Housekeeping, in the short glimpse we've gotten, has been a very nice surprise at the end of my strange school-week. Personal note here, but in the stupor of painkillers taken while trying to heal my spasmodic lower back, the wonderful prose and unique storytelling of Ruth have caught my eye. Even while barely conscious, I've been able to wring stuff out of Housekeeping's narrative, partially since the whole re-read-sentences-or-else-you-miss-a-bunch-of-stuff style is how I read books anyway. My eyes go a little too fast, so I'm right at home with Robinson's loaded passages.
The two anecdotes our class-time has dedicated itself to are the couple of "weirdly funny" scenes involving Edmund Foster, train-wrecked grandfather of Ruth, and Helen, who drives Bernice's Ford and herself off the side of a cliff to her doom. Like we've discussed, these two events in their plain and literal significance are no laughing matters. A massive train-wreck kills hundreds. A mother commits suicide. Totally horrible. But through the detailed yet emotionally detached accounts of these events by Ruth, they are riddled with an unusual and slightly uncomfortable humor. It mostly boils down to the vivid mental imagery Ruth conjures. After a few boys help her car out of the mud, the pleasant and polite Helen is then pictured "swerving and sliding across the meadow until she sailed off the edge of the cliff" (33). Though the actual context is quite sad, thinking of this mild-mannered woman spontaneously donut-ing to her death is darkly humorous. Then of course the train-wreck scene is rendered with a sense of weird, jarring passivity. What is a massive, crunching, spectacular loss of life is compared to a "weasel sliding off a rock" after "nos[ing] over toward the lake" (5). Gut reactions can be sort of like "Jeez! Isn't that your grandpa and dozens or hundreds of other people dying? And all you can think of is a weasel going *ploop* into the water?" I hear these pleas and agree something about Ruth's depictions is quite off-putting. But I'll argue for her as someone with a merely enhanced appreciation for the art of humor at inappropriate, often morbid occasions.
At least in the case of Edmund, Ruth has never encountered this man in her life. She isn't supposed to have many emotional ties to the guy. Much like me in the case of my great-great grandfather, Horatio Clayton Simmons. I swear, every detail I hear about this dude's life makes me laugh even harder. First of all, what kind of name is Horatio Clayton Simmons? That is legitimately hilarious. I couldn't think of a more obscure pasty name if I tried. Anyhow, this strange ancestor had 10 kids before dying at sea at age 50. You can call me twisted or whatever, but when I learned this detail, that Horatio Clayton Simmons, who made furnaces for a living, somehow got lost at sea and was never found again, I actually chuckled. How many random details can you fit into one life? However many it is, HC Simmons came pretty close to it. With all the insider knowledge Ruth has somehow attained, I wouldn't be too surprised if she could find an account of Horatio's last days. It was probably just as morbidly funny as her other stories are. Okay, maybe you had to be there. What is ACTUALLY really funny is my basketball coach's closing speech we had after our last game of the season. We got totally smoked, and so coach had to rally us up one last time and talk about how he's excited for the future of the team and all that. But when he goes into the details about how he and his buddies "worked in the cornfields for hours and then broke into the gym to go play basketball", me and two other players started quietly laughing. "What's funny?" he asked. Well what was funny was the mental image of these little southern Illinois boys being bored of corn or whatever and BREAKING INTO a basketball gym in the middle of nowhere, that's what! It was supposed to be inspirational, but the perfect cheesiness of it all just got to us. Sorry coach.
The point of all this is that humor often comes from the unexpected. There are actually theories that comedy comes from situations being different from what they're supposed to be. It might seem vague at first, but the idea of irony and incongruity driving humor makes a lot of sense to me at least. In the contexts mentioned, with a train plopping into the lake like a weasel, or a suicidal woman politely eating strawberries on the front of her car, or my direct ancestor being named Horatio Clayton Simmons and doing lots of strange things, when told correctly, they are all funny despite the morbid inhibitions. So in defense of Ruth, it's quite possible that this humor comes easier to her, and that she was never totally emotionally attached to the subject matter. Neither of her examples were in her control after all. From a child-care perspective, one might even be happy to see she's coped with the deaths of her ancestors with no visible psychological impact. Though I will give it to critics of this quality, it is still a little unsettling.
I agree with you, Ruth's voice is certainly humorous to a reader, even if she doesn't intend it to be. Sometimes the funniest people are those who don't know they're funny. Her wit, and emotionless depictions of events as you mention, do seem rather humorous though. The scenes are so strangely juxtaposed that they don't seem real anymore, allowing the readers to laugh a little without feeling morally questionable.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the incongruity of Ruth's narration and the events at face-value is funny. I laughed when she mentioned the woman who recited prayers with her parrot. I suppose that Ruth's predisposition to dark humor is a product of her environment, and the fragility of human life where she is, and how she has experienced it.
ReplyDeleteYes! I thought these passages were (darkly) funny as hell. Mr. Mitchell mentioned in class how they're almost Oscar Wilde-y in their sense of detached, dry humor, and I agree. Also, when we talk about Ruth's sort of larger, nature-oriented, "geological" understanding of time and the insignificance of human life, it doesn't seem as shitty of her to be cracking jokes about people's deaths who she never really knew that well. She definitely seems like the type of person to reject common ideas about sentimentality. Also, I love the imagery you're talking about. It's the concepts and images she's describing and comparing things to that are funny! I've heard that theory you mention about humor before, and I think it abso-LUTELY applies here. Nice post, very thoughtful!
ReplyDeleteI suppose I see both sides of this argument. Personally, when I first read these sections I was one of those people who was kind of appalled at how calm Ruth could be at moments like that. After we talked about it in class though, I re-read over those parts and I do appreciate the dark humor after the fact. It just strikes me that Ruth can make events like that sound so nonchalant and even humorous with her language alone, without even trying at that.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you were in Hero's Journey class but I found some of the moments in HouseKeeping similar to As I Lay Dying, in that its morbid and weird humor. I'd characterize it as awkward. While it's sad, being able to add a twinge of humor to it, is in my book pretty impressive.
ReplyDeleteI think also that a lot of her humor may come from the fact that neither of us are properly acquainted with Ruth's grandfather or mother enough to find her humor offensive. If we knew who they were and what their characters did or thought, we would have a greater sense of loss when they died. Since we know nothing about them from a firsthand experience, we are able to see these individuals as a butt of a joke as opposed to a genuine loss of life. Ruth is in the same position as us, which makes the humor possible, I think. If she were vividly reminiscing on her mother, I think her comments would have come across as strange.
ReplyDelete...Do I smell inspiration for a big show sketch in here? We've done some pretty morbid things on stage (cult activity, finding out you have cancer from your horoscope) and I think we've received a lot less scattered sympathy applause and a lot more passionate, genuine laughter. But maybe I'm just biased. I just want to say I loved this post. From your own anecdotes, to the perfect phrase "re-read-sentences-or-else-you-miss-a-bunch-of-stuff." I totally agree and appreciate what you have to say here. As we learned in theatre fest, pain and distance are necessary for comedy!
ReplyDeleteI'm a Huge fan of dark human and the many forms is comes in. I will say for me it was a little hard to get into laughing at a mom committing suicide, but I saw the humor she was trying to infuse the scene with for sure. Personally I think part of the nature of dark human is that you have unique ability to add humor to something since it;s personal to you and it makes other people uncomfortable. For example i like to make a lot of divorce jokes, it's a good time.
ReplyDeleteGood point on the mom thing. It's a little less all-out funny and more weirdly chuckle-inducing, with the image of her curtailing into the distance. Agreed btw, her personal association with the material allows her to cruelly joke about it and have it be funny rather than offensive and painfully awkward.
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