Clowns, Consumption, and Controversy

Tuesday's Coming Attractions...

"And what am I without my Buffo's face? Why, nobody at all. Take away my make-up and underneath is merely not-Buffo. An absence. A vacancy" (Carter 142).

"It was a panopticon she forced them to build, a hollow circle of cells shaped like a doughnut, the inward-facing wall of which was composed of grids of steel and, in the middle of the roofed, central courtyard, there was a round room surrounded by windows" (Carter 247).

Some thoughts...

Teaching novels such as Geek Love and Nights at the Circus tests the limits of acceptability. I've been surprised by the multiple comments made on how offensive and disturbing the texts are - making readers uncomfortable with the characters and disassociated from the narrative. Why shouldn't literature offend? Television is full of despicable, discomforting, and even repulsive characters that garner praise from critics and adoring audiences (House, Samantha, Sylar, Spike, Chuck Bass, etc). Generally speaking, shows with only good looking, happy, and successful people performing good acts don't get very far - we aren't interested in dull perfection as viewers. The most popular characters are crass, selfish, and manipulative. Yes, often there's a little storyline to make them more "human" for certain viewers and to give more depth to their ways; however, the characters we love to hate are generally more popular than good little heroes (and even the good guys and dolls usually venture to the dark side at some point, even if just temporarily, in order to expand their roles beyond the boundaries of a boring box).

Authors such as Dunn and Carter challenge us as readers to question the limits of our comfort. The clowns and the images of the panopticon in Carter's novel serve as tools for Carter's reader challenge: clowns symbolize a (dis)comfort. I used to love clowns at birthday parties because I was both afraid and intrigued by them. Until I read IT and never wanted to find myself in the same room as a clown again. Clowns, intended to entertain, are portrayed by Carter as complicated figures locked behind a mask and battling despair. The clown, a symbol of the carnival, becomes a trope for the panopticons throughout the novel.

The actual panopticons in the novel (whorehouse, museum of women monsters, the prison, etc), fall to pieces - Carter subverts the patriarchal representation of the panopticon with these symbolic structures. But the clown, as a figurative panopticon, is confined to a masquerade under constant watch. Without the viewer, the clown ceases to exist: "As long as a child remembers..." (141).

Indeed, disturbing and discomforting. Given what graces our television screens and city streets, however, it takes someone theoretically complex like Carter to push our limits and think beyond the box - to confront our own discomforting and at times exploitative responses.

Geek Love illustrations

Here's the link to the website with the interesting illustrations of Geek Love:

http://picturebookreport.com/category/geek-love/

First Class

During my undergraduate days at McGill, I loved taking summer classes. Although they were intense, they were short enough to maintain my interest and full of keen students. I particularly remember my Postmodern American Fiction course, which I anticipated despising, but from which I can recall nearly every lesson and discussion. A truly terrific and inspiring class.

Today is the first day of my Spring course “Freaks and Geeks” and I hope it’ll prove as engaging and intellectually exciting. Well, perhaps not today’s class per se, given it’ll encompass a lot of bookkeeping details, but the course in its entirety.

Geek Love sets the tone for the class. A strange, but enthralling novel written with imaginative language. Take the opening line: “‘When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets, “ Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing’” (3). The first sentence itself demands reader focus, as though we’re already spectators of the carnival, prepared to watch the show and listen to the story of these dreamlets and their parents that form a nuclear family. A family not unlike the ones that populate television shows such as Heroes (which featured a carnival this season).

The idea of breeding a freak show certainly guarantees that the children will always have jobs and raises questions regarding genetic control and/or cloning, which we’ll encounter throughout the course. Although the discussion topics that will arise from the required texts will prove interesting to most students, I’m unsure they’ll all enjoy the narratives themselves. Geek Love, for example, will either be adored or dismissed; it reminds me of Vandal Love, a novel I’ve taught before and on which I’ve written a chapter of my dissertation. Students had quite the reaction to Vandal Love – most expressing disappointment with the one-dimensional characters. What struck me was that many of the critiques of the novel focused on how the markers of difference in Vandal Love made it impossible for students to relate to the characters and care about the story. Several students felt the novel’s focus on deformed figures, in conjunction with the distortion of the text’s diction with interspersed French, prompted a sense of alienation and distance. Yet, I would argue that this perception of distance and disassociation is Béchard’s way of inspiring in the reader the same loss and dispossession experienced by the characters of the text. Most students understood my position, but I felt they were still disenchanted by the novel overall. Nonetheless, those who wrote term papers on the text, wrote the top essays – often the best papers stem from texts that students dislike, rather than texts they want to carry in their back pocket through trenches and over mountains.

Geek Love’s characters are more well rounded than those of Vandal Love; and the plot is more mysterious, prompting, perhaps, more engagement from the reader. But at the end of the day, both novels do seek to open minds and question perceptions of normalcy, the unbearable weight of idealized bodies, and the theoretically challenging and inspiring imperfections of humanity.