Thoughts about the Opera "Blue" You Won't Find Elsewhere

 The most poignant -- and disappointing -- moment for me when attending a recent performance of the contemporary opera "Blue" was near the end when the unnamed Mother gets up out of her seat in what is presumably a church and walks over to stand one last time at the coffin of her son.

"At last, an aria," I thought. This is the moment she is going to actually sing a song -- a musical tour de force through her thoughts and emotions -- highly memorable melodies requiring exemplary vocal technique, in the finest tradition of opera. The sort of thing that leaves one exclaiming in due course:  "wasn't she fabulous!"

But, no, just more of the same bits and pieces of often almost recitative-like vocalization, occasionally soaring with the continuous orchestration into one variety of crescendo or another.

While I'm sure she didn't do it, I can just see Briana Hunter, who sang the role of The Mother, down on her knees, begging librettist and director Tazewell Thompson and composer Jeanine Tesori "please, please, please, let me SING!" My heart goes out to her, as would have those of Handel and Mozart.

But that's where it's at these days in contemporary opera: "Singing? What's that? Some sort of distraction." I can hear Thompson and Tesori dismissing Hunter along those lines.

But what about the rest of "Blue," which I saw in a Seattle Opera production the other day. Widely praised, the almost entirely Black (librettist and performers) piece centers on the story of an angry and idealistic young Black man, the son of a police officer, being killed at what was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration by another officer. He's an only child and beloved by his father despite sociopolitical differences and thus a sometimes tempestuous relationship.

While the race of the officer who kills The Son isn't identified in the program or promotional material, he's identified as white in the lyrics, giving the opera additional currency in the post-George Floyd era. But interestingly, The Father at one point bemoans the fact that his son was killed by one of his "brothers" on the police force. 

Young Black men are not always killed by white officers. Notably, in "Between the World and Me," Ta-Nehisi Coates relates the trauma he experienced when he learned that a man named Prince Jones he had apparently known at Howard University had been killed by a Black police officer in a jurisdiction controlled by Black politicians. And, according to Coates, the officer who supposedly mistook Prince for someone else was sent back to work.

Well, the first half of the opera, which runs for two hours not counting the intermission, is about the risks young men run being born Black in America and the second half opens with news of the death of The Son as a result of police violence, and of course the racial inequities of that in America.

But almost immediately thereafter, the opera changes course in a fashion that none of the reviews that I have read mention. Race relations fall into the background and what comes to the fore is religion -- Christianity in this case. What's at issue in the lengthy segment that follows news of the death is whether the Chruch, and a particular Reverend, can offer the family and eventually their friends any consolation. The message there is at best mixed.

This jumped out at me in part because I had just finished reading "On Consolation," subtitled "finding solace in dark times," by Michael Ignatieff.

His bottom line: "It is not doctrine that consoles us in the end, but people."

Perhaps in that vein, the final scene of the opera takes the form of a flashback to a family dinner at one point during which father, son and mother join hands at the table. Perhaps the audience is led to believe the Mother and Father are consoled more by such memories than by anything else.

More on the Tension Between Art and Political Correctness

The New York Times rehashed the career of American painter Andrew Wyeth on Feb. 3, 2022, using the transfer of a couple of small islands off the coast of Maine from Wyeth family foundations to Colby College as an excuse. 

 One paragraph in particular jumped out at me.

 "In a 2017 assessment of his paintings of Black people in the Brandywine Valley, the art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw questioned the power imbalance in his representation of race, and also pointed out that in a handful of paintings he had darkened the skin tone of his white model, Helga Testorf, a Chadds Ford neighbor who posed for him in secret for more than a decade." 

 “His nude images of black women embody the power imbalance that characterized interracial interactions in the Brandywine Valley throughout the 20th century,” Shaw wrote in 2017, arguing that the “subordinate positions (of his models) as poor, black and working class enabled the artist to exert a great deal of control over how he imaged them on paper or canvas.” 

 To Ms. Shaw, the New York Times said, the visual representation of race in Wyeth’s work raised the question of how much leeway white artists should have in depicting subjects of another race. Is all fair in the name of art?

 The "power imbalance," and just what leeway artists (presumably not just those who are white) should have in depicting subjects of another race? What's at issue here is political correctness and cultural misappropriation. Sound familiar? 

 One wonders, should we go back through the history of Western art, identifying all the painting where an artist had some sort of "power imbalance" over a subject and/or where he or she depicted someone of a different race or culture and burn them? Or should we continue to evaluate them first and foremost on aesthetic considerations? We are, after all, talking about art.

 To be fair to Ms Shaw, the Times reported that in 2017 "she took pains to note that her work wasn’t intended to injure Wyeth’s reputation, but rather to layer it. "I love Wyeth,' she said. 'I think we can find artists to be complicated and frustrating and disappointing in some ways and still love the work.'" 

 Well, maybe Wyeth also wasn't trying to injure the Blacks depicted in his paintings, just lawyer them.

 I'll leave it up to readers to decide, but these are important issues in the current "cancel culture" mood of certain U.S. sociopolitical actors.

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.

-----

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.

 

Black Writers Make Progress Despite "Systemic Racism"

 We've heard a lot in recent months about how the U.S. is fundamentally defined by "systemic racism" -- in other words, discrimination against non-white citizens, and especially Blacks, is baked in the cake because the country was established on that very basis despite certain idealistic postulates.

Thus, one branch of this theory goes, reform of existing institutions can't, by definition, produce equality and justice. Absent a major transfer of power, Blacks in particular can't get anywhere.

In the face of such arguments, I've been trying to see if there might be a counter-narrative, at least in the arts. Could it be that things aren't quite as bad as it is currently fashionable to depict them?

The Nov. 9, 2020, Arts section of the New York Times  has an item about a woman, who somewhat against the tide, writes short stories and is just having her second collection, "The Office of Historical Corrections" published. Replete with a photo of the author, Danielle Evans, the piece was awarded two thirds of a page.  Not bad publicity!

Ms Evans is Black and what interested me was what she had to say about that. In a nutshell, while there is still room for improvement on one front or another, a lot of progress has been made.

Asked how things have changed, Ms Evans had the following to say:

"I'm less afraid that I'll be the only Black writer that somebody reads or that there will be only one book by a writer of color each season that people are talking about. It's much more true now that you'll hear, 'Here are eight books by Black writers. Let's think about what they are saying to each other.'"

While that's good news for those unwilling to throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to making America a better society, it's also good news for Ms Evans as a writer. It gives her, she said, more freedom to write about riskier, weirder material because she doesn't have to worry about being taken as representative of her race.

Where is change still needed?  In Evans view, white writers need to talk more about race and Black writers should be asked to review books written by whites, in part to point out what's missing there. 

"People of color notice absences, we notice the treatment of secondary characters, where the language gets weird. And that's useful for everybody."

There was a time -- well, it seems very naive now -- when the notion of where thing ought to go was "integration." The concept was that if discriminatory barriers could be broken down, we could all be the same despite differing skin colors, religions, whatever. Well, not anymore. Racial differences need to be noted, acknowledged in a positive fashion, explored, understood and valued.

Here's Evan's take on that when it comes to literature:

"We should be talking about race more as a function of craft -- of everybody's craft. Maybe it shouldn't be the first paragraph of every review, but it should be noted that books have a racial context. Conversations would be more interesting for it. Part of the answer is making that conversation more visible in more places, so it doesn't feel hyper-visible  when it's focused on the work of Black writers."

Moving away from race and onto the state of literary fiction, Evans believes it has a future despite many claims to the contrary.

"If I put the right story in someone's hands, it can change their life," she said. In that context, she pointed in particular to Toni Morrison's 1992 novel "Jazz."

 

A Few More Thoughts About the Prevailing Climate for Art

In recent posts, I've been talking about the notion that at present (in the U.S. at any rate), the significance or worth of a piece of art is determined more by the racial/gender/sexual orientation of the artist than by the attributes of the object in question. Pictures, music, literature, whatever -- don't stand on their own merits when it comes to critical acclaim. It's an approach, one could argue, that stands what was once the very nature and meaning of art on its head: the art in question stood on it's own. Of course one might then be interested in who created it because more works of equal or even greater beauty could be forthcoming.

Which brings me to the Oct. 10, 2020, "Arts" section of the New York Times, the lead article of which, plus a lengthy sidebar, is all about Louise Glück, an American poet, who was just awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

How did she feel about that?

 "Completely flabbergasted that they would choose a white American lyric poet. It doesn't make sense.... I come from a country that is not thought fondly of now, and I'm white, and we've had all the prizes. So it seemed unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life."

Glück, who has been writing poetry for decades and has won an array of other prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, would certainly seem to be a candidate in the Nobel tradition -- except, that in her view, reflecting the tenor of the times, her race would be a more important factor than the quality of her poetry. Well, it apparently wasn't in this case, but her comments are nonetheless revealing.

The NYT identified Glück as a poet who isn't afraid to use her work to explore cruelty. And an excerpt printed in the paper from one of her poems includes the line "I ask you, how much beauty can a person bear?"

Well, it's an interesting question these days because in the age of Political Correctness, pretty much everything or everyone that isn't downright evil is "beautiful," more or less by definition. In the article, Glück said she didn't want to be like the early American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow because his poetry was too easily understood. So, who knows, perhaps that line has a double meaning.

If Glück frequents major art museums these days to see exhibitions of contemporary work, she won't be troubled by too much in the way of beauty.  That's not what it's about.

For instance, another article in the same section of the NYT, notes that a group of prominent museums recently decided to postpone a retrospective exhibition of Philip Guston's work because of the current sociopolitical climate. Guston's work contains, among other things, images of the Ku Klux Klan.

According to a joint statement by the museums, the exhibition was postponed "until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston's work can be more clearly interpreted."

In other words, art these days is primarily viewed, evaluated and judged not on the basis of aesthetic considerations, but rather as just another form of politics.

Guston, by the way is white, and the main subject of the article noted above was how a group of Black trustees of American art museums have formed an alliance aimed at bringing greater diversity to such institutions. The goal, a statement quoted by the NYT  said is "to increase inclusion of Black artists, perspectives and narratives in U.S. cultural institutions by: addressing inequalities in staffing and leadership; combating marginalized communities lack of presence in exhibitions and programming; and incorporating diversity into the institution's culture."

Well, it is hard to argue that such goals don't have merit, but at the same time, one can't help wondering what, in the current climate of who the artist is matters more than the nature of the art, whether the Guston exhibition would have gone forward on schedule if the artist were Black.