I was somewhat sleepily reading along in Libra last week when I was suddenly jolted awake by these sentences in "In Atsugi."
"[Tammy] took him to a place called the Loneliness Bar, where the hostesses wore swimsuits treated with a chemical substance. The idea was to strike a match on a girl's backside as she walked by your table. Four Negro GIs went apeshit striking matches on sleek bottoms. There were matches jutting from the knuckles of every hand. They hooted and laughed, could not contain their amazement. They were young Southern Negroes, awkward and spindly, with a likable slapstick manner" (114).
Now I don't claim to have any kind of special authority on racial matters and in general I try not to get offended on other people's behalf, but this scene made me a little uncomfortable in how much it bought into stereotypes about black males as overly sexual. It buys into some other stereotypes as well like the "hooting," but the sexual one was the most blindingly obvious. This becomes especially loaded because the waiters are Japanese and therefore look closer to white women.
I can't really find an explanation for why DeLillo throws this in here. It seems acceptable and perhaps unavoidable that an author might tap into existing stereotypes to immediately conjure up an image in our minds of minor characters. Bobby Dupard's speech pattern, for example, and the way he is described twice as "hangdog." But he is expanded on in addition to that, were the four black GIs seem to be thrown in there just to perpetuate stereotypes.
DeLillo wrote this in 1988, so it seems unlikely that he would just not be aware that this could be problematic. But why would he intentionally include this? Is this supposed to be Lee's thoughts that DeLilli is just passing on to us? I would be interested to see what you guys thought of this scene cause I can make no sense of it.
This passage definitely seems like it's filtered through Lee's point of view, reacting to the wild scene around him (e.g. describing the GI's as "going apeshit"--this isn't DeLillo simply describing them, but presenting Lee's impressions), but the race-based discomfort you describe falls on DeLillo more than Oswald. Lee is just reacting to what he sees, in other words, but DeLillo chose this particular fictional scene to have him respond to, and it does reflect both stereotypes of African American men and of the highly sexualized Asian woman in a military zone dominated by American soldiers (anticipating Vietnam).
ReplyDeleteNow, in DeLillo's defense, we could say that the scene also reflects the stereotype of young, rural, parochial American soldiers seeing a whole new part of the world (and underworld) for the first time--wide-eyed and overwhelmed by this seedy corner of Tokyo, "going apeshit" on military leave. We've all seen this same kind of scene in countless war movies (perhaps one of them will get an ill-advised tattoo before the evening is over; another, like Lee, will wake up with a venereal disease). Maybe DeLillo made the rural wide-eyed soldiers black (and southern, and young and "spindly") in order to drive home the idea that these are young men who've never been exposed to anything like this before.
Dupard, however, to my eyes is a more distinctive and individuated character. His speech patterns certainly reflect black English ("somebody push they luck"), but he's also got his own distinctive way of talking and thinking ("There was a fire to my rack, which they accused me. But in my own mind I could like verbalize it either way"; "It's a question of working it out in my own mind, the exact why I did it. Because the psychology is definitely there") that makes him much less of a stereotype, and more like an ambiguous figure somewhere between the "grizzled old con" with hard-won wisdom Lee hopes for and an eccentric and maybe a little crazy disaffected Marine who just wants out of the whole game.
This is a good question, and I'm curious what your classmates think