It's Been a While, and Still Some Things Don't Ever Change

Long time, no see. America is drowning from a recent tea party (btw, totally symbolically boycotted tea on Election Day and got all of my caffeine from coffee, despite my preference for tea!), and in the world of fictional narratives, maybe nothing's different. Despite national turmoil.

Right now, I'm teaching a section of freshman comp in the Rutgers-Newark Writing Program, and we're moving into a unit on heroes. We've started with part of the introduction to Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which Campbell argues for what he calls the "monomyth": It's very Jungian, in that Campbell posits that there are archetypes that recur throughout cultures. And we've basically been dealing with the same kinds of stories. It's the context that's different, the names and faces and particular quirks of characters that are unique.

That seems to be a popular opinion in what I've been reading as of late. In A Short Story Writer's Companion, Tom Bailey argues that it's characters that make stories different and meaningful. This is not unlike Campbell's monomyth, which has been appropriated by modern tale tellers like George Lucas.

How'd I get on this tangent? The most recent update to Kate Beaton's webcomic Hark! A Vagrant! Beaton lampoons Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in a series of strips that place Friday as the more intelligent, sophisticated of the two. The purpose behind Beaton's comic is to mock a recurring film archetype that she read about in the Bright Lights Film Journal, in which Frederick Zackel argues that we've been seeing Robinson Crusoe's master-slave/white-black dialectic played for years. And it's everywhere. Yet we've been overlooking it in to address other concerns. Zackel writes,

For instance, we all remember the brouhaha about whether the 1993 movie Rising Sun actually represented Japan-bashing. Yet none of us seemed to have noticed that the two male leads in that movie, Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, were busy reenacting (or maybe "perpetuating" is a better word) one of the oldest fictional partnerships in our Western culture.

Englishman Connery played the part of Robinson Crusoe, while Snipes, a descendant of slaves, played his Man Friday. Not that those were their characters' names, of course. Not that either man realized what they were reenacting, either. Nor can either man be blamed for his part in perpetuating the myth.

First of all, I take offense to his referring to Sean Connery as an "Englishman," but his point is that Connery's and Snipes's characters are reenacting/perpetuating (his words) the Robinson Crusoe/Friday model. And it's not just Rising Sun; other movies, like Men in Black, have the older, wiser, patriarchal white male figure overseeing, guiding, and correcting a black counterpart (Tommy Lee Jones with Will Smith, for instance).

But seriously--Sean Connery is a Scot. Mr. Zackel is perpetuating his own stereotype--that Scots are happily English. But just as the rise of the Scottish parliament speaks towards Scotland's move toward freedom, so too should we try to craft into our fictions a move away from the Crusoe/Friday paradigm (first African American president, anybody?). Otherwise, nothing will ever change.

Patriotism, Hockey, and Canuckland Stereotypes?

Wow...this one's really delayed, apologies for that, but my mind's been a half dozen different places today. So now for something completely different!

Hockey. (Go Penguins. Antarctic fowl should win every Stanley Cup.)

Does it make me a bit of a traitor that I was hoping the Canadians would win the ice hockey finals? (C'mon, on the men's team, they had Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins! And how could I cheer against penguins?)

Or does it just make me unpatriotic? What does it mean to be patriotic?

These are questions intimately tied to the Olympics; basically, we want to prove we're better than everybody, smash the competition, and let out political tensions and anger in a global stadium that doesn't result in violent bloodshed. (Wait, and hockey is an Olympic sport?) So it's about national pride: Consider Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, who pushed for Russian Olympic officials to resign after Russia had a disappointing finish in the medals race. So there's Russia--we have to beat everybody--or there's the way that Kate Beaton pumped up Canada in one of her recent sketches--wowee, we actually managed to beat the Americans! (Note, you have to scroll down through a few about Queen Victoria and Top Gun, first.)

(Actually, look at Kate Beaton's most recent comic, as well: Canadian Stereotype Comics.)

I've always had a difficult time getting into the Olympics, precisely because I'm not very patriotic. America may be a great country to live in, but I find obeisance to a certain ideological mindset to be incredibly limiting, incredibly diminishing. Also, it's an incredibly polarizing force. Often, patriotism today doesn't lead to the extremes it does in Yukio Mishima's fantastic (yet gory and shudder-inducing) short story "Patriotism," in which a Japanese Lieutenant and his wife commit seppuku because of the lieutenant's belief in a particular cause.

But the attitude toward the Olympics this year in Canada caused a stir; Canadians--as Kate Beaton points out humourously--are often known for being a passive, inviting people, and yet their entire Olympic campaign was to win big on home soil. And this was contentious because the Canadian public doesn't much care for arrogance and also has had enough problems with ambitious athletes falling short of their intended goals (kayakers who claim to be able to win the gold and then finish next-to-last will remain nameless).

So the point here: I feel that patriotism is one of those little myths, and that nobody's better than anybody else. If one takes the Christian perspective of "God bless America," then...why just America? Why not everybody else in the world? Okay, that's a little tautological, but you get the point--the Olympics ought to be, first and foremost, good fun. But that's not going to prevent them from causing political problems and tensions--both home and abroad, the way that Medvedev's desire to sack officials and Canada's PR nightmare both indicate.

And final note on the Olympics: I myself am quite put out that the Jamaicans didn't have a qualifying bobsled team this year.

Cool runnings!