“It’s uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there.” – Their Eyes Were Watching God
“It was the longest trek Milkman had ever made in his life….Everybody kept changing right in front of him….If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” – Song of Solomon
“How can one discover truth I thought and that thought led me nowhere. No one would tell me the truth.” – Wide Sargasso Sea
A story can take a reader to a place. But if Janie’s telling of her story taught us anything, it is that the ear and eye must be attentive—and like Kumba showed, they must also be open. But what must the story do to initiate the reader into a place? That story must be honest about the place, presenting it truthfully. With an attentive, willing-to-change individual and an honest story, a new place comes, an elusive mind-space—a place we’ve learned to call “the bush.” Within may honest folk wrestle with the truth. Within may Kumba, with her beautifully wide eyes and mind, not pass judgment but rather seek understanding. Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God and the nameless narrator of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man exhibit story as a medium of truth, a harbor for the bush. With them, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury demonstrates a powerful way to construct truth by perspective, the only real way. And the experiences of Milkman in Song of Solomon and the man in Wide Sargasso Sea stride in rhythm with Faulkner’s story to show the individual how he must approach the place in question.
Janie’s telling of her story in Their Eyes Were Watching God serves as a model construction for the elements of how movement into the place works. If Janie wasn’t honest with herself, she could not be honest in her telling. And if her telling wasn’t honest, the story wouldn’t have the effect it does to the reader. The most important part of Janie’s telling is the frame that Hurston gives it: an open-eared, open-hearted friend. The hate and blindness of the other townsfolk spotlight the already radiant kindness of Pheoby. She even points out the difference between herself and the others: “An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done ‘heard’ ’bout you just what they hope done happened” (Hurston 5). This truth governs storytelling. If a listener isn’t hearing what the speaker is saying right now because he has already made up his mind, or some other selfish reason, the story is doing nothing; it is like an unread book, dead and lifeless until a reader reads, until the text is attended. Pheoby serves as both a reason for Janie to tell her story and a hopeful reflection of or guide for the reader. It is as if Hurston is telling us, “Before this woman shares her story, you must love her, forget the rags she is wearing, and listen with every ounce of attention you have to every single word she utters.” Living stories rely on active listeners, those willing to attend the story, to let it live again—now, perpetually—in themselves.
James Weldon Johnson presents a real place in his The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. It’s a space for the circled-around Negro Question to be thought about in truth. Johnson develops the space in story, and the story cannot be honest without all of its most dangerous and complicated parts, which are illumined by images and scenes from the nameless narrator’s tale: “He gives his story, and this story, with its gushing throat, its ‘eyes bulging from their sockets,’ its ‘mystery to the whites,’ and ‘the ivory whiteness of [his] skin,’ becomes his best answer—the only answer he knows—to the question of the Negro, even in all of its inconceivable complexity” (Sowers). Navigating both the white and black sides of the question provides a thread of honesty that strings the scenes in the novel together. Also, Johnson gives voice to opposers of equal right, lynchers, intellectual blacks, unintellectual blacks, hispanics, and the rich and poor. The Negro Question is approached from all sides and serves as a base for all of the action of the story to find itself.
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury shares another side of the responsibility of the storytelling. In this text, for the story to be a bed for truth, it rests on perspective. The story occurs inside four different narratives that can only circle the truth, for Faulkner seems to agree with the notion that the truth cannot be spoken or held in words: “It began with the picture of the little girl’s muddy drawers, climbing that tree to look in the parlor window with her brothers that didn’t have the courage to climb the tree waiting to see what she saw. And I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section One. I tried with another brother and that wasn’t enough. That was Section Two. I tried the third brother, because Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else’s eyes, I thought. And that failed and I tried myself—the fourth section—to tell what happened, and I still failed” (Faulkner 234-235). There is much more to this quotation than the evident fact that language cannot hold life or, as Faulkner seems to assert, that tellings and retellings (limited to a number) cannot do their desired work. He said that even after the second telling, the image was still too much outside of the those tellings, that he had to tell more and again. His choosing of different perspectives is key—“to see her through somebody else’s eyes.” Faulkner is joining the other artists with his take on modern art. He’s trying to get a truth to his readers by allowing them to read the story from all sides. Painters around this time were trying to show different perspectives on one surface. It is a stretching of the medium. Imagine seeing a picture of the earth from space: all of the continents cannot be shown; there are imperative parts left out. Faulkner tries to circumvent this.
Both critics and Faulkner seem to agree that the real story in the novel is about Caddy, but she only speaks through others’ narratives. And there, her words and actions are framed and reflected by the perspective of the narrator. Ostensibly, the reader must receive the character and relation of the characters surrounding Caddy to receive Caddy. Faulkner’s choosing to speak from her brothers’ points-of-view is monumental because of their characters. The first is an idiot who confounds the past and present. The second is an eccentric, intelligent, neurotic obsessive, who has developed a harmfully incestuous desire for Caddy. The third is a misogynistic, selfish brat. And the fourth is a present-tense third-person narrator who speaks years after Caddy has left and the family refuses to speak her name. Because of the brothers’ memories and the present-tense narration, the text develops a full timeline of Caddy. But time and action are not the primary factors in the development of Caddy; that is left to how the character is seen, and that rests on these disparate perspectives. Faulkner’s quest to give the image most perfectly doesn’t stop with the four sectioned perspectives. Within the first two, because of the characters’ idiosyncracies, the text zooms into and travels through the minds of Benjy and Quentin. The shifts signify themselves with textual alterations (in the form of italics or punctuational differences). Both Benjy and Quentin interact with the past—and this past is built and depends on Caddy—in different ways based on their characters, allowing for associations between people, images, and events (Benjy), and also conversations that might be fictitious or wishfully stretched (Quentin).
The hoops through which Faulkner’s text forces the reader to jump becomes truth. Entry into the Compson world must come before entry into Caddy’s story. Faulkner initiates the reader into the world by starting with an errant, unconventional narrator (Benjy cannot even speak). Placing the reader there, in the middle of the bush, demands attention and awareness or else the story won’t develop. The story is there—it is always there—but it won’t spring forth without an open-eared, open-hearted reader. Faulkner understands this. To overcome his thought that mere words cannot hold truth but only maybe talk around it, he forces a conversation; the text forces a conversation between itself and its reader. And out of the conversation comes truth.
Edna Ferber said, “A closed mind is a dying mind.” This truth strings our initiatory tales together. The man in Wide Sargasso Sea serves as the antithesis of how one should approach newness and difference and truth. He is like the townsfolk who have already “heard” Janie’s story. Their minds are shut to a new story, which is detrimental to themselves firstly but then the surrounding peoples also. The Compson’s are not unlike this, with the mother’s unwillingness to accept a view of the world that isn’t her own. Benjy is the embodiment of the ill effects and cyclical dangers of an incest of ideas. When a solitary viewpoint constantly breeds itself by the constraints of “common sense” and power or authority, the final product will be close-minded and ill-fit for anything resembling progress. To keep with the same ideas, ignoring true seeing will produce an invalid—in the case of Benjy, a man-child who can do nothing but moan for a loss that he can’t even specify.
The man comes from the position of authority because he is from the land of the colonizing force. Before placing a foot on the land, he already understands these people to be under himself. Rhys forces the man’s close-mindedness on the reader with a reflective/reflexive accusation on Antoinette by the man: “She often questioned me about England and listened attentively to my answers, but I was certain that nothing I said made much difference. Her mind was already made up. Some romantic novel….Reality might disconcert her, bewilder her, hurt her, but it would not be reality….Her fixed ideas would never change” (Rhys 94). This all can be attributed to the man, but he cannot even see it. What little self-awareness it would take for him to see! The man cannot change if his ideas do not, and fear of the different, the other, wear him down. He says, “I fear that this place is my enemy and on your side” (Rhys 129). To regain a sense of power or authority in this place, he resorts to naming things what he likes (To get our bearings on a disconcerting place, it may be instinctive that we would do this. The bull-king from “Bregantino Bregantin” comes to mind. It is an easy, inward way to assert failing power.) The pushed image of him doing this is changing his wife’s name from the beautiful Antoinette to the hideous Bertha. “Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into something else, calling me by another name” (Rhys 147). Assuming power over just one person would make him comfortable in this feared place. The man takes Antoinette back to England, where she sets fire to the house and jumps to her death from a window. With its punishing end for the man—he is maimed and blinded in the fire—the arc of Wide Sargasso Sea can be seen as a moral tale from one angle: if one doesn’t try to see or use his eyes correctly, they will be taken from him.
The man rejects the place and fails, but Milkman’s story ends with a beautiful surrender. He is told stories about his history from his father and aunt, but they never do their work until he goes there, like Janie says. The stories he is told are riddled with half-truths, mixed-truths, untruths and truth because they are from singular perspectives. He must find the real truth of his history; he must go. Hearing the story in the place makes a difference for Milkman: “Milkman felt a glow listening to a story come from this man that he’d heard many times before but only half listened to. Or maybe it was being there in the place where it happened that made it seem so real” (Morrison 231). Morrison hits on both truths here. Milkman must attend the story, and he must also be in the space to experience it. His car breaks down. He finds that a car won’t get him to where he needs to go. A shedding happens when Milkman enters the place.
Entering into the place isn’t enough to get the story. Milkman goes and is met with troubles, a fight in Solomon’s General Store and a failed car. His shell of guarded, city habits must be busted. He doesn’t look at the men in the store; thinking that he already knows who they are by a generality or stereotype, he doesn’t attend these men. That gives him the fight. But he makes up and, to hunt with the men, enters a real bush, of blackness and mystery and something he’s never experienced. “If he was to grow accustomed to the dark, he would have to look at what it was possible to see” (Morrison 273). Milkman runs through the wood, a physical symbol of the thinking one must do. In the connection between the men and their hunting dogs, Milkman feels the connection of his people, ones who will claim him, and maybe all people. “It was all language. An extension of the click people made in their cheeks back home when they wanted a dog to follow them. No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down” (Morrison 278). And there connection to the place is strongly sensed by Milkman as well: “He found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down down down into the rock and soil” (Morrison 281). Milkman is intuiting a oneness across all things. There is a connection of all men in a deep history, and Milkman is sensing this by searching for his own unique history. The farther back one goes, he’d find a connection with every person he’s ever met, those he hates and those he loves. We are all one in a history, but Milkman finds pride in his recent history: the story of the slave who flew back to Africa after fathering all those kids. Because he’s told by Susan Byrd, “It’s a sad thing, Mr. Macon, when you’re left without any people to claim you,” another moment of unveiling and joy comes when Milkman finally hears that the kids are singing about his people (Morrison 291).
It seems easy: have a good, honest story and an attentive reader or listener. But why would anyone attend a story, volunteering a change in themselves? And just because we happened to read incredible books doesn’t mean that every book contains a true story. People are content today. The stories that are in books are left there because they take work and patience to unearth. Wrestling can be avoided because there are other things that dominate our time. It’s easy to say that what we need is attention and willingness to listen, but where does that come from? Milkman found it in a self-empowering story, but it’s hard to say whether or not pride was the reason for his excitement. I’m generally one to think that pride can do nothing but wrong. But Milkman had a familial pride that we preach and validate in America. Maybe that isn’t so bad? I think anyone can latch onto a story that empowers them in a history of which they are no doubt a part. Opening eyes is a tough thing. But maybe it isn’t the work of us, rather the work of the story.
