“Yeah Jody, don’t keer
whut dat multiplied cockroach told yuh [...]
you got tuh die, and yuh can’t
live.” (Hurston 102)
***
I’ve wanted to write back to Lee for a while now.
Lee is doing things with Dr
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that I would never have expected. Here I sat, thinking
Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel was a simple horror story of the fuddy duddy 19th
century British variety -- and yet, in her analyses Hyde has morphed from a
back-alley London creeper to a fascinating figure of monstrosity. Lee has
explored ways in which Mr. Hyde’s subhuman status and life on the margins of
society puts him in conversation with the dehumanization and subhumanization of
other figures deemed unworthy by a society.
I particularly like the move that Lee makes in her blog entry
from October 19th. Although I knew that Achille Mbembe’s article
contained valuable insight, his article felt too expansive -- to work with his
words I felt that I needed to have a primary text concerned with oppression on
a massive scale. In her post, Lee focuses on the singular and specific
applications of Mbembe. For Lee, ideas float. I draw from this move.
***
Now, Mbembe is very specific about the scale and aims of his
argument:
My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations (14).
Doesn’t get much more blunt than that.
Despite this warning, I can’t help thinking of two moments --
one in Mbembe, one in Their Eyes Were
Watching God -- that somehow work together. In Mbembe, the first line:
“This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignity resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (11).
In Hurston, I am thinking of the long, protracted death of
Jody “Joe” Starks, Janie’s second husband. What kills Joe? As with many other
aspects of the novel, Hurston allows space for multiple meanings and
explanations. On one hand, a doctor tells Janie that Joe’s kidneys are shutting
down, and his death has been long coming. One the other hand, Pheoby admits to
Janie that
“Janie, Ah though maybe de thing would die down and you never would know nothin’ ‘bout it, but it’s been singin’ round here ever since de big fuss in de store dat Joe was ‘fixed’ and you wuz de done dat did it” (Hurston 97-8).
Fixed. I’ve been
interested in this idea since I first encountered it in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Here, fixed means that Janie has taken something vital from Joe,
something that leads him to think “There was nothing to do in life anymore.
Ambition was useless” (94-5).
Despite the claims of Janie and the doctor to the contrary,
I think that she kills Joe, and that it happens when Janie upbraids him in the
store after he has abused her in public. As the men around him laugh at Janie’s
sharp tongue, Joe
realized all the meanings and his vanity bled like a flood. [...] Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish [...] worse, she had cast down his empty armor before men and they had laughed, would keep on laughing. (94)
Unable to conceive of himself outside of only definition of
maleness he knows, Joe responds with his last available tool: violence.
Joe Starks didn’t know the words for all this, but he knew the feeling. So he struck Janie with all his might... (95)
And he retires to his room to die.
What if Janie is our sovereign, holds the power of life over
death? And what if she does it not through physical violence, but through the
power of her words to destroy?
(wc: 644)
3 comments:
Hi Jenny,
Another great post from you, as always! I love how you've argued Janie as being a necropolitical sovereign. It certainly makes me re-evaluate my thinking of her.
But I think your best move is in showing how her power comes through language, not violence. I feel as though Mbembe, who investigates the deployment of contemporary machines of war, doesn't address the power of discourse, the creation of a communal feeling or understanding through language, as much as he should in his essay and your blogpost illuminates that lack. Janie, through her words, creates around Joe a feeling of shame that he feels he can't escape. And though he attempts, through violence, to break through the net of ridicule that Janie has created, he can't and thus as you say, "retires to his room to die."
It's also interesting that, in making your argument, you have to go against even Janie's understanding of Joe's death; you point out that Janie denies any culpability. Does this make her one of Kate's "subconscious tyrants" then?
Like Lee, I find this reading of language as power (and violent power specifically) very intriguing, and I’d love to see it explored further. I think that viewing Joe’s death as in some way a murder by Janie is definitely unexpected.
But I’m curious about what such a move “gets” us, so to speak. What does it reveal about Janie if we see her as a killer and Joe as a murder victim (rather than a man so pathetically caught up in his own myth that he can’t survive its shattering)? I guess I’m struggling with making an attempt to connect Janie and Joe’s relationship to necropolitics: both relationships are concerned with power, but on such different scales and with such different ethical connotations that I’m not yet convinced that Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mbembe have a lot to say to each other. I definitely agree that Janie is powerful, and has power over Joe. But how is this power necropolitical?
Hi Jenny,
This post really does a good job comparing two specific moments from disparate texts. Like Lee, I enjoyed the questions that you raise at the end, especially considering Janie as a sovereign with power over another's death, using words specifically as a tool of power.
Your discussion of a "fixed" state of being, which is a sort of living death for Joe, correlates to Bryan and Ashley's readings of Mbembe. I also think that in many ways you indirectly tie Lee's reading of Jekyll, another character that slowly succumbs to the seemingly necropolitcal (surely biopolitical) tyranny of Hyde.
Along similar lines, Janie has "taken something vital from Joe," something that leads him to think that he no longer has reason to live after such an emasculating event. I wonder, since you connect Janie's power to society's expectations for gender, if Janie feels no blame for her actions because she gains power over a man? If Janie had gained her power over Joe through hypermasculine violence, would the situation have changed? Also, to what extend does Joe's use of force demonstrate some resistance over the sovereign?
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