Please read all 3 before you decide what you wish to blog about. Thank you.
Consider all the images of darkness in this story; if you list all of them, you will discover Baldwin's development (not a repetition) of a concept here. Which characters are associated with darkness? What does it mean for each character? Do the characters know others' darkness or only their own? Why or why not? Are they isolated? Can you mark a particular moment or certain moments of community in the story? What allows these moments to happen? Contrast the darkness in the story with the image of the "glowing" "cup of trembling." Can you discuss that "glowing" "cup of trembling"?----------------------
Two brothers from one household, one follows a straight and narrow path teaching algebra, and one becomes a heroin addict. One closes himself off from parts of life, and one is totally exposed and vulnerable to the storms and balmy weather the world has to offer. One thinks, "My trouble made his real" -- an important line in the story. Can you speak about this line and the brothers' relationship?
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Tina asked "What's love gotta do with it?"
Dr. Pruss asks, "What's music gotta do with it?"
Take this and run with it.
I will answer either question 1 or 2 when I have a few minutes to think about it. However, I wanted to quickly respond to "What's music gotta do with it?" Music is Sonny's "other" escape....this is when he can think about nothing but the notes and feel good about himself. The clubs are the only places he fits in in life -- he feels like an outsider everywhere else. Music is his connection to the world and his connection to other people. Herion is an escape, but a lonely one.
ReplyDeleteAlso, to continue with the music question: the older brother didn't approve of Sonny's music because he seemed uncomfortable with his own heritage and roots: playing the blues was a stereotype he wanted his brother to avoid. But in the end, it was their connection and it was his connection to a history he had worked so hard to deny. When he accepted "Sonny's blues," he could also embrace cultural connections that he once ignored. "Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did" (69).
ReplyDeleteQuestion 2: As I said in my music comment, the narrator had separated himself from Sonny. Not terribly worried about him, the narrator said Sonny was a good kid and wasn't worried about him, until he was arrested. Up to that moment, the narrator never reached out to his brother because he couldn't identify with him, his painful, his avoidance, his darkness. "My trouble made his real" signifies the death of his daughter. Now he can identify with having a pain that doesn't go away, a pain that gnaws at the insides. He still puts himself above "Sonny," and doesn't allow himself to become consumed with grief. He seems to view addiction and depression as choices; choices that he didn't make. But still, he now can reach out to Sonny in some way because now there is a semblance of brotherhood -- and the music helps bring light to the darkness.
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ReplyDeleteI found the "cup of trembling" reference interesting. I had to look it up, of course, because my biblical references apparently aren't what they should be, but I figured it sounded interesting and if Baldwin decides to end the story with it, hey, it must be important.
ReplyDeleteThe "cup of trembling" is mentioned in Isaiah 51:22 and Zechariah 12:2,3. Basically it's a symbol of power and redemption. This is the Old Testament, back when God was full of terror and vengeance and a little less laissez faire. From what I gather, Jerusalem became a place of sin and horror and God decided to set things straight. The supposed "cup of trembling" that make the people of Jerusalem nuts, sinners, or at least weaklings was taken out of their hands and put into the hands of the enemies. It works a little like the rainbow, a symbol of the covenant God has with His people, that no more evil will come to them.
So! It's interesting that Baldwin ends the story with this reference. I found it important that every aspect of music until the very last scene was depicted in a pretty bad light. The jukebox in the beginning filled everything with menace (49). When the uncle is killed his body is smashed up along with his guitar (55). The narrator whistles right after the "dead to you" speech and right before the mention of Grace dying (61). Sonny even says that the singers at the end must have gone through so much suffering that it's "repulsive to think you have to suffer that much" (64). The point is, music isn't depicted as a good thing throughout the story. Where music is, bad things happen. At the end, however, the evil is taken away. The brothers are able to connect with each other through the music and the cup of trembling represents the forgiveness and redemption they both feel.
Music is an important part of the story and an important part of the time period. Coming from the Harlem Renaissance, a time of cultural development of the Black community, Baldwin had to have found influence in the music of the time. In the story itself, we get the sense that it is the tale end of this era. We can look at Sonny's arrest as a point where the demons of the era are beginning to come into light. This could also connect to the "cup of trembling" that Chris has so intricately described. This idea of an era defined by its developments in the arts also being a time defined by some of the darkest components.
ReplyDeleteThe first time the narrator mentions music, it is because he hears one of the boys in the courtyard whistling a tune that was "only just holding its own through all those other sounds" (48). It's almost like this line predicts Sonny's later assertion that heroin makes you feel "in control. Sometimes you've got to have that feeling" (64). Sonny goes on to tell his brother that he takes heroin to "STAND it, to be able to make it at all. On any level." So we might suspect that making music is something you have to do hold your own in this world--just to keep moving forward, "[i]n order to keep from shaking to pieces." Viewed this way, music is an asset, something that can help you keep your head above the water and weather adverse circumstances. But there's another side to music in the story. Music doesn't just serve as an asset to help one make it through the day, it's also an EXPRESSION of suffering. Sonny hears the preacher woman singing, and comments how she must have gone through a lot of suffering to be able to sing that way. Listening to a sad song makes you kind of sad. This is because we're empathic creatures who feel one another's pain. The narrator shuts out jazz, and by doing so shuts out Sonny. It's not just that he won't reach out to Sonny and make a connection, it's also that he won't listen to "Sonny's blues," and share a little in his pain. The narrator doesn't make an effort to understand his suffering, whatever its nature. Music is not just power OVER something, or an expression OF something, it's also an INVITATION to participate IN something—so music has an important social function. (This is an interesting contrast to the way a lot of people take in music today—I see people walking around listening to their Mp3 players and I think about how they're socially shutting themselves off.)
ReplyDeleteThere were several instances in "Sonny's Blues" where inside/outside are contrasted. The brother mentions, "I wanted to say that it was all within; but was it? or, rather, wasn't that exactly the trouble?" And then in the end, when Sonny is playing and the brother is listening, the brother thinks to himself, "And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky." This juxtaposition between what is inside and what is inside of us that we show outwardly is an interesting one. Taking ourselves outside of ourselves and what we believe ourselves and others to be. A lot of people invite others in, as Sonny does with his music. Does the brother have a way of inviting others in?
ReplyDeleteI did not find darkness was associated with any single character. The darkness imagery in the story is pervasive, touching on almost every scene in one form or another. Collecting darkness imagery examples, the darkness becomes the oppressive and miserable situations the characters face. When the narrator reads about his brother, he sees himself and the fellow Harlem inhabitants as "trapped in the darkness which roared outside." Just as they cannot escape Harlem, they cannot escape the darkness. His students feel it, too. "They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone." The students feel rage at their limited lives and limited opportunities, "they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities." Knowing their limits leads to the "darkness of their lives . . . closing in." The darkness of the movies, paralleled with the darkness of their lives, presents a moment of community as they all dreamed of some sort of escape. Even that moment, however, is plagued with the reality of their isolation and oppression. The escape isn't real, and is still part of the darkness.
ReplyDeleteThe darkness reappears throughout the story, but is also associated with death and misery. During the funeral, the narrator describes the scene, "You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes and you hear the street noises every now and again, or maybe the jangling beat of a tambourine from one of the churches close by, but it's real quiet in the room." The silence and mourning are tied to the gathering dark that is pressing in on them. The dark outside is the dark of a limiting environment that continues cycles of children like Sonny falling prey to the lures of drugs and escapism. The dark appears in the two other important deaths. When the narrator speaks of his letter to Sonny, he ties the darkness to his
processing of his daughter's death: "I think I may have written Sonny the very day that little Grace was buried. I was sitting in the living room in the dark, by myself, and I suddenly thought of Sonny. My trouble made his real." The dark is deepest when the narrator's uncle is murdered by a group of drunken white men: "Your Daddy was like a crazy man that night and for many a night thereafter. He says he never in his life seen anything as dark as that road after the lights of that car had gone away. Weren't nothing, weren't nobody on that road, just your Daddy and his brother and that busted guitar." The dark is greatest when the oppression is greatest; in this quotation, it isn't just a limited life but a loss of life being imposed on the citizens of Harlem.
Sonny is trapped in the darkness, and it is music that brings him out. The narrator describes Sonny as looking like "an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light." Sonny's moment of triumph, on the bandstand in his "kingdom," is time spent in the light. It isn't easy to be there. The narrator states, "I had the feeling that they, nevertheless, were being most careful not to step into that circle of light too suddenly: that if they moved into the light too suddenly, without thinking, they would perish in flame." The musicians can escape the dark, but they must move carefully because it is not an easy transition. Also, we know they cannot remain in that light forever. The night will end, the light with go out, and Sonny and the others will have to find other ways of trying to "live."
ReplyDeleteThere is one quotation that seems to sum up Baldwin's use of darkness. The children at the funeral recognize that the adults are keeping things from them, and yet they are still touched by it. "And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he's moved just a
little closer to that darkness outside." The children are being exposed to the tragedies of the poverty, drug use, and undeserved suffering that was part of Harlem life. "The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It's what they've come from. It's what they endure." The quotation tells the reader that the darkness is the suffering endured by the adults, that made its way into the house through death. "The child knows that they won't talk any more because if he knows too much about what's happened to them, he'll know too much too soon, about what's going to happen to him." This final quotation is possibly the most depressing and pessimistic of the story. The misery that the darkness represents is being kept from the child, but the old folks cannot keep it out forever. Eventually, the darkness will "happen to him," too, and the child will become, as Sonny has been, another sufferer.
I would profoundly disagree with the statement that music isn’t depicted as a good thing throughout the story. I think there’s an incessant suggestion that music is a very good thing and that the tragedies associated with music come from it being violently stifled; I don’t see the tragedies as being rooted in or somehow caused by the music at all. The presence of the guitar of the narrators uncle, for instance, doesn’t seem to suggest that the instrument was some harbinger of doom. “…he heard his brother scream when the car rolled over him, and he heard the wood of that guitar when it give, and he heard them strings go flying, and he heard them white men shouting” (55). Their mutual destruction on the road is simply that; the music died with the uncle in one terrible cacophany.
ReplyDeleteThe narrator is concerned about Sonny’s pursuit of music, but in a terribly practical, oblivious, and perhaps even caring way. He is concerned with musicians and the drug culture that they are (to this day) inextricably bound up with—perhaps with the lone example of straight-edge/krishnacore/zencore and like-minded movements. When Sonny is in his early transformative moments, living in Isabela’s house, his “cloud” of sorts is something that many musicians strive for: letting the creative process and the relationship with an instrument totally consume everyday existence. Is it practical? No, absolutely not. When weighing practicality against the musician’s very soul, however, what’s being considered is snuffing out an inner flame for security’s sake.
As both musical performances in “Sonny’s Blues” make clear, however, security is antithetical to the traits and power of a great musician. They’ve achieved this power to inspire and move the audience “at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to make us listen” (69). I cannot, unfortunately, claim a familiarity with Jazz; it’s a long-standing musical illiteracy that I hope to soon rectify. I am, at heart, mostly in tune with the mellow sadness of folk. It’s not the only music that moves me, it’s just what I’ve been recurrently drawn to over the years. Two of my favorite artists, Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, embraced the proximity towards ruin and madness in pursuit of (or perhaps simply parallel to) art. Ultimately, they each chose death, but what they’ve left behind is, especially in the case of Smith, a beautiful and emotional body of work. Is this tragic? Of course it is, but I’m not entirely sure there was any choice for them. At the risk of death, they had to pursue music; for them and Sonny there was nothing else. The eventually redeemed failure of the narrator and his wife’s family is that they did not understand the closeness of music to Sonny’s being. By “spitting on” his pursuit of music, they were indeed threatening to put out that flickering artist’s self.
Ok- I posted this once but it didn't go through....
ReplyDeleteI think the line "My trouble made his real" can speak not just to the relationship between the brothers but also in society. The idea that a person can only fully understand what someone goes through when they go through it themselves, is a strong characterization. I think we can all have some sort of empathy for situations that we here about, but until yoiu physically go through it, you don't understand it. The fact that the brother had to lose his daughter in order to realize that Sonny's problems were real, was sad in a sense. The line also reminded me of the topic that we breifly discussed with "The Accident" and the idea of Fate. Society is in constant denial that horrible things can happen randomly and definately not to them, but again as Baldwin states..."My trouble made his real." We can only fully understand when we go trhough it ourselves.