Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 20

April 11, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Novelist-Narrators

[On April 10th,1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was publishedby Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I havemy problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and importantnovels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’llhighlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellowGatsbyStudiers!]

As I hopethis week’s series has reflected, there are a lot of layers to Fitzgerald’s noveland its AmericanStudies contexts, a lot of reasons why it has endured as fullyas it has for the 100 years since its publication. But high on the list has tobe his complex and crucial use of a novelist-narrator, a storytelling voice whois a character in the story but also and perhaps especially a novelist craftingthe text that we’re reading. That’s a device that many of our most interestingnovels have used, and used specifically to consider the American Dream, as Iargued in this2011 American Literary Realism article. It’s available in full atthat link, so in lieu of a final post in this series I’d ask you to check outthat article if you’re interested, and let me know any thoughts if you doplease!

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. What doyou think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?

April 10, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Gatsby’s American Dreams

[On April 10th,1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was publishedby Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I havemy problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and importantnovels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’llhighlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellowGatsbyStudiers!]

On two contrastingbut also interconnected ways to analyze the novel’s title character and themes.

On the actualcentennial of Gatsby’s publication, I have to start by noting thatapparently, at the very last minute (and thus too far into the publishingprocess), Fitzgerald tried to get the book’s title changed to Underthe Red, White, and Blue. That hyperlinked piece features info about arecent public scholarly book, Greil Marcus’s Underthe Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment, and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby (2021), which takesFitzgerald’s alternate title as a starting point for thinking about the book’s,it’s era’s, and our own engagements with key American themes. Since I’m goingto do the same here (having so far read only excerpts of Marcus’s book,although I hope to check the whole thing out soon as it looks great), I wantedto shout-out Marcus’s work as well as Fitzgerald’s original title, beforeoffering my own considerations of Gatsby’sAmerican Dream (which is also, as that hyperlinked record label pagereflects, the name of an indie rock band, reflecting just how ubiquitous this associationhas been).

On the onehand, Gatsby’s American Dream seems at best profoundly ironic, and at worstentirely fake and false. After all, the centerpiece of his dreams is Daisy Buchanan,a character who is not only married to someone else, and an awful someone atthat (the exemplary American whitesupremacist Tom Buchanan), but whose most defining action in the novel isthe accidental murder of another character (the tragic Myrtle Wilson, whom Imentioned in last week’s final post as a perspective we need to consider morefully and then am not really considering more fully this week—my bad, Myrtle!)from which she literally and figuratively flees, leaving her supposed love totake the fall. At thenovel’s conclusion, its narrator Nick says of Daisy and Tom that “They werecareless people…they shamed up things and creatures and then retreated backinto their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept themtogether, and let other people clean up the mess they had made,” and if we evensomewhat agree with Nick, we have to recognize that Gatsby’s dreams and his titulargreatness alike are built on a very shaky foundation.

But on theother hand, I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Daisy herself can be read asa far more nuanced and sympathetic character than Nick’s vision of her suggests(Tom definitely can’t, but he can within this alternative frame be read asabusive toward Daisy, just as he physically abuses Myrtle in theirone scene together in the novel), as both flawed and full of potential in waysthat in this reading would parallel Gatsby and help explain their mutual attraction.But Gatsby’s dreams are also not limited to Daisy, especially as the readerlearns more about Gatsby (or James Gatz, as he was born) in his childhood andyouthful identity, experiences, perspectives, and arc. That young man’s goalsof moving beyond the horizons of his parents and his hometown, of remakinghimself, of pursuing his own future rather than being defined by what had comebefore, are, as the novel’s iconicfinal lines illustrate, very much the story of America as well, from itsfounding (whenever and however we locate that moment) on down. The fact that hedoesn’t quite succeed, or rather that the past remains with him as he movesinto that future, could be read as a failure or as ironic or etc.—but it couldalso be read as deeply human, as the intersection of the worst and best thatdefines us all, individuals and nations alike.

LastGatsbyStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What doyou think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?

April 9, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Foshay Tower

[On April 10th,1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was publishedby Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I havemy problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and importantnovels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’llhighlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellowGatsbyStudiers!]

[NB. Ioriginally wrote this post for an August 2013 series on things I had recentlylearned, but both that spirit and the specifics remain entirely relevant herein April 2025!]

On the building and enterpreneur that bring an American icon to life.

The Midwest in general, and Minnesota in particular, occupy importantplaces in Jay Gatsby’s story. F. Scott Fitzgerald himself had been born inSaint Paul, Minnesota, the state’scapital and the twin city to Minneapolis; while Fitzgerald gives Gatsby anunspecified North Dakota birthplace, he has him attend college (briefly) atMinnesota’s St. Olaf College. And while Gatsby spends the rest of his tragically short life running away from those Midwestern origin points, Nick Carraway argues inthe book’s concluding moments that the story has been a profoundly Western (by which, given the locations to which he’s referring, he means what wewould call Midwestern) one.

I’ve recently learned about a Minneapolis history that reverses Gatsby’s geographictrajectory but seems in many ways to mirror his identity. Wilbur Foshay, born in upstate NewYork, moved to Minneapolis in the 1920s to pursue his dreams of wealth andsuccess, and like Gatsby he embodied those dreams in a spectacular, garishedifice. For Foshay that building was not a mansion but a skyscraper, Foshay Tower; modeled after the Washington Monument, an early encounter with whichFoshay credited with inspiring his dreams, the Tower was completed in 1929, ata dedication ceremony that included a march written for the occasion and conducted by John Philip Sousa. And Foshay’s dreams crashed as suddenly and nearly asdramatically as Gatsby’s: first with the Great Depression, which began onlymonths after the dedication and left the Tower unoccupied; and then with a famous trial in which Foshay was convicted of mail fraud (for running apyramid scheme) and sentenced to 15years in prison.

Foshay’s story doesn’t end there—President Roosevelt granted him a partialpardon, commuting 10 years off the sentence—and I’m interested to learn moreabout what seems to me just as iconic a story of the 1920s and the AmericanDream as Fitzgerald’s novel. America is full of such complex and compellingidentities and stories—enough to spend a career AmericanStudying them!

NextGatsbyStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What doyou think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?

April 8, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Three Phone Calls

[On April 10th,1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was publishedby Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I havemy problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and importantnovels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’llhighlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellowGatsbyStudiers!]

On threephone calls that illustrate the classic novel’s thoughtful portrayal of Moderntechnologies.

When youteach a book as often as I have F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925),you start to focus on different layers each time. Along with the dialogues withother authors/works like Nella Larsen’s Passingthat I talk about in that hyperlinked post, in my last couple times readingand teaching the novel I’ve thought a lot about just how many early 20thcentury technologies play central roles in its story. That’s especially true ofautomobiles, of course; not only in the book’s climactic events (which I won’tspoil here for the few people who managed not to read Fitzgerald’s novel inhigh school), but in the central presence (geographically as well assymbolically) of Wilson’sgas station and auto repair shop. It’s true of Hollywood film, both inpresences at Gatsby’s parties (andFitzgerald’s career) and in the novel’s underlying themes ofsurface and depth, illusion and reality. But it’s also certainly true of thestill relativelynew technology, particularly when it comes to the idea of every household havingone, that was the telephone.

As we meetthe novel’s main characters in the opening few chapters, Fitzgerald uses acouple key phone calls to present mysterious and ambiguous sides to them. InChapter 1, as Nick Carraway visits the beautiful home of his cousin Daisy andher husband Tom for a dinner party, Tom gets a mysterious phone call; Daisysuspects that it’s his mistress on the other end, but of course can’t know forcertain to whom he’s speaking. In Chapter 3, as Nick attends one of the lavishparties at his neighbor Jay Gatsby’s mansion, Gatsby gets a mysterious call;other partygoers suggest that it’s a criminal business partner of Gatsby’s onthe other end, but of course no one knows for certain to whom he’s speaking.These calls reveal both men as defined by secrets, dynamics that preciselybecause of their ambiguity are a source of intense speculation by those aroundthem. And those secrets can only be maintained in these scenes because of thetechnology of the phone, without which their conversants would have to visit inperson (or write a letter, which of course would be far less immediate).

[SeriousSPOILERS in this paragraph.] At the end of the novel, after all theaforementioned climactic events have unfolded, Nick has his own, quitedifferent phone call. He is trying to organize a funeral for Gatsby (or maybeJames Gatz, since his father who knows him by that name is one of the few whoattends that tragic event), and manages to speak with Gatsby’s elusive businesspartner Meyer Wolfshiem on the phone. In one of the novel’s onlymoments where a character says directly what he’s feeling and thinking, shareswhat seems at least to be the unvarnished truth (even when Gatsby and Nick havetheir heart-to-hearts, it’s always an open question whether Gatsby is tellingthe truth), Wolfshiem confesses to Nick that he can’t possibly be seen at thefuneral, that it would be far too destructive for his reputation andrelationships. This is the side of the telephone that allows us to be morehonest, more ourselves, in its conversations than we might manage to be if hadto face someone and something in the flesh. Just another layer to howFitzgerald’s novel reflects the technologies and contexts of its rapidlyevolving Modernist world.

NextGatsbyStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What doyou think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?

April 7, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Gatsby’s Pool

[On April 10th,1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was publishedby Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I havemy problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and importantnovels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’llhighlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellowGatsbyStudiers!]

On the tragic dip that’s as difficult to pin down as the man taking it.

Jay Gatsby spends his final moments relaxing in his home’s luxurious swimming pool. As NickCarraway is about to leave his neighbor for what turns out to be the last time,Gatsby’s gardener arrives to drain the pool; fall is arriving and the gardeneris worried that “leaves’ll start falling pretty soon and then there’s alwaystrouble with the pipes.” But Gatsby asks him to hold off for one more day,noting to Nick, “you know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer.” Andso it is during Gatsby’s first and only dip in his own swimming pool, lying on“a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer,” that thegrieving George Wilson arrives, an “ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward himthrough the amorphous trees.” Wilson is armed and crazed, seeking vengeance forthe tragic death of his wife Myrtle, and kills both Gatsby and himself.

It’s a striking and evocative image and moment, as so many of Fitzgerald’sare. And like so many others in the novel, it seems clearly symbolic—but ofwhat, exactly? The imminent shift in seasons feels significant—Gatsby is a novel of summer, and herethe season has ended but Gatsby is not willing to let it go, not least becausehe has not yet had a chance to enjoy it. Or perhaps the pool is simply amicrocosm of Gatsby’s palatial home—the height of luxury and excess, of the Roaring 20s and theirdecadent atmosphere, but offering those thrills less for its actual owner (whobarely makes use of it as anything other than a host for visitors) and more forall those guests who come to bathe in its excesses. Or maybe it’s just thefinal irony in a novel full of them—Gatsby finally takes a moment to relax, forwhat feels like the first time in years, and looks what it gets him.

All of those interpretations hold water (sorry), but I would also note a historicalcontext that it’s easy for us 21st century readers to forget: likeso many of the novel’s crucial social and technological features (cars, Hollywoodfilms, recorded music), an in-ground swimming pool in the early 1920srepresented a striking innovation. The first such pools in America had been openfor less than two decades, and were generally public or communal spaces; it wasnot until more than two decades later, after World War II, that they wouldbecome part of the typical imagery of the ideal American home. So as with every aspect of Gatsby’s success, here toohe would seem to have been ahead of the curve, helping to embody the American Dream—as well as its dark andviolent undersides—as it would continue to develop for the rest of the AmericanCentury, and into our own.

NextGatsbyStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What doyou think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?

April 4, 2025: Foolish Texts: Fool

[For thisyear’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool”in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word,for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

First, repeatingyesterday’s a bit of inside baseball: I haven’t yet had a chance to check out eitherof the texts on which my last two posts in this series will focus. I don’t wantto pretend to have specific things to say about them, but I did want to both highlightthem and use them as a lens for broader AmericanStudies questions. So in honorof ChristopherMoore’s 2009 novel reframing King Lear from the Fool’s perspective,here are AmericanStudies takeaways from a trio of similar such Shakespeareanadaptations:

1)     Rosencrantzand Guildenstern Are Dead (1966): Tom Stoppard’s play is quite simply oneof the most unique and compelling cultural works I’ve ever encountered, and I’dsay the 1990 film adaptationcaptures its essence (if you’re able to check that out more easily than theplay). There are a lot of reasons why, from the philosophical debates to the wittywordplay to the ultimate pathos, but I’d say a significant element in the play’ssuccess is integral to this broader genre of cultural text: it reminds us thatmany of our greatest literary works (especially from earlier centuries,although the trend undoubtedly continues) focus too fully on elite charactersand worlds, and that it’s worth stopping to consider how different the story andour takeaways from it alike might look from the perspective of others (to foreshadownext week’s series, Myrtle Wilson, anyone?).

2)     Shakespearein Love (1998): Look, I know there are people who think this film (co-writtenby Tom Stoppard!) is one of the most overrated ever, not least because it beat outSpielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for the Best Picture Oscar. Maybe all I needto say here is that I 1000% support that Oscar win, and think this is one of themost clever, funny, and ultimately moving films I’ve ever seen. But even if youdon’t agree with all of that, I think it’s undeniable that Shakespeareoffers a unique and thoughtful perspective on both the creative process and howit intersects with broader historical events. Given how much we tend to thinkof plays like Romeo and Juliet as timeless or universal, I very muchappreciate this film’s reminder that it was created in one time and place, by aplaywright and a group of collaborators fully and importantly immersed in thatworld.

3)     Opheliamachine (2013): I’veonly had the chance to read that Google Books excerpt of Magda Romanska’spostmodern drama (which as you can see only features peripheral materials forand about the play), and so will mostly direct you to check out that excerpt aswell as the Wikipediaentry on what sounds like a fascinating attempt to adapt Shakespeare’scharacters in a 21st century world. While there are lots of reasonsto create such adaptations, as just these few examples of the genre clearlyreflect, I’d say their most important effect is precisely Romanska’s goal: tohelp us think further about both the original work and our own moment, on theirown terms but also and especially in conversation with each other. I love thisgenre for both those reasons, and look forward to reading Fool soon toadd another example!

Crowd-sourcedpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. So onemore time: what do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 3, 2025: Foolish Texts: This Fool

[For thisyear’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool”in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word,for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

First, abit of inside baseball: I haven’t yet had a chance to check out either of thetexts on which my last two posts in this series will focus. I don’t want to pretendto have specific things to say about them, but I did want to both highlight themand use them as a lens for broader AmericanStudies questions. So in honor of theacclaimed recent sitcomabout cholo young men and their families and communities in LA, some thoughtson three other Latino cultural works that each redefined their respectivegenres (as that sitcom seems to have):

1)     Ruizde Burton’s novels: Between that post for the American Writers Museum blogand posts here like thisone, I’ve said a good bit about María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, one of myfavorite 19th century American authors and a truly unique voice andperspective on our history, community, identity, and more. Here I’ll just addone thing: I wrotein this post about my friend Larry Rosenwald’s excellent book MultilingualAmerica: Language and the Making of American Literature (2008), and whileRuiz de Burton published her novels in English, I’d still say she exemplifies amultilingual literary legacy that can help us radically reframe what Americanliterature itself includes and means.

2)     TheSalt of the Earth (1954): When it comes to this groundbreaking filmabout Latino and labor history, I can’t say it any better than did the great filmhistorian Vaughn Joy in that first hyperlinked post for her Review Roulettenewsletter. In many ways Salt is in conversation with other films aboutlabor history, including one of my personal favorites from my favoritefilmmaker, JohnSayles’ Matewan (1987). But in the mid-1950s, with the horrific OperationWetback in frustratingly full swing, a film about Latino workers representsa truly radical cultural work—and one that likewise embodies an alternative visionof what the era’s “socialproblem films” could be and do.

3)     In the Heights (2005): Aspart of a 2016 series on Puerto Rican stories and histories, I wroteabout West Side Story (1957), which as I noted there started with verydistinct cultural backgrounds for its protagonists before evolving to feature aPuerto Rican heroine (and her even more overtly Puerto Rican friends andcommunity). Given that multilayered evolution, I’d say that the title of “firstLatino Broadway musical” was still up for grabs, and that In the Heightsmight well qualify. But such distinctions are ultimately less important thanwhat cultural works themselves feature and do, and there’s no doubt that thevoices and beats, the identities and communities, put on stage by Lin-ManuelMiranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes added something significant to the genreof the Broadway musical, as each of these texts has in its respective genres.

Lastfoolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 2, 2025: Foolish Texts: Nobody’s Fool

[For thisyear’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool”in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word,for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

Twoimportant American Studies lessons from one of our quirkier, funnier, and moreaffecting late 20th century films.

Nobody’s Fool (1994),the Paul Newman starring vehicle based on the 1993Richard Russo novel of the same name (which I will admit, in a verynon-literature professor moment, to not having read), is a very funny movie. It’sfunny in itsscript, which includes plenty of laugh-out-loud funny insults, retorts, andquips; Newman’s Sully gets the lion’s share, but perhaps the single funniestline is given to a judge who critiques a trigger-happy local policemen bynoting, “You know my feelings on arming morons: you arm one, you’ve got to armthem all, otherwise it wouldn’t be good sport.” And it’s just as funny in itsworld, its creation of a cast of quirky and memorable characters (who, notcoincidentally, are played by some of our most talented character actors,including JessicaTandy in her final role). That those same characters are ultimately thesource of a number of hugely moving moments is a testament to the film’s (andprobably book’s) true greatness.

Unlike many ofthe other late 20th and early 21st century films I’vediscussed in this space—LoneStar and City of Hope,Gangsof New York, Jungle Fever and Mississippi Masala, and many more—Nobody’s Fool is not explicitly engaged with significant AmericanStudies issues. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t American Studieslessons to be learned from its subtle and wise perspectives on identity andcommunity. For one thing, Sully’s most central culminating perspective (SPOILERalert, here and in the next paragraph!) is a powerful and important vision ofour interconnectedness to the many communities of which we’re a meaningfulpart: “I just found out I’m somebody’s grandfather. And somebody’s father. Andmaybe I’m somebody’s friend in the bargain,” Sully notes, rejecting a temptingbut escapist future in favor of staying where he is; while he has ostensiblyknown about all these relationships for years, what he has realized through thefilm’s events is both how significant these roles are for his own identity andlife, and how much his presence or absence in relation to them will in turninfluence the people and communities around him.

If Sully haslearned that specific, significant lesson by the film’s end, he has also, moresimply yet perhaps even more crucially, done something else: recognized thepossibility for change. Sully’s not a young man by the time we meet him, andit’s fair to say that he’s very set in his ways; one of his first lines of thefilm, in response to his landlady (Tandy) offering him tea, is “No. Not now,not ever,” and the exchange becomes a mantra of sorts for the film, shorthandfor Sully’s routines (with every person in his life) and the fixity of hisperspective and voice. So it’s particularly salient that the film ends with anextended and different version of this exchange: “No. How many times do I haveto tell you?” Newman replies, and Tandy answers, “Other people change theirminds occasionally. I keep thinking you might.” “You do? Huh,” are Newman’sfinal words in the film, and he delivers them with surprise and, it seems tome, a recognition, paired with the earlier epiphany about interconnections,that perhaps Tandy is right, and he has future shifts ahead of him that hecan’t yet imagine. If the American future is going to be all that it might be,that’s going to depend on most—perhaps all—of us being open to change, mostespecially in our own identities and perspectives; Sully’s only begun thattrajectory, but exemplifies its possibility, at any point in our lives andarcs, for sure.

Nextfoolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 1, 2025: Foolish Texts: “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

[For thisyear’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool”in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word,for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On AmericanStudieslessons and limits from an English classic rock anthem.

In oneof my early posts, nearly 14 years ago, I wrote about the Australian rockband Midnight Oil (whose excellent latest album I included in this muchmore recent post), and the limits but also and especially the possibilitiesof the transnational turn in AmericanStudies. Since I’m writing about a song byanother rock group from outside of the US, England’s The Who, in today’s post, I’dask you to check out that prior one (the first hyperlink above), and then comeon back for some thoughts on that transnational band and one of their biggesthits.

Welcomeback! The Who’s “Won’tGet Fooled Again” (1971) is very much a product of its early 1970s moment,and specifically of a rising sense of pessimism and even cynicism about theprior decade’s social movements and efforts to change the world. That tone ispresent throughout the song, but most especially in the chorus: “I’ll tip myhat to the new Constitution/Take a bow for the new revolution/Smile and grin atthe change all around/Pick up my guitar and play/Just like yesterday/Then I’llget on my knees and pray/We don’t get fooled again.” A lot has been writtenabout how Watergatecontributed to an erosion of trust and shift away from 1960s idealism in theearly to mid-1970s, but this song (featured on the album Who’s Next)came out nearly two years before that scandal began to break, and despite itsEnglish origins I have to think it can be contextualized in similar perspectivesin the US as well. The transition between decades is never a singular norlinear one, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t moments of demarcation, andI’d say this Who song can help us identify one between the 60s and 70s.

At thesame time, it’s fair to say that a bunch of English white men aren’t going tobe the best judges of what did and didn’t take place for disadvantaged Americancommunities, and I think this Who song also features some less apt momentsalong those lines. For example, there’s the second verse: “A change, it had tocome/We knew it all along/We were liberated from the fold, that’s all/And theworld looks just the same/And history ain’t changed/’Cause the banners, they wereall flown in the last war.” Maybe that last line is an anti-Vietnam Warsentiment, in which case fair enough on that score, but when it comes toAmerican domestic history I think it’s impossible to argue that the worldlooked just the same after 1960s changes like (for example) the Civil RightsMovement, the women’s movement, the Great Society programs, and more. I’m not ahistorian of England, and maybe less had really changed across the pond duringthis turbulent decade; but here in the US, I think it’d be foolish to suggestthat “history ain’t changed” over that time.

Nextfoolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

March 31, 2025: Foolish Texts: A Fool’s Errand

[For thisyear’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool”in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word,for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On twoinspiring layers to one of our most unique novels.

In this earlypost, I wrote about the life and career of Albion Tourgée, one of myfavorite Americans for a wide variety of reasons (including but not limited tothose I detailed in that post). I had a good bit to say there about his firstnovel A Fool’sErrand, by One of the Fools (1879), so I’d ask you to check outthat post if you would and then come on back for some further thoughts.

Welcomeback! As I discussed in that post, the title of Tourgée’s novel is notmisleading, as it takes a consistently ironic and self-deprecating perspectiveon its autobiographical protagonist’s efforts to contribute positively toReconstruction’s efforts. To be very clear, that doesn’t mean Tourgée iscritical of Reconstruction’s goals when it comes to African Americans andequality (he dedicated his life to those goals, as I hope that prior postillustrated at length), but rather that he recognizes that his own youthful, loftyambitions and sense of self-importance were severely punctured by hisexperiences during Reconstruction and his recognition of the limitations ofboth any individual’s reach and (more complicatedly to be sure) societal change.I remain less cynical and more optimistic than the tone of Fool’s Errand(yes, even in early 2025), but I nonetheless think being able to reflectthoughtfully and critically on our own ambitions and arc is an important andinspiring skill to model.

In boththat prior post and the paragraph above I focused on the real-life elements of Tourgée’sbook—the autobiographical echoes and the political and cultural contexts ofReconstruction. But while those are undoubtedly present and perhaps even paramountin the book, it’s important to add that it is a novel, a work of fiction, aswas Tourgée’s follow-up second book about the Black experience ofReconstruction, BricksWithout Straw (1880). Which is to say, having spent years serving as alawyer, politician, and journalist (careers he would continue fully andsuccessfully for the rest of his life), at the age of 40 Tourgée turned hishand to creative writing and published not one but two novels in a two-yearspan. And they’re good, with really interesting creative choices (such as the distancedthird-person narration of Fool’s) that engage his readers and get themthinking about those aforementioned personal and political contexts. As someonewho’s own career and writing have evolved a good bit over the decades, and whohopes that trend continues for the rest of my life, I find this aspect of Tourgée’snot-at-all foolish books particularly inspiring as well.

Nextfoolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Foolish texts you’d share?