Reviewed in fiction by Victor Enns
Preface ; 479 words (Skip)
Sarah Binks Summer School of Semiotics (SBSSS)[1]
North Willows, Saskatchewan
Class: Reading it right
Instructor: Professor Lydia Binks[2]-Peters; Course number; 3.14 etc.
Dear potential Binksian Semiotician:
Your final exam, leading to your certification, is as follows:
Using at least five critical theories chosen from the ten forms of critical analysis studied this year, compare a text of your choice with one from our reading list this year providing at least two to three examples of critical theories that are unproductive for interpreting your text and two to three critical theories that are productive, for a minimum of five critical theories, in 1,000 to 2,000 words in the next 48 hours.
I look at the clock on my laptop. I’ve got 44 hours left. I stump downstairs cursing the absence of a railing. Fortunately, I reach the designer kitchen safely, making sure to get just the right amount of ice from the icemaker before the fridge beeps, and pour three fingers of scotch into my glass, careful not to slosh on my way back to my second floor writing studio.
I knew this assignment was coming and had already chosen Hard Hed: The Hoosier Chapman Papers as the novel of my choice, checking online for new fiction from the smaller presses that might interest me. I found a PDF Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) of Hard Hed which I read to get a quick sense of the story and to see how searchable it might be to provide statistical analytical tools if my own thinking fails me. Fortunately, I got a hard copy in time for my close read the second time through which was much easier to annotate.
SECOND READING, 1,045 words [Skip]
Book 1
The book starts with an author’s note proclaiming, “This book is unashamedly a work of speculative fiction.” Glad we have that straight. Book 1 is introduced by a quote from Emerson “Let the rough riders, Hoosier[3] or whatever hard head, half orator, half assassin, let these drive as they may,” revealing the source for the title of the book and an early use of the word Hoosier. Unlike A Strange Manuscript found in a Copper Cylinder[4] there is no provenance given to how it might have been found to include in this novel. It just is. Or rather is an ”acuntt by the Riter myself Dn’ll Linkhorn.” The journal provides twelve pages of text describing the rapid ascent of Linkhorn, a Hard Hed mounted rifleman, driving the Indians out of Indiana in 1811 and ending his successful career as a Brigadier General.
Marginal note: Post-colonial, postmodern, also references that could be considered in feminist theory (the slave girl), and Linkhorn’s ongoing references to his increasing salary could be looked at from a Marxist perspective.
Book 2
This book connects to the first because the protagonist Hoosier Chapman is introduced as an ancient cousin to Daniel Linkhorn, “related six long generations ago.” He is released dressed in an orange coverall, wearing poor quality work boots. He did time for planting “spitter apple seeds” in a public park and tells the deputy sheriff he is a local historian. The deputy laughs and points him back to Indiana on his release. Some lovely description and some humour everywhere, but every once awhile a stinker like “Seeds and words,” obviously for the dim reader who doesn’t understand metaphor, and pomo figures like “All of this may have happened. The records do not say.”
Book 2 features dramatic swings from the apocalyptic bus crash and the girls head in a back pack[5] to the slapstick scenes at the William Gass reading, swinging back to the tragic death of Nancy Miami, who had been returning with Hoosier from the reading. Also includes a letter from his brother informing Hoosier of their mother’s death.
Marginal note: Funnier than Beckett. Postcolonial, apocalyptic, could make an argument for a mythopoeic reversal – Hoosier offers Nancy an apple. Funny as hell, existential, with a hardy nod to the powers of horror. Consider also feminist theory, postmodern theory, and psychoanalytic theory (The dead mother).
Book Three: Big Woods: A Local History
This may be the local history Hoosier is writing which takes us back to Linkhorn County, Indiana “which is the last of the Indian lands to be settled by Indian killers.” References to Dan’ll Linkhorn cutting off heads and carrying them in a sack relating to the head in Hoosier’s back pack.[6] A little dipsey doodling with Johnny Applejack, Eerxes Chaman, Hoosier’s spitter apple planting ancestor and near synecdoche with a letter from Increase Fidler to the Linkhorn Tribune about Swedenborg “planting apple trees in Heaven.” Book 3 is dark including the ravages of the Klu Klux Klan and the rape murder of the “Indian Princess” Nancy Miami, an inescapable link to the murdered and missing aboriginal women all across Canada.
Marginal note: Postcolonial analysis dominant for this book, feminist theory not far behind. Hard not to be spooked by its relevance to 2011.
Book 4: Linkhorn, Indiana
We’re back in this century, and in Linkhorn Indiana, with protagonist Hoosier Chapman being picked up off the street by his father. They have a conversation that wouldn’t be out of place in a Beckett – or a Tidler play.[7] Funny too. The investigation into the murder, a cover-up, has its ironic moments but is not nearly as interesting as the writing about the relationship between Hoosier and his father. The conversation back home is disgusting and well written. The racism as revealed in the discussion of the murder, and watching nightriders and whitecaps on TV dominates, overshadowing Hoosier’s realizing his parents have looked at his manuscripts that he had left in a box in a garage, and they’ve burned them all. He slips away when his mug shot comes up on the TV as a potential suspect in the murder. Book 4 ends with Hoosier’s head exploding like a mushmelon, shot not by the sheriff (or his deputy) but by a lynch mob sharpshooter, who takes revenge on Hoosier offering to defend an African American boy from the mob.
Marginal note: Postcolonial discourse developed through from book 3, but with a psychological twist. Autobiographical re burnt manuscripts? Then there is this whole Jesus thing, and the ruined orchard where all the spitter apple trees he planted have also been destroyed. This is the garden at Gethsemane.
Book Five: The Ruined Orchard
This ending is another beginning in the garden of Eden or referring back to the story about planting apple seeds in Heaven in the previous book. First, a quote from Thomas Jefferson in his second inaugural address regarding the “Indian Problem” clarifying which analysis will provide the best reading. ..”in order for habit to give way to reason, we must close our hand and crush the other.”[8]
There is some postmodern joking regarding a lost song about Applejack, and how “All we know for certain is that, anecdotally, Hoosier Chapman awakes singing.” Returning to the Garden still ruined as before, Hoosier strips off his prison overalls, and naked starts grafting the ruined trees so that they may grow again.
Marginal Note: There is a lot that happens in 178 pages in this novel to hold the reader’s interest. The narrative is well maintained, the characters a little less so. Stereotypes may be necessary in postcolonial writing, but the characters would have been more interesting, possibly also the plot, if not presented so much in black and white.
BRIDGE, 304 words (Skip)
I pull the novel with the sepia almost rag-like soft cover with a shaved head on the front and layers of lightly visible handwritten text giving the book a mock historical feel, as if this might be a real historical document, out of my messenger bag. I turn on my laptop and select the Band’s The Band album from my computer files as by the far the most appropriate music for this enterprise with Tidler writing a scene involving a sleeping bag that might be an almost literal reading of Rag Mama Rag, well except perhaps for an even more unhappy ending.
Besides my annotated Hard Hed: The Hoosier Chapman Papers, I have a copy of David Macey’s Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory and my daughter’s[9] paper for her final University of Winnipeg Fundamentals of Literary Study exam to help me with this assignment. She left a copy in the recycling box next to my printer last semester.
She chose True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey as her text for comparisons and critical analysis. Her paper was one of the reasons I signed up for this Binksian Semiotics course, the other a result of attending a university cocktail party with my professor wife and feeling that my references to Barthes and Kristeva were, if not wrong, at least out of date. I like to keep up with the women in my life. It makes for more interesting conversations at the dinner table.
As it happens True History of the Kelly Gang was one of the books in the Binks class syllabus I read, and with the paper clearly delineating some of the same theories I had studied on-line, it is the perfect go-to book for my comparative analysis. I open Hard Hed to review my initial classifications.
Sarah Binks Summer School of Semiotics
Instructor: Lydia Binks-Peters
Class: Reading it Right
August 29, 2011
Victor Enns Student I.D. SBSSS 43
Final Exam Paper 1,000 words (Skip)
UNPRODUCTIVE CRITICISM
- Queer Theory
- Marxist Theory
- Feminist Theory
PRODUCTIVE CRITICISM
- Reader Response Theory
- Postmodern Theory (inc. Deconstruction and post structuralism, i.e. Beckett, Kroetsch, Gass, Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard)
- Post Colonial Theory (includes subjection of black and aboriginal races by white imperialist oppressors)
So to begin:
UNPRODUCTIVE CRITICISM
A) Queer Theory. There is precious little in Hard Hed: The Hoosier Chapman Papers that could benefit from queer analysis except the absence of queer performance itself. Queer analysis works better for True History of the Kelly Gang with its cross dressing and use of pistols. There is a pistol in Hard Hed, but no evidence it is ever fired, figuratively, literally or metaphorically.
B) Marxist Theory. This works, I think, accepting my daughter’s analysis, for True History of the Kelly Gang. It does not work for Hard Hed. Despite the poverty of white trash and the dominance of authority figures wearing sheriff’s uniforms or white sheets, this novel is not really about work, controlling the means of production, working conditions or capital.
C) Feminist theory. There are simply not enough female characters in either novel to make feminist analysis productive. Whether this is because of the male authors’ reluctance or inability to write three-dimensional female characters, or because the stories are focused on men (a bit of relief actually, being a man who reads books, and like to occasionally read a book that takes my gender seriously), doesn’t really matter. It is not possible however to overlook the rape and murder of an aboriginal young woman in Hard Hed without regarding feminist theory, though in this instance post-colonial theory will be given preference.
PRODUCTIVE CRITICISM
A) Reader-response criticism is a productive approach for reading Hard Hed, The Hoosier Chapman Papers, unlike True History of the Kelly Gang. Carey directs the reader to accept the authenticity of the documents, of the history of the Kelly gang, as true, much like Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid. Tidler, on the other hand, provides multiple choices, casting doubt on all the documents, reports (a word that appears at least 15 times in the text), diaries presented as archival historical evidence, despite detailed descriptions about the condition of the paper and the binding of a variety of texts. The reader may tire of this approach by the time two variant endings are provided. Hard Hed can feel a little like a young adult choose-your-own adventure, but it does truly require the reader to engage with the text and respond.
B) Postmodern Analysis is a slippery fish. It is often applied to a variety of cultural practises and analysis, and contrasted with Modernism (which was home to New Criticism and really sharp buildings even in Winnipeg and uncomfortable furniture, some of which I sit on every day).
Postmodernist literary theory is closely associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism. The first indication that postmodern analysis provides a productive reading of Hard Hed is provided above in the multiple readings available and the lack of closure. This approach does not work as well for True History of the Kelly Gang, for which New Criticism might provide a productive reading. Carey certainly imbues the text with authority and provides closure.
C) Humour, one of the positive values of postmodernism, is played against the high seriousness of modernism. Hard Hed is a very funny book, demythologizing the Johnny Appleseed fable[10] and providing an echo of Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue.[11] One of the funniest scenes in the book, a clear demarcation of postmodernism and a strong desire to move on, occurs in a description of a William Gass reading, with Gass attacking the protagonist, Hoosier Chapman, mistaking him for someone else who has stolen a first draft of an early manuscript of one of his novels.
D) Postcolonial analysis is based upon the examination of social organization, primarily around racial or ethnic lines. Postcolonial analysis seeks to illuminate how oppression is replicated through language and metaphor to denigrate those not in the dominant social or racial class. [12]
Postcolonial analysis provides the most productive reading of Hard Hed: The Hoosier Chapman Papers, in its direct representation of the colonization of backwoods Indiana including the murder and forced relocation of aboriginal populations, or in less gentle terms, genocide. The novel doesn’t stop there with a significant portion of the text given to the implacability and stupidity of the Klu Klux Klan in the 20th century, and the rape and murder of an aboriginal woman. These references also draw an interesting comparison to the religious intolerance of American and Taliban fundamentalism in the 21st century. It is somewhat refreshing to read a good story taking the piss out of colonialism and racism.
True History of the Kelly Gang is not completely maladapted to postcolonial analysis; the story is concerned with the oppression of poor Irish immigrants in the British colony of Australia. However, the Kelly Gang themselves are often proponents of racism. Ned’s suffering leads him to jealousy and anger towards blacks in the novel, cursing the black men, as he “was raised to think the blacks the lowest of the low but they had boots not us and we damned and double damned them.” While Carey makes it clear that Ned’s racism is a result of his impoverished upbringing, which in itself is a result of British colonization, it limits the success of applying a postcolonial analysis to the text[13].
EPILOGUE 250 words (Skip)
One thing about Professor Lydia Binks-Peters: she marked hard and quickly. I opened my Outlook on August 31st to find her email and an attached document which was a PDF of my certificate recognizing my status as a Sarah Binks Semiotician with the privilege to use the letters SBS after my name which I proudly wrote into the certificate after printing it.
I then turned to her comments on my final exam paper, which were rather harsh I thought considering it was a summer course:
Dear Victor,
I have granted you your SBS certificate with some reservations and with a grade of C+ on your final exam paper. There are several reasons for this;
a) you use someone else’s paper as the basis for yours, but as it was cited according to our rigorous standards, I will let it go instead of dismissing you from SBSSS for plagiarism,
b) your paper just barely arrived in my Outlook in time for me to grade it before harvest,
c) feminist critical theory would surely have worked for Hard Hed,
d) your essay just barely met the number of words required, but most importantly,
e) you did not cite one critical text or groundbreaking semiotician in your essay, which leads me to believe you have not done any of the assigned readings for the course.
Please note the attached brochure for our offering next summer, “Digital Dialectics,” a SBS post-graduate course during which students will grabble with the cloud. Course cost will again be $999.00.
Lydia
[1] Lydia showed Kristeva’s endorsement of her school in badly scanned PDFs to all applicants showing Julia’s signatures in her seminal volumes, Revolution in Poetic Language, Powers of Horror and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy, which were inscribed with the words “Jouissance Lydia! Love, Julia,” dated the same night as the Blue Jays won the World Series. Lydia never dared to think what might have transpired that carnivalesque night.
[2] Though results from the DNA lab in Regina were inconclusive, Lydia was always sure Robert Kroetsch, in a moment of unbridled teenaged passion, surging in a garden of sweet violets behind the red barn, impregnated her mother Sarah, who hid the affair, the pregnancy and Lydia’s birth. Not wishing to embarrass her parents, or Robert, Sarah left Lydia on the doorstep of the Willows Eat Right bakery, knowing Mrs. Peters would teach Lydia the leavening of the alphabet. Lydia had her name legally changed to include “Binks” when she was but 13, despite the opposition of the adopted parents who wanted nothing to do with a Binksian literary reputation, so sure were they that it would set Lydia apart from the other kids on the schoolyard. Lydia responded to the teasing by becoming the school’s crokinole champion, the echo of her name in every bink off the posts.
[3] An early reference, once pejorative, referring to uncouth, rough frontiersmen, it’s now accepted as a vernacular term for residents of Indiana.
[4] James De Mille was a professor at Dalhousie University and Cylinder is considered one of the first books of Canadian literature (De Mille published between 1860-1880), serialized posthumously in Harper’s Magazine in 1888.
[5] The grisly Canadian Greyhound story, recast.
[6] There are various “Hard Heds”.
[7] He has written twelve according to copy opposite the title page.
[8] Italics are the author’s.
[9] Bronwyn Jerrett-Enns
[10] See also David Arnason’s revisioned fairy tales, and the fractured fairy tales in Rocky & Bullwinkle.
[11] This may be a bit of a reach. If this paper was a web bookstore it would likely pull up some text that said
if you liked Hard Hed, you might like Faulkner novels, Cormac McCarthy’s books, especially Blood Meridian, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and novels by William Gass and Leon Rooke.
[12] Bronwyn Jerrett Enns
[13] Ibid.
Anvil | 240 pages | $20 | paper | ISBN #978-1897535691
One Comment
Umm, should I read this book or not….