Kermit O — Community Researcher & Educator

Tag: SFF

  • Beauty and Self-Hatred: A Reading of Sherman Alexie’s Flight

    In the novel Flight, by Sherman Alexie, there is a visible current in which the author establishes the white person aesthetic as “beautiful”, in contrast to the “ugliness” of Indians.  As it is common in American (U.S.) society for whiteness and white people to be held aloft as the standard by which all else be judged, this current became clear to me almost immediately.

    The main character is a half-Indian, half-white teenager named “Zits” – a nickname he adopts for the fact that he has a severe case of acne.  The character defines himself by his worst physical quality, but also his “Indian-ness”, in spite of his blended heritage.  That Indian-ness and ugliness should be mutually inclusive, at least in the narrator’s mind, is established early in the story.

    I’m ashamed of … being tall.  And skinny.  And ugly.  I’m ashamed that I look like a bag of zits tied to a broomstick.  […]I wonder if being Indian causes acne.  […] I’ve inherited his [my father’s] ruined complexion and black hair and big Indian nose. (p. 4)

    This self-identification with Indian-ness and ugliness is juxtaposed against the other side of his heritage, which he regards as beautiful.  We are first exposed to the “white is beautiful” theme as Zits speaks of his mother and mourns the fact that he did not inherit her qualities.

    She was a white woman.  Irish I guess.  I have a photograph of her, too, and she is gorgeous.  My eyes are green, like hers, but I’m not pretty.  I wish I looked more like her. (p. 5)

    Throughout the story, Zits has the unusual opportunity to occupy the bodies and circumstances of other people throughout time.  The pretext for this “time-jumping” is that he experience the universality of human brutality, but the equally ubiquitous – if only less common – instances of compassion.  But there is a subtext tucked within this main premise wherein the character also has the opportunity to be “beautiful” by inhabiting the bodies of white people.  The first is Hank Storm, an FBI agent who serves on the front lines of some sort of shadow war against Native Americans.  When Zits first notices his new body, he thinks:

    And so they had to take my zitty teenage Indian mug and replace it with a handsome white guy’s face.  Yes, I am looking at a very handsome white guy in the mirror.  His hair is blond.  His eyes are blue.  His skin is clear. (p. 40)

    Here we notice two things: first, that Hank Storm has blond hair and blue eyes, two qualities that are quintessentially “white”, those regarded as pristinely beautiful for the fact that they belong almost exclusively to white people.  Second, the man has clear skin, another way the narrator notices how different – that is, how beautiful – this white man is compared to himself.

    Later, while Zits is still occupying Hank’s body, we meet his wife, who again is clearly described as a white woman, and also the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

    I can’t believe this woman is my wife.  She is beautiful.  Black hair, blue eyes, pale skin.  She is maybe the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in person. (p. 58)

    For their prevalence, it is my impression that Alexie is drawing intentional parallels between white and beautiful, Indian and ugly.  Also for the emphasis he places on features that are unmistakably white versus those that could also belong to people of a different race.

    During another time-jump he inhabits a pilot named Jimmy – who also has pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes.  Jimmy has relationships with two women, one of which is his wife, and the other a younger acquaintance.  Zits describes the mistress, Helda, as:

    Red hair, green eyes.  And she’s pretty.  Very short and very curvy.  Cheerleader curvy. (p. 115)

    There is a connection drawn between Helda and Zits’ own mother, who had earlier was identified as white – specifically, Irish.  Helda’s features automatically speak to her whiteness even were the connection to the mother not made, as red hair and green eyes are second only to blond and blue in identifying a person as white.  Both are described as beautiful.  In contrast, Zits describes the wife – Linda – as:

    …older, gray-haired, a little bit pretty and a little bit chubby.  Her brown eyes are huge. (p. 117)

    Linda’s race is left ambiguous, although for Jimmy and Helda’s ultra-whiteness, the reader might assume that she is white as well.  I get the sense that the ambiguity is intentional, because Alexie does not miss any other opportunity to identify a character by ethnicity.  Linda has features that could belong to any other race or ethnicity, and perhaps for those features she can only qualify as “a little bit pretty”, not for the overwhelming beauty of Helda or the other quintessentially white women in the book.

    One of the last instances of tethering beauty to whiteness comes towards the end of the book, as Zits finds himself back in his own body, just seconds before he made the lethal choice that set the book in motion – to shoot and kill random strangers in a bank, and to be shot in the head himself.  Visiting this choice a second time, he takes a particular interest in a woman and her son.

    He is maybe five years old.  He has blue eyes and blond hair.  He’s wearing good shoes. A  jean jacket.  Khaki pants.  Blue shirt.  He’s beautiful.  A beautiful little man. (p. 158)

    Again the emphasis on blond hair and blue eyes.  Alexie even verges on hyperbole by saying beautiful twice, and by making the child’s clothes blond and blue – Khaki pants, blue shirt – as if to punctuate the statement that white is beautiful.  If there is beauty in compassion and ugliness in brutality, then perhaps this child is also the punctuation on Zits’ decision not to carry out mass murder a second time.

    Throughout the text, Zits makes it clear that he regards himself as ugly, in contrast to the beauty of the many white people he encounters.  When in his final time-jump he occupies the body of an Indian man – and not just any Indian man, but his own father – we are again presented with an unappealing physical image.

    Not only do we know him to possess the features that Zits regards as ugly in himself, but Alexie adds an extra veneer, of dirtiness – the man is homeless, drunk, and has vomited on himself – and bloodiness – he is ill, vomiting up blood.  He meets a couple of strangers, a couple who are, at least ostensibly, of the white liberal ilk that in spite of the most benign of intentions (they call the homeless man an ambulance and the woman even goes so far as to say he is important to them) try to smother all the nuance of racial and social dynamics beneath a pretext of compassion.  Alexie shows us the kind of rage the white liberal attitude can provoke, but instead of recognizing it as justifiable, he paints this man as ugly both inside and out, the point being not merely to cast Indian as ugly and white as beautiful, but to identify this current as one of self-hatred.

    Self-hatred is explicitly named on page 137 – “Maybe I can defeat her with my rage and self-hatred”, as an answer to a white woman’s display of compassion towards him – and again on page 156 as Zits’ father affirms his own father’s low opinion of him, repeating “I ain’t worth shit!” over and over again.  It is the same self-hatred and rage that underlies Zits’ predisposition at the start of the book, and ultimately his violent actions that set the story in motion.

    But in the end, Zits makes the “beautiful” choice and rather than killing the people at the bank, turns himself in to the police.  He is in turn offered a chance at redemption, but more importantly a chance to love and find beauty in himself.

    This shift in self-image and potential – a word Zits sneers at early in the story – is punctuated by his new foster mother telling him that he is handsome, and showing him how to remove the acne from his face.  The story ends with Zits insisting that his foster mother refer to him as Michael, his real name.

    Where I am left wondering, however, is in how redemption and self-love are still necessarily facilitated by white people and via whiteness.  It is the white cop, his white brother, and white sister-in-law, who foster Zits and who offer him not only to wash away those physical traits that he identifies as ugly, but also to participate in the quintessentially “American” – that is, white – experience, living with them and going to baseball games.

    A psychologist early in the book tells Zits that he’s “never learned how to be a fully realized human being”, something she connects to mainstream U.S. (white) culture, things like wearing a tie and having newly shined shoes.  Zits, while strongly identifying as Indian, rejects these norms, but at the end of the story seems to embrace them.  It is interesting too how he distinguishes between Indian-ness and American-ness, the latter interchangeable with whiteness for all that it seems to be inclusive of people of color in the United States – which is to say, not very inclusive at all.

    A baseball game!  Jesus, how American.  Next thing you know, Dave and the firefighter and I will be playing catch in the backyard.  (p. 176)

    In Flight, Alexie seems to be asking whether or not self-hatred can be neutralized through assimilation – that is, can Zits’s hatred of his own Indian-ness be dissolved into a claiming of his whiteness?  Indeed whiteness itself is a product of assimilation, with Irish, Italian, German, and other European ethnicities blending within the “melting pot” to create a new racial paradigm.  Alexie clearly recognizes the construct of whiteness – an institution that transcends individuals – identifying it explicitly when Zits occupies the body of his own father:

    Jesus, I wonder if this homeless guy understands the difference between white and whiteness.  And then I wonder if I should be so condescending, considering I am this homeless guy. (p. 136)

    Yet in spite of this clear acknowledgement of whiteness, at the same time Zits becomes Michael he embraces his white foster family and their “American” cultural norms.  It seems Zits is on the verge of the same assimilation.  Should, then, his father have accepted the compassion of the white liberals rather than demanding their respect?

    Could there be salvation or redemption in assimilation?  Just who is redeemed in such a situation – the person of color who by default is excluded from the mainstream American experience only to be invited in by the sheer grace of white people?  Or is the redemption for the white people themselves who seek to alleviate the guilt they possess for how their own institutionalized supremacy has caused such exclusion?  Alexie may be hinting at this question, if not its answer, on page 177:

    [Officer Dave] is trying to save me.  And he’s smiling about it.  I guess that’s okay.  Maybe I can save him, too. (p. 177)

    Is Alexie’s message, then, a more saccharine one, that through some sort of joint effort people of pallor and people of color can come together and redeem each other or their collective society?  I sincerely doubt it. I think Mr. Alexie, known for his wit and subversiveness, is taking aim and laughing at the idea.

  • Literary Alchemy and the Power of the Five Senses

    The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, a speculative fiction novel by Michael Scott, is a solid example of where the reader’s senses are evoked to great effect.  In the excerpt below, Scott manages to appeal directly to three of the five, and implies a fourth.  Exposition in fiction would go nowhere without visual descriptions, so it is a given that every author will use them, sometimes even to the point of excess.

    Robert Jordan comes to mind with his penchant for describing blades of grass; the Wheel of Time turns slowly indeed.  Unlike the more gassy storytellers, however, Scott’s prose is lean and precise, as he manages to stuff plenty of visual details into a small space simply by using the right words.

    She was startled when the woman’s bright green eyes snapped wide open and she whirled around to look across the street…just as all the little square windows of the bookshop abruptly developed cracks and two simply exploded into dust.  Wisps of green and yellow smoke curled out into the street and the air was filled the stench of rotten eggs.  Sophie caught another smell too, the sharper, cleaner smell of peppermint. (p. 17)

    Consider the use of snapped in the first sentence – intended to demonstrate the speed and thus the urgency in her expression.  Yet snapped is also a sonic word, and while we can assume that the woman’s eyes did not make such a sound, it serves well as a beat, a moment preceding the rise of tension in the story.  She then proceeds to whirl around, again a word that creates a visual, but also a sound, and even a feeling – the implied whipping of her coat as she turns, and the gust of air kicked up by the sudden movement.

    We can also clearly picture the wisps of smoke, and not just any smoke, but green and yellow, which in the story are the colors of two opposing forces.  We know from this description that an unseen battle is taking place behind those windows.  So much detail, both explicit and implicit, simply by using the right visual cues.

    But it would hardly be enough for an author to use visual descriptions and rely on mere implications of the other senses.  It is also interesting to consider that a book heavy on visual language could be translated into Braille for a reader born blind, and for whom such words have much less, if any significance.  Yet so many writers rely almost exclusively on visuals, to the expense of the other senses.

    Sound is nearly as common, from the more obvious explanations of characters’ tones or inflections, to the more visceral onomatopoeia – bones crunching or innards squishing. Words like explosion are both visual and aural, the latter implied due to it involving windows, which allows us to hear glass shattering with our mind’s ear, even though it is not actually described.  Before the explosion, we see the cracks forming, but again, a word like cracks serves a dual purpose.  Implied is the straining and popping we associate with glass cracking as we recall similar events from memory.  Scott could have easily spent another few sentences describing the sounds, but in this case it is unnecessary for all that is implied through our own experience.

    Touch is probably a close third in a writer’s repertoire, as they describe the feeling of the icy winds biting exposed skin, or the sharp penetration of a blade through flesh for the person on either side of the knife.  Scott makes ample use of touch throughout the novel though not in the above paragraph.

    It seems especially rare, however, that an author will tap into the reader’s sense of smell or taste, except for under the most trite of circumstances like breathing in the wind off of the ocean or sampling the greasy starches and sugars of a doughnut for breakfast.  Such things tend to be inconsequential, arbitrary details the author throws in just for the sake of doing so.

    But for Scott in The Alchemyst, the sense of smell is evoked for significant reasons.  In the above paragraph, he describes the odors of rotten eggs and peppermint.  Much like the colors green and yellow, these two smells are also associated with one of the protagonists and one of the antagonists.  Each of the two characters is a sort of magician – an alchemist and a necromancer to be specific – and when they invoke their powers, these odors of rotten eggs or peppermint fill the air.

    Even if we had not already been told, we might automatically associate yellow – a color of caution or sickness – with the rotten egg smell, and the green – of leaves, and indeed mint – with peppermint.  And we’d be correct.  It is interesting to think of how a different juxtaposition of the same elements might disrupt a story’s believability.  Would it cause a sort of dissonance if, in fact, the yellow smoke carried the peppermint odor?  I think so.  Or what if the “good guy” was the one who used powers that reeked of rotten eggs?  He might make for a rather unlikeable sort, certainly not the person you want on your side in a fight for the sake of the world.

    What The Alchemyst in general, and the above paragraph in particular demonstrate, is how the reader’s senses can be tapped not just for the sake of creating a scene, but also infusing it with nuance, with meaning.  Within the context of the novel, these details, which might be applied to say, a cooking accident in another book, convey so much more than just how the characters physically experience the world.  They express all the tension and urgency of high stakes conflict and even combat, all without mentioning any of those things explicitly.  Evoking the senses is one of the most powerful tools that an author can use, one that can give spare prose like Scott’s the same impact as that of a more flowery writer.