Okay, so this title is a little confusing, but for some reason I kept seeing parallels between Gunnar's previous school in Santa Monica with the Brotherhood from Invisible Man. In class during discussions, most of my classmates seemed to be against the 'multicultural' education that Gunnar underwent during his years in Santa Monica. Despite all of its good intentions, the whole schooling system was flawed, it pushed its students to fit into a mainstream mold that was mostly representative of 'white culture'. Likewise, it was almost patronizing in the way that it claimed all students were human, as if some students were privileged to be treated humanly, and as if by acknowledging their human-ness (for lack of a better word), the school was doing something great. After attending this kind of school for such a long time, it was almost next to impossible for Gunnar to fit into the totally different culture he encountered in Hillside.
The ghetto culture in Hillside was as big of a shock to Gunnar as the zootsuiters were to the Narrator. Both of these groups fell outside of the range that the Brotherhood and Santa Monica school catered to, they fell outside of the mainstream, and in the eyes of both institutions, they were nonexistent and not worth caring about. As the Narrator became more involved with the Brotherhood he realized that the Brothers did not care about his individuality but that they only saw him as a useful tool to meet their needs. He was the skilled, black, public speaker, much like Gunnar was the funny, cool, black guy. In order to be successful, both the Narrator and Gunnar had to conform to the societal values that were forced on them.
Wow...people in Beatty's ghetto = Ellison's zoot suiters!!?? Perhaps Beatty IS saying that these people have plunged outside of history...but perhaps that they could not help it: the plunge for them was preordained, since it had happened before they were born. The question is--is it even possible for these people to become a part of history again? I guess we'll have to see.
ReplyDeleteYeah! Crazy right? I only just realized how well that comparison actually does work. But I mean, really, in every era of every society there have always been people on the fringe that are 'invisible' to others. I think this still applies to the modern day, but you're right, we'll just have to read more of Beatty to see what exactly will happen.
DeleteAs we're nearing the end of the novel, I'm thinking of the whole "plunge outside history" thing in a new light. The Hillside culture sure represents a kind of "diversity" in America that is not neatly contained in the "rainbow society" good-feelings curriculum of multiculturalism, and Gunnar's radical "solution" to the failure of "civility" (not civil rights per se but basic, shared participation in society and culture) entails people voluntarily plunging themselves outside of that society, in the most radical way imaginable. Maybe there is a parallel to explore here with the narrator plunging down his hole.
ReplyDeleteTanisha, that seen actually reminded me a lot of some of the issues we are currently facing at Uni. Not in the way that we are teaching kids about multicultural elephants...but how to find the balance between discussing and acknowledging our differences without alienating one and other for them. That seen really summed that up perfectly do me
ReplyDelete