Innocence and History in Forrest Gump


The 60s have held a fascination in the minds of millions across the world— the Beat Generation, the hippie culture, Joan Baez, Holden Caulfield, the Beatles, lifting the ban off Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Catch 22 etc have appealed to the rebellious desires of artists, writers and filmmakers for years. In the romance of the rebellion, it is easy to forget what it was that gave strength to this counterculture—the Vietnam War. American cinema is flooded with films about the Vietnam War and it is interesting to note that an entire chunk of these films were made in the 90s. Most of these films are centered around a sense of loss and hopelessness as they base themselves on (and at the same time also create) the veteran discourse.
Robert Zemeckis’s multiple Oscar-winning film, Forrest Gump (1994) isn’t just about the Vietnam War though it tells the story of a war veteran. It records the history of America in and around the 1960s through the figure of a slow-witted man, Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks). In this paper, I would like to discuss how Zemeckis’ representation of the Vietnam War is significantly different from most accounts of the War, especially a film like Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and why Zemeckis feels the need to take a somewhat simplistic view of history. Is it that by the 90s America had finally reached a place where the trauma had been dealt with and there was space for alternative views on the War in popular culture? Or is it embedded in a more political reason, whereby a conservative worldview had to be justified and encouraged?

I

The problem with Forrest Gump begins with the beginning, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.” True to this opening line, the film treats American history of the decades between the 1950s and the 1970s as a box of chocolates; you might not know what flavour you are going to get, but whatever it is, it will still be chocolate. The view of history the film will adopt can be ascertained by the fact that the original quote in Winston Groom’s book on which the film is based, was, “…bein’ an idiot is no box of chocolates.” In the film, Forrest flows in and out of events that shaped American history, particularly in the 1960s, like George Wallace and the desegregation of Alabama University, the Watergate Scandal and the Vietnam War etc. Through Forrest, we see a linear American history¾no mistakes, no looking back, just success. Simple. Encapsulated. In this triumphant march of history, or rather of America, the representation of the Vietnam War is what suffers the most. Numerous critics have debated the conservative or radical impulse of this film, but it is in the representation of the War and the counterculture that the film becomes conservative.

In the latter half of the 80s and through the 90s, America saw an intellectual and artistic revival of the experience of the war in Vietnam where the United States sided with South Vietnam against the Communist regime of North Vietnam. The Vietnam War was the subject of more than thirty films that appeared in this period, the most widely acclaimed of which is Oliver Stone’s Platoon. As Marita Sturken says, Platoon was marketed as ‘the first real Vietnam film’ because of its autobiographical content.[1] Through the film, we are rooted in the landscape of Vietnam and the feeling of no escape is transferred from the soldier to the spectator for whom that landscape is as alien. The film begins with the ominous image of dead bodies wrapped up, ready to be sent back; this is the first view of Vietnam for the protagonist Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) as well as the spectator. The film doesn’t spare us the brutality that ruled that space and time, and this is most evident when Taylor fires at a Vietnamese boy who is expected to keep jumping from one side to the other to protect himself from the shots. Taylor can’t seem to understand why he is doing what he is, he doesn’t understand the anger that is growing inside him, which he decodes only when the film closes, he says, “we weren’t fighting the enemy, we were fighting ourselves…the enemy was within us.” There is death everywhere, not just of American soldiers, but also of the Vietnamese, American GIs burn down entire villages, kill innocent civilians and even attempt a gang rape. There is a critique of the self (read the American), its brutal abilities and the role it plays in the carnage that is made most visible through the film.

Forrest Gump too looks at the Vietnam War, it uses the traditional vocabulary and references¾ the use of the word ‘Charlie’, the reference to the incessant rain, the weapons used, the phones connecting the lieutenant of a platoon to the base camp etc— yet it depicts a different, a softer history. Unlike the opening shot of Platoon, when Forrest appears in Vietnam, the mise en scene is that of a beach party, there are barbeques and stacks of beer cans everywhere, there are GIs playing cards, and there is music in the background. In fact, the comic is introduced in the next scene in an overlap between Forrest’s omniscient narrative and mise en scene. When the GIs are patrolling, Forrest’s omniscient narrative voice says, “Lieutenant Dan was always getting these funny feelings so he’d tell us to get down, shut up.” And then Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise) repeats, “get down, shut up.”
Most importantly, we don’t see any Vietnamese people in Vietnam. We don’t see the Americans as aggressors in any way, only as helpless GIs—all of whose names and hometowns have been discussed by Forrest—who merely defend themselves, against the faceless oppressors. Quite naturally, the spectator’s sympathy is directed towards the young, innocent, injured familiar figure of the American GI, not with the faceless Vietnamese attacker. In the way the War appears in this film, even in their defense, the Americans didn’t kill or injure a single Vietnamese, because the only dead and injured that we see are the Americans.
It is interesting how Zemeckis tries to deal with the political situation of very real events and at the same time tries to distance himself and his film from any direct political comment. He shirks the responsibility of the statements made through the film by focusing on the innocence that Forrest embodies. The pretence is that of an ‘objective’ history; for instance, he places the blame of the injuries and death in the war on a loosely defined entity, that is never shown and hardly ever referred to directly. Whatever else this entity may be, it is not American, so there is no space for self-reflexivity. In Platoon, there is a sense of guilt that comes across in Sergeant Elias’s (Willem Dafoe) statement, “…what happened today is just the beginning, we are going to lose this war…we’ve been kicking other people’s asses for so long, I figure it’s time we got ours kicked.”
The impact and suggestions of Forrest Gump regarding Vietnam are very different from other such films where the spectator and the filmmaker have to come to terms with the destruction and the unending sense of doom that stems from the fact that USA lost the War, something that Zemeckis chooses not to mention. The real difference therefore lies in the struggle with the self and its sense of morality and also with one’s country that continues to be hailed as the moral saviour of the world in the moment when films like Platoon were made. It is the lack of this struggle that marks Zemeckis’ film, where events flow with so much ease that the War, the loss and the entire age seem mocked at.

II
The question that needs to be answered, however, is why the last fifteen years of the 20th century keep coming back to the 60s moment. There are two broad possibilities:
First; as Marita Sturken says, “American society slouches toward the 21st century as a culture deeply suspicious of its history. We have moved from various phases of late modern optimism into cold-war fears, from 1960s disillusion to a late 20th century culture in which conspiracy theory forms a primary narrative…the contemporary paranoia of American culture and about American history can be seen as a direct outcome of the political and social upheaval of the 1960s.”[2]
So while Platoon occupies one end of the spectrum with Stone’s deeply critical view of the Vietnam War, Forrest Gump occupies the other where not only is the significance and impact of the War underplayed and shielded from the viewer, but the American GI is looked at most uncritically. Look at the figure of Forrest. He is the physical embodiment of all boy-scout qualities—he is honest, courageous, loyal and masculine (in his chivalry, also physically, he is a star football player, and during the War, he has the physical strength to carry his injured friends to safety). Very early in the film, we are told that he has an IQ of 75, a mere five points lower than the level required for public schools. In every other way he surpasses ‘normal’ – he is emotionally intact and knows how to respond to love, jealousy, disappointment etc, he is successful, humble, and an eager parent. In other words, he is good at everything he does. The lack of cynicism that functions as the catchphrase of the film is a result of a careful process of selection done by Zemeckis from the original novel. Zemeckis decides to leave out almost all of Forrest’s failures as they appear in Groom’s text—that he went to a special school, failed in college, could not marry his friend Jenny, smoked pot and had an incredibly troubled relationship with his son.[3]

The publicity material for this film stated, “Forrest is the embodiment of an era, an innocent at large in an America that is losing its innocence.” Losing its innocence perhaps because of the darker side of benevolent America with its sensitive, heroic, self-sacrificing soldiers is explored and thus made available for the world to see by films like Platoon and earlier by a film like Soldier Blue.
Second: till the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States of America focused in everyway at containing Communist forces across the world. The Cold War was depicted as the war over evil and liberty. With the end of the Cold War there was a disintegration of this focus and a sense of direction. American authorities could not afford to let go of the status of the saviours of democracy and freedom. Secretary of State James Baker addressed the World Affairs Council in March 1990. He said, “Already a great, new debate —actually a great, old debate —has broken out, an argument as old as our republic. Now that the adversaries of democracy are weaker, some say we should retire, mission accomplished, to tend our problems at home. I am not among them. In the new world struggling to be born, like the old world now rapidly passing away, there is no substitute for American leadership.”[4]
At this point the United States was also looking at interference in a number of other countries, the Gulf and Central America for instance. The public had to be convinced of this foreign policy, they had to be convinced of the reasons for fighting this war that had no direct consequences for the American people. The larger-good-of-mankind argument had to be made in the context of the Gulf War. And since a similar argument was used for Vietnam, the ghosts of that war had to be touched up and re-presented. In Forrest Gump’s version of the Vietnam War, there is less violence, one death (of Forrest’s friend Bubba) and the possibility of looking forward—the Vietnam War introduces Forrest to ping-pong, bringing him fame (he meets the President again and appears alongside John Lennon on The Dick Cavett Show) and money to start the shrimping business which in turn brings him more success and financial security. Ironically, it seems as if Forrest Gump begins where Platoon leaves off, where Taylor says, “Those of us who did make it, have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and meaning to life.”
There was a need in the 90s therefore to bend popular opinion towards ideas of a free world that America had an obligation to build, and it was necessary to convince the public to ensure that a counterculture like the one that appeared in the 60s didn’t raise its head again.
Thus the other indicator of Forrest Gump’s conservative nature is the representation of the counterculture of the 60s. In the film, the counterculture is signified through the figure of Jenny (Robin Wright), Forrest’s friend, object of desire and ultimately his wife. Through Jenny, the counterculture is represented as the darker side of American history, that which was unsuccessful and destructive.
Despite their friendship, Jenny is always the anti-thesis of Forrest. She is engendered in an atmosphere of abuse and has no stable home at any point during the film. She avoids her father’s house, and then moves in with her grandmother who lives in a trailer; Jenny is seen at every point in the film near cars and buses—means of escape, leaving for someplace where she’ll look for meaning. This is reflective of the very mobile hippie culture that she invariably becomes a part of. Not daring to think out of the box, Zemeckis places her in very traditional images of drugs, prostitution, suicide attempts, abusive relationships, and misguided youth—represented through the leader of the Black Panthers Party whose personality comes across as confused, aggressive and astray—and not surprisingly, all of these become characteristics of the counterculture. At various junctures of the film, Forrest comes to her rescue, the most interesting of which is the episode at the headquarters of the Black Panthers Party where in spite of his agitated speech about women being mistreated as a result of the War, the leader and his entire group stand and watch as Jenny’s boyfriend beats her, it is only Forrest who intervenes. Until she decides to unite with Forrest, Jenny, and hence the counterculture is a failure. Constructive aspects of the counterculture like its art, literature and music are conspicuously ignored or ridiculed—for instance, Jenny aspires to be like Joan Baez, and while we do see her singing ‘Blowing in the Wind’, she is doing it in a strip club where no one is paying attention to her song. Through the protesters who force unknowing people (like Forrest) into the peace congregation, the ‘host’ at this congregation who wears the American flag and repeatedly uses obscenities encouraging the mob to cheer, and through the leader of the Black Panthers, the counterculture is not only severely criticised but also caricatured.

We see both Forrest and Jenny growing up together, but since the film is his (fictional) biopic, we see the process of his growth, while she is seen in relation to him. We see him as a witness or a participant in the events that shaped 20th century American history, and this is achieved most convincingly through the interpolations in documentary images that are used throughout the film—he meets almost every president of the United States, he is present at the desegregation of Alabama University, he cracks the Watergate Scandal leading to Nixon’s resignation, and he is a soldier fighting in Vietnam. Jenny’s life however is not seen as a selection of events, but as moments. They are more like snapshots that have no explanation, they are just images. The corroboration of his history with actual events are in contrast to her history, which is caricatured, and also, in comparison, open to debates about authenticity. This establishes Forrest’s as the master narrative, the mainstream, and hers as the disturbed fringe that is tolerated as an unfortunate detail.

The closing decade of the 20th century saw a culture of affluence in the United States; in the Introduction to a New Yorker anthology, David Remnick says, “The American record of economic growth (was) unprecedented and, since March 1991, uninterrupted, and (had) inscribed itself on the landscape¾the McMansions of suburbia, the princely constructions along the oceans, the real-estate manias from Manhattan to Palo Alto…” Remnick recalls a sentence from The Great Gatsby, “He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.” he places this sentence at the heart of the contradiction that defined America in its ‘moment of prosperity, satisfaction and self-satisfaction’.[5] It was perhaps this contradiction of the ‘New Gilded Age’ that lead to the oppositional instincts of self-satisfaction and self-exploration.
Despite its simplified representation of the Vietnam War and the counterculture, some of these contradictions occupy Forrest Gump as well, because the Vietnam War is just one aspect of this film, and therefore all questions are not yet answered.

[1] Marita Sturken. ‘Reenactment, Fantasy and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stone’s Docudramas’ in History and Theory volume 36:4:36, December 1997.
[2] Marita Sturken. ‘Reenactment, Fantasy and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stone’s Docudramas’ in History and Theory volume 36:4:36, December 1997.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Gump
[4] American Foreign Policy Current Documents 1990 (1991). From http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/61.htm
[5] David Remnick (ed). The New Gilded Age—The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence. New York: The Modern Library (2000/2001). All references in this paragraph are from David Remnick’s Introduction to the anthology.

The Politics of Space in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

The Politics of Space in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace


Much has been said about J.M. Coetzee’s discomfort at being branded as a South African novelist and not just a novelist. Much has also been said about his “impatience” with history defining and dominating literature. While one notices this trend in most of Coetzee’s writings, Disgrace works differently. In fact, it deals with history in the most upfront manner. I would like to argue that the changing settings of the narrative work as an enveloping device encasing the concerns Coetzee tries to communicate to his readers.

I

The novel works around two major well defined spaces, namely Cape Town and Lucy’s smallholding in the Eastern Cape. At first glance, there are stark, and predictable differences between these two spaces. Cape Town is typified by the University which allows regular interaction among different races, by the supermarket and the sophisticated and ‘discreet’ escort service. The smallholding, on the other hand, appears, at first, to be a contemporary pastoral space. In Coetzee’s words, “(the) smallholding is at the end of a winding dirt track some miles outside the town: five hectares of land, most of it arable, a wind-pump, stables and outbuildings, and a low sprawling farmhouse painted yellow with a galvanized-iron roof and a covered stoep. The front boundary is marked by a wire fence and clumps of nasturtiums and geraniums; the rest of the front is dust and gravel.” Coetzee takes great pains to present an ideal picture of the countryside in this description, only to shatter that image completely later. While one can see the obvious distinctions between these two descriptions, they undergo visible changes once parallels are drawn between Lurie’s sexual encounter with Melanie in Cape Town and Lucy’s rape at the smallholding. In both cases there is sexual intercourse between people of two different races and in either case, it is not consensual on the woman’s part. A further parallel is highlighted by Gareth Cornwell when he says that Lucy’s determination to not report the rape rests on the argument that what happened to her was a “purely private matter.” This statement ironically mirrors Lurie’s explanation to Lucy regarding his response to the enquiry against him where he said, “Private life is public business. They wanted a spectacle: breast beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact. I wouldn’t oblige.”[1]
Therefore, as Rita Barnard suggests, “the distinctions between the city and the country are effaced. The erosion of the old pastoral opposition of country and city, is but one aspect of a general erasure of boundaries in the world of the novel.”

Taking off from the question of Lurie’s encounters with Melanie and Lucy’s rape, one can say that another parallel between the two spaces is that of sexual subjugation of women which is supplemented by racial discrimination. To highlight Lurie’s contribution in this Cornwell brings attention to a statement made in the novel by Farodia Rasool, a member of the enquiry committee. She says, “Yes, he says, he is guilty; but when we try to get specificity, all of a sudden it is not abuse of a young woman he is confessing to, just an impulse he could not resist, with no mention of the pain he has caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is part.”[2] This situation is ironically inverted in the context of Lucy’s rape, for there it is the exploitation of a white woman by black men. Yet, the history of exploitation from the period of apartheid continues. In both cases, space plays an important part. Let us first consider the Lurie-Melanie case: each time there is a breach of appropriate space that takes place. First, Lurie invites Melanie, his student to his house for a drink, an act that, in layman’s language, can safely be called ‘unprofessional’. Next, he almost forces himself into her flat despite her clear protests. Not only is that a breach of professional conduct, it is a clear refusal on his part to adhere to her wishes and a violation of her space. Lastly, when Melanie comes to stay with him, his initial thoughts are: “Now here she is in his house, trailing complications behind her.” But soon he thinks, “Every night she will be here; every night he can slip into her bed like this, slip into her.”
Coming now to Lucy’s rape: the way in which she understands it is reflected in her statement to Lurie when she says, “What if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves.” Secondly, the role of Petrus in Lucy’s rape: he was clearly aware of it, and therefore made sure he was away at the time. The way in which he benefited from it was in terms of land. He knew that once Lucy was ‘warned’ by the attack, she would either ultimately be persuaded by her father and leave the farm for him, or have no choice but to accept his ‘protection’ which would come at the price of letting go of her mastery over the farm. And that is exactly what happens. Lucy accepts his supremacy, and gives up all the land except the house and the kennels. It is interesting to note that Petrus is a name borrowed from Gordimer’s story, ‘Six Feet of the Country’, in which Petrus is a helpless black peasant who is refused land for the burial of his family member.[3] It is therefore no coincidence that here Petrus becomes the master of a large plot of land, some of it acquired, (almost by force) from a white woman. Rita Barnard sees Disgrace as a “striking response to the post-apartheid moment, or the ‘new South Africa’…where Coetzee seems to have relinquished this earlier dream of a maternal and deconstructive pastoral mode. In the ‘new South Africa’ of the novel, the urge to stake one’s claim, to own, to procreate is forcefully present.”[4] This can be seen not only in Petrus but also in Lurie who tries to appropriate Melanie’s identity by twisting around the pronunciation of her name to Meláni, the dark one, who he can dominate.
The entire discourse of the female body as a site for declaring mastery, political and social, comes into play in this situation, but since that is another tangent altogether, I will not go further into it.

II

In Lucy’s relationship with the farm we can see, at an allegorical level, the changes South African society was undergoing post apartheid. When we first see Lucy, she stands sturdily on her patch of land, “(her) toes gripping the red earth, leaving clear prints”, the meaning of this hardly needs to be glossed. From this, it moves on to the stage where according to Cornwell, Lucy’s reading of the rape as her debt or tax is a deluded attempt of a traumatized woman to make logical sense of what has happened to her, to make her experience meaningful by construing it in some sense as necessary or deserved.[5] From here, we move on to Lucy’s statement which is, “Yes, the road I am following may be the wrong one. But if I leave the farm now I will leave defeated, and will taste that defeat for the rest of my life.” There seems to be a hint of indignation in her tone. This determination undergoes complete transformation when she accepts Petrus’ mastery over her and by extension over her land. The farm is her identity, this is where she came when she gave up life like her ‘city folk, intellectual’ parents and pursued her alternative identity as a woman, a lesbian who runs a farm. She had, in all ways, proven that she did not need male support, instead she was paying Petrus and had given him space to stay in the old stables on her land, and then gave shelter to her father when he needed to get away from Cape Town. In a violent turn of events, this feminist ideal was shattered, leaving her in her pregnant (reasserting her ‘womanhood’ and forcibly resituating her in the ‘feminine ideal’ as the bearer of children) after the rape, her father looks after her, advises her and ultimately Petrus will become her husband, in order to be the male presence that would protect her. Towards the close of the novel, Lucy is barely left as a master of her house, and is instead fixed in the romantic pastoral feminine ideal: “Lucy is at work among the flowers…she is wearing a pale summer dress, boots and a wide straw hat... the wind drops. There is a moment of utter stillness he would wish prolonged for ever: the gentle sun, the stillness of mid-afternoon, bees busy in a field of flowers: and at the centre of the picture a young woman. A scene ready made for a Sargent or a Bonnard.” Lucy has been stuck in the ambit of the ideal female. The untranslated German phrase means, the eternal feminine, it is borrowed from Goethe’s Faust, holding the idea of redemption. According to Barnard, Lurie’s desire to prolong this beautiful moment goes hand in hand with a desire to view the present as a recurrence of the past. His gaze and discourse remain masculine, European, traditional, a matter of received ideas of rural life…[6]
It would be extremely reductive, almost incorrect to view this as an attempt on Coetzee’s part to indicate that only the whites in South Africa had to undergo adjustments and that he was forwarding the post apartheid white paranoia that they were being driven out of South Africa. It is on the other hand, an inverted gaze at the history of exploitation and subjugation and a self conscious realization of the ever-present burden of history.

III

After the attack on Lucy, Lurie becomes more actively involved in two activities that have hitherto been ignored or attempted half heartedly by him: the animal hospital and the chamber opera based on the life of Byron in Italy. In his involvement in both these activities one can see a visible change in Lurie.
The animal hospital run by Bev Shaw seems to be a value neutral space since neither of the two ‘crimes’ that are central events of the novel, took place here. Lurie’s work at the hospital can be seen as a redemptive exercise, for something as seemingly trivial as giving the dead dogs an honorable funeral becomes a driving force for him. The identification with the dogs and there space started in the early stages of his arrival at the smallholding when he began his ‘interaction’ with Katy with the words, “abandoned, are we?” and the identification becomes complete when he shares Katy’s kennel and sleeps there peacefully. The way he was locked up and unable to save his daughter, so was Katy, the abandoned dog. Coming back to the hospital, he seems to understand the peace the animals feel when they are under Bev Shaw’s care at the hospital. Therefore, his services seem to work as an attempt to redeem himself of his own sense of disgrace. While he appears to be reduced to this activity from the position of a professor at an esteemed university, one can certainly feel a higher sense of his self worth by the time the novel closes.

The chamber opera that he has been planning for years does not move forward till much after the attack on Lucy. After the incident, however, it changes tracks completely, from an opera about Byron’s life in Italy with borrowed music, to one about his mistress Teresa and his abandoned daughter Allegra. And this time around, he ‘composes’ the music himself even if it is the simple ‘plink plunk plonk’ of the strings of a banjo. So far Lurie’s image has been linked to Byron, the seducer, but now, according to critic Kimberly Segall, he shifts his narrative into the space of the violated woman exemplified by the ghostly girl he sees in his dream, Teresa and Allegra. The figure of Allegra critiques the self absorption and trend of tragedy in Byron and by extension in Lurie. This shift suggests Lurie’s shift from emotional detachment to an emergent recognition of female suffering.[7]
Therefore we can say that, the hospital and the chamber opera serve as Lurie’s alternative spaces.

Through the figures of Lurie, Lucy, Petrus etc. Coetzee showcases the changes that are taking place in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid, and the role played by history in contemporary social conditions and social relations. The reason why space is a factor in this novel is because it works around the tenets of apartheid which were based on a physical segregation of the South African people. Coetzee is among the few white writers who confronts and accepts the equal presence of black South Africans and he does this in Disgrace by situating them in an actual physical space. In Disgrace, he challenges the comfort zone of the whites where the unsaid rule is, “If people are starving, let them starve far away in the bush, where their thin bodies will not be a reproach. If they have no work, if they migrate to the cities, let there be roadblocks, let there be curfews, let there be laws against vagrancy, begging, and squatting, and let offenders be locked away so that no one has to hear or see them.”[8] It is Coetzee’s attempt as a white person, to realize what he repeatedly asserts throughout the novel, that, “this place is South Africa”.
[1] ‘Realism, Rape and J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace’ – Gareth Cornwell, Studies in Contemporary Literature, Rhodes University, 2002
[2] ‘Realism, Rape and J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace’ – Gareth Cornwell, Studies in Contemporary Literature, Rhodes University, 2002


[3]Coetzee’s Disgrace and the South African Pastoral – Rita Barnard, Contemporary Literature, Volume 44, No.2, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003 (From JSTOR.org)
[4] Coetzee’s Disgrace and the South African Pastoral – Rita Barnard, Contemporary Literature, Volume 44, No.2, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003 (From JSTOR.org)


[5] ‘Realism, Rape and J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace’ – Gareth Cornwell, Studies in Contemporary Literature, Rhodes University, 2002

[6] Coetzee’s Disgrace and the South African Pastoral – Rita Barnard, Contemporary Literature, Volume 44, No.2, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003 (From JSTOR.org)


[7] ‘Pursuing Ghosts: The Traumatic Sublime in J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace’ – Kimberly Wedeven Segall, Research in African Literatures, Indiana University Press, 2005
[8] ‘Dream Topographies: J.M Coetzee and the South African Pastoral’ – Rita Barnard, South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 93, No.1, 1994

Review - United 93

United 93 : Polite Propaganda

Let’s start with some basic facts. United 93 was one of the four planes that were hijacked on September 11, 2001. The plane probably missed its intended target and crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania leaving no survivors.
Now United 93 is the film made by Paul Greengrass that tries to capture what might have happened on the flight and restructures the scenes at the various air control centres across the United States as they discovered one hijack after another.
The film has an immediate emotional impact as the viewer feels the fear and helplessness of the passengers on the flight. The moment when the door to the aircraft closes is given enough cinematic time for the audience to understand the relevance and finality of the action. After that the aircraft becomes a sealed space, and since the camera only captures the insider perspective, the viewer becomes a virtual passenger who shares that impenetrable space. Once we become a part of the victim group, the interplay between the real and the supposed begins.
However, there is an attempt to pass off the film as reality, even though, (as Greengrass says himself in an interview) most of what happened on the plane is purely speculative[1]: The poster of the film fixes it in real life (“September 11, 2001. Four Planes Were Hijacked…”) people like Ben Sliney and Shawna Fox etc play themselves, real conversations have been used and the film is in real time. Many have tried to string together the content of the various phone calls that were made from the flight to understand the situation. But that is all we have and it can, at best, help to construct a part of the reality. And in this constructed reality, the portrayal of the terrorist is what is most poorly done. Its poor as in simplistic or poor as in reactionary.

The film opens with one of the terrorists chanting from The Quran. While he is still chanting, there is a change on screen and the camera captures a long shot, top view of Boston at its serene best. The desired effect of the calm before the storm is easily achieved. Film Critic Roger Ebert praises the film saying, “We know what they (the passengers) know when they know it, and nothing else. Nothing about Al Qaeda, nothing about Osama bin Laden, nothing about Afghanistan or Iraq, only events as they unfold.”[2] This however is not true. We might share the fears of those on that flight, but we know more than they, we do know about Al Qaeda, we do know about Osama and most importantly, we know about 9/11. We know the fate of the passengers before they do. That is why the effect of the omniscient chanting appears ominous to us. A small detail that adds to this feeling of impending doom is when the terrorists are on their way to the airport, and apart from the calm surroundings, we see a container with the text, “God Bless America”. There is a contrast that sets in at this point, between the two references to God. And it is this contrast that flows through the entire film. Later in the film it is done directly with some of the passengers saying The Lord’s Prayer that seems countered by the terrorists whispering verses from The Quran.
The primary problem is that it shows us the hijackers not as members of specific terrorist groups, but more as Muslims in general. They don’t really speak much through the film, but are seen muttering religious verses to themselves (or shouting it out) for atleast 95% of their screen time. And since most of the American audience will not know what language they spoke in, it will once again be seen as ‘Muslimness’.[3] A significant line Ben Sliney says in the film captures the essence of the thought the film projects, “Anything is suspicious now.” The first signs of trouble on American Airline Flight 11 came about when some one heard a transmission that he didn’t understand. What he says is, “It was not American, it was foreign”, and the opposing binaries are well set.
The only identifiable thing one hears from the hijackers, are phrases like “Allahu Akbar” and “Ya Allah”. In fact the attack on the flight starts with a sudden shout of “Allahu Akbar” and the hijacker brutally stabs a passenger with repeated cries of the same phrase. Even if you ignore the fact that it is a childish stereotype the objection here is obvious; these are the most usual, everyday phrases used by Muslims all over the world, and Greengrass fixes them in the context of 9/11. This, in any case, is not all, the two hijackers in the cockpit repeatedly ask for Allah’s blessings for their heinous crimes, saying things like, “To you I submit myself”. Now what can that possibly mean, that Islam, or more stupidly, the ‘Islamic God’ asks his followers to kill innocent people? A lot of what the hijackers say is in fact left untranslated therefore it is the continuous random religious shouting that becomes the language of the brutal killers. There is so much wrong with this representation; it links Islam with violence of the most heartless kind, and in a more contemporary context, it links it with terrorism. Not Al Qaeda, not Osama, but Islam.

In the film’s diatribe of show and tell, it is difficult to think beyond what the filmmaker wants you to and therefore easy to forget that it is largely a hypothesis. All the phone calls that the passengers or crew members made, were at the risk of being stabbed by the angry militants, and therefore (as shown in the film as well) chances are that no one wasted time in trying to identify the terrorists or their cultural background. So, what evidence can there be that without doubt points towards the identity of these terrorists. The actors playing the terrorists, are of Iraqi, Egyptian and British extraction[4] giving the crime a pan-Muslim image.
It seems as if the film looks back at The Holy Crusades, in one way re-enacting it and in another re-writing it. In this context, the word, ‘United’, in the title of the film can acquire several meanings. From the United States of America, to the united people of the west (primarily American) fighting for the ‘holy land’, which ironically, translates into America! This is manifested in the coming together of all the hostages to fight the terrorists. The survival instinct of a helpless group of victims is used to glorify America.

We, in our spirit of understanding, forgive this depiction, because after all America did suffer from the greatest injustice. So what if this film comes from a country where hate crimes against regular Muslims are steadily rising[5]; from a country that attacked Sikhs because they thought they were Arabs[6]; from a country where we have people (Republican Congressman Peter King among others[7]) demanding racial profiling; from a country where a WMAL-AM[8] host stated on air that: 1. “Islam is a terrorist organization.” 2. “The problem is not extremism. The problem is Islam.” and 3. “We are at war with a terrorist organization named Islam.”[9]
If you are still wondering about the film’s connection to this list, here is the icing on the cake: In Scottsdale, Arizona, on April 29, 2006, three young Muslim women wearing head-covers were verbally attacked by a middle-aged couple who indicated to them that they had watched the movie. After asking the young women if they were Muslim, the couple told them "Take off your fucking burqas and get the fuck out of this country. We don't want you in this country. Go home."[10]
I rest my case.

[1] From an interview with Gavin Smith, Film Comment, May-June 2006.“It’s catharsis, it’s a reliving, it’s a reconstruction. It’s a hypothesis.” Greengrass also said, “The critical thing was to say, What might have happened? Here’s what we know, and here’s what seems to be reasonable supposition – now let’s take those two elements… and try to ‘play’ in such a way that we can unlock a believable truth.”
[2] From: http://www.rogerebert.com. April 28, 2006
[3] While I couldn’t decipher the language and accents of the terrorists, a few viewers have said that they spoke in varying accents and dialects:
“Hollywood doesn't differentiate between Iraqi dialect and other Arabic dialects. So he (Greengrass) went with the Iraqi dialect.”
From, http://www.fayrouz.blogspot.com April 29, 2006
[4] “Iraqi born actor Lewis Alsamari was denied a visa by the US immigration authorities when he applied to visit New York for the premier of the film. The reason given was that he had once been a conscripted member of the Iraqi army.”
From, http://www.answers.com/topic/united-93
[5] From, www.cair.com/pdf/2006-CAIR-Civil-Rights-Report.pdf
[6] From, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_attacks#Public_response

[7] Republican Congressman Peter King said, "I think it is time to end political correctness. To me, if a person is of Middle Eastern descent it is legitimate for the screener to ask more questions." Quoted in the article, ‘Increased Calls for Racial Profiling At Airports In Wake of Foiled British Plot’ by, Bill Rogers in Washington D.C, August 2006. In http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-08-23-voa45.cfm

[8] WMAL-AM is a Radio New Station based in Washington D.C
[9] From, www.cair.com/pdf/2006-CAIR-Civil-Rights-Report.pdf, page 29

[10] From http://www.answers.com/topic/united-93 .
Another instance of how films like this one can work as propaganda lies in the predecessor film, Flight 93, Jerry Mazza said, “Flight 93’s patriotic spin landed before the sentencing of Zaccharias Moussaoui, who has been thrust in the role of scapegoat for the entire 9/11 debacle, even though he was in jail at the time. So we have a little multi-media propaganda to stir up the jury and America’s misguided rage.”
From, http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_752.shtml

The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye: The Language of a Rebel

‘I am not aiming high
I am only trying to keep myself alive
Just a little longer’
— Charles Bukowski

By virtue of being published in 1951, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye didn’t fit into any well defined literary canon, it was too early to be part of the Beat generation and too late to be in the highly respected Modernist group. The creation of Holden Caulfield however, is considered to have been a stroke of Salinger’s genius. It was perhaps this lack of any existing pattern that made The Catcher in the Rye a best seller for all time to come. So popular was the novel that Salinger, who shared a desire for anonymity with Holden, had to instruct his publishers not to print his photograph with his biographical note at the end of the book.
The protagonist, Holden Caulfield personified the desires, fears and frustrations of the American youth after the Second World War in the typical teenager vernacular of the 1950s. The conversational style of Holden’s language was unusual, and its apparent lack of pretension or ‘phoniness’ was what attracted thousands to the book. The faulty structure of Holden’s sentences is quite common and typical in vocal expression.[1] It indicates that Salinger wanted the language to represent spoken speech rather than formal written (read recordable) speech. The conscious use of these phrases and a deliberate violation of grammar rules is not only a part of teenage vernacular, but also an act of defiance on Holden’s part and hence Salinger’s.

Holden seems incapable of definite thoughts, as most of his sentences are incomplete and only broadly convey the idea he has in mind. His language is replete with sentences ending ‘…and all’ or ‘something’, especially where these phrases are not required; for instance, “Somebody with sense and all.” or “I should’ve at least made it for cocktails or something.” This recurrence suggests a sense of looseness of expression and of thought which becomes a part of Holden and helps to characterize him.[2] Salinger very consciously draws a distinction between Holden and the precocious Carl Luce. The difference between them becomes clear in their respective usages of language. An extract from their conversation serves as a telling example: Holden says, ‘In her later thirties? Yeah? You like that? You like ’em that old?’ to which Luce replies, ‘I like a mature person, if that’s what you mean. Certainly.’ to which Holden asks again, ‘You do? Why? No kidding, they better for sex and all?’ In this exchange, Luce comes across as controlled and confident, like an adult. The important thing is however, that the sympathy of the reader lies with Holden, because Luce, like Stradlater, appears sophisticated, but is ultimately a ‘phony’, whereas, Holden’s transparency and evident lack of tact suggest a childish innocence.
Holden seems very conscious of his speech and confesses his lack of communication skills which becomes apparent in the number of times he repeats himself. In spite of his disdain for school, he is somewhat embarrassed of his position as an outcast of the education system. In his conversation with members of society, he often adopts characteristics. He pretends to have friends, to be a regular donor to charities, and in general to be older and more mature. This highlights his sense of alienation and his lack of confidence, which also becomes evident in language. He is also extremely aware of the ‘phony’ quality of many words and phrases that he uses, such as, ‘grand’, ‘prince’, ‘traveling incognito’ etc.

One of Holden’s main concerns is the ‘phoniness’ of the world. Almost everything seems fake and ‘phony’ and just ‘kills him’. For instance, ‘“How marvelous to see you!” old Lillian Simmons said. Strictly phony.’ This one word is repeated numerous times in the novel and it captures the American ethos of the 1940s and the 1950s. Interestingly, the other phrase Holden constantly uses, ‘It really was’ or ‘I really did’, works in contradiction to the ‘phony’ world, as he feels compelled to reinforce his sincerity and truthfulness.[3] It was a response to the post Second World War and early Cold War era, where all alliances were political and temporary. This period saw a breakdown of old political, cultural and moral structures. As John Updike explains, America’s artists and intellectuals, like those of the Twenties, felt mostly a sardonic estrangement from a government that extolled business and mediocrity.[4] The public realm seemed ruled by a variety of fantasies, both comic and dreadful[5], and the people felt the need to find an escape route from the overbearing control of the ‘superstate’. This is effectively portrayed when Holden says he would like to be ‘the catcher in the rye’. He says, ‘I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all…and nobody’s around, nobody big…I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff.”
The most important aspect of the language in The Catcher in the Rye is the distance between the writer and the protagonist. As the novel is recounted in first person, this distinction is often blurred. The use of a colloquial, ‘tangy’ idiom was an extremely conscious step on Salinger’s part to create this distance between himself and the teenage Holden. Simeon Potter identifies the use of slang as a means of increasing intimacy, because it allows the speaker to drop into a lower key, to meet his fellow on even terms and to have ‘a word in his ear’.[6] The American reader could identify not only with Holden’s character but also with his language.
The late forties saw new writers making a visible effort to change the style and language of fiction. The Catcher in the Rye borrows aspects of the Modernist movement in art and literature. This becomes evident in a number of ways; firstly, in the opening line of the novel: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Salinger rejects the established method of story telling, with a snide remark reserved especially for Dickens — representative of canonical storytellers. Secondly, the novel, like most Modernist works, focuses on the microcosm, the individual – Holden Caulfield. In Holden, Salinger creates a confused character who tells a rather fragmented story. While the direct focus is on the individual, ultimately, it serves as an analysis of society.
In the fiction of the period, the trend was to negate the realist and naturalist style that dominated the literary scene. Salinger, however, borrowed aspects of the naturalist tradition in his portrayal of Holden’s gloomy life full of betrayals and dejections and an unfulfilled desire for love and acceptance. At the same time, Salinger distanced himself from the tradition in his use of an extremely informal language full of slang and swear-words. What really separates Salinger from other naturalist writers is that he doesn’t attempt a disinterested, detached portrayal of Holden. In this novel, like in a lot of American fiction following the Second World War, the controlling image of the hero was that of the rebel-victim. Almost always, he was an outsider, a child, adolescent, criminal, saint, scapegoat or clown compounded in ironic or grotesque measures.[7] Again, the reason America could relate to Holden was that they saw bits of themselves in the character.
It is this sense of the world and its people being fake that gave rise to the Beat generation of which Salinger can be considered a part in spite of the ten odd years that lie between him and the peak of the Beat movement. The Catcher in the Rye is a follow up of a long list of trends and influences from Camus, to The American Dream and predates a long list of symbols of rebellion from Cacth-22 to Elvis Presley. The novel’s experimentation, rebellion and consequent staggering popularity influenced an entire generation of literature to come.

[1] ‘The Language of The Catcher in the Rye’ – David P. Costello. From Salinger – Henry A. Grunwald (ed)
[2] ‘The Language of The Catcher in the Rye’ – David P. Costello. From Salinger – Henry A. Grunwald (ed)

[3] ‘The Language of The Catcher in the Rye’ – David P. Costello. From Salinger – Henry A. Grunwald (ed)
[4] More Matter: Essays and Criticisms – John Updike
[5]‘The New Consciousness’. From Literary History of the United States
[6] ‘Slang and Dialect’. From Our Language - Simeon Potter
[7] ‘Resisting Orthodoxy: Dissent and experiment in fiction’. From Literary History of the United States.