Avatar. The Avengers. Iron Man 3. Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The Dark Knight Rises.
These are five of the top ten all-time highest grossing movies. Their (arguable) inclusion in the Science Fiction canon begs a question of the genre: is it just the spectacle that we shell out to witness, or is there some more primitive itch that these kinds of events scratch?
This blog is dedicated to figuring out how it is that Science Fiction addresses the problem of defining "human."
I did enjoy reading this story; however I think that I would have liked it more if the events had been explained more in depth. I understood that poisonous gases from the tail of a meteor wiped out most of New York, but I would have liked to know more about the specifics of the comet; why it was so close to the earth, what has happened when the tail of Halley’s Comet passed over the city, and most importantly why the woman was spared when she was only sheltered by a dark room. Plot issues aside, I thought it was fascinating how DuBois managed to bring up the question of what qualifies as being human to apply it to different races of human. As opposed to artificial/technological life, the alien race in The Comet was dark skinned people; beings who are clearly human yet not considered to be such because of their complexion. The fair skinned characters in this story seemed to define human as being ‘pure’ or ‘righteous,’ which are characteristics that they didn't believe people of color to be capable of displaying. Even at the end of the story, when the crowd finds the two survivors on the roof and learns that the man had saved the woman, they feel the need to punish him (even going so far as to suggest lynching) just because he is dark skinned.
"The human voice in his ears sounded like the voice of God" was where I felt something trigger as I read. Prior to that, lots of death, evidently from the gas. Following that line, however, we get hysteria from this woman that the narrator hears, and the voice of God even appears to have gone insane. I think that was the effect I found most interesting-- the extended meaning, or perhaps implication of that segment.
Actually, there's a lot of mention of God in this story, as both characters' dialogue, and the narration as well, keep mentioning things like "the words of God" or "God's breath." Not really sure if this was terribly significant or me just paying too much attention to the rhetoric of the time, but it appears to be a part of the story’s greater moral, which is, I think, that when it comes down to the heart of the matter, and there is quite literally nothing left, black and white, man and woman, and other distinctions become irrelevant. Everybody uses God’s name in reverence and fear in this story. The one sentence, “She was neither high nor low, white nor black, rich nor poor” hits the nail on the head—we are all human, especially in God’s eyes. Even the ignorant folks that DuBois nods to in the story are silenced, as the wiser ones realize that Jim dun real good. Then at the end we see the argument hit a final point, as we see what is left of Jim's family, and the fact that he has a family, too, that this isn't just a "white thing," is what makes this even more significant.
Conclusion: In a post-apocalyptic or similar situation, we hit a sort of singularity, and humans seem, at least according to DuBois' paradigm, to look past race, class and other trivialities. This is the sort of situation (comparable to the 9/11 disaster in America) that bonds humans together as just that--humans. Only question now is, moving forward, is this actually the ultimate future we're coming to?
Picture the largest possible time-out and this is it. Don't just go sit in a corner, but take a break from humanity for a while. It was an interesting story, but it was kind of unbelievable which made it less entertaining. I mean I know it's supposed to be more about the underlying message, but the story fell victim to that. Dubois was more concerned with smacking you upside the head with a call for equality.
A lot of the story was left unexplained or rushed through. To start, he's sent down into the basement and you get the impression that it's going to be some sort of catacomb story where the underdog they push down is going to be rich because he found a treasure chest of gold (?) but then they completely leave that plot line alone and go on to the destructive comet.
After you realize this, all explanation is rushed through or just skipped over. The story itself is a summary so that he can get at his not so subtle point. Everyone's dead except one man and one woman. Death makes everyone equal. The end. The final two, upon finding each other don't even take the time beyond searching the city a little bit and making one attempt to phone out before they come to the conclusion that humanity as a whole is wiped out and therefore must take it upon themselves to become the next Adam and Eve and parent the future generations.
Also, there is absolutely no revelation as to how both his and her family survived and how New York is the only city that got wiped out or how the wife survived when the child in her arms didn't. Although it was an interesting plot and way to go about explaining his message he got carried away with making sure that was plain and clear - similar to the girl who approached me in the Tim Hortons line in the union asking me to join her in rallying for the Democratic candidate. At first I was willing to hear her out and then she started angrily pushing her policies and ideations on me. No thank you.
I quite enjoyed this story. I want to delineate in my comment two things that caught my eye:
1) I found it fascinating the way in which the issue of race disappeared when Jim and Julia believed they were alone in the world. When the gaggle of white men appear, the structure of white supremacy is reconfigured and slurs start getting hurled at Jim, there's a lynching threat, etc. It illustrates that, particularly in a dire situation, two people confronted with their mutual humanity can find points of connection, but that when the social order is reconstituted by the presence of other oppressive figures (a white, presumably heterosexual man is the figure head of white supremacist heteropatriarchy par excellence of course). I think DuBois very intentionally and cleverly embeds a critique of not just racism but the construction of race—both in terms of “construction” as a noun and verb. As long as race is operational racism comes out. DuBois states that race requires a certain social configuration to exist, an interaction between many entities, and that race itself naturally serves the needs of white supremacy and is a system of establishing hierarchy. 2) If a massive wave of death is required to get a bourgeois white woman to treat a black man like a human being, I wonder what DuBois would consider our society's capacity for racial liberation barring some kind of cataclysm. While the comet's wiping out most of New York City manages to set a stage in which the drama of racial equality can play out, what about our world where that's unlikely to happen and still every 28 hours a black person is extrajuridically murdered by a cop? Even with the comet, the white supremacist order reasserts itself by the end of the story, so what about in our world?
I didn’t really like this reading, bar the ending. It was really hard to follow in a couple parts. Its setting is similar to that of immediate post-segregation U.S, with strong racial attitudes prejudices. When they send him down to the lower vaults because he is black and expendable, I was expecting the story to take a different turn. Ironically, their sending him down saved his life.
I didn’t like the method DuBois used to kill everyone, poison gas from a passing comet seems too unbelievable for me. I also don’t understand how he can survive outside just minutes to hours after the same gas just killed everyone else. Thankfully, none of this matters, because after he meets the white girl the story becomes interesting.
Their first argument about where to go first I found revealing. That morning, she would never have even seen him as an equal, but now she understands that her survival relies on him, whether for good or bad reasons. After she agrees to go to Harlem first, they find his family missing. Almost immediately they left for the girls fathers office. Where the messenger took moments, the girl takes forever by comparison, searching for her father after he went on a ride.
I couldn’t follow how they got to where they were at the end, when they meet the girls father and, I assume, her fiancée/husband. I find it odd one of them gives Jim money in lieu of actually showing some gratitude for rising above race to help their loved one.
The Comet, being written in 1920, was I feel, a statement about how blacks were being treated. Unfair laws (Jim Crow Laws), segregation, and racial hatred, all were very strong still. Yet, through all of this, Jim still has the humanity to help her, and the humanity not to kill everyone at the end, when in the face of a life of adversity like he would have faced, there are no reasons not to.
From Stephanie: This story was interesting though, as others have pointed out, not particularly compelling because it leaves out large bit of information about what is actually happening in exchange for the characters inner monologues about their relation to each other. The whole idea of death and destruction making these last two people equal didn't quite drive home for me, because all the revelations about equality were shown from the perspective of the white woman's mind. She even has a whole paragraph where she talks about how she had not seen men like him as humans like her until he came to her rescue. She is constantly having these "aha!" moments where she starts to think about how they really are equal--when in fact they are not. It's certainly easy to say "how foolish our human distinctions seem now" when you have never been harmed, and have in fact benefited from them all. If it had been Jim saying that it would have had more meaning for me. Before this all happened, the segregation between humans was a system that gave her power, because it put her above someone else. When everyone but Jim was gone she decided to do away with that system, once again because it was to her advantage to have someone working with her. It's clear that no progress is actually made here no matter what she starts to thinking about equality, because everything is back to the way it was at the beginning when they come across their families and once again Jim is threatened and verbally abused by the white men.
I did enjoy reading this story; however I think that I would have liked it more if the events had been explained more in depth. I understood that poisonous gases from the tail of a meteor wiped out most of New York, but I would have liked to know more about the specifics of the comet; why it was so close to the earth, what has happened when the tail of Halley’s Comet passed over the city, and most importantly why the woman was spared when she was only sheltered by a dark room. Plot issues aside, I thought it was fascinating how DuBois managed to bring up the question of what qualifies as being human to apply it to different races of human. As opposed to artificial/technological life, the alien race in The Comet was dark skinned people; beings who are clearly human yet not considered to be such because of their complexion. The fair skinned characters in this story seemed to define human as being ‘pure’ or ‘righteous,’ which are characteristics that they didn't believe people of color to be capable of displaying. Even at the end of the story, when the crowd finds the two survivors on the roof and learns that the man had saved the woman, they feel the need to punish him (even going so far as to suggest lynching) just because he is dark skinned.
ReplyDelete"The human voice in his ears sounded like the voice of God" was where I felt something trigger as I read. Prior to that, lots of death, evidently from the gas. Following that line, however, we get hysteria from this woman that the narrator hears, and the voice of God even appears to have gone insane. I think that was the effect I found most interesting-- the extended meaning, or perhaps implication of that segment.
ReplyDeleteActually, there's a lot of mention of God in this story, as both characters' dialogue, and the narration as well, keep mentioning things like "the words of God" or "God's breath." Not really sure if this was terribly significant or me just paying too much attention to the rhetoric of the time, but it appears to be a part of the story’s greater moral, which is, I think, that when it comes down to the heart of the matter, and there is quite literally nothing left, black and white, man and woman, and other distinctions become irrelevant. Everybody uses God’s name in reverence and fear in this story. The one sentence, “She was neither high nor low, white nor black, rich nor poor” hits the nail on the head—we are all human, especially in God’s eyes. Even the ignorant folks that DuBois nods to in the story are silenced, as the wiser ones realize that Jim dun real good. Then at the end we see the argument hit a final point, as we see what is left of Jim's family, and the fact that he has a family, too, that this isn't just a "white thing," is what makes this even more significant.
Conclusion: In a post-apocalyptic or similar situation, we hit a sort of singularity, and humans seem, at least according to DuBois' paradigm, to look past race, class and other trivialities. This is the sort of situation (comparable to the 9/11 disaster in America) that bonds humans together as just that--humans. Only question now is, moving forward, is this actually the ultimate future we're coming to?
Picture the largest possible time-out and this is it. Don't just go sit in a corner, but take a break from humanity for a while. It was an interesting story, but it was kind of unbelievable which made it less entertaining. I mean I know it's supposed to be more about the underlying message, but the story fell victim to that. Dubois was more concerned with smacking you upside the head with a call for equality.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the story was left unexplained or rushed through. To start, he's sent down into the basement and you get the impression that it's going to be some sort of catacomb story where the underdog they push down is going to be rich because he found a treasure chest of gold (?) but then they completely leave that plot line alone and go on to the destructive comet.
After you realize this, all explanation is rushed through or just skipped over. The story itself is a summary so that he can get at his not so subtle point. Everyone's dead except one man and one woman. Death makes everyone equal. The end. The final two, upon finding each other don't even take the time beyond searching the city a little bit and making one attempt to phone out before they come to the conclusion that humanity as a whole is wiped out and therefore must take it upon themselves to become the next Adam and Eve and parent the future generations.
Also, there is absolutely no revelation as to how both his and her family survived and how New York is the only city that got wiped out or how the wife survived when the child in her arms didn't. Although it was an interesting plot and way to go about explaining his message he got carried away with making sure that was plain and clear - similar to the girl who approached me in the Tim Hortons line in the union asking me to join her in rallying for the Democratic candidate. At first I was willing to hear her out and then she started angrily pushing her policies and ideations on me. No thank you.
Good potential. Good message. Bad story.
I quite enjoyed this story. I want to delineate in my comment two things that caught my eye:
ReplyDelete1) I found it fascinating the way in which the issue of race disappeared when Jim and Julia believed they were alone in the world. When the gaggle of white men appear, the structure of white supremacy is reconfigured and slurs start getting hurled at Jim, there's a lynching threat, etc. It illustrates that, particularly in a dire situation, two people confronted with their mutual humanity can find points of connection, but that when the social order is reconstituted by the presence of other oppressive figures (a white, presumably heterosexual man is the figure head of white supremacist heteropatriarchy par excellence of course). I think DuBois very intentionally and cleverly embeds a critique of not just racism but the construction of race—both in terms of “construction” as a noun and verb. As long as race is operational racism comes out. DuBois states that race requires a certain social configuration to exist, an interaction between many entities, and that race itself naturally serves the needs of white supremacy and is a system of establishing hierarchy.
2) If a massive wave of death is required to get a bourgeois white woman to treat a black man like a human being, I wonder what DuBois would consider our society's capacity for racial liberation barring some kind of cataclysm. While the comet's wiping out most of New York City manages to set a stage in which the drama of racial equality can play out, what about our world where that's unlikely to happen and still every 28 hours a black person is extrajuridically murdered by a cop? Even with the comet, the white supremacist order reasserts itself by the end of the story, so what about in our world?
I didn’t really like this reading, bar the ending. It was really hard to follow in a couple parts. Its setting is similar to that of immediate post-segregation U.S, with strong racial attitudes prejudices. When they send him down to the lower vaults because he is black and expendable, I was expecting the story to take a different turn. Ironically, their sending him down saved his life.
ReplyDeleteI didn’t like the method DuBois used to kill everyone, poison gas from a passing comet seems too unbelievable for me. I also don’t understand how he can survive outside just minutes to hours after the same gas just killed everyone else. Thankfully, none of this matters, because after he meets the white girl the story becomes interesting.
Their first argument about where to go first I found revealing. That morning, she would never have even seen him as an equal, but now she understands that her survival relies on him, whether for good or bad reasons. After she agrees to go to Harlem first, they find his family missing. Almost immediately they left for the girls fathers office. Where the messenger took moments, the girl takes forever by comparison, searching for her father after he went on a ride.
I couldn’t follow how they got to where they were at the end, when they meet the girls father and, I assume, her fiancée/husband. I find it odd one of them gives Jim money in lieu of actually showing some gratitude for rising above race to help their loved one.
The Comet, being written in 1920, was I feel, a statement about how blacks were being treated. Unfair laws (Jim Crow Laws), segregation, and racial hatred, all were very strong still. Yet, through all of this, Jim still has the humanity to help her, and the humanity not to kill everyone at the end, when in the face of a life of adversity like he would have faced, there are no reasons not to.
From Stephanie:
ReplyDeleteThis story was interesting though, as others have pointed out, not particularly compelling because it leaves out large bit of information about what is actually happening in exchange for the characters inner monologues about their relation to each other. The whole idea of death and destruction making these last two people equal didn't quite drive home for me, because all the revelations about equality were shown from the perspective of the white woman's mind. She even has a whole paragraph where she talks about how she had not seen men like him as humans like her until he came to her rescue. She is constantly having these "aha!" moments where she starts to think about how they really are equal--when in fact they are not. It's certainly easy to say "how foolish our human distinctions seem now" when you have never been harmed, and have in fact benefited from them all. If it had been Jim saying that it would have had more meaning for me. Before this all happened, the segregation between humans was a system that gave her power, because it put her above someone else. When everyone but Jim was gone she decided to do away with that system, once again because it was to her advantage to have someone working with her. It's clear that no progress is actually made here no matter what she starts to thinking about equality, because everything is back to the way it was at the beginning when they come across their families and once again Jim is threatened and verbally abused by the white men.