Sunset Limited - conflict and contradiction by Filipe Ferreira

O título da obra The Sunset Limited remete para um comboio do mesmo nome que faz a travessia dos EUA do Atlântico até o Pacífico. A mítica viagem para o Oeste, que muitas vezes na literatura dos EUA representa a descoberta do novo o renascer, mas que também pode ser o sítio onde termina uma viagem, onde o Sol se põe.

As duas personagens, Black e White cruzaram-se numa estação de metro (lugar subterrânio, viagem aos infernos), onde o primeiro impediu o suicídio do segundo.

A primazia nesta obra é dada à palavra, aos diálogos, tudo o resto é reduzido ao mínimo, o cenário e as indicações de cena.

A acção decorre no apartamento de Black, um local à parte, fechado para o mundo exterior, na porta uma coleção de cadeados e trancas parecem querer proteger o local do mal que está lá fora, sobre a mesa uma bíblia e um jornal a primeira marca este local como um lugar onde é a “palavra de Deus” que reina o segundo uma ligação mediada ao mundo exterior.

As personagens caracterizam-se de forma bastante distinta e cumprem a sua vida de acordo com certezas, narrativas sobre a existência que vão confrontar tentando fazer prevalecer uma sobre a outra.

Black

“Me? I'm just a dumb country nigger from Louisiana. I done told you. I aint never had the first thought in my head. If it aint in here [na bíblia] then I dont know it.”

“If it ain't got the lingering scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it.”

White

“I believe in the primacy of intelect”

“You give up the world line by line. Stoically. And then one day you realize that your courage is farcical. It doesn't mean anything. You've become an acomplice in your own annihilation and there is nothing you can do about it. Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.”

As personagens seguem em sentidos “diferentes”:

Black vem de uma situação que caracterizava como “Death in life.”, até que uma “revelação divina”, o momento em que ouviu o que diz ter sido a voz de deus “If it were not for the grace of God you would not be here” fez com que passasse a dedicar a sua vida à palavra de Deus “If you never speak again you know I'll keep your word.”, à vida eterna “He said you could have life everlasting. Have it today. Hold it in your hand.”.

White valorizava a erudição “Books and music and art […] have value to me. [...]foundations of civilization., até o ponto em que se desiludio com as suas crenças “The things I believed in don’t exist any more. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now” o que deseja é a morte absoluta “I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I've known in life […] That would be the ultimate horror.”

“I want the dead to be dead. Forever. And I want to be one of them”.

Ao longo do texto as personagens vão jogar com a linguagem como criadora de significados, interpretando a realidade de formas diferentes e tentando fazer prevalecer uma interpretação sobre a outra. Ambos utilizão expressões do outro como ponte de ligação entre as narrativas, como ferramenta para contra-argumentar, como subversão da argumentação do outro. (Primacy; Loathe; Facetious; Trick bag; Constituents; Niger; Jailhouse/penitentiary; Mojo.)

Black

“But not the primacy of all them folks waitin on a later train.”

White

“I might be warming up the trick bag”

A “vitória” intelectual será de White que abandona o apartamento aparentemente para o seu encontro com o Sunset Limited. Black, abalado, termina perguntando a Deus “If you wanted me to help him how come you didnt give me the words? You give em to him. What about me?”, reafirmando a sua devoção à palavra de Deus e a pergunta repetida “Is that okay? Is that okay?”.

Expressões conotativas em Sunset Limited, de Cormac MccCarthy - por Sofia Freitas

As serious as a heart attack.  Black claims to be this at the beginning of the Sunset Limited. One could see a kind of morbid humor in such a statement, considering Black has just finished stopping another man from committing suicide when he says it. If Black wasn’t serious, things could lead back to White trying to kill himself again.

The lingering scent of divinity. A catch phrase Black hears from a preacher. Black claims he does not think of anything that does not have the lingering scent of divinity; an interesting point to note is that, throughout the story, Black’s arguments to dissuade White from his point of view all end up drawing from the same idea that it is through believing in God and in the light that White can see life with new purpose.

I read the Book of Job. White claims this when asked whether he has read the Bible or not. The irony of the statement is not lost on the reader, considering that the Book of Job deals with the theme of God’s punishment of the just and can be criticized in a way that would portray God as an incompetent entity or as one who does not care to save or help those who are faithful and just. This would end up showing the very action of reading the Bible, a book dedicated to God, and Black’s convictions towards believing in God as achieving happiness, as pointless and foolish ventures.

See when that next uptown express is due. The ‘uptown express’, as Black calls it, is the Sunset Limited: the train that crosses the country from Louisiana to California can be seen as a way for someone who comes from a poorer background (typically those living in Louisiana have less favorable living conditions than California; California is considered one of the states with the highest amount of billionaires living in it) to get to a ‘richer’ state. We can see the Sunset Limited as a metaphor or a perverse representation of White’s ‘ascension’ to a better reality. Black tries to show White ‘the light’ and tries to steer him towards what he believes is a better way of thinking by keeping him away from the ‘uptown express.’ White, on the other hand, finds the ‘uptown express’ to be his ticket to a better state of being.

Fixin’ to put you in the trickbag. The ‘trickbag’ is Black’s code for a group of experiences and information that he commits to memory and saves for future use. The trickbag seems to be what the characters refer to as their deposit for arguments and expressions that might later advance their rhetoric, and this ends up being called back to a few times during the narrative.

Moral leper colony. If taken literally, those who would suffer of moral leprosy would theoretically be those whose morals would slowly degrade into nothingness, individuals having a disease that can never truly be cured. White refers to the people living in Black’s neighborhood as a colony where the people are beyond saving.

Constituents. Black mentions constituents as something one can have in order to organize, or to live their life; the word is an interesting marker of Black’s own social background, as it happens to be used amongst prisoners and drug peddlers. White questions why he’d need constituents and Black claims he does not necessarily need them, but the opinion that one should live one’s life by feeling like they are a part of something (for instance, like Black believes he is part of God’s plan by doing his best as one of his faithful) in order to find happiness is something we can infer from the conversation. White does not feel like he is a part of anything, he does not feel like a ‘constituent’ in anything, not even where he teaches or among his family. There is a lack of belonging, and, while Black admits that he doesn’t necessarily need to belong to anything, there can is truth in stating that some people can in fact feel more fulfilled, feel like their lives have meaning, when they believe they are a part of something, be it a higher purpose or something more mundane.

Manual overrider. Black’s ‘manual override’ would make him revert to his violent ways. The manual override implies that Black would stop forcing himself to be a good man to others and to just let himself go and give way to despair. White finds the expression interesting perhaps because he sees the irony of Black applying the catch-phrase without truly giving it deeper consideration. If we take into account that he has, in fact, to force himself to care and to continue living, we can assume that life is too Black as much a bleak and painful experience as it is to White; by stopping himself from going into manual override, Black is simply struggling against what is inevitable in White’s eyes.

Communal misery. White’s concept of communal misery is exactly what it sounds like. It is the search of kinship through the common ground of being miserable. People group together in function of how miserable they feel, and White does not see how something like that could be in any way something anyone would wish to do. Socialization seems to be, for White, something people do to avoid introspection, to avoid thinking about their situations on their own. It is then a type of coping mechanism for those who still practice living. In a religious context, believing in God is just a different flavor of deluding oneself into believing that life is not devoid of happiness.

Terminal Commuters vs. (Every)day Travelers - Practice exercise for the test

Thinking of these opposition in several texts throughout the Post-1945 US Literature Course, choose A. or B., relating any of your writings with at least 3 of the texts we have studied:

1. Write a commentary on the struggle of the approaches to life, movement, mobility and community in your preferred texts in this class.

2. Write a creative text dramatizing the struggle between these notions.

Please try to be in class on time tomorrow

Our guest will be there at 2.00 p. m. sharp and there are people who will have to leave early. Let's make our best.

Jim Train by A. M. Homes

Please comment
- on the symbolism of the train and the journey in the short story
- on relevant passages (with examples) of the image of the United States

Charles Reis Felix - special class on the 10 th December

Dear students
the texts for the special class on the 10th december are already in the moodle platform:
https://plataforma.elearning.ulisboa.pt/course/view.php?id=5345
and in the "fotocopiadora vermelha" (red photocopy store"
Please read by order of importance:
1. Charles Reis Felix, "I don't want a Portagee in the family" from Through a Portagee Gate (2004)
2. Interview with Charles Reis Felix by Francisco Cota Fagundes
3. Article by Fagundes on Through a Portagee Gate
4. Article by Fagundes on Da Gama, Cary Grant and the 1934 Elections

Please note that the chapter "I don't want a Portagee in the family" will replace, in our reading list, the text by  Sherman Alexie, The True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2004)

Subverting the Racial Codes and the Role of Maggie in "Recitatif" by Toni Morrison (by Seray and Irem)

In the early 1960's, throughout much of the South, African-American people’s right to vote was denied, they were barred from public facilities, subjected to insults and violence 
and, in the North, black Americans also faced discrimination in housing, employment, education and many other areas. Because of these reasons, many African-Americans started to protest and claimed their rights in what became known as the Civil Rights movement. This subject substantially took part in US literature. Toni Morrison also draws attention to this subject and she is doing  it in a different way.
     “Recitatif” tells a story of two girls, Twyla and Roberta, both abandoned by their mothers. They first meet in an orphange where they spend four months together and then meet four times as adults in different places and situations in life. It is evident that these two girls are from different races and this can be understood from thelines: “-it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race”(Recitatif 2253) and “-that we looked like salt and pepper standing there..” (2254). On the other hand it is not clearly emphasized which girl is black and which one is white and the reason why Toni Morison leaves it unclear is that she tries to raise consciousness. On the other hand, although it is not mentioned directly, the story gives us some clues about their racial identities. For example, Twyla remembers her mother having warned her that the people of Roberta’s race “never washed their hair and they smelled funny” (2253). Twyla validates Mary’s stereotypical notion by saying, “Roberta sure did. Smell funny, I mean” (2253). This may be a reference to black people according to white canon and it can be considered that Roberta is black. Morever, another example for this is lack of  knowledge of Twyla about Jimi Hendrix. When Roberta says that she and her friends have an appointment with Hendrix, Twyla thinks about someone else and it can be seen in these lines: “ ‘Hendrix? Fantastic!’ I said. ‘Really fantastic. What's she doing now?’ Roberta coughed on her cigarette and the two guys rolled their eyes up at the ceiling. ‘Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix, asshole. He's only the biggest-Oh, wow. Forget it.” (2258).

However much racial coding the short story contains, “Recitatif” shows that racial stereotyping is based on illusion, since one can never be certain about the reality of the story. For instance, the examples which are given above can be also deceptive because blacks can also have a prejudice against the smell of whites and,  additionally, Jimi Hendrix appealed to a lot of white people at that time. Therefore, it is still ambigious which girl is black and which one is white because the decision is left to the reader to conclude, since everyone can interpret these clues according to their own experiences in life. By giving these clues, without conclusion, Morrison subverts traditional stereotypes and myths concerning blackness and whiteness. For example, it is therefore likely that Twyla's mother, Mary thinks that “beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise” are connected with the white race. This hypothesis is subverted, though, as we meet the mothers of the two girls: Twyla reports her mother having looked cheap and ragged in a “fur jacket with the pocket linings so ripped she had to pull to get her hands out of them.” (2256). In addition, in the scene, Twyla is situated in a serving position and she works in the coffee shop where Roberta is a customer. This might shows that the servant-role associated with black characters is subverted in the story. So, it can be said that the story has several racial codes but they are used in order to deconstruct the stereotypes in people’s minds.


There is another important character in the story besides these two girls named Maggie, who is mute and most probably deaf. Maggie has several significant roles in this story. One of them is that she might be the representation of African-American people in general. She is mute, she has legs like paranthesis and her disability symbolizes the African American presence as the stereotypical “Other”. For instance, “Maggie fell down there once.The kitchen woman with legs like paranthesis. And the big girls laughed at her.” (Pg 2254). In this line, Maggie needs help but no one helps her and the big girls make fun of her like white people do to African-Americans.

     Another role of Maggie is that she is used here similarly as a surrogate body through which the protagonists reflect their own experiences and consequently the reader can consider his or her relationship with stereotypes. For example, Twyla says that “Maggie was my dancing mother” (2265) and she does not help Maggie when she falls and Twyla admits that she wants to harm Maggie, as well because she replaces Maggie as her mother who is not with her, and due to her mother's absentness, Twyla blames her mother and wants to harm her. Therefore it can be said that Twyla and Roberta each perceives the mute Maggie as her own unresponsive, rejecting mother, and therefore hates and wantes to harm her. Morever, the character of  Maggie helps us to understand races of two girls because each girl perceives Maggie according to their own experiences. For instance, when they meet in Food Emporium, Twyla thinks that Maggie fell in the orchard but Roberta says that she didn't fall and the other girls pushed her down. In addition, when they meet again in front of the school, Roberta insists on the fact that they kicked Maggie when she fell by saying that “Maybe I am different now Twyla. But you're not. You're the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady and you have the nerve to call me a bigot” (2264).These lines can show us that although Twyla remembers Maggie as a sandy-coloured woman, Roberta perceives her as a black woman and tries to protect her, so the reader can speculate that she is also black and she reflects her own situation in society through Maggie. 

    In conclusion, in this story, Toni Morrison tries to deconstruct racial stereotypes and, in order to do that, she leaves the races of the protagonists unclear because she tries to make the reader  interpret the race issue according to their own experiences. Additionally, she uses the character Maggie so as to  help the reader understand the protagonists' inner world and sense of diffidence.