Class exercise 23/7/04: Write in the four modes to show your understanding of them

My hypothesis is that literariness lies in the reconstruction of significant experiences so that in retracing events in texts one can gain a better perspective upon one's place in the world. When writers pursue a broadly environmental agenda by focussing on events so far inaccessible to city readers such as Glendon Swarthout in Bless the Beasts and Children (1970), she reminds her American readers of the plight of the once-prevalent but now only symbolic buffalo on the prairies. She brings into contact with them some disenchanted teenage boys on parole. These great beasts excite some touching moments of significance for her readers. Both buffalo and teenagers are now outcasts, victims of a selfish exploitative society, but in their encounter she creates a magical, even religious moment central to her environmental agendum. The animals are portrayed as victims of cruelty like the boys themselves:

The buffalo is the largest, most awesome game animal found on the American continent. . . Even in wan moonlight the curved, carved horns glinted, sleek sides tautened over muscle, eyes struck sparks of fire. . . . These beasts deprived of the open range and comparative freedom they had known from birth, cut out from the big herd and stockaded for three days without food and water and goaded by alien sounds and smells, were totally unpredictable. (p. 85)

In that field of suffering, a wondrous miracle happened: the boys shrugged off their toughness and connected for a moment with the pristine goodness of their natures. In rather melodramtic language, Swarthout recreates an idealistic encounter of man and beast.

Beasts and boys considered each other. They smelled each other. And suddenly boys of fifteen, fourteen, and twelve were children once more. The breath of innocent animals blessed them. And emotion filled them, a tenderness that none of them had ever known. Peace descended on them, and they were not afraid. For a moment, or moments, it was as it had been in the beginning, before fear, before evil, before death, at the time of the creation, when the earth was fair and living things flourished therein, when the earth was fair and all living things dwelt together as kindred. For a moment, or moments, beasts and children were friends, there in the sweetness and silence of the night, there in the calm and lovely fields of the Lord.

"Hello buffalo.. . Hello. Are you hungry? We're going to let you out." (p. 107).

Make an author-centred response  Swarthout seems to be a white woman, a product of the alternative movement of the nineteen sixties, with a sensitivity to creating an idealised environment on earth. Apparent here beside the obvious borrowing of conventional religious language and imagery, is a contemporary desire to create alternative religious events focused on natural feelings and special places that arose in that historical movement. Published in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, this rather topical view was to say that exotic is not necessarily better, and that authenticity and miracles are possible on the US mainland. This novel was received with some notoriety, showing that the author had matched her art and theme with the prevailing ethos of the early seventies US countercultural movement and the hippies. A residual assumption underlies this passage that umixed human nature is good. Ecstasy, stasis, meaningfulness can still be reached it seems in the growing confusion of legal entanglements and social complexities where free American boys can be forced to accept a no-future fate.

Make a text-centred response The text attempts to resolve many binaries embedded here: city boys possess the power to 'see' in a rural setting, boys and beasts are reconciled ("sheep lay down with wolf" of Isaiah in the bible), earthly paradise is possible (primitive hippie utopianism), new cultures supercede tired conventional (Christian) religion, and youth bring new wisdom. It is powerful irony to have animals in reserves against their natures being set free from five youths in a summer camp reserved for deadbeats. It suggests significance is to be found solely on the edges of US society not in the Capitol or White House heartland. Peace while unfamiliar is not a fearful but attainable quality. It is sensory writing. That cinematic style suggests a quality of events evident in the blending of fact and fantasy, where interior and exterior reality are united to reveal wholeness and authenticity. Short staccato sentences are offset longer than usual discursive and narrative lines suggesting an abundance of ideas and a strong desire to convince. The passage seeks coherence in a still understandable world if only the key of insight or understanding was found. Swarthout's pace and rhythm in the passage are lyrical and poetic, suggesting some recovery of respect for the intuitive side of understanding. I found myself making an intertextual connection with our Australian novel and film "Walkabout" where a young Aboriginal boy (played by David Gupilil) leads two lost upper-class children to rescue in the South Australian desert. The alluring appeal of a happy ending, even a conversion in the boys, is sure to ensure acceptance in the wider commercial print market.

Make a reader-centred response Read today some thirty years later (2004) makes me snigger on this naive and corny miracle. We have a more hard-edged view of evil today as resistant and unchanging; so we risk less if we believe less. We subscribe to the maxim, "People don't change." Yet I can see the need for recovery of something other than science to believe in, for the destruction of the buffalo to natural extinction has been motivated by capitalist and scientific greed in white population. Talking to the animals in words is the most natural thing to do and such a communication will be heard by captured animals like themselves. Swarthout positions herself to challenge this exploitative hegemony.

Make a world-context centred response  I read here the beginning of environmentalist and First Nation (red Indian) agenda that develop more fully after this time. That boys will risk capture and further punishment by freeing the animals unfairly corralled is justified in the degree of daring, risk and challenge it entails. Human disapproval is the measure of its righteousness. That moment of essential reconnection is a significant climax in the book and captures the boys' transformation thereby attaining the biblical vision of Eden in one wonderful scene. Thus, a literariness is achieved for its consistency as a special purpose reading. Both the buffalo and the boys are lost causes yet the text focuses interest on them to publicise their essential dignity and place in the natural world. In this moment of certainty in the flux of the wild prairie, the boys risk the culture's disapproval and punishment to challenge man's cruelty, an action which will surely be rewarded in natural justice in an unacknowledged ordering of things transcending the narrow legalities of white law. This appeal to a higher ethic is seen as an admirable and justifying impetus to seek freedom for themselves and the animals even if it is only an ineffectual, symbolic act of resistance.

From the cover blurb: Bless the Beasts and Children In an Arizona summer camp for teenagers, the 'no-good-at-anything' dead-beats are put together in one cabin. Bolshie Cotton becomes their leader, leads skirmishes against the other cabins, and then decides to take the 'Bedwetters' on a mission that will outdo the best of their rivals. Cotton's objective: to set free a herd of buffalo about to be killed by a brutal shot-gun party. It's a self-imposed task that pushes Cotton and his lads to the limits of their cunning, endurance and loyalites in a story full of drama, bitter humor and unusual honesty ISBN 0 333 19965 0 London Macmillan 1976

Author and webmaster G Smith July 2004. Returned to web 25/10/2007

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