Especially since so many folks were conferencing or sick, I wanted to make a couple of comments about this week’s class and activity on the blog. Having spent so much time on the Christmas backstory last time, we talked a lot about the way the novel develops Hightower’s narrative in the final 1/3 of the novel, and how the novel reaches ambivalent closure to its three major subplots. We’ll talk more about this in the first few minutes of class next week, but here’s a little amuse bouche:

• We talked about the striking moment in which Hightower, having declared himself “out of life” and hence insulated from involvement in Byron’s ethically questionable scheme to win Lena’s love, gets dragged back into life. Fascinatingly, especially for a man outwardly devoted to a rather Puritan worldview, even after his being cast out of the church, Hightower is invigorated by his being conscripted to deliver Lena’s baby. In the wake of this event, Hightower’s appetite is awakened, he lights a fire that would seem to correspond to his inner lust for life, and he even fantasizes about Lena’s naming her baby after him, figuring him as Lena’s husband and a bastard’s father. It’s dirtiness and pollution that links these influences: Hightower soils his hands with Byron’s scheme, he associates with disreputable characters, he engages in the literally messy practice of delivering a baby, and he even leaves his dishes dirty! As we’ll discuss next time, this invigoration finds its parallel in Hightower’s inner landscape, in which he returns to the figure of his father and grandfather, meditating on his dual parentage (as it were) and mediating between the “cavalier” ideal of his grandfather and the messier and more mixed-up figure of his father, who also shifted from being a preacher to a doctor and who returns from the War in a coat make of patches of other coats (including a conspicuous patch from a Union solider), a fitting metaphor for a more humane and “mixed up” social body that stands in sharp contrast to the ethnically cleansed polity Percy Grimm seeks.
• We also discussed the very strange end of the novel, emphasizing the following:
  • the way the novel resists “comic” closure: we are primed to expect a union of Byron and Lena, but instead the novel ends with the odd couple’s continuing to meander with Lena’s “a body does get around” comment. We discussed ways in which this suspension rather than closure might be considered a “comic” ending in a sense: the novel arguably affirms liminal states–wanting rather than having, becoming rather than being, existing along vectors rather than dwelling at rest–as a means of resisting the proto-fascist mentality embodied most egregiously by Percy Grimm.
  • the importance of the frame of this last narrative vignette: the story is related by another “outsider” to Jefferson, a traveling furniture dealer who has returned to his young wife and relates the story to her in a bit of flirtatious postcoital (really intercoital!) pillow talk. This framing emphasizes the “lightness” of the ending after a very dark narrative and implies that the broader community contains elements that are capable of sensitive and morally generous listening/interpreting/sharing of stories of “mixed up” subjects like Byron and Lena.
  • We didn’t really get into Christmas’s death scene in any detail: next week we’ll wrestle with that very challenging moment, with its disturbing implications of Christian redemption and a peace that one might consider to be bought too cheaply.
• I strongly recommend that you read (among others) Lynn’s post on the three endings of the novel; Stephen’s on what Christmas’s death means; and Karen’s on windows and other liminal spaces in the novel.

Finally, I emailed about this already, but take a look at the guide to the final assignment if you haven’t.