Hogan/Haints/DeadWomenTalking/LeftBehind

Today I read the next fifty pages of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. In this section of the novel, Hogan starts to develop the character of Stace Red Hawk, the federal agent, in more detail. It becomes clear that he has always felt some ambivalence about working for the government, but that ambivalence increases sharply once he comes out to Oklahoma to investigate the deaths. Like many of the other characters in the novel, he feels the pull of the old ways exerting their force on him as the situation around him worsens. Interestingly, Hogan also includes several white characters who become “race traitors” (to use Noel Ignatiev’s resonant phrase) by turning their backs on white privilege and living as Indians. At one point, Hogan references obliquely the 1890 massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee and this reminder of the Indian Wars and the genocide of Native Americans throws a new light upon the deaths being investigated in Mean Spirit. Specifically, if this novel is a murder mystery of a kind, what is the meaning of these murders in the context of the attempted murder of an entire race? How does the fact of genocide change the meaning of a Native American crime novel?

I also finished Arthur Redding’s Haints. In this closing section of the book, Redding points to a curious contradiction: contemporary American fiction is thronged with hauntings and ghosts and yet most Americans remain blind to, or in denial about, the gothic nature of our culture. Why? Redding’s answer is innocence, an innocence that Americans insist remains one of their defining qualities: “Innocence, which is always constructed in retrospect (innocence only manifests itself once it is lost, or threatened) is the very denial of haunting.” The project of Redding’s book could be thought of as a sustained attempt to make this denial impossible, but to what end? Although Redding resists reparative readings of some of the texts he analyzes, the closing words of his book resonate with suggestions of healing—both of the past and as part of an effort to imagine alternative futures: “the ghost is a figure by which we might imagine bridges across difference, but also recognize—and honor—that which is lost or sacrificed in any act of exchange or translation or history—that which is abandoned, left behind. The remainder, that haunts us, the ghosts of potential, of alternative.” It’s a beautiful vision, to be sure, but is it true to the darkness of the gothic, to the way it can be dedicated to opening rather than closing wounds?

I also began Brian Norman’s 2013 book Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature. The title is entirely descriptive in that Norman’s focus is on dead women who talk in American literary texts (Beloved, Angels in America, The Lovely Bones) and, increasingly, in popular culture as a whole (Desperate Housewives, Drop Dead Diva). According to Norman, “Dead women tend to talk in American literature when their experiences of death can address an issue of injustice that their communities might prematurely consign to the past.” Crucially, Norman distinguishes these dead women talking from either corpses or ghosts, partly because so much critical work has been done on these figures (and especially on the latter—see, for example, my recent posts on Arthur Redding’s Haints). The fact that these women are embodied, talking, and demanding, Norman argues, differentiates them from mute ghosts. What are they demanding? According to Norman, the answer is citizenship, and interestingly, just as with Arthur Redding, Norman sees Morrison’s character, Beloved, as emblematic: “Beloved inserts herself into the community in search of something else: citizenship.” This demand for citizenship, Norman argues, allows these dead women talking to address “concerns about political ventriloquism, inactive citizenship, posthumous legal rights, and racial blood memory.” In other words, there is a lot at stake.

I also watched Left Behind, Vic Sarin’s 2000 film based on the phenomenally popular series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The film tells the story of reporter Buck Williams, played by former Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron, who finds himself involved in a series of strange events that he comes to believe are the beginning of the Apocalypse, with the Rapture spiriting millions of believers to heaven while those who are ‘left behind’ witness the rise of the Antichrist in the form of Nicolae Carpathia, the head of the United Nations. This is one of those films that it’s impossible to be neutral about. If you’re an evangelical Christian, you may love it, and if you’re an atheist, as I am, it is hilariously bad. The acting is appallingly wooden, the production looks cheap and shoddy, and things move so slowly that one finds oneself wanting the Day of Judgment to arrive as soon as possible, just to relieve the tedium. Fun fact: Nicolas Cage is scheduled to star in a 2014 remake of Left Behind. If that’s not a sign of the impending apocalypse, I don’t know what is!