Narrative Point of View in "Of Love and Dust"

In an unpublished speech given around 1969 in Marin County, California, Gaines speaks about the plot of Of Love and Dust and about the political milieu of the day. It is one of Gaines's most political speeches that I have read; however, I do not want to get into that aspect for this post. If you would like to see an example of it, there is a copy of another speech given around the same period that deals with the subject of politics, unwritten rules, and the history of racism within the context of Of Love and Dust. For this post, I want to focus briefly on a stylistic element of the novel, one that I have touched on before, the narrative voice. James Kelly narrates the novel, with interspersed second hand accounts thrown in here and there, specifically sections where Aunt Margaret relates to James what transpires between Marcus and Louise at the house. However, even Aunt Margaret cannot see into the bedroom when Louise and Marcus block the door.

Marcus and Louise's relationship starts out as a method of revenge for both of them. Marcus wants revenge on Bonbon for working him half to death and for loving Pauline, thus causing her to ignore him. Marcus decides that to get back at Bonbon he will seduce Louise. Louise wants revenge on Bonbon because he shows more love and affection for Pauline and their two children than he shows her and Tite. Louise continually tries to seduce various men in the quarters, but no one takes her bait until Marcus looks up at the gallery following Pauline's continued rebuffs of his advances.

Gaines has said that he struggles with writing from the omniscient point of view, and to that point, only two of his works use that point of view: Catherine Carmier and In My Father's House. Instead, the first person point of view comes easier to him, and when talking about Of Love and Dust, he mentions that F. Scott Fitzgerald's deployment of it in The Great Gatsby by having Nick Carraway as the narrator served as a model for James Kelly in his own novel.  During the unpublished speech mentioned above, Gaines talks about the first person narration in the novel and about the process of writing. He tells his audience that because he could not see inside of Marcus's and Louise's heads, he does not know what caused them to change their minds about one another. Instead, all he knows is that they did. Rather than just seeking revenge, as they initially set out to do, the two fall in love.

But when my two revenge seekers come together, something else happens to them instead. I don't know exactly what caused it. I suppose if I had written the novel from the omnicient [sic] point of view--that is, if I had followed my characters every where they went--even to the bed room, even to the bed--I would be able to explain to you whey they changed so. But since I told the story from another character's point of view, and since he was not allowed to enter the bedroom, he was unable to tell us, both you, the reader, and me, the author, how such a drastic change between my two young characters came about. But I do know this for a fact that after they had been with each other a while, instead of seeking revenge on the other man who had been forced by this society to hurt both of them, they fell in love and made plans to escape from South to North. That is a drastic change, I would admit, from their previous intentions; but nothing more drastic than my overseer's change of hear for the Black woman [Pauline] or the Black woman's change of heart toward my overseer. (5-6) 

This quote is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it gives us insight into Gaines as a writer and the way that a work of fiction comes into being. He states that he cannot exactly explain why the two fall in love, they just do. Because Aunt Margaret can't see into the bedroom, she does not know what occurs within. All she knows is that she hears loud noises then nothing. Even when the door opens, she only sees feet and naked bodies, nothing more. The path to love for Marcus and Louise is not spelled out for Gaines because he does not delve into their minds; he remains outside looking in, from the community's perspective. Likewise, the reader does not know what happens either because all of the information we get is from Margaret or others in the quarters.

In many ways, the scenes where Aunt Margaret hears Marcus and Louise in the bedroom recall Nick's leaving Daisy and Gatsby alone to reconnect. Unlike Aunt Margaret, Nick does not hear the conversation; he just "walk[s] out the back way . . . and [runs] for a huge black knotted tree" and stands there while the two lovers talk within his house (93). When Nick returns, Daisy and Gatsby do not notice him at first; they sit on opposite ends of the couch stare at one another "as if some question had been asked or was in the air" (94). Nick notes that Gatsby looks different, glowing, and the trio make their way next door to Gatsby's mansion.

The narrative point of view in both novels provides us, as readers, with implied explanations for what occurs. What exactly do Marcus and Louise talk about after they make love? Does the act resemble, as it did in my head, the scene in Invisible Man where IM has sex with the white woman then shames her by writing on her body in lipstick? Or, is it like the scene between Madge and Bob in Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go when Madge tries to get Bob to "rape" her? The sounds Aunt Margaret hears makes me think of these scenes, but I cannot say for sure that anything like the scenes described above happened. What do Louise and Marcus talk about before he jumps out of the window and heads back down the quarter? All Gaines knows, and I know, is that they fall in love. How that happens, we can only speculate. What that says though, it what Gaines's speech resonates with: love is the answer to the problems we experience. Possibly I will write about the rest of Gaines's speech at another point. As for now, what do you think about Gaines not letting us see how Marcus and Louise change their opinions and fall in love? What are some other novels that are similar in this manner?

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1995. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. Of Love and Dust. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Print.

Chandler's "The Big Sleep" and the Issue of Class

I have arrived, at the hard-boiled tradition, through a rather circuitous manner. Starting with the works of African American novelists such as Chester Himes, Donald Goines, Robert Beck, and Ronald S. Jefferson, I have begun to retrace their steps and to read works by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Recently, I completed Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939). Thinking about the novel, I cannot help but recall Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. On the surface, this comparison may not seem to hold much water. While both novels incorporate the first person narrator, they appeared in different milieus: Gatsby during the Roaring Twenties and The Big Sleep near the end of The Great Depression. Even though on novel arose during an economic upsurge and the other during a downturn, both deal with class differences and the ways that, try as one might, an individual has a hard time moving from one class to another.



Chandler's novel focuses on Philip Marlowe, a private eye, and a case he undertakes for the elderly General Sternwood. The general tasks Marlowe with squashing a blackmail attempt involving Sternwood's daughter Carmen. Marlowe takes the case, only asking for twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses. Marlowe does his duties for Sternwood and ends up receiving five hundred dollars, which he did not ask for. Throughout, Marlowe maintains that he tells the truth and that is what he is concerned with, the truth of events. Marlowe appears to be, in a way, the moral compass of the novel, seeking the accurateness of the events that occur during the course of the novel. For my discussion here, I want to focus on what separates the Sternwoods from Marlowe and others in the novel.

The Sternwoods made their money in the oil business, even building their house in Los Angeles on a hill overlooking their investment. As Marlowe leaves the Sternwood mansion after his initial visit, he sees the fields:

On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from which the Sternwoods had made their money. Most of the field was a public park now, cleaned up and donated to the city by General Sternwood. But a little of it was still producing in groups of welsl pumping five to six barrels a day. (21)

By moving up the hill, the Sternwoods escaped the "smell [of] the stale sump water," while still being able to "see what had made them rich" (21). While the Sternwoods made their money through oil, the fields they owned slowed in production, bringing in less and less money to the family. At the end of the novel, Marlowe and Carmen go down the hill to the desolate fields. Marlowe describes the field as a wasteland of machinery; he even notes that "[t]he wells were no longer pumping" (218). No more money came into the Sternwoods through the fields that made them rich.

Now, we do not know, from the novel, what place in society the Sternwoods held before their oil field endeavors. However, we do know that there is a clear disctinction between them and some of the other characters, like Marlowe, in the novel who occupy a lower social strata. What interests me is this separation. In Gatsby, Nick and Jay both come from lower classes. Jay attempts to rise in order to regain the love and Daisy, and Nick just goes with the flow during his summer with Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom. Jay, even though he amasses a large sum of money through nefarious means, never attains the same social level as Tom and Daisy. Watching Jay's attempts to get Daisy back, Nick becomes nauseus and sick of the way that Tom and Daisy act as "they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or thei rvast carlessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess thay had made" (187-188).

Gatsby does not allow for any sort of equality between its characters. Tom and Daisy go on with their lives, Jay dies, and Nick leaves. The Big Sleep, on the other hand, concludes with a poetic comment on the equality of mankind. While differences in class may arise during people's lives, death brings everyone together. Marlowe says,

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. (230)   

Chandler's novel ultimately equalizes the charcaters in the end through a discussion of dust to dust. Gatsby, on the other hand, concludes with Nick lamenting the fact that noone comes to Jay's funeral and urging himself on towards the future stating that we all continue to strive for "the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us" (189).

At this time, I don't completely know what to make of all of this. As stated earlier, I think that looking at these novels in relation to the periods of prosperity or depression they were written within warrants attention. I did a quick search on Chandler's novel and The Great Depression, but I did not come up with any hits. Has anything been written on this? Next post, I will continue looking at The Big Sleep and The Great Gatsby, examining the charcaters that make up the backdrop of each novel.

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1992. Print.

"Idle White Rich" in Catherine Carmier

Map of False River in Pointe Coupee Parish. 

As Catherine drives Lillian home, Lillian looks out at the river and notices that the calm river soon breaks out in to waves as two motorboats roar over the surface. "In each boat was a boy and a girl waving and shouting at those in the other boat" as they raced towards Bayonne (39). Lillian comments that the occupants of the two boats are "the idle white rich" and they own the land and the river, not allowing the "poor" to fish it because "it's theirs to do what they want with it" (39). The map to the right shows how the land was divided amongst various individuals and families. Later in the novel, Jackson stands outside the store drinking a Coca-Cola and sees "[a] sailboat halfway out [on the river] drifting leisurely toward Bayonne" (174).  On the boat, Jackson can see the whites "diving off the boat, swimming away from it, then back to the boat again" (174). Jackson does not comment and call the whites "idle," but the scene resembles the one with Lillian earlier because in both instances the whites on the river appear to have nothing to do but partake in leisure activities.  

The two moments take up no more than two pages in a novel that consists of two hundred and forty eight. However, they are just as important as the rest of the novel because they point out that even though the novel centers around African Americans, Creoles, and Cajuns, the whites are the specter in the background they play an important role in the lives of the characters. Mack Grover sold land to Raoul, and Bud Grover , Mack's son, as discussed in another blog post, sold the prime farming land to the Cajuns. While they work the land, all Bud Grover, according to Aunt Charlotte, "do is drink. Ain't worth a penny" (29). Bud, like the "idle whites" on the river, has nothing to do except sit around and drink himself into a stupor while others work for him. Bud leases out the land to the Cajuns, who can  produce more crops than the African Americans because of the tractors, and all he has to do is rake in the profits.

Reigning over the land, the whites continually appear fleetingly throughout Catherine Carmier, and the themes that Gaines introduces in this novel recur in A Gathering of Old Men (1983). Here, Jack becomes the next Bud Grover. While everyone on Marshall is concerned about the shooting that happened down in the Quarters, before he can even hear about it, Jack Marshall lounges in a swing on the front galley passed out drunk, before twelve-thirty in the afternoon. Miss Merle tries to wake him up, but it is of no avail. Jack, like Bud Grover, has can idly waste his days away because others work to make him money. Elsewhere, Chimley discusses how Mat and he used to fish anywhere on the river whenever they wanted to. Now, however, they only have one little spot where they can fish because the white people "done bought up the river now, and [they] got nowhere to go but that one little spot" (27). Just as the whites parsed out the best farming land to other whites and to Cajuns, they also took control of the land, regulating where people can fish and where they can't. Chimley and Mat don't come in contact with the whites who "own" the river, but they feel the effects of that ownership hovering over them. Likewise, Lillian and Jackson do not encounter the "idle whites" on the river, except for at a distance; however, their presence is felt in the changing landscape of the Quarters and in the fact that the "poor" can no longer fish on the river.

The presence of whiteness in the background calls to mind Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993) where Morrison argues that American literature, specifically white American literature, oozes with an African American presence. She talks about this presence in the works of Hemingway, Cather, and Poe. Along with calling to mind Morrison, the fact that the whites appear in the background in these instances, more precisely in Catherine Carmier, makes me think of the African American presence in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). In a novel that many call a representation of the "Jazz Age," African Americans appear very, very infrequently. The only major appearance comes when Nick and Jay travel to New York. On the bridge into the city, they pass a car of African American revelers and a funeral hearse. Why, in a "Jazz Age" novel, do African Americans only really appear here? Could the revelers be seen as the democratization of the American Dream? As one blogger put it, the scenes in which African Americans appear in the most recent film version of The Great Gatsby by Baz Luhrmann show that the American Dream crosses racial lines. While that statement is debatable, it's worth looking at Catherine Carmier and The Great Gatsby through the same lens, the lens of the presence that is there yet is not there. In Fitzgerald's case that is African Americans; in Gaines', it is the "idle white rich."

As an interesting side note, when preparing this blog post I came across an article from 2000 where Carlyle V. Thompson argues that Gatsby is in fact "black." To a certain extent, this argument is intriguing, considering the proliferation of "passing" novels by African Americans during the 1920s and earlier. I think it is something worth thinking about, especially considering individuals like Jean Toomer as well and the discussions about eugenics that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century. If you have any thoughts on any of this, feel free to leave a comment below.

The Great Gatsby and Of Love and Dust

Ernest Gaines has made his indebtedness to various authors known throughout the years, and some of these authors have already been discussed on this blog. One author that pops up purely for the influence of style on Gaines' writing is F. Scott Fitzgerald. When listing authors who taught him about writing, Gaines often mentions Fitzgerald. He says that The Great Gatsby is a good novel; however, he also says, "I don't care for Fitzgerald, but I love the structure of Gatsby" (Blake 144). That structure can be seen, partly, in the way that Fitzgerald ends each chapter, something Gaines does in works like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. On another level, Fitzgerald's influence on Gaines can be seen in Of Love and Dust where Jim Kelley narrates the story instead of Marcus. Discussing this decision in 1976, Gaines said, "I needed a guy who could communicate with different people" (Tooker and Hofheins 107). That guy, of course, would become Jim Kelley. Jim could communicate with Bonbon, Aunt Margret, and Marcus; he could navigate those relationships in the same way that Nick could navigate his in Gatsby. "Fitzgerald used Nick," according to Gaines, "because he could communicate both with Gatsby and the real rich" (107). This can be seen in the way that Nick talks with Daisy and Tom and how he speaks with Gatsby.

While the aspect of having a narrator who can communicate with all of the sides involved in the plot appears in both novels, I would go a step further and say that Nick Carraway and Jim Kelley make good narrators because they both admire their subjects, Jay Gatsby and Marcus respectively, and attempt to show the human side of each of them. In the opening pages of The Great Gatsby, Nick states, "No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men" (6-7). Nick, throughout the novel, paints Gatsby as a sympathetic figure. He portrays Gatsby as a man who, while Nick may have "disapproved of him from beginning to end," warrants admiration, and Nick admires Gatsby through the end, even becoming the only person in New York, really, to do anything after George kills Gatsby (162).

Jim, like Nick, disapproves of Marcus' actions and the way he goes about them. Jim tells himself, early in the novel, "One of these days I'm going to stop this, I'm going to stop this; I'm a man like any other man and one of these days I'm going to stop this" (43). Even though Jim thinks this, he doesn't do anything about it. Marcus becomes, in essence, the motivation for Jim to finally act and leave at the end of the novel. Near the end of the novel when Jim tries to catch Marcus before he confronts Bonbon, Jim says, "No, I didn't blame Marcus any more. I admired Marcus. I admired his great courage" (270). For Jim, Marcus becomes an inspiration because he actually stands up to Bonbon and decides to "stop this." Both narrators, Jim and Nick create sympathetic portraits of Marcus and Gatsby. They both allow the reader to see the nuances of each character. If Marcus narrated Of Love and Dust, we would most likely just get "The hell with it, let the world burn; I don't give a damn" (Tooker and Hofheins 107).  



Blake, Jeanie. "Interview with Ernest Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 137-148. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1995. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. Of Love and Dust. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Print.
Tooker, Dan and Roger Hofheins, "Ernest J. Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 99-111. Print.