I apologize if this blog is only interesting to those in African-American Literature last semester, but the comparison here is so interesting I couldn't help but write a blog about it.
During class today, we were talking about Pluto Noak and whether we wanted to see Jason become more like Pluto or not. While we were talking about this, the phrase was tossed around that Pluto was a little bit crazy and hyper violent, he "doesn't give a toss" as Jason would say. And I am pretty sure I heard someone use the phrase "psycho" to describe Pluto. This conversation immediately took me back to last semester when we were reading The White Boy Shuffle and we first encounter the character of Psycho Loco. The more I thought about it, the more similarities I saw.
When we first meet Psycho Loco, we hear some horror stories about how violent he is. The first two stories we hear of him is how he shoves a makeshift branding iron on someones face when they aren't paying him back his money, and how he tore the ears of a guy in a dispute over who would break the glass in a jewelry robbery attempt. We get a similar introduction with Pluto Noak, where our first impression of him is this kid who turned over a teachers car. Both are portrayed as the local cool kid who is a little crazy and violent and doesn't care too much about things.
Jason and Gunnar would never initiate a relationship with Pluto or Psycho, in part because there is a class barrier between them. Both Gunnar and Jason are ashamed at being too rich for these "hard" kids who are much poorer than them. The relationship must then be initiated the other way. In Black Swan Green, Pluto and Jason first develop something that could be called a friendship because Pluto notices an act of Jason's (tying the string to Blake's door) , and sort of invites Jason to become his friend because of that. In White Boy Shuffle, Psycho Loco notices Gunnar walking along and singing out loud and talks to him. Psycho Loco likes that Gunnar was singing, and so Gunnar is left with no choice but to become his friend.
In both cases, the friendship comes with baggage. Gunnar now has to bury weapons in his backyard for Psycho Loco, lie to the police and say that Psycho was with him all night, and just generally cover for Psycho Loco's illegal doings. In Black Swan Green, Jason is told to abandon his friend to Mr Blake and go home. Interestingly, the hitherto parallel stories dovetail here and Gunnar accepts the baggage that comes with the friendship, while Jason does not.
Perhaps it is significant that we studied one of the books in a coming-of-age class and one in a class not centered on coming-of-age. In Black Swan Green, we (or at least I) see this rejection of the baggage as a crucial step in his self-developement. It is a very mature decision for him to make, and will doubtless prompt much growth in his character. We never see Gunnar make a tough, mature decision like Jason does here. One could quite easily make the case that Gunnar never does come of age in that novel. As we talked about with The Bell Jar, suicide can be seen as a complete failure to come of age and at the end of The White Boy Shuffle Gunnar is very seriously considering his own suicide. Maybe you can look back at this one parallel scene and say that making a tough and mature choice like Jason does can make all the difference between coming-of-age or failing to come-of-age.
While I agree with you that Jason's refusal to accept Pluto's baggage as you put it is a decisive coming of age moment, Jason still has a long way to go though before I think we can say he's come of age. With Gunnar it's a little more complicated in that he is trying to come of age in a super messed up time in L.A.'s history. After the Rodney King riots (which are a crucial chapter in White Boy Shuffle) the fictitious neighborhood of Hillside could almost be termed a dystopia of what an American neighborhood should be in the late twentieth century.
ReplyDeleteGunnar goes on to become an almost messianic figure for his neighborhood, and a public figure in Paul Beatty's U.S. To me Gunnar has come of age under duress but he’s still come of age all the same, sure some of the things he does are crazy, but he fits right into the context of his society, which, is in turn fighting the rest of society. Jason makes one very noble and self-defining decision, but will he continue down the path of self-determination or retreat into the comfort of going unnoticed by the world around him? One other interesting point of comparison between Gunnar and Jason that I just noticed would be their surprise success in poetry and how that comes to have a larger role in their lives as we progress through each book.
(You know, when I first encountered _White Boy Shuffle_ and knew I wanted to teach it, I debated whether to include it in AALit or COA Novel--it would work well for either.)
ReplyDeletePluto Noak and Psycho Loco both have some of the coolest names you'll come across in fiction.
This is an interesting and totally original comparison. With Pluto, alas, it's more a matter of speculating what it might have been like if he had functioned in a "Psycho" way, as a kind of mentor to Jason. He *seems* like he'd be a bad influence, but that's how PL seems at first too, right? And he turns out to be a stand-up guy. And there's something about Pluto that I think Jason could learn from--the "not giving a toss." He just needs to realize that this might not take the same *form* as it does for Pluto. For him, not giving a toss means going back for Dean, and not caring if these guys will reject him for it.