Edward+P.+Jones+discussion

=//Edward P. Jones' "Bad Neighbors" (in the New Yorker, August 7, 2006)//= This remarkable recent short story can be read on line at: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/content/articles/060807fi_fiction


 * Please post comments below**

//Comment by Mark Auslander:// There are many fascinating aspects to this ironically titled short story, yet another of Jones' growing collection of short fiction exploring African-American Washington D.C. I was especially struck by the engimatic presence of a carved wooden figurine, which calls to mind the carved doll early on in Jones' novel, **The Known World**. I find myself in both instances thinking of resonaces and legacies of central African Kongo //minksi// (power figurines, once termed "fetishes", singular "nkisi"), in which the hopes and capacities of the maker are lodged within the object, often with opaque or unexpected implications. In both the novel and the short story, the figurines embark on curious, somehow interrupted circuits, which seem to transcend the intentionalities of their makers, even while traces of the maker evocatively endure within them. In the short story's next to final scene, the carver (whose identity is only revealed to us at this moment) speaks aloud, and it is not quite clear if he is addressing himself, or another of his wooden figurines, or both. At this moment, we also learn that the carver has been, in an odd sort of way, serving as a kind of guardian angel for another key character in the story, and that the object itself may continue to have talismanic functions for her. Although I doubt Jones was making any conscious reference to Kongo artistic and ritual traditions, I can't help but note that the modern KiKongo term for "angel" is "nksi." // //

//Comment by Ellen Schattschneider:// I also greatly enjoyed the Jones story, which I found a brilliant, nuanced exploration of social class. (I would be interested in hearing from those who know their way better around Victorian fiction if there see direct parallels to depictions of subtle class hierarchies in mid and late 19th century works, say.)

Perhaps because I've been doing research on dolls and figurines (in Japan) for some years, I too was intrigued by the carved objects. I've been working for instance on the small "mascot" figures made for military personnel including Kamikaze pilots during the Asia-Pacific War (c. 1931-1945) in Japan. Most of these objects were destroyed during or immediately after the war, but in the post war context, they do resurface from time to time. When this happens, the object invariably occassions a kind of epistemic shock, rather comparable to the one triggered by carved figure in "Bad Neighbors" when the female character discovers its history. In Japan, such figurines are profoundly uncanny, carrying disturbing traces of the dead or possibly dead, who seem to hover in ambiguous ways around them; this is the case as well with the figure Sharon wears. (She thinks to herself, "I don’t even know if the carver is living anymore.") It thus becomes of her, in Annette Weiner's terms, an "inalienable possession," which she simply cannot sell or detach herself from.

By the way, those with access to Project Muse can read on line, my recent paper on mascot figurines carried by Japanese soldiers and "Kamikaze" pilots during World War II: Schattschneider, Ellen "The Bloodstained Doll: Violence and the Gift in Wartime Japan" The Journal of Japanese Studies - Volume 31, Number 2, Summer 2005, pp. 329-356 http://muse.jhu.edu.resources.library.brandeis.edu/journals/journal_of_japanese_studies/v031/31.2schattschneider.html

//Comment by Carole Meyers//: Thanks for sending this story along. I read it and then, exploring through the New Yorker online, came upon this piece about the Duke lacrosse scandal: [|Big Men on Campus]. Both tell stories of race, privilege, rage, and prejudice. The president of Duke concludes by musing on the enormous limitations and yet seeming inevitability of acts of (pre) judgment, and finds in //Othello// an archetypal statement of the prejudicial cycle: “Belief of it oppresses me already,” Brabantio sighs when he hears of Desdemona's relationship with the Moor.

One of the things I found most interesting about Derek's character was the way Jones constructs him through his language. In the first section of the story, we have only his neighbor's vision of him, the lone young working male left with his family, that in an of itself suspect. However, when halfway through the story, we first hear from him directly, he utters a sentence of remarkable depth and construction: "The May maid swayed away to pray in the day’s hay." I googled the sentence but got no results other than the New Yorker story, so I presume this is not a quotation, in which case I'm struck by the aggressive nature of the rhyme, consonance, and assonance of the statement. This sophistication stands in contrast to the proposed genuine marker of value -- not dropping the "g" in "ing" -- that Sharon mentions at the story's end.

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//Comment by makali777//: time and illusion I also enjoyed this intricate short story of the struggle of class, family, and community, particularly the writing style, crossing time and events, as in, "She would be wearing them (jeans) in her yard one early afternoon months later when…” and the sense of impermanence not only of time, but also of possibilities, as in, “In another universe, before that moment Amanda would have liked…” Jones’s description of Derek’s arms in contrast to the red German alarm clock provided a painterly image that remained with me long after reading the story.

The evening before reading “Bad Neighbors” I had watched the newly released film, "The Illusionist," and given the many differences of culture, place, and population was struck by their unexpected parallels; the crossing of time and events, tensions of class and love, the inevitable whom one may or should marry, but also what is real and what is the illusion?

Both stories also cleverly employed an element of a protector or ‘angel,’ as Mark has referenced as the African Kongo nkisi, in these stories, a lovingly and intricately carved gift, quietly saved despite time and life-passages.

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