culture wars -- isn't out of the question for one of those two diversity seats as long as he isn't heterosexual. Perish the thought!   Except, of course, if one is talking about the requisite diversity seats on a foreign company that lists on Nasdaq where two woman would be needed. But perhaps a transgendered, formerly white male would qualify there.

Actually, most large U.S. companies, such as those that comprise the S&P 500 stock index, already have at least one woman on their boards. But Nasdaq reportedly believes about 75% of the over 3,200 companies that list their shares on the exchange would not be currently in compliance of the new rule, if approved.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the SEC is unlikely to grant Friedman's request as the agency is currently configured, but might if incoming President Joe Biden appoints new commissioners.

Now wouldn't it be great if corporate boards were something other than a rubber stamp for management, having been purchased as such by way of very generous compensation? Don't hold your breath even if Friedman's initiative is successful. Diversity first, good governance maybe later.

 

Metropolitan Museum Evokes "1984," "The Sympathizer"

The latest development at New York's Metropolitan Museum brings to mind books like George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" and the equally grim tale "The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen. In both stories, the chief protagonist runs afoul of an authoritarian regime and as part of his punishment, must make confessions.

On Nov. 26, 2020, the New York Times ran an article in its art section that the Met had appointed its first Chief Diversity Officer, Lavita McMath Turner, a Black woman with experience in such matters, most recently at the City University of New York.  That's not a big surprise.  Many major U.S. cultural institutions have recently taken a similar step.  Moreover, as the NYT article pointed out, the NY city government informed its cultural institutions that if they didn't take steps to diversify their staffs, they might lose some of their public funding. 

What most interested me was an element of confession associated with the Met's announcement.  It came at least in part as a result of a staff letter five months ago, the NYT said, that urged the museum's leaders to acknowledge "a deeply rooted logic of white supremacy and culture of systemic racism at our institution."

The notions of white supremacy and systemic racism are key phrases and concepts in the current movement that sometimes go as far as attempting to "cancel culture" in bringing about change, much of which is arguably overdue. If one doesn't decry "white supremacy" and "systemic racism" in those terms, however, one is insufficiently "woke" and, well, might suffer the fate of Orwell's Winston Smith or Nguyen's anonymous narrator -- periods of punishment and correction.

While those advocating such a reconsideration of the very basis of U.S. society tend to paint it in terms of a moral awakening and reckoning, is also purely and simply a power struggle.

The Met's President and CEO Daniel H. Weiss and Direct Max Hollein stopped short of repeating the key phrases -- "white supremacy" and "systemic racism" -- in the institution's July 6, 2020 mea culpa. But the document made it clear that a confession along such lines is in the offing.

"Our government, policies, systems, and institutions have all contributed to perpetuating racism and injustice, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art must reflect on its past and aspire to be an agent of change," the July 6 statement said.

Along with promised reforms and new initiatives on various fronts -- hiring, staffing, collecting, exhibitions, etc. -- substantive change "will also require that we understand our past and that we accept the importance of truth-seeking as a necessary part of the process of learning and reconciliation."  

In other words, forward-looking reforms are not enough. 

"A set of commitments to anti-racism cannot begin without an honest assessment of an institution’s own history and present practices. This process will require that we investigate our own history and that we accept the importance of truth-seeking as an essential element of healing and reconciliation. We will begin this work in the coming year through an institution-wide initiative and produce a public report."

That was number one on the list of steps the Museum said it planned to take.

In writing this, I don't mean to beat up on the Met per se.  It's just that these developments are an excellent example of the nature of the culture war in which the U.S. is currently engulfed, and particularly in the arena of high-culture arts and that of academia. 

But at the same time, they give rise to an interesting question: if the Met's forthcoming self-examination concludes that the institution and thus its leadership have been complicit in preserving white supremacy and that the Met is part of systemic racism, can Weiss survive as president and CEO? It's hard to have it both ways.

 

New Yorker Fiction and "What is This Story About?"

 It's not unusual to read a work of fiction and find oneself thinking: "I wonder what this story is about?"

This is perhaps especially true with respect to the New Yorker's Nov. 23, 2020 short story entitled "The Winged Thing," by Patricia Lockwood.  Part of the problem is that it isn't actually a short story. It's an excerpt from Lockwood's forthcoming novel "No One Is Talking About This" and in effect, is an ad for that book for which Lookwood didn't have to pay, but instead presumably got paid. Wouldn't most writers love to find themselves in that position!

Basically, if you read the excerpt and you like Lockwood's style of writing, you might buy her novel and perhaps find out by reading the whole thing what she's really trying to say. Is that what this this "text" is about.

In the usual author's interview, Lockwood is first asked about her approach to the narrative -- "a protagonist who is immersed in the language of the Internet" -- and indeed there is a bit of that although in some respects, more abstract in nature than one might expect on the basis of that description. It's all about escaping suffering, we are told.

Finally, there is what happens in this excerpt.  The apparently younger sister of the unnamed chief character, a woman who may be a lesbian ("Back in Ohio and heterosexual again," she says at one point), is about to have a baby that appears to be developing in the womb in an abnormal fashion bringing up, among other things, the possibility of an abortion.

There, Lockwood spins out a convincing and thought-provoking narrative of all that might go on in such a situation and as a result, one could easily conclude it's what the story is about. Except for two things. First, this is just a small segment of a novel and second, in her interview, Lockwood says that the significance of the episode is that it plucks the main character out of her online life and puts her "back into the body that suffers." And that then leads Lockwood into a rather puzzling explanation of the nature of language.

What is this story about?

Interpreting William Faulkner's Story "Dry September"

 

On its face, William Faulkner’s short story Dry September (1931) is an account of a Black man precipitously lynched by a hastily assembled group of white men because he allegedly had a transgressive interaction with a local white woman. As such, it was surely reflective of many real-life lynchings in the wake of Reconstruction and it foreshadowed the 1955 killing of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy accused of flirting with, and possibly touching, a 21-year-old married storekeeper named Carolyn Bryant while visiting relatives in Mississippi.

Largely because Till’s mother insisted upon having his mutilated body displayed in an open casket in his home-town of Chicago, attracting a host of viewers and great publicity, that event became an important impetus to the phase of the civil rights movement that resulted in significant gains for Blacks in the mid-1960s.

Although Faulkner’s story can certainly be read as a story about a lynching, it is maddeningly short of details. Nothing is known of the transgressive incident in question; little other than a name (Will Mayes) and his place of work is known of the alleged Black perpetrator; there are no details of his killing (although by implication he was shot); readers don’t know why one key figure, a town barber, insists that Mayes couldn’t have done it, and it isn’t clear why Mayes’ apparent killer, a former Army officer named John McLendon, was so anxious to go after him. But more on McLendon later.

The only character Faulkner spends any time developing in Dry September is Miss Minnie Cooper and readers learn quite a bit about her to the point where she, rather than the lynching, appears to be the main subject of the story. From a “comfortable” but not prominent family, Minnie was slim and vivacious as a young girl, but too childish to be sufficiently class conscious. When she overhears her more sophisticated contemporaries dissing her, she ceases to accept social invitations and retreats to life as a young spinster with her invalid mother and a “thin, sallow” aunt. She’s 38 or 39 at the time of the story.

But she’s no recluse. “Still on the slender side of ordinary,” she regularly goes into town, wearing one of three or four new voile dresses she buys every summer. Voile is a lightweight, semi-sheer material that while appropriate for very hot weather, is also arguably noticeably expressive of femininity. Faukner makes so much of Minnie’s choice of such dresses that readers are surely meant to think they say something significant about her.

One of the town barbers, a man named (Henry?) Hawkshaw, trying to defuse the rumor-driven situation, suggests Minnie is so unattractive no one would want to have sex with her. “I leave it to you fellas if them ladies that get old without getting married don’t have notions that a man can’t,” he says, depicting her as “a woman that never …”  but who is susceptible to fantasies.

However, based on what the unidentified narrator of the story subsequently tells us about Minnie, Hawkshaw’s characterization doesn’t appear to be entirely accurate, even though he claims to know her.  It appears he is most likely depicting her as less attractive than she is to protect Mayes, who he also says he knows, but readers aren’t told in what context or why he so insistently proclaims the Black man’s innocence.

Mayes works as a night watchman at an ice plant some distance out of town and as a Negro in the South in 1930 or so, clearly doesn’t get his hair cut by a white barber. Readers aren’t told where he lives or what he does when not working.

In contrast to Hawkshaw’s assessment of Minnie, Faulkner’s narrator first tells us that as she watched her schoolmates pair off, get married and have children, “no man called on her steadily until she was known as ‘aunty’ and mothers told their children how popular she had been as a girl.” But then, in her late 20s, she attracted the attention of a widowed bank clerk of about 40, smelling faintly of the barbershop, “or of whiskey,” and was seen riding around with him in his car – the first in town – in a motoring bonnet and veil. The town, evidently aware the relationship was unlikely to be promising, started referring to her as “poor Minnie,” but also saying “she’s old enough to take care of herself.”

The relationship, or the affair, or whatever it was, lasted four years, and as a result (it is now eight years later), Minnie had been “relegated into adultery in public option,” the narrator tells us. That’s considerably different from what the barber, Hawkshaw, would have us believe. But his focus is Mayes, not Minnie.

The key to the story, from the perspective I am advancing, is that after four years, the bank clerk left Minnie and moved to Memphis, returning once a year, at Christmas, but never seeing her. Rather, friends told her about his episodic reappearances.

Minnie is thus an abandoned woman, in the tradition of Medea, Dido and a host of others – a trope, if you will, most recently mined by Elena Ferrante, author of The Days of Abandonment and four novels known as The Neopolitan Quartet in which themes related to abandonment are developed. This is a major subject for her, Ferrante makes clear in series of interviews.

So what did Minnie do? At first, readers are told, she began drinking whiskey supplied by a clerk at a soda fountain, and continued to go out into town in her new voile dresses, insisting that the children of her friends call her “cousin” rather than ”aunty” to reinforce the notion she was still young and potentially desirable.  But it was no use. “Lounging men did not even follow her with their eyes anymore,” the narrator says, an assessment that does square at least in part with the Hawkshaw’s characterization of her then-prevailing state.

Based on what Ferrante, if no one else, tells us about abandoned women, Minnie’s resentments were continuing to build along with, one can fairly assume, her sexual frustrations. Surely her four-year relationship with the bank clerk, given his background, age and likely desires, was not devoid of intimacy.

So, on the single afternoon and evening during which the story takes place, readers, though the narrator’s eyes, are allowed to see Minnie late in the day, feverish (presumably as a result of the rumored incident) and having trouble dressing while three seemingly sympathetic, but also salaciously curious, female friends await her story.

“While she was still dressing her friends called for her and sat while she donned her sheerest underthings and stockings and new voile dress.” Her friends told her (the narrator relates) that when she got over the shock, she was to tell them everything – “what he said and did.” Who was “he?”

In the eyes of a John McLendon, a WWI veteran who commanded troops and was cited for valor, any Black male would do. “What the hell difference does it make?” he asks when Hawkshaw suggests the sheriff investigate the rumored incident to discover who, if anyone, is to blame. “Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?” (my emphasis), McLendon says.

But again back to Minnie: eventually she sallies forth, escorted through the town to a film by her friends, “fragile in her fresh dress” – pink in color readers eventually learn thanks to one observer.

And rather than the apparent lynching, about which readers are told nothing, what happened to Minnie is described in some detail. She wanted to break out laughing and hoped the film would help the laughter under control “so it would not waste away so fast and so soon.” She clearly wants to enjoy something she has apparently pulled off, but to no avail. Her friends hear her, take her home in a taxi “where they removed her pink voile and sheer underthings and stockings.”  They put her to bed and as her laughter, increasingly hysterical, turns to screams, send for a doctor, but since it was a Saturday evening, one couldn’t easily be found.

An abandoned woman, one might argue, is a force of nature. While Dido limited the destruction by killing herself with a sword Aneas, her lover and the founder of Rome, had left her as a souvenir, Medea murdered her own sons by Jason, who abandoned her, as well as various others.

“Can one continue to live if one loses love?” Ferrante asks in an essay contained in her book of miscellany called Frantumaglia. “It seems like a pretty much discredited subject; in reality it’s the question most crudely posed by female existence. The loss of love is a failure; it causes an absence of sense.”  [my emphasis, again]

I think that based on what we know about her, Minnie fell in love with the bank clerk, or convinced herself she was in love and he loved her because, as a still-eligible woman who had never had such love, it was essential. She tried to swallow his desertion but couldn’t. It eventually built up to the point where retribution was necessary and since she apparently couldn’t take it out on him, she found a way to take it out on society.

She’s laughing because society bought it as she knew society would. In her pink voile dress and sheer underthings, she represented herself as fragile white Southern womanhood, viewed as being always under threat of transgressive Black male desires.

Before the rumored incident, as we know, men sitting and lounging in storefronts “did not even follow her with their eyes anymore.”  But after the rumor, as she and her friends are heading for the theater,  ”even the young men lounging in the doorway tipped their hats and followed with their eyes the motion of her hips and legs when she passed.”

Her sex appeal restored, she doesn’t have to think of herself as an abandoned old maid – at not even 40, at least for now.

But at the same time, Minnie perhaps only gradually comes to realize that by launching the rumor, she was unleashing terrible forces that would result in violence, not against the bank clerk or people who had laughed at her, but against someone who had nothing to do with her. And so her laughs turn to screams.

This is a plausible psychological explanation of the story, the leader of a seminar in which Dry September was considered, told me after reading this paper. He, himself, preferred what he called a sociological interpretation.

Whereas I viewed this as fundamentally a story about a woman in which a lynching occurs, he viewed it as a story about a lynching in which a number of characters appear, important among them a woman named Minnie Cooper. But her emotional state in his eyes is distinctly secondary and almost irrelevant to the prevailing attitudes toward race in a Southern town like Jefferson.

Interestingly, Faulkner, in a question-and-answer session at the University of Virginia, appeared to suggest the story about Minnie could stand independent of an incident involving race.

A woman asked a question, the final words of which were unclear in the recording, to which Faulkner replied:

"Yes. In which a—a—a woman, in that condition of frustration after menopause or about menopause, could have caused that sort of tragedy. It wouldn't necessarily have to have a—a—a colored note in it. Not necessarily that same story, but she could have caused that same grief, injustice, crime."

In this case, Minnie, at nearly 40, was still about 10 years away from menopause. So, I will stick with abandonment as what prompted actions on her part that resulted in a crime.

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The second most interesting character in Dry September is John McLendon. “He had commanded troops at the front in France and had been decorated for valor,” Faulker’s narrator tells us. We also learn that he is married and lives “in a neat new house” that “was trim and fresh as a birdcage and almost as small, with its clean, green-and-white paint.”

That’s almost all we know.

We don’t know anything about his background other than that he led troops in WWI and we don’t know his current occupation which, based on the size of his house, doesn’t appear to be anything grand. He may be from a level of society similar to that of Minnie Cooper – “comfortable,” but not “the best people.”

One other thing we do know, however, is that he is apparently tired of his wife, who has sat up in a chair until midnight, awaiting his arrival home, her face “strained, pale and weary-looking.”

McClendon, irritated to see her, accuses her of not obeying his instructions not to stay up “to see when I come in.”  He catches her shoulder then, half strikes, half flings her across the chair, where she remains, watching him leave the room.  So much for fragile, vulnerable Southern womanhood that must be protected at all costs.

What is eating McClendon – his apparent lust to kill a Black male, guilty or innocent; his disinterest in and maltreatment of his wife?

The narrator makes a point of McLendon’s army background and his alpha-male, “leader of men” swagger at the barber shop; his insistence on calling the shots as to what to do with Mayes.

Has it been hard for him to return to civilian life, where he is probably a person of little consequence, compared to his service in the Army?  Does he feel disrespected and, perhaps a bit like Minnie, needs an outlet for his frustrations?  Or was he changed by the violence and killing he went through in the recent conflict?

It's impossible to say, but Faulker seems intent on making it clear service in the Army does not have to corrupt a man.

During his time in the barbershop, “the third speaker rose and grasped McLendon's arm; he too had been a soldier. ‘Now, now. Let's figure this thing out. Who knows anything about what really happened?’”  McLendon brushes him aside.

And during the car ride out to ice plant, when Hawkshaw again insists Mayes is innocent, the second former soldier says: “Sure, sure. We’re just going to talk to him a little; that’s all” and he tried to quiet the young, man, Butch, who loudly insists otherwise.

It's not the Army per se that has corrupted McLendon. But what has? As a man who can own little more than a house the size of a birdcage, like the uneducated Butch, does he, too feel threatened by possible advances by the Black population and unable to take out his social frustrations on his white “betters,” finds another avenue?

It’s a grim picture much at odds with that of slow-speaking, ever-so-polite Southern white society.