In response to Mr. Mitchell's comment on my previous post, I would just like to add to my last thoughts: DOUBLE YUCK!!!!
I've read some gross short stories, The Lottery being chief among them. But nothing compares to the grossness of "Lyndon." It is just DISGUSTING.
I do not really care to read page after page of detailed recounting of Lyndon B. Johnson's bodily functions (like the nasal inhaler--I can't take the constant information about LBJ sticking this thing up his nose and inhaling-ugghhh!). And I don't want to hear about his use of a wastebasket as a toilet or his meetings held in the bathroom. And what is with the narrator's husband's mysteriously gross wasting disease?
I would give you some examples of passages that make my stomach turn, but it just seems insensitive for me to subject you all to that.
So I'll conclude with this parting thought: all this detail makes me like Lyndon B. Johnson even less. It doesn't humanize him for me, it turns me off. I'm so glad that story is over and I hope Libra is totally different.
2 comments:
Don't worry--I don't *think* _Libra_ has any particular fixation on bodily functions . . . not that I can recall, anyway. (But if these most human of details *don't* "humanize" Johnson, then what does "human" mean?)
I would say that humanizing a historical character means allowing them to be something that their historical reputation forbids them to be. For example, LBJ could be humanized by seeing him speak in his Texan way in private since he is seen as a president with a president's formal speech.
Or to humanize the white slave master, Rufus, Butler tells us about his messed up relationships with his parents as a way of explaining how a human could act like a monster. Or when she allows Rufus to hold his son on his lap, that gives us a glimpse of the person inside the beast.
Butler doesn't humanize Rufus by trying to say, "look, he's human! He pees and farts and barfs like you!" That would just be revolting! No, she gives him qualities that are considered human as opposed to detailing his human bodily functions.
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