Caveat: If the second half of this post seems a little incoherent, it's because I wrote it in unbridled anger. I had a nice, finished entry and as soon as I hit "Publish Post," Blogger immediately ate more than half of what I'd written. So I took a half hour to stomp around the house and throw things before coming back to finish it. So the tone may shift wildly. I apologize in advance.
Let me start by admitting that I didn't find Ronaldo Wilson's Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man to be that obscene. It's possible that I'm desensitized to talk of sex and blow jobs and dicks because of my romance reading habits or because of all the young male authors I read back in high school; I'm guessing a lot of you have had the same experience. I don't think it's the obscenity that is "shocking" in this book, just as I don't think it's the book's driving force, either. I think it's the super-simple style of the Narrative that leads people into feeling as if they just read something profoundly dirty or grotesque (also, I think it's a matter of race being brought into the mix of the sex and shit that gets to readers). We've read a lot of work with some kind of "artifice" lately - the quotations of Notley, the idea of roles in The Maids, etc. So the thing that interested me about Wilson's book was its lack of artifice, the way it simply lives in basics.
When I talk about "basics," I mean a handful of things. There's the actual writing style, which is incredibly simple. You don't have to run to the dictionary reading this book. The simplicity is what gives it such a poetic feel, particularly in its most beautiful passages - such as that last paragraph on page 25. There's power in the elemental aspects of good writing, particularly in the power of the plain nouns. If you look at Wilson's writing, you'll find it contains very few adjectives. And often the adjectives are nouns, too ("sand clouds," for example).
One of the other things I refer to when I say "basics" is the use of color in this book. You've got two colors right in the title. I was absolutely bowled over by the sheer colorfulness of this book, especially when considering that it's largely the same colors coming up again and again (white, brown, black, grey, green). I'm still trying to figure out the exact significance of the colors besides the fact that they build the world in really cool ways. It's largely a factor of what is meant by using color words. To call the man "white," to call the boy "brown" - these are systems of labeling, and Wilson takes that labeling and begins to apply it to all sorts of things in the world of this book. In some ways, it takes away the power of labeling colors, but it also highlights the fact that we and the characters live in a world defined by color. Color is everywhere and nowhere at the same time in this book, much like race somehow manages to feel both integral and secondary to this narrative.
Finally, one of the things that really strikes me about the deceptively simple style of this book lies in the duality Wilson establishes throughout. Everything has a kind of back and forth to it. Dichotomies here become incredibly important. Old and young. Black and white. The city of the boy's present and the open field of his past. The land and the water. It's fascinating how these dichotomies are established in ways that aren't necessarily attached to value systems. There's not really good and bad in this book. Instead, it's the fact that the narrative is capable of polarizations in a single plane of existence. Wilson establishes a kind of shuttered world within the narrative, to the point where you feel trapped in with the readers, and yet this shuttered world is full of opposites everywhere. Much like the colors, these dualities become easily forgettable while also sticking out like a sore thumb.
This is where Bataille comes in, I think. I'll admit to struggling with the Bataille a bit (it's nice out and a couple of ducks got into a fight in front of me while I was reading it!), but it seems largely concerned with the falseness of utility, and how our obsession with utility is problematic. It just made me think about the one type of dualism I barely noticed in Wilson's work: that of class. Wilson establishes a world of dichotomies and yet there's not a great sense of socioeconomic class. There is an early section in which the brown boy mentions how hard his mother had to work and how relieved he was to realize he wouldn't have to do the same. And obviously there's mention of some wealth in the petsitting section. But mostly this book lives in what Bataille seems to find particularly reprehensible: the world of the bourgeoisie. Isn't the white man's world basically a model of everything bourgeois? It's such a world of middleness, of accumulation without real meaning. Think about how plain this world is. The book seems more alive when the white man's not around, I think. The bourgeois has this kind of pulverizing thing going on where it obliterates utility because of it's own obsession with utility. Is the white man's world one in which middleness reigns? How does this differ from the boy's past? I hope someone can help me understand the ways the Bataille article connects to Wilson's book (outside all the talk of excrement, at least), as I had a bit of trouble with it.
Finally, we absoutely cannot talk about the Narrative without talking about the body. This is a book where the body suffocates everything. It's a book largely dealing in bodily fluids: the sex and shit of the brown boy's world. What's interesting here is how bodily functions differ in this narrative when considered in the context of time. This seems related to how bodies are controlled throughout the book. The boy's past is marked by the body's loss of control. The father losing control of his bowels, the way the baby keeps throwing up all over itself - these things hold a kind of horror for the boy. And then there's the material weight of the mother's dead body. The body as its presented in the past is all about the way it cannot be controlled. Then, in the present (or future, we might call it), the body is marked by sex. It exchanges one bodily fluid for another, but this one seems almost easier to control. The sexual body is all over this book in the context of the boy's current existence. Penisis and blow jobs and the way the brown boy notices other men's bodies all the time. And yet it all seems much more controlled than the loss of bodily function presented in the dreams/memories of the past. Isn't it a mark of adulthood that we can (technically, or at least so we think) control who we fuck?
I'm interested in what you guys all have to say. How do you see the body in this book? What about the dualities or use of color? And what do you make of the ending, which is so beautifully written and yet which felt like a bit of a cop-out to me in the way everything becomes literally clear at the end. It made the issues of race in the Narrative seem a little too well-dealt with by the end in the way color becomes obliterated inside that glass. What did you guys think?
Note: I hope I wasn't the only one to get the Sleepers reference in that section with Kevin Bacon and Brad Pitt (who were both in the film, which was made in 1996). Wilson's bringing up of that movie is really interesting to me because of the way the film deals so harshly with not just sex and death but with the horrifying divide between being a boy and being a man. It's a really problematic movie, from what I remember. Wilson's use of it brought back my own memories of having watched the movie on cable when I was in middle school one afternoon when my parents weren't around. At an age where I could barely comprehend my own body, I was being confronted with what happens to other people's bodies (rape, murder, etc). I still remember Kevin Bacon's leering face when I think of that movie. I haven't watched it since, and it's probably more innocuous than I remember. But I don't plan to ever see it again. Anyone else in this boat? Or am I a special, pop-culture-warped snowflake?
Thanks for awesome and illuminating post, Beth. I didn't find the book obscene either; in fact, I felt a curious sense of "whiteness" or "blankness" that permeated the entire text, including the mention of shit, vomit, semen, etc. (Not that otherwise I'd think these would be obscene, but that quality of whiteness or blankness made everything seem a bit virtual and innocuous to me.) Perhaps my sensation of “whiteness” or “blankness” is partly due to the spare and lucid writing style--the bare-bones vocabulary (as you mentioned) and the straightforward tone. Maybe it’s also because of the strange way that the white man and the brown boy seem to collapse into one another in a strange way. You mentioned how the polarizations in the book feel as if they exist on a single plane of existence, and I felt the same: it's as if the white man and the brown boy (again, as with Genet) are two sides of the same coin.
ReplyDeleteLet me put a little pressure on that, and bring in the Bataille as well. Bataille's notion of jewels and shit being equivalent is interesting--both are "cursed matter that flows from a wound" (119), and both are charged with significance that has nothing to do with their use-value. In completely utilitarian / capitalist economy, shit and diamonds are both excessive, non-utilitarian, emanating from the principle of loss. (Both being sacrifices of oneself, as he says.) The most “precious” and the most “filthy”, the most glorified and debased are not the same, but they are equivalent, hooked into one another by the strange, overriding bourgeois economy. I think it’s telling that shit and vomit are all associated with the Brown Boy, as well as sex, body, meanness, fashion, and being spoiled (38). Excess, or nonproductive expenditure in Bataille’s terms, links all of these. What of the White Man, though? He’s associated with work, meditation, his house, his mother, and his father (38)—all things linkable to bourgeois middle-classness. (Meditation may be a *bit* iffy, but as meditation concerns the mind rather than the body, it elides pretty well with middle-class values.) Bataille writes, “The rich man consumes the poor man’s losses, creating for him a category of degradation and abjection that leads to slavery” (125). While the brown boy and the white man are not a traditional master-slave pair, their erotic relationship is dominated by the same dialectic: “Go Shower. This command reveals his relationship to the white man. He follows his lover’s orders like a slave without anything but the promise of being fed and shown a movie” (64). And again, as with Genet’s maids who both hate and love their mistress, the brown boy and the white man both hate and love each other (3). The brown boy must be abject and filthy so that the white man can be clean and, well, white. But both seem to be hopelessly locked in the economy that Bataille’s essay describes.
DeleteI feel like I can say more on this, but I’d like to turn to turn to your question about the ending of the book. You mentioned the sense of a cop-out in the final moment of the brown boy’s “clarity.” I guess that I feel the “clarity” achieved is totally false—I don’t trust it at all. I feel like it’s the final triumph of the “whiteness” or “blankness” that pervades the entire book, a kind of final loss—the loss of the brown boy’s self that would resist being totally swallowed up in by the white man’s economy: “His white man loves him, so much so that from this love, the brown boy, who is often like a jagged rock stuck at the bottom of a river is slowly losing his sharp and angry shape” (76). He might be losing his sharp edges, but still he fantasizes about breaking the glass of the shower so that the “sword-like shards” would cut into the white man’s body, making him bleed the blood that all humans bleed regardless of any distinctions. Then he stares into the vase, where the “brown barbs” of flower-thorns are contained within the “clarity” of the glass. This is a strange moment to me—it seems that the brown boy is swallowed up, drowned in a system that is just as transcendent as it is false, the clarity of the over-arching white man’s bourgeois economy. I could be totally misreading this, but what do you all think?
thade, that bataille quote you mention about shit and jewels was my favorite bit from the article.
ReplyDeletethanks for your post beth, good job.
i guess i should start by admitting that i don't really have any great thoughts about this text that weren't already said by you two. i was drawn to the body in this text, how excessive it seemed, how bodies were constantly objects of desire. i felt it was particularly interesting when the brown boy imagines (or actually does?) giving an old white man a blowjob. that was the most obscene moment in the book to me, but it was obscene in a good way i think.
the brown boy is the embodiment of excess. he loves fashion and sex and violence. he can't help but imagine shattering the glass at the end because that's how he thinks: he wants to touch and fuck and destroy flesh all for the pure pleasure of it. this is bataille's nonproductive expenditure. the brown boy never wants to have sex with a woman in order to make pretty babies, but instead he wants only pleasure from white bodies. still, the white bodies seem to be in control, and the brown boy spends a lot of time fantasizing.
i think thade is pretty dead on with his comment. i don't have much to add. i like the idea that the brown boy is swallowed up by the system. the brown boy doesn't seem too interested in whether or not a system even exists, he is too enmeshed in it, he is way more interested in the bodies around him to even consider those sort of issues.
by the way, i've never seen sleeper beth, so i didn't know there was a movie reference in that section. that was definitely my favorite part of the book though.
Thanks for this, Beth— I, too, noticed the colors, how they enhanced the Renaldo Wilson’s book, Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, in their simple adjectives, and also had the ability to simultaneously mute the piece, with the same colors showing up again and again… these were colors we as readers had to recognize, but because of the repetition, I felt they both expanded upon the substance as well as washed it of further context. It simply was, as it were: you couldn’t ignore it.
ReplyDeleteI was also struck by the simplicity of the text, and the dichotomies that struck against it. I was especially captured by “The Brown Boy’s Flesh,” in which the dialogue and the text labels and rebels:
“If he saw it, he would have been fascinated by something so black for dessert. In fact, he probably would have taken it from the white man, giving it back to him for only a taste.” (66)
I don’t really want to go into the socio-political implications of this, as I feel it speaks for itself (obviously, the implications will bleed in what I’m about to say). I’m interested in the colors and the brown boy’s want for color of his likeness; I’m interested in the white man ordering the black dessert, and the brown boy’s initial misinterpretation, as he thought the white man would finish his sentence “it was as black as you” (66). These are labels (besides the obvious character labels): the dessert becomes a misnomer, and the brown boy’s thoughts become the driving force of what is labeled, and how.
Now, for color oppositional, I’m brought to “The Brown Boy, the White Man, and the Snow”— instead of black, there is white (23). Instead of the focus on the brown boy and his thoughts, it seems to delve into the white man’s thoughts, and reflect just how oppositional these thoughts are (rather than the beauty that consumes the brown boy; winter is depressing, birds shit everywhere). But again there is food, almost a hunger. There is lots of focus on what is being consumed, and who is consuming what and who is not consuming, and who would like to consume.
Sometimes it’s a notation of (non)consumption of food, like gelato or Pad Thai. Sometimes it’s clothes, like green sweaters. Sometimes it’s sexual. Sometimes it’s even skin— these are all not necessarily wants, but notes of who has what. I feel color enhances most of these consumptions, but does not define them. Again, it’s the simplicity of the text that lets the colors and consumptions speak for themselves.
Megan, I'm glad you mention the way food is used in Wilson's book. It is very conspicuous. Strangely enough, the most "shocking" moment of the book for me was when the brown boy is eating the 3-D Doritos. It's so weirdly specific and super-capitalistic. I'm always a little startled when random brand names show up unexpectedly in a text. Brand names tend to take on a fetish-like quality.
DeleteThank you, Beth, for including that disclaimer. It made me laugh to imagine you stomping around your place since you are always so calm.
ReplyDeleteOne of the first stings that struck me immediately about this text was the text itself. O rather the prose form of these poems (do we take it for granted that they are poems? yes? or can we question this?). Anyhow, that was precisely the issue that came to my head: what about this narrative makes this work poetry? There are no specific line breaks throughout the work, or any of the things that we might immediately associate with poetry, so what makes this work poetry? In my head this narrative is a sort of re-imaginative slave-narrative of our times similar to the narrative by Frederick Douglass which sort of speaks to us from the past—I enjoy that very much—the imaginative drive that pushes the narrative. In terms of the form itself though I have a harder time appreciating it.
On the form, if I can even begin to articulate my thoughts I will say this: it is constructed through language and more specifically through the agency that language gives and takes from to the various parties that embody a text: author, characters, reader etc. If we keep in mind the power dynamic, the slave/ master play that is at work in this text then I think we (or rather I) can begin to appreciate the for and what I am calling the agency of language and which is really more like the way the language/obscenity can literally fuck with your reader and thus playing over and over again with this undercurrent of the master/slave dynamic going on here.
The language is very important; it spoke to me in ways that maybe most will not consider but that brown ppl often do, at least the ones I often dare to speak about race with: for example if you are brown and you go to a new place you immediately search for others like you and you are conscious if there is no one like you (now a days this is becoming rare bc brown ppl have taken over but still..) . maybe i am going on a tangent but that is how i read this text: there is so much at play here with the language, even a word like “boy” it becomes a castration or what someone like Malcolm x would call a denial of “manhood.” i always notice for example with the news programs how there is always a white male anchor and if there are ppl of color as anchors it is usually an asian woman—rarely a latina or black woman. if a brown man/ anchor is ever present he is never accompanied by a white female. and most brown anchors are always in sports commentary. this is to me a performance of the word “boy” and is how i read the text accompanied with the added violence of the language—the shit, bj’s etc—and of course the added issues and complexity of sexuality, class etc. but maybe i am wrong so if you know of a latino or black male anchor (other than juan gonzalez and amy goodman from DN! i want to know) idk idk
i do think there is violence here, and that is captured in obscenity obviously but obscenity as a driving force/form of the work which plays/tears and reconstructs to various effects the master/slave boy/manhood penetrator/penetrated dynamics. maybe that is the poetry idk idk
Interesting discussion everyone, and great job Beth. I feel just like saying ditto… I’m having a hard time to find something that hasn’t been said or even fits in with the current threads. It maybe that I’m stuck somewhere on the toll road or in between two different time zones, but I had a totally different read of Wilson’s Narrative of a Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man.
ReplyDeleteLike Beth and Megan, I was drawn to the color and materiality of the text. I loved the precision and clarity of his images. I found the memories and relational components fascinating. But overall, for me it felt like none of it was real. Driving back from Chicago, I kept rethinking the imagery, and that so many of the poems were packed with memories of memories, or memories of memories of dreams. Every story, every action, was distanced from the speaker by either time or consciousness. So his use of food, sex, color are anchors that the reader thinks are concrete.
For example we begin with this red house, and at the onset we are told “the red house is burning slowly way, but not from fire.” (4) (I got all obsessed with the color red in Recluse, so I also got all obsessed with the house red) Why is the house red? I thought about the various symbolic reasoning for red, and the actual properties of red, like it is the color the eye can see from the greatest distance. I started thinking about the physicality and violence of the book and started thinking of red as blood, and I hated how obvious that might be, and tried to reject it as a symbol.
But than I thought, if the color of blood is really red, it is only red when it hits the external world. The poems now fell into not a story about a brown boy or a white man, but a story of what happens to the interior world when it is forced into the exterior. And in some strange way the interior is void of color. It is void of the concrete, the physical, the sexual. The interior is blankness that is filled with the violence and matter of the external world.
So even though the images were concrete and meant to be jarring, I felt them at a distance, at a delay, because they felt like recollections drawn from a blankness of the speakers mind. I felt like Wilson’s poem was mimicry of the broader social context, but within his speaker the larger society had no real meaning.