Horse, Novel, Horse Racing, Race, Racism, Fantasy, Geraldine Brooks
If you read this book, you will like it. It is a compelling story, well told, by a
competent author – she’s a former Pulitzer Prize winner (for March) after
all. But it is hard for me to recommend
it because it contains a fatal flaw – well two of them. I have complained of this flaw in other books
– most recently Tomorrow
and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – but I write about it here both because I think
my understanding of the flaw has improved and because the consequences of that
flaw in this book are more damaging.
The flaw at the center of this book is that two of the
central characters are two dimensional.
The characters are, in a word, unreal.
Doesn’t that happen a lot in books?
Indeed, doesn’t it happen in all books – can the complexity of the human
experience be captured on the page? Why
would I bring this particular flaw in this particular book to your
attention?
The more central reason to bring this flaw to your attention
is that it has to do with race. In an
attempt to be politically correct, I think the author has practiced a particular
form of racism that, while well intended, does not serve the greater good.
The proximal reason has to do with a friend’s characterization
of a character’s actions in a lesser book, a book not worth reviewing, as
betraying that the story was a fantasy.
This led me to think about the nature of fantasy.
Now, I have nothing against fantasy. Reluctant or not, I am a psychoanalyst and
fantasy is part of my stock and trade. I
am curious about other people’s fantasies and look to my own fantasies as a
means to better understand the world.
But there are different varieties of fantasy. Tom Ogden describes three types of thinking
in the fantasy world: magical thinking, dream thinking, and transformative thinking. When most of us talk about fantasy, we are
referring to the first of Ogden’s types.
We are talking about imposing our will on the world as if we could
magically make the world conform to our wishes.
The underlying wish is a wish for a kind of omnipotent control. This is the thinking of the daydream where we
throw or catch the super bowl winning touchdown pass, or we are receiving the
Nobel Peace Prize for having negotiated peace in the Middle East.
Dream thinking, which is also a kind of fantasy, is
different from this. It is
integrative. It brings together
different parts of our experience in novel, and frequently coded ways. We are testing hypotheses with dream thinking
rather than coming to solid conclusions.
Of course, dreams can be driven by magical thinking, but they can also
move towards transformative thinking, which is a problem-solving technique
where our redefinition of the problem can lead to new approaches to
understanding and solving the problem.
Ah, so, the book. Horse
weaves together three plots – two major and one minor, across three time
periods. The central story is of the
titular hero – the horse. An historical
horse, Lexington, bred in Kentucky during the waning days of the antebellum
period, it was the fastest horse of its day when horse racing was the NFL of today
(though at that time, there were no other channels – Horseracing was not
competing with baseball or basketball for the attention of the viewer. And everyone had a horse!).
Lexington, the horse, was bought – or finagled - from its
Kentucky owner and raced in New Orleans, where it won all but one of the races
that it was placed in, and then was the most successful stud horse in the
history of horse racing, having the most offspring win the most races in 16 years
– 14 of them in a row – about double the next best horse in history. About 80% of current racing thoroughbreds can
trace their lineage to Lexington.
Lexington was so famous that, when he died, his skeleton
went on display at the Smithsonian Institute as one of our national treasures. After horse racing lost some of its luster,
Lexington’s skeleton was relegated to a closet, and the second major plot in
the book is a constructed story of an Australian woman who works in the bone
lab at the Smithsonian and her chance encounter with an African Art History
student in the United States who happens upon a long lost portrait of Lexington.
There is a third minor thread in this tapestry. This is the mostly true story of an actual
portrait of Lexington that a New York art dealer buys from her African American
House Cleaner.
The author’s task in this historical novel was not an easy
one. She had to tell the story of a
horse with very little documentation of how that horse was cared for, raised or
trained. (There are newspaper stories
articulating the horse as a phenomenon – including the horse’s role in bringing
stopwatches into our lives. As he posted
incredible times in races – three-mile races compared to our one-mile races of
today – fans would purchase stopwatches to come participate in the race by timing
him.) The author did have evidence, from
the skeleton, of Lexington having had a debilitating eye disease that led to
blindness and caused his early retirement from racing. And she thought, and I certainly agree, that
she had a compelling story to tell.
So, the author states that she decided to tell a story of
racing, but found that it was impossible not to tell a story of race. She invented an African American slave, the
son of the trainer for the original owner of Lexington, and had this boy, this
late adolescent, grow up with the pony who would become the greatest horse of
all time.
This device, gave us a couple, rather than just a horse, to
follow through a coming of age period.
But the author, I think, felt inhibited.
She did not feel comfortable, I don’t think, fleshing out this boy
coming to be a man’s character. I think she
wanted to avoid painted him with racially based stereotypes – things like
powerful feelings that might have been stirred by the way he was treated when
the horse, which had been promised to his father, was stolen from him, or how
he might have felt when he was sold along with the horse and therefore
separated from his family. She appears
to have felt compelled to have him be unrealistically stoic, unflustered by a
wide variety of insults and injuries that come his way.
The impetus for this seems to be explained by the
interaction in the second story between the woman who is the expert on
reconstructing bones and the man who is the art history student. They meet when she mistakes his unlocking a
bike that is exactly like hers from the rack next to hers, which they both take
to be evidence of her racism. Though,
they move past that to become lovers, the original misunderstanding haunts
their relationship.
Now I don’t think that mistaking someone for taking a bike
that is exactly the same as one’s own
is inherently a racist act. It is an
honest mistake. Whether there is a
racist component is completely an internal experience, as it is portrayed
here. But I think it is possible for
this to be discharged as an honest mistake if
the person making the mistake is comfortable with their misreading of the
situation as also having racial overtones.
It is the discomfort with the attribution of judging someone with
stereotypes that seems to be at the heart of the problematic interaction.
I think the author’s discomfort with, for instance, portraying
an African American as angry, something that is done stereotypically (and
frequently as a result of projection on the part of members of the dominant
culture), she overcorrects, portraying her main protagonist as neither a
masochist who is taking pleasure in his mistreatment, nor even a saint, who is
aware of the injustice, but able to forgive it, but as something else entirely –
as a kind of other worldly being who is both aware of but unmoved by the
injustice that he suffers. Someone who
is aware of the parameters, careful to avoid them, but not incensed by the ways
in which those parameters harm him.
Ironically, this gets played out by the boyfriend in the
second plot. He, too, is weirdly unaware
of the perils of being a black man, something that leads to his demise, yet he
has had ample evidence that he can be mistreated because of his race. As a foreigner in America, his African
American friends try to warn him, but his boy scout like adherence to a code of
caring for others ends up being his tragic flaw.
Boy, if I’m going to have a tragic flaw, that would be
it. I would love to be remembered as too
trusting, too caring, and too available to help others….
These characters who are unrealistic are, therefore, fantasy
characters. And they are not the kind of
fantasy characters that allow us to think about race and the impact of slavery
on slaves themselves and on the present-day impact of the racism that is still
rampant among us, but they encourage us to think magically about those who are
black – to think that they are unmoved by what befalls them.
One of the complaints that African Americans have about the
medical establishment is that physicians and other health professionals act as
if they don’t feel pain – or that they have a high tolerance for it. This book suggests that the pain threshold
for each of the characters is incredibly high.
True, at the end of the book, after the civil war, the former slave
moves to Canada to avoid the racism in the States, and he articulates his
displeasure with the treatment that he received, but this feels like an almost
intellectual anger rather than a visceral one.
He knows that he has been treated poorly, so he takes his gifts and talents
elsewhere. This feels like the world of
fantasy to me.
The problem with this in a regular novel is that the novel doesn’t
help us deal with whatever conflict is at the heart of the novel in a mature
fashion. There is a magical
solution. I don’t suppose that is such a
bad thing for a summer read – for a reading that we are doing for pleasure or
to pass the time. Does it hurt us to
imagine winning the Kentucky Derby? I
think daydreams serve a kind of purpose – a means of allowing us to break from
the realities around us. But when those
realities are as harsh and important as the impact of slavery and racism, I
think we need to be prepared to interrogate that impact seriously, and to risk
engaging with the subjects of those experiences realistically. Or, we can, like the author of The
Help, avoid the interior experiences entirely and simply describe the
behaviors – taking the implicit position that, as a member of the majority
culture, we can never actually know what a member of a marginalized culture
experiences…
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