Gunnar discovers his identity quickly but isn't happy with how people react positively towards his talents. His poetry and basketball playing propels him to unusual heights of celebrity status but the adoration he receives makes him feel depressed. Gunnar's dissatisfaction could be linked to the patronizing quality of the crowd at the Shakespeare monologue contest, where the people there mocked Scoby by cheering for him. But I feel like this doesn't apply to the context of his fame, as the people around him aren't pitying him. Maybe it's the superficiality of some of the adoration that bothers him: people think they are like him but they're not because they haven't actually experienced the ghetto like he has. I think of this because of the reaction to Gunnar's poetry that's seen when he goes to his first college class, where everybody seems to be a huge fan of his work. Their praise of his poetry is an exaggerated, satirical portrayal of white people responding to a black artist's work, as one person says "I thought that if I mentioned a black poet, I wouldn't be taken seriously by the rest of the class." After Gunnar strips the students ask if they can keep his clothes because they'll be worth a lot someday, suggesting that they see him only as an entertainer while furthering the absurdity of the scene. However, this behavior doesn't represent all of Gunnar's fans as he has a massive following in the area he grew up in (which is where people started paying attention to him in the first place) and they don't say things like "I could welcome home an Ashanti warrior returned from the hunt with a fresh kill" (179).
During Gunnar's first organized basketball game, he notices how much control he has over the crowd's emotions, while caring little about winning the game himself. Despite that, he and Scoby become the "main attraction" in their school and in a sign of things to come, Scoby breaks down over the attention he's getting. Gunnar makes an observation that as a black person, he (and Scoby) "can't go back home and blithely disappear into the local populace. American society reels you back to the fold" (119). This idea ties into the rest of the novel as the adulation keeps growing to the point where Gunnar's influence is so profound that people are moved enough by what he says to end their lives. As his college class demonstrates, he can't get away from it.
Gunnar does seem to dislike the attention he gets for his accomplishments and I think you're right in pointing out the superficiality of their adoration. I think one key aspect of this attention that annoys Gunnar is the fact that the people see him only for the basketball player and the great poet and not as the person he is. They care about him making the shot and publishing the poetry but not why he wrote the poetry or what he's feeling. This dynamic reminds me of the narrator in the invisible man feeling as though he is invisible to everyone and being seen as merely a "great speaker" and not as a person or how he wanted to be seen.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Gunnar dislikes the attention that he receives from both basketball and from his poems. I feel like it plays into the idea of Gunnar being a source of entertainment and nothing more. Even when the schoolmates are chasing him around the BU campus, they don't care about him, but about his poems and their ideas of who he is. This is something Gunnar struggles with throughout the novel and maybe his sense of identity (or lack there of) is what leads him to the darker and less optimistic Gunnar that we see at the end of the book. Nice post!
ReplyDeleteI think Gunnar moving people to kill themselves is less people following him like crazed fans and more just that the things he's saying are resonating with people. They aren't killing themselves because they think it's cool, they're killing themselves because what Gunnar is saying makes sense.
ReplyDeleteYes that's a fundamental aspect of the situation that I should have addressed in my post
DeleteI like your point about Gunnar being in control of a lot of people. I also find it interesting that Gunnar seems pretty ambivalent about his power. He doesn't get power hungry or scared of his power he just recognizes that he has this control and carries on. He doesn't try to get rid of his power nor use it for his own devices like most characters.
ReplyDeleteGunnar's rejection of the role of "famous underground street poet" is particularly confusing for some readers, myself included, to some extent--isn't the whole point of writing and publishing to hopefully connect with readers, to have your words read and appreciated? There's no sense in which he deliberately compromises his poetry in order to appeal to an audience, white or otherwise--in fact, it's his wry and ironic depictions of America's racial climate that seems to resonate so strongly with all kinds of readers. And even within his own community, everyone in Hillside is apparently carrying their personal copies of _Watermelanin_ around with them.
ReplyDeleteBut Gunnar doesn't seem gratified by any of this--in the end, his poetry is all about himself, and self-expression. If readers feel inspired by his words (as Maya says above, "they make sense"), that's fine with him--and they are free to do what they want with what he's said--but he isn't actively courting their approval, or trying to have this connection with a readership. It's not just the embarrassing white writers in his CW class; he has a similar reaction to all adulation for his writing. Maybe some of this stems from his earlier epiphany that writing is "useless" in the face of the oppression represented by the King verdict.