Szopka Part 1, Teaching Michael Cunningham's White Angel

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, long after Carlton's death, 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 the turbulent era in which he thrived. Despite Frisco’s admission, this isn’t a story about criminality or the perils of libertine abandon, excess, amorality, or anything so droll. One must trust a pretty slippery slope that would connect the recreational drug here to the story’s tragic end, and, despite the obvious perils these kids put themselves in, that opening scene celebrates the generosity and depth of fraternal affection. What happens at the story's climax is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill domestic accident, a stupid example of Murphy's Law that allows a widget of plate glass from a sliding patio door to claim Carlton’s life. If we weren't warned on the first page that something like this is about to come, then we'd mark Cunningham's story as the best classroom example of a Deus Ex Machina--ever. 

         But Frisco is telling us this story as a sober adult. This is an act of remembrance, a votive candle lit in the honor of his brother. The purpose of the act of telling is first to breathe life into that husk of memory and the moment in which he thrived, when the snown falls, dropping into the moment as if hypnotized, shutting one's eyes and reliving each scene in the present tense. At the end, however, we discover another motive for the storyteller's act of telling and realize that this keen display of nostalgia is, in part, a means to an end.

I teach the story in a fiction writing class at an art school. It’s a juicy yarn, defying an eighteen-year-old's expectation that what they're about to read will be dry and boring, worse, it won't reflect any of their own experiences. And while it is a story about suburban white kids in the late 1960s, it's also about brothers, and (yes) sex, drugs, and anything else that they shouldn't be doing. I don't want to cowtow I beleive that we all should encounter and read and delight in what's outside of our comfort zone or purview, and truly feel it's a teacher's duty to encourage broad exposure to what we call "the human condition," and I make every effort to foster inclusivity, and yet know that I also must meet them at some point eye to eye. Incidentally, most folks between 16 and 25 (at least when I first wrote this essay) have a peculiar framework regarding vice. I'm often surprised at their moral chauvinism their inability to think further on human behavior beyond whatever they're told. It's very easy for them to stop at axioms, memes, go-tos, and labels than it is to address phenomena critically, diagnostically, dialectically, or with any tools of investigation at hand. Perhaps that's always been true. I find it very interesting that they view with skepticism the survivors of that epoch and are wary of those self-aggrandizing boomers-- and there's merit in this--but there's also a slick little shortcut, a   desire to not appear too generous, to (stupid as it sounds) look "cool": a concussive trap of the spirit and imagination I call "romantic cynicism." 

         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. Algebra. 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.