In the opening scene of the story, White Angel, sixteen-year-old Carlton shares a hit of LSD with his little brother, Frisco. Years later Frisco remarks, “I was the most criminally minded nine-year old in my class. I was going places.”
Set at the end of
the nineteen-sixties, when “radios played love songs all day long,” White Angel eulogizes both a beloved
brother and a turbulent era. Despite Frisco’s admission, this isn’t a story
about criminality or the perils of vice. Consumption of drugs doesn’t lead to
the story’s tragic end, and, despite the obvious perils, that first scene celebrates
wonderment and the depth of fraternal affection. At the
story’s climax, it’s a pedestrian, domestic accident, a fatal widget of plate glass from a sliding patio
door that claims Carlton’s life.
Frisco is telling
us this story as a sober adult. Throughout he has tried to recreate his
brother, to breath life into the husk of his memory and the moment in which he
thrived. But by the conclusion it’s obvious that nostalgia is only a means to
an end.
I teach the story in a fiction writing
class at an art school. It’s a juicy yarn, and, given that most students (especially art students) expect
literature to be dry and boring, anything that perks their interest is
valuable. Incidentally, most folks in their twenties have a peculiar framework regarding
vice. They view with skepticism the self-aggrandizing that baby boomers are often
guilty, and perhaps rightly so. But they tend to leap to conclusions out of a
lack of imagination.
But Carlton isn’t
trying to corrupt our narrator, or to spoil him; he wants to make his little
brother a gift of the world as he sees it. “You wait,” Carlton says, “Miracles
are happening. Goddamn miracles.”
Of course, Carlton’s
problem is his inability to recognize the incongruity between the universe and
his ideals. He takes dangers for granted, naively believing that benefits
outweigh risks. It’s the spiritual risks Carlton takes that are the most
hazardous. And though the story concludes with his death, the real tragedy, as
played out in the dénouement, is what happens to those who have survived him.
Carlton is an idealist. He’s also
a narcissist and a lawbreaker, but his visionary mindset trumps these. Sewn on
the back of his buckskin jacket is a luminous eye. The drugs he uses and the
music he listens to are means to the same end. He wants to achieve bliss, but
he also wants to share it, and he believes in a physical space that can contain
such generosity. His idealism is flawed not in its grandness, but in his
inability to reconcile the purity of his Utopian visions with the movement of
history, of events over time. The state of being he celebrates, he believes, exists
elsewhere, some five hundred miles from Cleveland Ohio, on a pasture owned by a
farmer named Yasgur in Woodstock, New York. Nothing happens, one might think,
in a fly-over state.
This is Carlton’s
dominant objective, an objective he states directly: to go to Woodstock and be
part of the “new nation.”
Carlton’s desire provides the
perfect object lesson for a teacher answering
the central question of what it is that he
wants. This classic approach harkens back to Aristotelian axiom, desire is fate.
Character driven stories
necessitate motives. All objects in space have tendencies: water flows, turns
to ice or vapor; ants burrow, fight and feed. But only sentient beings have
choices. “What does the character desire?” One might think globally, zooming
out and squinting at the story’s silhouette, but the active reader will also get
in close so they can smell the ink on the page, absorb themselves with the
question scene-by-scene.
Not only has the
plot featuring hallucinogens and marijuana and sex succeeded in sparking
interest, but my students have begun to entertain analysis. Their brows begin
to furrow. So, when asked, “what does Carlton want?” clichés abound. Carlton
wants to be a rebel, or he wants Freedom, or to get high. Though not wrong, these
answers miss the target.
A few students
usually “get it.” It is on “Woodstock” Carlton harps. This is a story about the
nineteen sixties, about idealism confronting pedestrian realities. Carlton
wants release from social obligations, he wants rebellion and music: “a life among
the trees by the river.” Universal desire submits to manageable particulars. Woodstock
is a place, a “New Nation” a concept. Arcadia. Eden. Perfection. He wants
infinitives: to go, to do, to be. Or, to clarify: Carlton wants Woodstock.
Even though the music
is over, he insists that the concertgoers have not abandoned the ideals made
manifest. His flawed logic is shared by anyone who clings to Utopia: he
believes in the possibility of stasis, of suspending history’s movement
forward. He imagines that the hippies at Woodstock have maintained the
high-pitched enthusiasm that came about almost accidentally, like a juggler
magically hovering a ball in the air, even though it (the love, peace,
and communal joy) has all (in reality) come to an end. History begets irony. Tragedies,
like the one at Altamont, will blemish the nobler sensibilities of the era.
At this point, my students
begin to understand how a story’s plot is connected to desire. Desire is fate. They enjoy an “ah-ha” moment. But
their excitement is often misplaced. They are taught to believe that art, literature
(poetics in particular), is appreciated by reduction. Art as a problem to be
solved. There is a key, a silver bullet, a code to be cracked. In their
thinking, a story possesses a singular reason
to be told. The reader reduces the text to this singular essence (the
author’s imagined intent, moral, or message), and, once achieved, the thing is
conquered. Such maltreatment isn’t new, but nowadays defenders of arts
education are shamed into arguing the virtues of music, literature, theater,
dance and art as valuable only in their quantifiable connection to improved
test scores. Utilitarian pragmatism at its worst. Now students look forward to
the convenience of answers like, “this is a piece about racism,” or “this work
is about the dog-eat-dog world we live in.”
As a teacher of college writing, as apposed to English as an academic pursuit, I’m not
burdened with the catechism of contemporary literary criticism. The irony,
from a pedagogical perspective, is that encouraging sensitivity to techniques
and conventions stimulates critical thinking without succumbing to the “isms”
of the day.
We ask what
Carlton wants and the answer is “Woodstock”. When asked if Carlton ever gets
Woodstock, most shake their heads no.
The question appears moot: Carlton never
leaves Ohio, never sets foot in upstate New York. But there’s always at least one
student who will speak up and claim that he does obtain this superobjective. It,
Woodstock, manifests as a facsimile of his ideal in the final act.
To celebrate the end
of winter, Carlton’s parents throw a big party and invite their mortgage
paying, middle aged, “Ohio hip” friends. What should follow is a fete comprised
of aging folkies tipping back wine jugs and strumming acoustic guitars. But Carlton
senses an opportunity for a mini revolution. He invites his own cadre, leather-clad
“outlaws,” and arranges a “blind date” between the two societies. The blending
of young and old sets us up for a comedy of embarrassment, yet Carlton’s social
engineering will prove to be his finest moment. The party is his experimental
“New Nation.” Woodstock in a jar.
It proves
successful. An evening of dancing and merriment follows. Frisco steals
cocktails. Dylan goes electric. Middle-aged schoolteachers groove to The Rolling Stones. Social divisions
blur. Sans Arcadian pasture, “Woodstock” has arrived in Cleveland.
But Woodstock in miniature, the toy version Carlton has created, is
lacking. When one of the party goers reports seeing a flying saucer hovering
over the back yard, a knot of excited party goers spill out the patio door to catch
a glimpse. Mist and an airplane explain away the UFO, so, disappointed, they file
back inside to continue merrymaking, shutting the glass door behind them. But, Carlton
(still wistful?) has remained outside.
Frisco observes these
events from the hall. His mother, with Carlton’s support, has sent Frisco to
bed, and spying suits his clandestine revenge. He’s furious with Carlton’s
disloyalty. From this vantage, he witnesses his brother running across the back
yard towards the closed patio door. He could do something to stop his brother,
but doesn’t Indeed, he relishes the
inevitable impact (imagined as a mere bump on the nose) because he has been
betrayed.
In the split
second before it happens, Carlton’s girlfriend screams, but it’s too late. The
beloved brother doesn’t bump his nose on the door, but “explodes” through the
glass. There’s a moment in which he stands in shock. When he reaches up to
remove a piece of glass stuck in his neck, “…that is when the blood starts.” Frisco
shoulders guilt for not having warned his brother, having wished him harm, and (even as an adult) can’t shake this
feeling.
But what is so
important here is the question of wants and desires. Perhaps it’s fixated in an
idea of original sin, or in the idea of sin itself, of impure thoughts and how
they corroborate and infect out material lives.
Carlton fails to see the good
thing he’s done. He has created a version, vaguely metaphorical, that just
falls short of his ideal. A plaything, toy-like in scale and disposability; but
perhaps not lacking in gravity entirely: The playfulness of the little world he
creates furnishes its inhabitants with joy and sweetness. Too bad he can’t see
it. He longs for the complete version, the unbounded, authentic Woodstock that
actually never existed. The Woodstock that exists at the end of history, rather
than its beginning.
Even if Carlton
hadn’t died, the party would have come to an end. The guests would have gone
home. There would be hangovers and stains on the carpet other than blood. He’d
have faced disappointment. He’d have witnessed
little change in his family, though the “thaw,” the ease and peace that result
from shared pleasure, might be there.
