Getting Oriented

It's been a busy but good few days in Budapest! Both of my roommates (Mykhaylo and Ruchit) have moved in now, and we went on a couple of walks around the neighborhood together, trying to stock up on basic foods, cleaning products, and the like. After some searching, we found the nearest supermarket, which allowed us to buy all of the things we hadn't been able to locate in the smaller shops all around our apartment. We also located the school building where classes start tomorrow, as well as the Keleti train station, which is a big hub for Budapest's public transportation system as well as the departure point for many of the international trains. It's a beautiful building! I've been walking about four hours a day for the past three days or so, which has helped me get a lot more familiar with my immediate surroundings in Budapest. I've gone on a couple of nice walks through City Park, which has multiple castles as well as lots of nice grassy spaces and trees.

On Saturday at 13:30 we had a couple of practical orientation sessions, which were reasonably helpful and informative. The biggest benefit was that I got to meet some more of my classmates for the semester! I spent most of the socializing time we had catching up with my friend Travis and meeting his roommates, who all seem very nice. In the evening we went on a walking tour of Budapest that highlighted some of the beautiful structures on the Danube as well as some of the "ruin bars" that form the center of the party scene here. I'm not much for clubbing, but I did go to dinner at a nice place in that district and we had a good time.

Today (Sunday), I went on a long walk with Ruchit up to the Citadella, which is a pretty fortification on top of a big hill on the Buda side of the city. The whole hill is a park with lots of trails winding up and down, and the view at the top is spectacular! You can see the entire spread of the city beneath you. We also had opportunities to travel on the trolleys, buses, and subway lines, and the whole public transportation system is wonderful! The subways in particular are the best I've ever ridden on, and the stations are beautiful. Prices in general are very reasonable, which means that I'm able to eat out with friends frequently and use the public transportation system as much as I want. :)

I'm running out of time to make this post before I have to get ready for the start of classes tomorrow, so the rest of the post will be in bullet-point form. In the last few days these things happened:

-A person asked Travis and me whether or not it was true that U.S. students had to pay to attend state schools.

-I learned that the crows here actually have a lot of white on their bodies, with only the wings, head, and tail being totally black.

-I ran across a number of buskers as well as a capoeira group while wandering through City Park.

-I realized that smoking is MUCH more prevalent in European cities than it is in American ones. However, so are bakeries! So I guess it evens out.

First Day in Budapest

Greetings from Budapest! After spending all of Tuesday traveling, I've started to explore my new surroundings and get settled in my apartment for the semester. Travel turned out to be a bit more complicated than expected--I had three flights, and one of them got cancelled while the other two were each delayed by over an hour. I had to do a fair amount of running around to make all of the connections work out, but in the end things were fine and I touched down in Budapest at around 9:30 AM local time.

I didn't sleep on the flight over and was pretty jet-lagged when we arrived, but fortunately customs went very smoothly. I had some trouble finding the BSM representative I was supposed to meet at the airport, but along the way I met another student in my program, which was nice. We eventually met the BSM representative, who drove us through the city to our apartments. Budapest is beautiful! I didn't get a chance to take many pictures today, but the topography varies from Illinois-like flatness to rolling hills, and there are a lot of cool old buildings throughout the city. My apartment is located just a 5 minute walk from campus, and it's also very nice. Both of my roommates are arriving later than me, so I got the first pick of bedroom. All of the rooms are spacious, and in particular the ceilings are shockingly high--over 12 feet! I spent a good while today appreciating the fun echoes and unpacking my basic essentials.

As a sort of mini-orientation, my landlady (who is also the director of students for BSM) gave me a quick tour of the surrounding blocks. There are several grocery stores and an ATM in my immediate vicinity, along with a wide variety of restaurants, cafés, and bakeries. Even better, my apartment is just a block away from City Park, a huge green space in the middle of Budapest. There's a lot of construction happening near where I am right now, but I hope to explore the more peaceful areas of the park in the near future.

I spent most of the afternoon and evening in a jet-lagged stupor, going out to convert some money into forints (the Hungarian currency) and buy groceries but otherwise remaining in my apartment to relax and unpack. Around 9:00 PM my first roommate arrived, and we seem to get along pretty well. We both enjoy math, classical music, and video games, and tomorrow I'm going to take him on the mini-tour my landlady gave me earlier. Over the next few days we're hoping explore our surroundings more and to get our kitchen stocked with ingredients to cook meals with actual nutrients in them. That's about all for now--I'll close out this post with the few pictures I've taken so far:

The view from the plane somewhere near Philadelphia

My room in Budapest (no decorations up yet)

Forints are very pretty (1 forint is about a third of a cent so the bills have big numbers on them)

The ceilings in my apartment are absurdly high--this is as high as I can reach!

This is the view from my apartment window

The People's Cooperative Guerrilla Theater

When I was reading Angry Black White Boy, I had great difficulty in finding a character I could fully support. As we've discussed in class, Macon Detornay is an infuriating, self-contradicting yet self-aware mess, and I could never find it in myself to see him as any sort of hero. I found most of the other characters unlikeable as well, but there was one group that redeemed the entire book for me. The People's Cooperative Guerrilla Theatre, the "aggressive, community-based literacy program...that recruits randomly and [doesn't] take no for an answer" (86), was my favorite part of Angry Black White Boy, and I would like to spend this blog post discussing why I think they are integral to the message of the book.

Angry Black White Boy presents a wide variety of views towards race relations, satirizing almost all of them. Macon is constantly shown as hypocritical in his beliefs, making assumptions about the black people he meets even as he claims to be the "downest whiteboy who ever lived." Professor Alam's reverence of rap as an unassailable art form fares little better, and the run-of-the-mill white liberals are described as stupid, fake, and generally unable to comprehend the lives of those different from them. The People's Cooperative Guerrilla Theatre, however, defy all of these categories. They are a troupe of black thespians who lost the support of their community for their efforts to put on non-African-American plays like The Importance of Being Earnest. The PCGT is all about defying labels and refusing to be boxed into stereotypes like everyone else. Every other character in Angry Black White Boy is obsessed with the idea of a fundamental divide between black and white people. Macon feels that he needs to "be black" in order to fight against racism, but the PCGT understands that different races don't have to be diametrically opposed. They don't have to be white to put on A Midsummer Night's Dream. As one actor says, "Black man got a right to wear pink when he damn well pleases...I ain't just a raisin in the sun. I'm a tomato in the rain forest." (86)

Although the People's Cooperative Guerrilla Theatre is seen as a sort of joke by the Race Traitor Project, I believe that their actions have much more of an impact on race relations than anything like the Day of Apology does. Throughout the book, we see Macon attempting to do something revolutionary but ultimately reinforcing the same old stereotypes of black people and just making everything worse. When he starts robbing white people, his victims assume that he is black, and black taxi drivers suffer as a result. The Day of Apology turns into "just another race riot," and Macon's interviews alienate audiences as often as not. The PCGT, however, smashes these same stereotypes into smithereens. They confront strangers in shady parks at night, but only to perform a piece of classic drama with them. They don't reject their own heritage or try to "be white" as Macon tries to "be black," but still appreciate the value of other cultures. Even during the riot, when an abusive police officer is about to be torn apart by the angry crowd, the actors merely force him to play a humiliating role in their play. In every instance, the PCGT rejects simple classification in interesting and publicly visible ways, which does more to change an average person's mind about racism than any violence could. If you were stopped by a black man in a stocking cap one night, what would you assume? If he then asked you to play Oberon in their group's production of A Midsummer Nigh's Dream, how would your assumptions change? Afterwards, such an experience could permanently change your expectations walking through that park. The PCGT changes hearts in a way that Macon never can, and that is why they are my favorite aspect of the entire novel.

P.S. I did a little research, and guerrilla theatre is actually a real thing. It originated in the 1960s and usually involves flashmob-like performances with a social justice theme. For example, a group of actors might reenact atrocities of a war in order to protest it. This is pretty much what the PCGT is doing: protesting racist assumptions by rejecting them in the most flagrant way they can.

A Child's Voice

I know that a lot of blog posts have already been written about Jack and his narrative style, but I thought that I'd join the throng with a slightly different focus. Child narrators have become increasingly popular in the 21st century, both in "young adult" fiction featuring teen protagonists and more mature works like Room. In my opinion, most of these novels completely fail to depict a child's mind with any accuracy. The child narrators are either turned into annoyingly precocious "small adults" with limited vocabularies or imbeciles that have to be told not to eat their pets. It's easy to see why this sort of thing occurs. Most authors are adults, and as such they have forgotten how to think and act like a child. However, the dearth of good child narrators is often frustrating for me as a reader, and so it's especially satisfying to see a novel like Room execute the idea properly.

So, how does Room succeed where so many other novels fail? According to Emma Donoghue, she learned partially by watching her own five-year-old son Finn and thinking about how different Jack would be from him. However, we can also examine a firm psychological grounding for Jack's worldview in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. (Psychology disclaimer: as with the ideas of Freud I used a few posts ago, Piaget's theory is overly simplistic and frequently criticized or modified. However, I think it's good enough for this sort of superficial analysis. Feel free to comment with suggestions on how to make the model more accurate if you feel I'm missing something important.)

According to Piaget, five-year-olds are in the "preoperational" stage of cognitive development. This means that they are able to mentally represent the world around them through images and words, but unable to think in a precise and concrete manner. Properties such as the conservation of substances are not yet clear to preoperational children, and egocentricism is common. A preoperational child often becomes intensely curious about the world, and builds up a massive store of knowledge as a result, but is still uncertain about how to organize and use the knowledge. In short, the thought processes of a child Jack's age are intermediate between the barrage of emotion experienced by a baby and the logical reasoning characteristic of adults or teenagers.

Does Jack's narration reflect these sorts of thought processes? I think so. Jack has absorbed much information about Outside from TV and Ma's answers to his incessant questions. However, he has difficulty piecing everything together into a coherent worldview, and particularly struggles to understand other people's viewpoints. These difficulties are entirely reasonable, given that Jack has no interaction with humans other than Ma, which makes it hard to empathize with the people he doesn't even see as real at first, but it also reflects the stage of his cognitive development. He also has a tendancy to focus on one aspect of an object to the exclusion of all else, which is a hallmark of the preoperational stage. For example, he has a powerful association between vomit, a bad smell, and death due to his experiences in the Great Escape. When he sees vomit a couple of times later in the book, he only associates it with death and the smell, rather than noticing the color or anything else about it. The mental connections he forms are strong, so strong that he sees a few traits of most objects to the exclusion of all else. This is a big part of what makes his narration so realistically child-like: he constantly references his earlier thoughts, linking things together very differently from any adult, and I think that's key to what makes this novel so compelling.

A Comparison of Heroes

At this point in the semester, I feel that we have read enough novels following the hero's journey described by Joseph Campbell that we may begin to divide them into sub-categories. Two such categories present themselves to me, with two of the books we've covered thus far in each. One, the "epic" hero's journey, describes The Odyssey and A Lesson Before Dying, and the other, the "personal" hero's journey, can be seen in the plots of As I Lay Dying and Room. Comparing and contrasting these two sub-categories, I believe, will help us better understand both genres as they relate to the overarching paradigm described by The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Let's start with the epic hero's journey. These stories are told from an outsider's perspective, and as a result individual introspection is downplayed in favor of public actions and deeds. The outcome is known from the start, as an epic hero's journey is meant to be told and retold through generations. This narrative arc is most obvious in The Odyssey: the epic was literally sung by bards for hundreds of years, and the first two or three stanzas explain the majority of the plot, taking away all suspense for the audience. Although A Lesson Before Dying doesn't fit this mold quite so cleanly, the hero (Jefferson in my opinion, although some may disagree) only narrates one chapter of the novel, and his execution is set from the very first chapter. Jefferson denies his humanity until the end of the book, and the focus is more on his external reactions to Grant's lessons than his private internal monologue.

The personal hero's journey is very different, In these stories, the hero is also the narrator, and the journey is more about their thoughts than their actions. The outcome is less well known, as most if not all heroism takes place in the hero's mind without leaving any sort of legacy behind. As I Lay Dying is a perfect example of this, as the Bundrens are only remembered as "queer" or worse by the various townsfolk they encounter, and as a result developments such as Darl's burning of the barn are not broadcasted to the audience at the beginning (there's no framework of other people retelling the story). As I Lay Dying also focuses on how each member of the family copes with their grief over Addie's death rather than the details of her burial, emphasizing the internal aspects of their journey. Room, like A Lesson Before Dying, is less clear-cut, but the most important parts of Jack's journey are more mental than physical. Although he appears to exhibit some classic heroism in his execution of Plan B, he has far more difficulty communicating with Officer Oh than getting out of Rug. Furthermore, his physical heroism occurs less than halfway through Room, and the emerging struggle in the chapter "After" is a purely mental one. Jack has never been outside Room before, and learning to cope with the fastness of the world is a huge obstacle to his personal growth. I expect that his Supreme Ordeal has yet to come, and when it finally arrives it will revolve around his psychological development rather than anything more external.

I'm curious to hear what all of you think about this hypothesis. Should A Lesson Before Dying be considered an epic hero's journey, or a personal one? How about Room? Do the sub-categories need to reworked, or should they be considered as a spectrum instead? Where do the other hero's journeys you enjoy fit in to this model?

Jefferson's Philosophical Progression

In A Lesson Before Dying, we've talked a lot about what it even means for Jefferson to become a man. Some of the characters are taking bets on whether or not Grant will succeed in his teaching, but his goal is a very abstract and subtle one to grasp. As I read, it seems like Jefferson is slowly progressing through various philosophical systems until he finally approaches one in which his actions can have the wide-ranging effects that Grant, Tante Lou, and Miss Emma hope for from him.

During Grant's first few visits to the cell, Jefferson is practically in a state of shock. He barely speaks, and when he does talk it's only to say that "it don't matter" and that he's "nothing but an old hog." He is described several times as displaying a wide, painful grin in order to hide his feelings from any and all visitors. In short, he appears to be existing in anomie, a state where an individual is not provided with moral guidance from society due to a lack of connections with their community. Jefferson is cut off from the rest of the world as he attempts to come to terms with his own impending death, and in response he simply shuts down and rebels against anything and everything he can. He tries to hurt his visitors with his cynicism and recalcitrance, and frequently refuses to eat or speak because he sees everything as meaningless.

Once his execution date is actually set, Jefferson's attitude changes. He is still unready to grapple with what it means to die, so he begins to seek distractions by indulging in hedonism (or what passes for hedonism in a jail cell). Jefferson asks for his last meal to be an entire gallon of ice cream and spends entire days listening to the radio Grant gets for him, ignoring Miss Emma when she tries to talk to him. At this point, he's still attempting to deny his inevitable death, but his awareness of the outside world is beginning to grow.

A couple of weeks later, Jefferson is able to really listen to and comprehend Grant's speeches about heroism and the broader impact of his own actions. He understands that his actions will have no impact on his own fate, but realizes that he can still "break the cycle" and become a hero in his community. Although he still acts in some slightly un-heroic ways (asking what anybody has ever done for him, for example), Jefferson seems to be actively grappling with his own death and potential legacy, searching for the strength to confront his execution with the dignity that everyone is requesting from him. However, he still doesn't seem to have the answers he's looking for, and I expect that this final stage of development will be the subject of the last three chapters of the novel.

The Trio As Hero

During our class discussion of As I Lay Dying, we frequently wondered whether any of the characters could be considered the hero of the story. As I recall, there was no real consensus. Anse is portrayed as weak, stupid, and emotionally manipulative, which makes me hesitant to deem him a hero even though he "wins" in the end. Darl is the primary narrator for most of the book, but his own opinions are almost never displayed, which makes him a rather empty hero. Cash and Jewel act in a very heroic manner during the river-crossing and barn-burning scenes, but they function more as scenery than fleshed-out characters for the rest of the story. Addie is dead, and Dewey Dell and Vardaman (the last members of the Bundren clan) seem too confused and childlike to be proper heroes. However, the Bundren journey does appear to follow the heroic arc described by Joseph Campbell (well, after a fashion...), from the refusal of the call to adventure to the supreme ordeal and final resolution. What hero, then, is completing the hero's journey?

I argue that As I Lay Dying does in fact contain a more satisfying hero, if we're willing to consider the three eldest Bundren siblings together. This isn't quite as strange as it may seem. According to Sigmund Freud, all psyches are comprised of three elements: the Id, Ego, and Superego. (Yes, I know that many of Freud's ideas were crazy and have been discredited, but this stuff is everywhere in popular culture and so I believe that the analysis is still valid. Just bear with me.) The Id represents one's basic instincts and raw emotions: the unconscious and disorganized drives for life and death. The Superego represents one's conscience and desire to conform to society's ideas of morality, and the Ego is a sort of middleman that comprimises between the contradictory demands of the Id and Superego. Although these elements are supposed to be pieces of an individual mind, they are often used to create characters in books and television shows. For example, in Star Trek, Doctor McCoy represents the Id with his angry outbursts, Spock represents the Superego with his emotionless logic, and Kirk mediates between them as the Ego. In the Harry Potter books, Ron, Hermione, and Harry fill the same roles respectively.

In As I Lay Dying, I think that the eldest Bundrens are also a Freudian trio. Cash is incredibly stoic and focused on doing things the "right" way regardless of the cost. After his leg is set with cement, he soundlessly faints from the pain after repeatedly saying "it don't bother none." This sort of emotionless calmness is characteristic of the Superego. Jewel is almost the exact opposite of this. His catchphrase is "Goddamnit" and he spends most of his time yelling angrily about either Addie or his horse. This wild, unconstrained emotion is very akin to that displayed by the Id. Although we never get much of a sense of personality from Darl, we do see that he is able to relate to both Jewel and Cash. He's almost like the ultimate Ego: he can see into everyone's heads and mediates between them with his clairvoyant narration. If we look at them as three parts of a whole, perhaps they could be the hero of the narrative. Jewel and Cash's heroic acts complement each other, and Darl provides them with a significant narrative voice. Notably, Cash becomes significantly more talkative after Darl breaks down at the end of the book, almost as if there were some sort of connection between their abilities to narrate the chapters. Although the Freudian trio is broken up with Darl's arrest, the conclusion could still seem heroic in the sense of an epic tragedy. Cash/Darl/Jewel was progressing along a heroic path, until all three aspects of them were damaged by Anse's selfish desire to operate without any sort of assistance. This is not unlike, say, Othello, who was heroic until Iago's evil tricked him into killing his own wife. What do all of you think about this? Is any individual character a hero in this story, do we need to look at some combination of them, or is there no hero at all?