academia v. neelofer

Distaste towards suburbia, qualified by houses with white picket fences and perfectly manicured families, is central to the core of the beat generation so it comes as no surprise that Gregory Corso's "Marriage" and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "In Goya's Greatest Scenes" brutally pick apart the superficially pristine world of suburban America. Corso's "Marriage" begins by posing the questions, "Should I get married?/Should I be Good?" (Corso 179.1-2) as if being married has a direct correlation to being good; being good, of course, means living the American dream of a house with the white picket fence, two car garage, 2.5 children and a dog. However, within the first stanza, Corso quickly reveals his true, 'alternative' self: "Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries," (Corso 179.3) erecting the foundational beliefs of the beat generation, beliefs that the social norm of the 1950s considered to be radical, disruptive, and counterproductive to the growth of an upwardly mobile society.

Corso's nonchalance towards the '50s life style grows as he mentally flips through the different kinds of women from the stereotypical straight laced Stepford wife to "a beautiful sophisticated woman/tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves" (Corso 181.90-1). Even being married to a person and a setting diametrically opposite of the dominant American culture of the time, marriage to a high society woman in the cultural mecca of the world: New York, is a "pleasant prison dream" (Corso 181.95). It conveys that Corso's distaste lies within the institution of marriage, not a specific type of girl. Marriage is the gateway to a suburban lifestyle and Corso is clearly not a fan. The poem closes at the epitome of Corso's blasé attitude, "Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,/all alone in my furnished room with pee stains on my underwear/and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!/Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible then marriage would be possible --" (182.103-6).

Similarly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, contemporary of Corso, bluntly exploits the underlying truths of the '50s culture, comparing the culture to "the moment when they [the people of the world] first attained the title of 'suffering humanity'" (Ferlinghetti 249.3-5). The rampant rise of suburbia in America parallelled the growing security Americans felt with their government. With looming threats of nuclear bombs, people found hiding underneath desks an acceptable shelter. If not for the counterculture of the beat generation, the revolution of the 1960s would not have become a reality.

The human suffering Goya depicts in his paintings is timeless much like the vicious, self-feeding cycle of injustice within the human race. Never has it been as terrible as it is in times of ignorance and apathy. Recent examples of human suffering at its worse include 1950s suburbia and suburbia today, which has been dubbed "middle America" by the Left. The "maimed citizens in painted cards" (Ferlinghetti 250.33-4) with "strange license plates and engines that devour America" (Ferlinghetti 250.35-7) are still travelling the "freeways fifty lanes wide" (Ferlinghetti 250.28) "illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness" (Ferlinghetti 250.31).

Americans today are exponentially better imitations of their '50s predecessors because not only have they perfected the art of apathy but with such arrogance that they are rapidly alienating any allies they might once have had. Unquestioning of the world around them and the press releases they hear on the corporate media puppets blaring through their 30 inch plasma screens, Americans have convinced those being oppressed that they, the oppressed, must incorporate into their lives such as the institution of marriage. Unless you are bound by religion or other similar beliefs, there is no reason for a person to get married beyond benefiting from the legalities of the system (read: tax breaks). If two people genuinely love each other enough to spend the rest of their lives, why does their race, religion, or sexuality matter? Why is there a massive gay rights movement to legalise marriage? Why is there a counter movement for a constitutional ban? Marriage is not an ethical issue unless religion is dragged into it; I distinctly recall our founding fathers creating stipulations to bar the influence of church upon the state. Government should institute civil unions for every kind of marriage; if one's religious beliefs dictate for a marriage, then those people are welcome to have the ceremony. The government should not be forced to recognise the ceremony as a binding contract like civil unions would be.

Recommended reading: Gregory Corso's "Marriage" and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "In Goya's greatest scenes"

Before this class, I had never heard of the term shinola. When explained that it was used to refer to something good, I found myself thinking wow, that’s a really shitty name to describe something that is to be considered high-class. Being the good little English major that I am, I got right down to doing extensive research, namely directing my Firefox browser to dictionary.com, which promptly confirmed my instinctual feelings about the word. The site stated that shinola was a euphemism for the word “shit.” Next in the web address bar was the “Online Etymology Dictionary” (http://www.etymonline.com/), which led to a somewhat conflicting explanation but also a clarifying resolution.

Shinola, once commonly known as a brand of shoe polish, made its debut circa 1930 in regards to the working definition for our purposes. Prior to that, it was popularized as a “negative particle” among Milton and Anglo-Saxon poets. Furthermore, the etymology dictionary refers to perhaps what can be called the second coming of this word during the late 1980s, partly in thanks to the cult classic Wayne’s World television sketches on Saturday Night Live. Also, we have Orwell, who constructed the double negative form of the word. A conglomeration of these three instances leads to a rather watered down mixture of shit and shinola.

All three instances of shinola defining moments in our history rate different levels on the “shit from shinola” scale. First up, we have the Milton/Anglo-Saxon poets, who most people would promptly place under the shinola category for the simple reason that poetry is high culture. Diametrically opposite to most Milton fans would be those who would choose to categorize the Wayne’s World/Saturday Night Live duo under shinola for excellent comedic achievement. A minor player in the game, Orwell would probably be placed midway on the Milton/Anglo-Saxon poets and Wayne’s World/Saturday Night Live spectrum. Although I’ve heard great things about Milton’s Paradise Lost from teachers and professors I hold in high esteem, I simply have no desire to read it. Although I’ve heard nothing but good things about Saturday Night Live from each and every one of my friends, I’ve had no desire to watch the show. That leaves me with Orwell, who I unabashedly adore for the dystopian world he created in 1984. Thus, Orwell is most definitely shinola (if shinola is to imply something good/interesting) whereas the high cultured Milton and his fellows and cult classic Saturday Night Fever don’t generate enough enthusiasm to be rated as shit or shinola. (One could consider this to be even worse than being considered shit.)

Simultaneously, the word “shit” is not to be left out of a discussion in arguing the technical meaning in our ever-changing language/world. Primary definitions of the word (on dictionary.com) define it a means of defecating, often related to diseases such as diarrhea. One would obviously never consider diarrhea to be shinola so obviously shit is shit and thus shit that is shit is shit. However, we have pop culture to save the day, when one can refer to urbandictionary.com and see how the word “shit” can be transformed from something that once seemed irrevocably disgusting to what many consider shinola by the simple addition of the article “the” as a prefix. Urbandictionary says, “’the’ shit is the best but it is not to be confused with shit, ‘which is something that sucks ass.’” Given these varying definitions, one can surmise perhaps that Milton is shinola (using shinola to mean high culture at times of Stepford-esque socio-economic norm), Wayne’s World/Saturday Night Live are “the shit” and Orwell is just some guy on the wayside.

A further question to pursue would be an analysis of shit being shinola. Many people bemoan the current state of New York City, calling Manhattan a yuppie-fied tourist utopia. The remnants of a cultural mecca are long gone, leaving in their place commercialised artefacts. Once upon a time, a person walking through Manhattan would be able to identify the neighbourhood based on the general ‘atmosphere’ of the surrounding blocks. So many native New Yorkers almost wish the city hadn’t become so commercial, driving away the people who have lived here forever because they can’t afford the skyrocketing rents. New York City is losing its rough-and-tumble edge so perhaps shit can be shinola too?

Buddhism has an especially strong drawing power among the constituents of liberal arts programs in places like New York City. Even in Middle America suburbia, Buddhism seems to be especially popular among the “alternative” kids: the kids most people perceive as kind of weird but really smart. On top of that, there is the yoga crowd, which is probably the most popularised version of the Buddha’s art of meditation. However, “Western” Buddhism, to some, is a poor imitation of the true philosophy of Indian Buddhism and even Chinese Buddhism. Despite the fact that the religion had minimal staying power in India, it has blossomed in the Far East. Several variants of basic Buddhism have surfaced, amongst which Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism are the most well-known.

Initially, Zen Buddhism seems drastically different from Mahayana. In Dharma Bums, Ray explains,

“’I’m not a Zen Buddhist, I’m a serious Buddhist, I’m an oldfashioned
dreamy Hinayana coward of later Mahayanism,’ and so forth into the
night, my contention being that Zen Buddhism didn’t concentrate on
kindness so much as on confusing the intellect to make it perceive
the illusion of all sources of things. ‘It’s mean,’ I complained. ‘All those
Zen masters throwing young kids in the mud because they can’t answer
their silly word questions’” (Kerouac 13).

Herein lies a contradiction. If one is to be devoted to one’s beliefs, then quite obviously he or she should chose to be rather serious about it, which leads to the conclusion that a prospective Buddha would study Hinayana/Mahayana instead of Zen because enlightenment in Zen Buddhism is instantaneous thus foolishly considered to be easier. Although this is a gross generalisation, one might say that younger people and Westerners, in general, are attracted to Zen Buddhism because it is easy Buddhism. The notion of everyone being a prospective Buddha and the fact that an awakening occurs without any form of “hard work” makes Zen much more appealing than its more serious counterpart. This is also quite possibly the reason why younger people tend to flock towards Zen. Superficially, Zen is the watered down, popularised for the Western world, trendy kind of Buddhism.

Upon further research, one realises that Zen Buddhism is much harder for the socialised Westerner simply because his or her is trained to be almost over-analytical about anything it encounters. Simple comparisons include any of the arts. Often, a person comes across art, whether a painting or a sculpture, and attempts to analyse its beauty, to break it down into cold, hard, scientific facts. For example, one might say that a certain landscape is beautiful because the gentle stream flowing through the heavily wooded forests conveys a sense of tranquillity. From this point on, he will try his level best to put into words the natural beauty of the area because words are what man uses to define himself and his surroundings. In his quest to define, he will lose sight of the true beauty and all he will have left is pale comparisons. “’The secret of this kind of climbing,’ said Japhy, ‘is like Zen. Don’t think. Just dance along,” (Kerouac 64) encapsulates the essence of Zen Buddhism. The concept is further explained in The Way of the Zen. “The difficulty of Zen is, of course, to shift one’s attention from the abstract to the concrete, from the symbolic self to one’s true nature” (Watts 126). It is not for man to construct or deconstruct; it simply happens. Although one may consider the existentialist argument that man is nothing more than his actions, which leads him to the moment during which he attains enlightenment, are a direct result of the step-by-step decisions he is making in order to create the ideal being, invalidating the Zen argument that enlightenment is a “eureka” moment. Of course, one must be aware that even the “eureka” moment requires an intricate set of progressions; for Zen, these progressions involve deconstructing the socialisation most of the world has undergone.

Buddhist principles encompass many of the values that major Western religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam preach, such as the need to avoid materialism, calling it is a destructive force on one’s spiritual path, the need to be kind and charitable to every one and the need to comprehend that without evil there is no gauge for good. When considering the role of deities or supreme beings, one is bound to run into a conflict. Buddhism does not have the same type of monotheistic God figurehead that is a crucial part of the Western religions. Furthermore, each of these religions considers humans to be the creation of a supreme god. Specifically, in Islam, Allah is such an exalted being that no man should even refer to himself or any other man (including prophets) as anything but a simple creation. This fact is one of the key differences between Islam and Christianity as Christianity commonly refers to Jesus as the son of God, a relationship unacceptable in the Islamic faith. Thus, it is possible for Buddhism to exist in harmony to a great extent amongst the Western religion, but this sense of harmony lies largely in the hands of the person who chooses to incorporate these similar yet different ideals. However, given the state of organised religion at this point in history, characterised by a herd who only participates in rituals with little to no comprehension of the ideological foundation of their religion or the rituals they are performing, one would be a fool to believe that society as a whole would find this mix of eastern and western philosophies to be acceptable practices.

However hard the philosophies of Buddhism may seem, essentially the existential lifestyle is equally as difficult if not harder to adopt because it takes the responsibility of the entire human existence and places it in the hands of each human being with the idea that each action each person takes must be the ideal action for every other person thus creating an ideal existence for an entire race of people. For example, Dean cannot create the ideal existential being in On the Road because he steal cars, one after another to satiate his own needs, and if everyone stole cars, it would lead to mass pandemonium. An existentialistic lifestyle is very much in tune with the feeling of disparity and absurdity.

The critical juncture in the “Buddhism + Neelofer(Existentialism) Project” is the conflict between the Mahayana philosophy of the self and the existentialist philosophy of the self. Both forms of Buddhism, Mahayana and Zen, advocate an exemplary set of guiding principles such as the act of kindness and charity, the necessity for meditation, and the appreciation of life through struggling to reach enlightenment or having the simple ability to acknowledge instantaneous enlightenment without turning it into some deductive reasoning logic problem. However, being a firm believer in the idea that a human being is the construct of all his past actions, I find it impossible to believe that a human does not have an identity separate from his fellow human, that he is not the construct of his choices but merely a part of a greater entity. As a guiding philosophy on the way of life, to become the ideal being, Buddhism lays an excellent structural foundation but falls short when it minimalises or rather completely eliminates the role of the self.

Recommended reading: Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible, Alan Watts' The Way of Zen, and Jean-Paul Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism"

Recently, The Pace Press attended the annual Associated College Press convention in San Francisco. Incidentally, the ACP convention was on the same weekend as the Academy Awards so The Pace Press would be in flight. Roughly three weeks before the trip, when we were booking our flights did we realise that we would be unable to watch the Awards. A section of our editorial board meeting was devoted to finding a solution for this problem. The group decided that it had no problem charging the bill for in-flight television to the University as long as we would be able to watch the show.

Flying to San Francisco, we anxiously skipped through the channel line up to find the network airing the ceremony. Throughout the weekend, a good chunk of time was dedicated discussing who would win in each category with the dilemma of finding someway to watch the Awards looming over our heads. Ready to give up when we reached the airport on Sunday, our Editor-in-Chief saved the day when she suggested we call someone to tape the show for us. Several disgruntled editorial board members reaching for their mobiles to call friends who might tape the Awards for them. However, none of our irresponsible friends answered their phones, leaving the thirteen of us in a bit of a bind. As we boarded the plane, we quickly changed channels from the in-flight plane tracking map to one of the network news stations, which would allow us to catch snippets of who won in each category as part of their news briefs section.

The next day while at my internship at NBC, I noted the Academy Awards on one of the monitors with the Hebrew subtitles. Dumbfounded, I looked closer and realised that it was an Israeli networks broadcasting the Academy Awards. Having discussed the topic in our Cultural Studies class the previous night, I was thoroughly amused to find that it had such a large worldwide appeal. While there are many stories, worldwide, more deserving of attention than the “who wore what” and “who was on the red carpet with who” at the Academy’s, it’s seems that corporate media consistently takes these entertainment stories and passes them off as news stories.

Incomprehensible is this phenomenon of entertainment serving as news, it is becoming more and more prevalent in our society day by day. One must wonder why Americans, specifically, and the world as a whole is giving into an escapist mentality, where they go to their 9-5 jobs, eat dinner while staring at a television screen, and go to bed. The fact that people are ignoring human tragedies around the world is directly proportional to the lack of revolutionaries in our society and the world as a whole. There are two devastating types of people in this spectrum. There are those who give into the escapist mentality day in and day out and then there are those who have become so desensitised by the problems the world faces and have lost their faith in mankind in general that they do nothing but bitch and moan about the world gone wrong. While academic discourse on these topics is a starting point, there is no one, it seems, that is taking it beyond general discussion. We all seem to be talking the talk but no one is walking the walk.

On the Road is the definitive text on a culture hidden behind what has now become the commercialised 1960s counterculture. A decade that is more commonly known for its stepford-esque suburbia is the same decade during which wandering souls were searching for any kind of religious or spiritual guidance, any kind of meaning to give their lives. To many On the Road is a historical document of a quest into a mystical form of religion like the kind referenced in the works of William Blake and Walt Whitman; to others, the journey of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty is a philosophical one that does not even touch upon any kind of religion, whether traditional or not.

Biblical language, alongside a few other religious references (monk, Tao), runs rampant in this text, making it quite obvious why this novel is so often referred to as a religious text. However, it is presumptuous to believe that simply because Kerouac uses this language, he means the traditional definitions of these words. Sal’s perpetual references of Dean’s Saintliness and Godliness, the duos encounters with the town of Testament and a strange hitchhiker, Solomon, are only a few of the references that could lead a reader to consider this novel to be a religious text. These references, however, are simple words borne of familiarity. Both Paradise and Moriarty were born into Catholicism thus one can easily deduce that this language is only used because of its familiarity and its connotations.

Solomon, the hitchhiker, brought them back to the town of Testament once more and as Dean implored Sal to believe that God did exist because they continuously got hung up at the hands of this man with a Biblical name and in this Biblical town, one realises that traditional religion is holding them back from finding “it” and as they roared out of Testament, everything was fine again. They did not keep returning to Testament as a reason for their devotion to searching out a religion but to illustrate how traditional religion and its commercialised doctrine was the downfall of man. They were always roaring away from Testament; they never had the “it” while in Testament.

Sal so often equated Dean to God because in Dean, he saw all the good. Dean was the epitome of what Sal wanted in his life: “the ones who are mad to live” (Kerouac 04). “I had to struggle to see Dean’s figure, and he looked like God” (Kerouac 284). When Galatea decided to expose Dean for all his wrong-doings in life, from being responsible and running from one place to another to marrying women left and right, Sal was the only one, who supported Dean, while acknowledging just how much of a con-man Dean was.

If it is not a religious quest, then what exactly are these people doing transplanting themselves from one part of the country to another. The question arises, “Is this a philosophical text, an existential text?” Referring to primary definition of existentialism as discussed in the Jean-Paul Sartre essay, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” existentialism “puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence entirely on his shoulders. And when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men” (Sartre). This clearly indicates that Dean is not an existentialist because his actions from stealing cars to sexual promiscuity do not create the ideal human being as the philosophy of existentialism requires.

However, in many instances, it seems as if Dean is on the path to some form of non-traditional existentialist quest. Throughout the novel, he is searching for any form of a familial tie in order to create an identity, to define himself by his actions. He goes from marrying one woman to another, to having one child to another, to searching cross-continent for his own father in hopes of finding who he is.

Dean was not alone in his efforts of giving his self definition. Although in most parts of the book, Sal is simply the chronicler of the journey, he, too, makes an effort to create an existential definition of the person that is Sal Paradise. In his first cross country trip, Sal finds himself

“far away from home, haunted, and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all that sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon. (Kerouac 15)

That moment of losing himself happens at precisely the perfect time as he has left behind the university life he is familiar with for the open road. His journey into the Great Frontier is rebirth, his life a tabula rasa.

In the beginning of the book, Sal made a bargain with the devil himself. Well aware that his relationship with Dean is a mutually beneficial relationship, one in which both parties use and abuse each other to some extent. Sal Paradise craved Dean’s intensity, his excitement, his ability to let go of societal norms and have “it.” In perhaps the most eloquent passage of his discourse, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sartre said, “I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the meditation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself. Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me,” which goes far in explaining this reciprocal relationship that only Sal and Dean are able to share. Without Dean, Sal is left with nothing to chronicle, nothing to experience, nothing to aspire towards. Consequently, without Sal, Dean has no one to validate his existence. All of his friends, including his various girlfriends and wives, denounce him at one point or another. The best example of Dean’s life without Sal can be captured in the last few paragraphs of the novel, when Dean asks Sal if he can give him a ride to Fortieth Street. Unfortunately, Sal is forced to say no and Dean disappears in the shadows of New York, into nothingness.

The last paragraph of the novel provides closure on the religious aspect of the novel, stating, “… and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?” (Kerouac 307), which implies that God or rather the essence of God is everywhere, even in something as simple as a child’s toy. By no means is this reference to God one that implies the deity in the traditional sense. Perhaps, it is not even a reference in the mystical, non-traditional sense of the world. Using the word God here simply symbolises that all the good that the traditional deity of God embodies is found everywhere and that is more the conclusion of a philosophical quest than anything else. Existing and the euphoric feeling in acknowledging the beauty of one’s existence was the “it” and the open road their religion. The lives of Sal and Dean are not paths paved to a road of religion.

Recommended reading: Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Times have changed plenty since Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road. These days, nearly every high school student has heard of, if not read, the book. Who hasn’t heard the most quotable quote,

”…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

Planted everywhere from instant messenger away messages to yearbooks, this quote defines what all of us seem to be searching for in our young, rebellious lives. One of my good friends was a real Kerouac junkie. She was obsessed with the beats and Buddhism but me, I was afraid to read Kerouac, afraid that he wouldn’t live up to standards I had created for him without ever touching any of his books. So, I waited until the summer after freshmen year, when I picked up Dharma Bums and I wanted to love it but I had to put it down. I didn’t know enough about Buddhism; I wasn’t ready for it. Every time I’d go to the bookstore, I’d go find the book [On the Road] with full intentions of buying it but I never did. Finally, my roommate did it; after watching me eye the book upon every trip to the bookstore, she bought it and told me I had to read it. She had never read it herself. I still didn’t read it, not until it was assigned in this class.

No one can deny the romance of travelling through the night on a flat-board on a truck, whiskey in hand, racing across the great American continent. The way they lived, especially Dean, is something that all of us want and perhaps so badly need to give our life meaning, to give it that kind of clarity that one can only find in perfect moments. I found myself relating to Sal through most of the book but knowing damn well, that in a perfect world, I would be Dean. One of the best people I know is someone, who embodies Dean’s spirit of being in the moment, of having the “it,” of always being excited and experiencing, and simply being delighted by the simple pleasure that is to be alive. Although Sal partook in this glamorous journey to find the “it,” to have the “it,” I think it’s pretty obvious that he was just a bystander in the story, the man, who chronicled the journey. On the Road has inspired me to put aside my days of simply writing about things I love, things I hate, things I want to do and actually start experiencing them for the good and the bad they are worth.

This one goes down in the history books alongside Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet as one of the books that I will whole-heartedly always recommend to people. In fact, after finishing it the first time, I promptly went out and bought a copy and mailed it off, inscription on the inside cover, for one of my best friends, who has yet to read it. My copy has no white space left; my small, block-print scrawl is scribbled between many lines. Nearly each line of the book is underlined.

The protagonists of On the Road have lives that people in their mid-late twenties can only envy. In this modern day and age, who can hitchhike cross-country with just $50 in their pockets? As far as the literary value of this book is concerned, anyone who reads this text and doesn’t automatically award it in its rightful place as the definitive text of a generation needs to seriously re-think his or her definition of good literature. For the past fifty years, this book has been the Bible-equivalent of generations of misplaced youth, searching for the “it.” Time and time again, soul searching teenagers and twenty-somethings are going to find solace in Kerouac’s cross-continental travels and hope against all hope that perhaps they, too, will experience something, anything, which might come close to eclipsing this amazing experience that most of us will only vicariously live.

Friday, 19 February, 2005 at the 2/3 Clark Street subway station in Brooklyn, New York.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

The first third of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, showcases several key concepts highlighted in the James Scott excerpt from Weapons of the Weak. The “everyday forms of resistance” (89) that Scott refers to are ever-present in Hurston’s novel specifically in the interactions of the townspeople in Janie’s new, coloured town. Sitting outside Joe’s shop, the townspeople are found discussing the ways in which they feel as if they are enslaved once more but by a black man instead of the white. Furthermore, within that new town of coloured people, there is a struggle within the people themselves. Scott states, “All too frequently the peasantry finds itself in the ironic position of having helped to power a ruling group whose plans for industrialization, taxation, and collectivization are very much at odds with the goals for which peasants had imagined they were fighting” (89). While this statement is not the most precise definition of the events in Hurston’s novel, the underlying sentiment is most definitely the same. The coloured people, together, have created this town in which they are all equals but it turns into Joe becoming the mayor and treating the others as if they are slaves. An excellent exposition of this argument is brought to light in the passage that describes Joe’s house: “It had two stories with porches, with banisters and such things. The rest of the town looked like servants’ quarters surrounding the “big house.” And different from everybody else in the town he put off moving in until it had been painted, in and out. And look at the way he painted it – a gloaty, sparkly white” (Hurston 47). Another example of this “every day resistance” is Janie’s interaction with her first husband, Logan, during which she allows him to do all the work like cutting logs without really helping out in anyway. Finally, when Logan accuses her of being spoiled and acting as if she were a white person does she verbally lash out against him.

Unlike the townspeople who are engaging in this passive-aggressive revolt of sorts (because at least they are discussing it amongst themselves), Nanny is party to a slightly different approach. She tells Janie, “Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’d take a broom and cook-pot and throw up a highway through the wilderness for her” (16). Nanny is doing two things: she proclaims of her effort to clear a path for her child because she would not be able to do those things herself and secondly, she is discussing her aspirations with her grandchild as if to plant the seed of hope within her. As the novel progresses, Janie is awarded a position in which she can be amongst those coloured women sittin’ on high as the wife of the mayor. She can take very real issues and bring awareness to them simply because of the high profile she has inadvertently achieved. The dialogue between Nanny and Janie and its consequences are exactly what Scott means when he says, “Even a failed revolt may achieve something: a few concessions from the state or landlords, a brief respite from new and painful relations of production and, not least, a memory of resistance and courage that may lie in wait for the future,” (89) which leads the reader to hope that Janie will indeed take advantage of her high society position for the betterment of her people.

However, before any of these revolts can take place, the people must identify exactly who or what they are revolting against. The coloured people understand that part of their revolt was against the white man as it was he who had initially enslaved him but they are now part of a much bigger problem, where their own people are those that are enslaving. “Us colored folks is too envious of one ‘nother. Dat’s how come us don’t git no further than us do. Us talks about de white man keepin’ us down! Shucks! He don’t have tuh. Us keeps our own selves down” (Hurston 39) truly encapsulates the larger dilemma this race of people is facing, not only in the ‘30s when the novel was published but even today.

Recommended reading: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Professor Chapman's notes:

Existentialism was a big part of the 1950s. It denies human nature, defining itself as the philosophy of choices made in the context of complete freedom. Anecodctal evidence explains, "Push a rock up a hill, let it roll down; push it up again." Existentialism is all about being aware of oneself and one's actions, of being responsible for one's actions. You create your own road map and you do it alone. Because we have radical freedom, our choices cannot infringe upon the choices and freedoms of others. Our lives are lived in the vain effort to create a human being, which is the ideal human being. Existentialism is a philosophy of action. As philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre so eloquently stated, "Man is nothing more than a collection of his actions."

Sal Paradise states on page 15 of the Penguin Classic version of On the Road, with the Ann Charters introduction:

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the on distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted, and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all that sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

I furiously scribbled the text below in my red, spiral notebook, during the discussion of the "it," our mad desires in achieving it and holding on to it, the concept of perfection for more than just a moment, the concept of an infinity of being in the "it."

Beliving in something means to submit to it so whether you believe in G-d or a completely different set of guidelines, you're submitting and how can submission be liberating? You can never be the epitome of the embodiment of it because it is parallel to the concept of an afterlife. If one goes to heaven and that is the stand point that you've desired than once you're there, what do you do? Because you are completely satiated and complete satiateness is not desireable because we live for momentarily satisfaction. An eternal form of satisfaction cannot exist because then we would not view it as satisfaction. It would become the status-quo and as human beings, we are forever trying to overcome the status-quo. Does that mean that once you've reached "it" or mastered "it" or gone to heaven: is that the change of consciousness?

Suggested reading: "Existentialism is a Humanism" by Jean-Paul Sartre and On the Road by Jack Kerouac