Displaced Information


DISPLACED INFORMATION



Zecker, Robert.  Metropolis: The American City in Popular Culture.  Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008.





On page 117, Zecker writes:

"The rats echo the grim opening of Richard Wright's novel of Chicago ghetto life, Native Son, in which Bigger Thomas battles to keep the vermin from his child's crib."

It is an accident, one hopes, that led Zecker to confuse Bigger Thomas with Joe, "a frustrated ghetto father…played by James Earl Jones" in an episode of East Side/West Side, an early 1960s television series.  The episode was titled "Who Do You Kill?"  The title is generic.  It might have been used for a 1960s essay on black anger.  Joe's child is attacked by rats and dies in a hospital.  Enraged, Joe acquires a weapon and roams the streets of New York, seeking a person upon whom " to exact vengeance" (118). Zecker's point is that "Joe suffers and endures; unlike Bigger Thomas, he does not kill" (118).

We have a remarkable displacement of information.  Bigger kills the rat to protect his mother, his sister, and his brother.  He is not a father.  He has not fathered a child.  Wright implies that Bigger Thomas is the man of the house,  a surrogate for his father who had been killed in Mississippi.  As we learn in the first section of Native Son, Bigger is capable of protecting his family in a limited fashion, but he is not psychologically predisposed to assume the full burden of being a father.  He fears --even resents --one role that being a black male who is coming of age in a racist society might put upon his shoulders.  Wright opened  the  Pandora's box of race in the 1930s USA by indirectly manipulating a reader to recognize the symbolic function of the rat.

Zecker committed a slip of memory in writing about a television episode which focused on the frustration of a black male in the city.  The slip of memory, a not untypical instance of failure to copyedit one's text,  does set us to thinking productively.  It serves as a warning that scholars must fact-check and copyedit to avoid displacing information.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            June 9, 2019

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog2.14.2021

  Blog2.14.2021   The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. Isaiah 11:6   Humble yourself and follow the lead of the child, but first teach the child to read.   Reading narratives to the child while it is still in the womb is a project for preparing children who will be born in the 21st century for what they are condemned to expect:   the heavy burdens of history as narrative prior to history's becoming equipment for daily life, instruments for probing inevitable uncertainties.   Always discuss with the child the centrality of narrative in the state of being human.   If this sounds to you like dream-work and   platitude your hearing is accurate. As what we once knew as American democracy slowly becomes a fascist desert, we must arm ourselves and our children to do battle with inconvenient truth. ...
Read more

a house ponders

A   House Ponders   "Death be not proud."   The formality of it, the style of bullets dancing in Ballroom A to warm a winter afternoon. Goodness disappears.   They told us this is the way a world turns, told us to define "acrimonious." Young and eager to learn, we did. We were loyal citizens.   They told us that a random day might be cerulean or grass green or beet purple. We denied our ears and put faith in our eyes.   On what summer door are sixty-five fragile retirements posted? When we come in old age to knowledge, we trust ourselves more to believe less of what the turning world creates.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            November 18, 2021    
Read more

violence and male narratives

VIOLENCE AND AMERICAN MALE LIFE HISTORIES Our constructions of "reality" convince us, a bit too easily, that violence is an essential feature in the lives of American males and as "natural" as is the history of violence in the founding of our nation.   The same constructions sponsor the myth of gender, allowing us to contend that women are naturally less violent than men.   We are socialized in the United States   to be gullible, to be worshippers of under-examined truths and full-blown lies.   This seems to be our fate, our destiny, our normalizing of cowshit and bullshit . We can imagine relatively violence-free   male visions, as did Clifton Taulbert in Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored   and subsequent installments of his autobiography, but the aesthetics of hubris retard our doing so.   The American majority   has an unholy, acquired taste for the sounds of explosions and gun-fire   and the lurid patterns of blood leaking...
Read more