The Book of the Dead: The History of Plight - Essay Example

The Book of the Dead: The History of Plight. Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead was published as part of her 1938 volume U.S The poem is a tribute to the dead of the Gauley Tunnel worst accident ever; claiming the life of 2000 people, it is the bleak chapter of American history. The miners died of silicosis in early 1930s’. The Book of the Dead, which is also a ‘poetic documentary’ of the Depression era, was ignored by the contemporary literati but its rebirth in recent years has caused a great stir and it has become the hot debated book. In the Depression era a new genre was evolved, the documentary, it was a significant area of reportage that aimed to shape our public knowledge with feelings. Rukeyser in her poems by using the technique of social documentary emphasized the historical importance of the event by focusing on the causes of those happenings to brace up social changes. Dos Passos’s, “42nd Parallel” the trilogy, published in early 1930 changed the conventional plot, recurrent in fiction, by adding biographies of political celebrities. Dos Passos says, “[A] writer is after all only a machine for absorbing and arranging certain sequences of words out of the lives of people around him.” (Major Nonfictional Prose.) We have the resonance of these comments in the Book of the Dead. Other writers, who had a tilt towards the Left, were also influenced by the above mentioned comments of Dos Passo. It was the emergence of New American culture and in poetry the traditional pastoral lyricism had the content of the modern mass media .The Book of the Dead, a book to commemorate the plight of the down-trodden; the workers, was a protest against the corporate culture. And she betrayed an allegiance with the proletariats, who are the prostrate segment of the society. Instead of becoming the slogan chanters the intellectuals like Rukeyser became the “voice of the destitute” to dismantle every pillar of discrimination be it sex, race or the have- nots. She decided not to write of women in their dances and wildness it was like exile from self but to write of their plight and struggle was the aim of the writer. “The Book of the Dead at once resembles and revises The Waste Land. The rituals of burial and their concomitant promises of rebirth set up the descent into the underworld, where Rukeyser locates redemptive and revolutionary possibilities.” (Thurston, 173) Rukeyser exploited the new strands of documentary culture and the event at the Bridge for its literary rebirth and the third nuance was the Communist Party’s Popular Front. Rukeyser transformed the tragedy into new political poetic in her The Book of the Dead. The poetry of Rukeyser was a new hope to reincarnate the new man, free of prejudices and discrimination. As mentioned above it was to be achieved within the system not stirring for revolution. A hope was pegged on democracy since it is the only system, if practiced within the norms of the true democratic spirit that can help to establish the ‘endurable world’. The suffering gained meanings because it did not go unnoticed. “But planted in our flesh these valleys stand,” (The Book of the Dead) The need was to make the down-trodden aware of its plight and then inculcate determination among the wretched of the earth to struggle for the egalitarian society. The political poetry and to some the Literature of Resistance from 30s’ onward broaden its scope; not confining to anti-bourgeois literature but to take into account of all the artistic pursuits which were helpful to voice the plight and then to rekindle the spirit of struggle in the society. In The Book of the Dead the distorted modern notion of development is exposed. The greed is disguised as development which is launched at the cost of humans. Moreover, as it happened in colonized countries, the culture of the down trodden is projected as the great obstacle on the way of progress. The oppressors, of colonial era and now in corporate, have caused great sufferings on the pretext of development. The vision evoked in Absalom by the miners “highlighted helmet and the radium workers’ allows us to see both the positive and negative aspect of our myth identity”. (Thurston, 209) The myth of a technological advanced nation, who has crystal shell over the sky but by narrating the event that shell is broken. Sillen asked Rukeyser about the engineers in The Book of the Dead in her Radio interview that they were not natives of the town to be included in the poem. Rukeyser replied, “The engineers were the representative type of what I should call society in the abstract. They cared mainly about the mechanical beauty and efficiency of the things they were building, and not about the human life involved or any of the humanities.” (Radio Interview Muriel Rukeyser by Samuel Sillen. Berg Collection, New York Public Library.) This new literary approach to find the remedies in the culture succeeded in restoring the tarnished image of the once down-trodden. The folklores and stories of the land got significance and moreover, the cruel incidences were highlighted as in The Book of the Dead and in the writings of many Afro-American writers. The obvious example is The Roots which is fictional narrative of the history of slavery. Now, “God is in heaven all is right with the world” (Robert Browning) did not sooth them. You folks who think that human lives Are worth far more than gold, To the Union Carbide company You must raise your voices bold (Absalom) Fanon writes, “Perhaps this passion and this rage are nurtured or at least guided by the secret hope of discovering beyond the present wretchedness, beyond this self hatred, this abdication and denial, some magnificent and shinning era that redeems us in our own eyes and those of others.” (Fanon 148) Rukeyser maintains the primary voice to narrate the events and locale in the first four poem of The Book of the Dead; and among the four ‘The Road’ and ‘Gauley Bridge’ are the prominent one. The mode is lyrical and documentary. To start The Book of the Dead with ‘The Road’ was both a testimonial of association with Whitman and his America as illustrated in ‘Songs of the Open Road’ and a remedial to it since it was propped up on the historical experience and on new knowledge. (Dayton, 33). The realm of the poem is physical country in which we move and rejoined in the process of history and by changing the refrain by the line “These roads will take you into your own country” the realm becomes mental. The physical world of the poem is West Virginia, “The Midland Trail leaves the Virginia furnace”. In The Road the world is not that congenial as we have in the poem of Whitman and it poses no hope of remedy which gives a political stance to the poem. ‘Gauley Bridge’ is the unromantic documentary presentation of rural small town to depict the scene of the tragedy. Louise Kertesz commenting on Gauley Bridge says that Rukeyser sees possibilities in human life where modern people must actually live it; she has no pastoral fantasies, no nostalgia for a more ‘lovely’ world.” (Louise Kertesz, 101) It did not romanticize the event rather Rukeyser presented the scene of death with all its gory facts. Michael Thurston says and which was actually said by Rukeyser herself in the radio interview that it was all to prevent such happenings in future. But the real purpose is to enable the people to have an eye to eye contact with harsh reality. She does not believe in coloring the bitter reality to suppress it in the ‘unconscious’ causing neurosis in people as neurosis is a great hurdle in the praxis. It was reclaiming the past to inculcate the awareness of change and to voice the plight of the poor whose tragedy might not have been acclaimed as such but Rukeyser’s description of the event made that tragedy the tragedy of the nation which needed acknowledgement not indifference of the ruling elite. The Disease, a cinematographic presentation, recalls the scene of the worst tragedy to bring out the feelings of the patients who were affected by ‘Silicate dust’. It all happened in this real world and the poor miners were the victim of the avaricious corporate which wanted to leap forward at the cost of human life. The poem informs the plight of the sufferers to the coming generation lest they should forget. It focuses on the details of our major organs i.e. lungs and heart and we feel the same awe as was felt by the sufferers of the fatal disease or their folks. The repetition of the scene of viewing the X-ray but now in the broad day light is to bring forward the suffering to realize the reader of impact of silicoses on the miners. It enrages us and we become the sufferer ourselves, the experience is an assimilation of ‘self’ with ‘others’ and then we ask ourselves, “Why did it all happen, it could have been avoided?” This is the question which makes the people conscious of their living, who do not want to be tools in other hands and such incidents unmask the- historical view of progress, where human words are lost in the noise of loud machines “ Little warmth, no words, loud machines.” (Mearl Blankenship) The boss is dead but the narrator is there to narrate the story, the narrator is the conscious being who is posing a great threat to such progress by exposing the cruelty of the modern civilization built on the “coughing of humans”. It is like building pyramids to assert the power and the Gauley Bridge horrible incident exposes the pelf and megalomania of a civilization propped on human bones. The monologues are about real human drama, where the narrator is not puzzled by the metaphysical riddles, and these are not arrows of fortune but the buffets of harsh world and the sufferers do not think to commit suicide, they want to live with all their vitality to suffer. To conclude the poetical poetry of Rukeyser is a conscious effort to bring forth the responsiveness to prevent the plight of humans caused by the greedy and indifferent higher strata of the society. John Lowney while discussing on The Dam says “If there is any doubt about the poems implication of white supremacy with abusive labor practices, the description of the material site of "Power" makes this clear: "The power-house stands skin-white." And immediately after this, the poem returns to its opening statement: "this is the road to take when you think of your country, / between the dam and the furnace, terminal" 9 References ¹ Thurston, Michael. Making Something Happen. The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. ² Thurston, Michael. Making Something Happen. The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. ³ Kalaidjian, Walter. American Culture, Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 4 Thurston, Michael. Making Something Happen. The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 5 Frantz Fanon, Trans: Richard Philcox. The Wretched of the Earth. NY: Grove Press, 2004 6 Dayton, Tim .Muriel Rukeysers The Book of the Dead. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. 7Kertesz, Louise. The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser. Louisiana State University Press, 1980 8Frantz Fanon, Trans: Richard Philcox. The Wretched of the Earth. NY: Grove Press, 2004 9Ed. Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman. "How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?” The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser. New York: St. Martins Press, 1999.   Read More