Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver, David Copperfield, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Human Motivation
I have been meaning to write about this book for over a
month, but, besides being busy with the end of the academic year stuff, I have
been stymied about how to write about the extreme disorientation that I felt –
especially as this book drew to a close.
Yesterday morning I went back and read the first few pages and now,
perhaps, after a bit of stewing, I may be able to take a shot at it.
Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer
Prize, a prize for fiction about the American experience, for good reason. Or actually many of them. Kingsolver has served up a rambling, dense,
interconnected tale of life in rural Appalachia that takes on multiple big topics
with the clear eyes of someone on the ground who both gets the big picture but
also knows how to tell a story that particularized that big pictured in the
lives, but in this case, the life, of an individual.
Kingsolver takes on the woefully failing foster care system
in this country as well as the despicable action of the Sackler Family’s Perdue
Pharma (one of the groups behind the fentanyl disaster) all while making you
turn the pages. This is a real tour de
force. It is also, I understand, a rebuttal
to D.J.
Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy’s position that the Appalachian’s and their characterological
weaknesses are to blame for the Fentanyl mess.
Kingsolver places the blame clearly on corporate greed rather than the
little guy, while she sympathetically portrays the hell of addiction and its
consequences.
So, I both like and respect this book and author. The book was a fun, educational read that I would recommend to virtually anyone. But it was also, for me, a as I said above, a very disorienting one. It violates two principles that I have experienced as important in reading.
The violation of the first principle is the comfort that an author has in writing in the first person about someone with whom they do not share central aspects of the personal identity of the person about whom they are writing. I first noticed this in The Help, a book about the black/white divide in the United States South where Kathryn Stockett assiduously avoided writing about the African Americans in the first person, while she was clearly quite comfortable writing about the white women’s experiences in her/their own voice. She was advocating for the African Americans, but recognized that to speak through the African American characters (at least as I understood it), rather than on their behalf would be appropriation at best and something like pandering – enacting the white entitlement to know the black experience, the very thing she was objecting to in the book – at worst.
This is not to say that some authors cannot cross lines of
identity fruitfully. Recently I wrote
about Tan Twan Eng’s writing in the first person about his character Lesley in The
House of Doors, but this made sense because he was, as a gay man from a Muslim
country, identifying with a white English woman in the early twentieth century
who had to “closet” her feelings, including about her husband, because they
were not welcome and she had to figure out how to live a furtive life in order
to achieve something like integrity. He
was imagining himself into someone who looks very different, but, in his mind,
is living a parallel life.
But the violation of the second principle is one that I wrote about in
relation to the book The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a novel by Stieg Larson, in which he credits
the hero with tremendous abilities that allow her to wreak revenge on the
people who have put her through ungodly torture. I object to the notion that a fiction writer
might have that we can torture women and they will be OK – in fact, they will
have extraordinary powers – as if women are resilient enough that we can harm
them without consequence – a kind of over the top, sadistic version of benevolent
misogyny.
So, yes, this is a book written in the first person. It is written by a woman about a man – or a
boy’s coming of age to be a man. Not
just any boy, but a boy whose father was a Melungeon, and who has
features of the Melungeons – mostly he comments on his copper hair and eyes,
but I found myself wondering about the color of his skin (or the assumptions
about his race – at one point he is described as white – but he is also the son
of Melungeon in Western Virginia). His father died before he was born and his
mother died when he was quite young – though old enough that he remembers how
absent she was. It is also a work of
fiction.
Demon Copperfield is a work of fiction that is based on a roman a clef: David Copperfield. The two stories both begin with a first-person
account of the birth of the hero – though I found Kingsolver’s hero’s
description of his entry into the world more engaging than Dickens’. The details of the two births were quite
different, but what united them was an insightful and jaunty attitude towards the
potential awful events that occurred to them.
Unlike Bill
Clinton, in his autobiography, or J.D.
Vance, for that matter, these heroes are psychologically minded and can
take themselves as objects and can imagine what the impact of events on them is
without having to really know that. OK,
sometimes Demon is all too certain of himself, but there is an endearing
quality to it his certainty – a sense that he knows that he doesn’t know all,
but he is going to imagine that he does – he has pluck.
Part of what was so disorienting in reading this book was
that I was mourned the loss of it – and I mourned the loss of Demon in particular
when it was over. It was as if I had
lost a real person. What was doubly
disconcerting was that this feeling was not for the representation of a real
person, but for the person I felt I had come to know in the process of hearing
his voice, engaging in his battles, fearing for the various threats – some external
some internal – and cheering for the few good things that came his way in life. I was pleased about how he repeatedly made
lemonade out of very old lemons mixed with tepid water and, occasionally, a
packet of sugar stolen from a diner.
Over the month or two that I have lived with myself and the
affection – the crush, for lack of a better word – that I lavished on a person
that did not, in fact, exist, it was helpful to return to David Copperfield (I
book I have never read all the way through, but a book that was, essentially,
the autobiography of a man who did go from rags to riches – Charles Dickens). It also brings to mind another author who
went, if not from rags, from rural simplicity to being the toast of the town –
Mark Twain.
As much as I disdained the idea that the resilience of the
human spirit is something that we should be cautious of praising because we can
use that to justify treating others inhumanely – as in, “they will get over it,” I am deeply and powerfully moved by stories
of resiliency. I assign essays to my
students about marginalized folks who have had tremendous careers in psychology
because I think they can learn from them – and I can to – about the ways in
which we can manage the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that inevitably
end up being directed at us. I think
that pluck is one of the greatest companions a person can have – and I hate to
admit, as an analyst who should be non-judgmental, that I have feelings of pity
and sometimes contempt for those who don’t have some measure of pluck.
I can justify valuing pluck from an evolutionary
perspective. Living organisms are anti-entropic
entities. There is proven evidence that
the universe is hurtling towards entropy and our efforts to ward it off are
futile, but that seems to be our mission and we are hell bent on accomplishing
something in the face of the inevitable conclusion that nothing will last. This, I
have recently learned, is at the heart of the idea of Greek comedy. Yes, comedy has a happy ending, but we, the
biological creatures that we are, full of foibles and failings, triumph over
the Gods; while in tragedy – by trying to imitate the Gods, which we as mere mortals
cannot do, we fail – and expose our tragic flaws rather than flouting them as
we do in comedy.
This book, then, embodies the comic hero in Demon Copperhead. He has the capacity to understand and manage
the minds of those who would derail him because he loves them – meaning that he
can appreciate them for who they are – and not try to pretend that they are
more or different. This also arms him
with the ability to understand the roots of their motives and to distinguish their
best interest from his own. He can even
acknowledge when he has failed to do this and to apologize to those he has
offended by not, for instance, getting their sex right.
I worry that I have betrayed my own gender bias by assuming that a man can survive the slings and arrows of fortune and still be a whole, psychologically healthy individual – that I find Demon Copperhead to be a believable hero and a real person where that was not the case for the Girl with the Dragon tattoo. All I can say in my defense is that I think Barbara Kingsolver’s ability to empathize – to think about the motivations, strengths, weaknesses and capacities of various individuals is the superpower (and identity) that she shares with Demon, and I only wish, as an analyst, that I could emulate her (traditionally female) virtues that she imbues her hero with.
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