The Suffocating Dust in Gaines's "Of Love and Dust"

Just as most of his stories and novels, Gaines's Of Love and Dust opens with a sort of journey. Instead of the main protagonist involved in the trek as in James' trip to Bayonne in "The Sky is Gray," James Kelley stands on his porch and sees a truck flying through the quarter kicking up dust everywhere. Gaines' second novel is intricate, and I would argue, his best. I could sit here and write numerous posts about it, and I have already written a couple: "The White Eagle" and "The Great Gatsby and Of Love and Dust." For this post, I just want to look at the opening of Gaines' 1967 novel. The novel begins:

From my gallery I could see that dust coming down the quarter, coming fast, and I thought to myself, "Who in the world would be driving like that?" I got up to go inside until the dust had all settled. But I had just stepped inside the room when I heard the truck stopping there before the gate. I didn't turn around then because I knew the dust was flying all over the place. A minute or so later, when I figured it had settled, I went back. The dust was still flying across the yard, but it wasn't nearly as thick now. I looked toward the road and I saw somebody coming in the gate. It was too dark to tell if he was white or colored. (3)

The word "dust" appears in four of the eight sentences in the opening paragraph of the novel. Granted the word shows up in the title, but four mentions in the first 128 words warrants attention. What does the repetition of this one word mean?

In "Of Snow and Dust," Matthew Spangler speaks about James Joyce's presence in Gaines A Lesson before Dying, something I have mentioned on this blog before. Discussing how "soot," "smoke," "dust", and other elements work to show a character's attitude towards his or her setting, Spangler addresses the opening paragraph. For Spangler, "Gaines's us of dust draws upon American cultural narratives of the wild, rural, pre-settled nation, particularly those associated with the American West and South" (112). Spangler claims Gaines's use of "dust" becomes "a symbol for paralysis and entrapment" (113). With this assertion, I wholeheartedly agree. In the novel,"dust" becomes synonymous with heat, sweat, work, grime, and oppression.

As James walks back down the quarter, he begins to think about the oppressive heat: "It must have been a good hundred. That dust was white as snow, hot as fire. The sun was straight up, so it didn't throw any kind of shadows across the road. You had nothing but hot dust to walk in from the time you left the highway until you got home" (82). The reflection of the sun off of the dust is white enough to blind him, and the heat is so unbearable that when he gets home he will have a hard time being able to relax, as he mentions earlier that he couldn't fall asleep on his bed because of the heat. The dust symbolically smothers and blinds the characters in the same way that the oppressive system that they live within does. The novel is full of characters "sweating," "squinting eyes because of reflections," "dirt caked faces," and "oppressive heat." It would take too long to mention them all.

To conclude, I want to quote a brief passage from the end of the novel. Here, James is relating Sun Brown's account of Marcus's death at the hands of Bonbon. James says, "Then [Sun Brown] saw a car coming toward him--no, he saw the dust. The dust was flying all over the quarter. In front of the dust was a car, coming up the quarter with no lights on" (274).  Sun Brown's account of Bonbon's car speeding through the quarters mirrors James's at the beginning. Before he sees the car, sun Brown sees the dust, flying all of the place; then, he sees the car in front of it. Unlike the opening paragraph, there is not mention of the dust clearing. Here, at the climax of the novel, the dust overcomes Marcus. He cannot escape the rules of the plantation and the Deep South by heading North with Louise. Instead, the suspended dust metaphorically suffocates him while Bonbon literally kills him with a farming implement (a scythe).

Next post I plan to talk about manhood in the novel. What are some other instances in the novel that show the landscape as a symbol of the subjugation in the novel? Are there other instances? What other works, like Joyce and Gaines, use landscape as this type of symbol? Let me know in the comments below.

Gaines, Ernest J. Of Love and Dust. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Print.
Spangler, Matthew. “Of Snow and Dust: The Presence of James Joyce in Ernest Gaines’s ‘A Lesson Before Dying.’” South Atlantic Review 67:1, 2002. 104-128. Print.

The Short Story and Ernest Gaines Syllabus

Last post, I talked about the Second Annual Ernest J. Gaines Center Summer Teaching Institute. With that in mind, I want to take the time in this blog post to do something a little different. Instead of writing a critical post, I would like to use today's entry to present you with a possible syllabus for teaching Gaines' works either in a secondary or post-secondary setting. When available, I have provided links to the stories below.

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The Short Story and Ernest Gaines

Objective:

This course will examine various authors from around the world and how they influenced the writing of Ernest J. Gaines in particular. Along with authors that influenced Gaines, the course will also explore contemporaneous authors with Gaines and his work. Through this examination, we will challenge the monolithic view of literature, and in particular African American literature, by showing that authors do not receive their inspiration from a uniformed sources. While the course center on Ernest Gaines, it will provide us with an opportunity to explore other avenues as well: short story structure, peasantry in Russia and the United States, Modernism, the South as a space of memory, and other topics.

Readings (Chronological Order):

Ivan Turgenev A Sportsman's Sketches (1852)
Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Illych (1886)
James Joyce "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" (1914)
Jean Toomer "Blood Burning Mood" and "Avey" (1923)
Ernest Hemingway "Soldier's Home," "Big Two-Hearted River Part 1," and "Big Two Hearted River Part 2" (1925)
William Faulkner "April 7, 1928" (Benjy's section in The Sound and the Fury) (1929)
Richard Wright "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" and "Big Boy Leaves Home" (1938)
Eudora Welty "A Worn Path" (1941)
James Baldwin "The Outing" and "Going to Meet the Man" (1965)
Ernest Gaines Bloodline (1968) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971)
Alice Walker "Everyday Use" (1973)
Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers 1967 to Present Ed. Gloria Naylor (1997)
Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature Ed. Suzanne Jones (2003)

Assignments:

• Response papers: These will be in the form of blog posts. I will set up a blog for the class, and you will post your responses there. Each post will require you to answer to my prompt and to respond to other students' responses as well. We will discuss how to do this in a proefssional manner during class. (Teachers, see Shannon Baldino's "The Classroom Blog: Enhancing Critical Thinking, Substantive Discussion, and Appropriate Online Interaction" for a discussion of blogs in the high school classroom.)
• Wiki: Students will be placed into groups of four. Each group will be required to construct a collaborative wiki with ________ components on an author and text that we read in class. 
• Each student must write a paragraph describing the class discussion for that author. For example, if the class discusses narrative voice in Faulkner, the response should talk about narrative voice and what the class said about it. 
• The group must come up with five questions to think about based off of the class discussion or research. 
• The group must construct an annotated bibliography of six sources. The annotations must be 250-500 words and contain a section stating the source's credibility, a summary of the source, a way to use that source in a research project. 
• The group must construct a list of symbols/allusions/or other references in the stories. The number here will vary, but each entry must provide information about where it comes from (especially for an allusion) and what purpose it serves in the context of the story. 
• The group must construct a review of the short story. The review must be between 500-1000 words. Remember, a review is not a summary. Some summary is necessary, but the thrust of the review should be about the story's meaning and importance. 
• The group must construct a creative page. This page can be anything that you desire. For example, it could be a hand drawn map of the setting. It could be sketch of one of the scenes. It could be a Prezi talking about the author and the themes of the story. It could be a video discussion. This page is open to whatever you want to do.   
• Research paper: the paper must explore connections between at least two of the authors discussed in class. For example, you could explore the pastoral in Turgenev and Hemingway. Or, you could explore representations of the South in Wright and Baldwin. The paper must be 8-10 pages. You must use 4-6 secondary sources as well to support your argument.

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What other types of assignments would you require in a class like this? For class discussion, I would incorporate the "fish bowl" activity. The "fish bowl" has worked well for me in the past, especially in my literature classes.  As well, the wiki assignment worked well. After the initial apprehensiveness of students to work together in this way, students created some amazing wikis and creative pages. Plus, the information provided them with a head start on their research papers. The wikis helped to show students that learning and writing are not solitary activities; they require interaction with others.

Regarding the readings above, I chose them because of their relationship to Ernest Gaines. Gaines has stated, at various times, the influence of many of the authors above. Along with his influences, I added contemporaries of Gaines such as Wright, Baldwin, and Walker to show his work in relationship to those he wrote alongside. The two anthologies listed provide short stories by African American writers and Southern writers. There are works in there that could be used to expand upon the themes and topics in the class.

List of previous blog posts that may be of help with the readings in this course:

• "The Two Ernests: Gaines and Hemingway"  
• "Jean Toomer's Cane and Ernest Gaines"
• "James Joyce's 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room'"
• "The Specter of Lynching"
• "Benjy Compson and Sonny"
• "Trees and the Southern Landscape: James Baldwin and Ernest Gaines"
• "Ernest Hemingway's 'Soldier's Home'"
• "Eudora Welty's 'A Worn Path' and Gaines' 'The Sky is Gray'"
• "The Jim Crow South in Welty's 'A Worn Path' and Gaines' 'The Sky is Gray'"

Please provide your insights and suggestions in the comments below. What other texts would you suggest in a class like the one above? What assignments and activities have worked for you in the classroom when teaching literature? If you have a syllabus or reading list you would like to propose, let me know at gainescenter@louisiana.edu.

Dilsey and Miss Jane

Scene from James Farnco's adaptation of The Sound and the Fury (2014).
Lorretta Devine plays Dilsey. 

The previous post, "Benjy Compson and Sonny" explores the correlations between William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Ernest Gaines' "A Long Day in November," specifically focusing on the stylistic similarities between Benjy's section and Sonny's narration. For this post, I would like to focus on another aspect of Faulkner's novel that some have brought up in relation to Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. This aspect deals with the "similarities" between Faulkner's Dilsey and Gaines' Miss Jane. 

In 1945,  Faulkner added an appendix to The Sound and the Fury (1929) to help clarify some aspects of the novel. Entitled "Compson: 1699-1945," the appendix chronicles the Compson family lineage from 1699 through World War II. The events of the novel conclude in 1928, so the appendix helps to fill in the information about what happens to Mrs. Compson, Benjy, Jason, Caddy, and others. Faulkner concludes the appendix with a section on Dilsey and her family. Even after he goes into detail about what happens to the other characters in the novel, Faulkner simply states, before discussing Dilsey's family, "And that was all. These others were not Compsons. They were black." Here, he only provides a couple of sentences for T.P., Frony, Luster, and Dilsey. He doesn't even provide information for Roskus or Versh. For Dilsey. all Faulkner says is "They endured."

Dilsey, throughout The Sound and the Fury, is the mainstay. She even comments in the final section, "I've seed de first en de last" (297). Dilsey takes care of the Compson family, looking after Mrs. Compson, making sure Benjy is taken care of, stepping in between Quentin and Jason at certain points, and ultimately keeping the house in order. While she deals with the decaying Compson household, Dilsey maintains strength; she endures. Even though Dilsey endures, Faulkner does not provide her with a large amount of space in the novel. She remains, for the most part, in the background, more specifically in the kitchen.  Divided into four sections, the Compson sons (Benjy, Quentin, and Jason) narrate the first three sections of the novel and the fourth section is told by an omniscient third person narrator. Many call this section "Dilsey's section"; however, I have qualms with that label because the final section, while focusing on Dilsey partly, mainly revolves around Jason's attempt to retrieve the money from Quentin and the man she ran off with. Compounding Dilsey's lack of voice in the final section, Faulkner tells the other three sections from the first person point-of-view of male protagonists, not providing Dilsey, or even the Compson women, an adequate voice throughout the narrative. Herman Beavers notes, "Faulkner's decision not to provide [Dilsey] a section of her own in the novel, while it marks off her moral strength, likewise swears her to secrecy," concluding that Dilsey's narrative "will take place in the world beyond" (129).

Ad for The Autobiography
of Miss Jane Pittman

Even though Faulkner does not portray Dilsey as intricately as he could have, she remaines a memorable character in modern American literature. During its promotion of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The Dial Press used a quote from Geoffery Wolff's Newsweek review that compares Miss Jane to Dilsey. Wolff writes: 

This is a novel in the guise of the  tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has  lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a  witness to the black militancy of the 1960's. In this  woman Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure,  a woman equipped to stand beside William  Faulkner's Dilsey in  The Sound And The Fury. Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has  'endured,' has seen almost everything and foretold the rest.

While understandable for marketing purposes, Wolff even compares the novel to Homer's The Odyssey and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn in its scope and subject matter, the comparisons between Dilsey and Miss Jane can only go so far. Gaines makes known that as a Southern writer and an African American writer he cannot escape writing back to Faulkner

Gaines told John Lowe in 1994 that an interviewer once asked him if he had Disley in mind when writing Miss Jane's Story. Gaines simply replied, "No, I did not have Dilsey in mind" (313). Gaines goes on to say that Dilsey tells her story not from her own kitchen but from Compson's, and "Miss Jane is talking to a black teacher in her kitchen" (313). Essentially, Gaines allows Miss Jane to tell her own story, unlike Faulkner who fails to provide Dilsey with a voice in his novel like Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. Disley becomes relegated, as stated earlier, to the background, the servant who maintains the family's secrets and endures as they wither away.

More could be said here, but I would like to leave the discussion here to see what you have to say. Make sure to post your thoughts and comments down below.

Beavers, Herman. Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Print.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.
Lowe, John. "An Interview with Ernest Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 297-328. Print.

Benjy Compson and Sonny

"Somebody is shaking me but I dont want get up now, because I'm tired and I'm sleepy and I don't want get up now" (Bloodline 3). So begins Gaines' short story "A Long Day in November," a story narrated by five-year-old Sonny. The boy tells about the relationship between his father and mother, their conflicts then their eventual reconciliation. For this post, I do not want to focus on the narrative of the story. Instead, I want to talk briefly about the narrative voice that Gaines constructs to tell the story.

Reading Sonny's voice for the first time, I could not help but think that something felt eerily similar to me. As I kept reading, I finally began to figure out that Sonny's narration reminded me of Benjy Compson's from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. In fact, a couple of pages into "A Long Day in November," I scribbled "kinda like Benjy narrating" in the margins. Specifically, what sparked this connection came from Sonny's narration when describes his dream the waking up from it. There are not clues that Sonny awakes. The narration moves fluidly from sleeping dreams of Billy Joe Martin, Sonny, and Lucy playing to "Somebody's beating on the door. Mama, somebody's beating on the door" (7). Sonny's seamless movement from sleep to being awake is not as abrupt as Benjy's leaps over the course of thirty years, but it is similar. Along with this type of subtle shift, Sonny also takes on some of Benjy's linguistic style.

Even though Benjy is thirty three, his decreased mental capacity makes him appear as if he is merely a child. For example, he can only mumble and cry when he hears Caddy's named mentioned. In fact, the family doesn't even say her name when she is gone so Benjy will keep quiet. Opening his section, Benjy states, "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming towards where the flag was and I went along the fence" (3). Just like Sonny's initial sentence, Benjy's contains a simplicity, even though both also have a subordinate clause. Their apparent simplicity arises from the structure (a subject followed directly by a verb). This structure allows both Sonny and Benjy to sound like a five-year-old boy and a thirty-three year old man child respectively.

Responding to a question about writing from the point of view of a young boy in "A Long Day in November," Gaines responded by saying "we have all been children once" and because of that, the viewpoint is there somewhere. Even though this voice resided within Gaines, and us, he had to find out a way to bring it out. To do that, he received help from both Joyce and Faulkner. Joyce helped Gaines write about events that span a day. From Faulkner, Gaines said he found out how to write in the voice of a five-year-old Sonny.

In the first part of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury the Benjy part, Benjy uses the simplest terms to express his feelings: "the gate is cold," "the fire is good," "I stamped my shoes on," all this sort of thing. This childlike section is so convincing that I really fell in love with it. I really did. (Fitzgerald and Marchant 11)    

I am in the process of rereading The Sound and the Fury, so in a couple of days I may have more to say about the novel and Gaines. However, at this point, I just wanted to note the similarities in regards to the way that Gaines structures Sonny's narration and the way Faulkner structures Benjy's. If you have any comments or questions, remember to leave them below. 

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.
Fitzgerald, Gregory and Peter Marchant. "An Interview: Ernest J. Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 3-15. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. "A Long Day in November." Bloodline. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976. 3-79. Print.