Discussing the Actual (Shudder!) Content
Posted by: Admin
I want to discuss the book’s merits as literature. I want to discuss character motivation, and foreshadowing, and plot surprises. I want to discuss an author’s skill in tying together his threads at the end. As for the actual content of the book – its historical setting, its social setting, the issues at stake – well, those are secondary at best, in most cases simply a pretext for storytelling. What we discuss in our book group is how we responded to the emotional situation of the novel – how we felt about the hero’s choice at the end of the story, for instance. The actual situation – the cathedral-building or fly-fishing of the piece – is generally frosting.
Daniel L. Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes is making me re-think this prejudice, particularly in terms of what makes a book good for discussion. As I approach the halfway point, he’s already had two superb set-pieces of narrative – the desperate race upriver to save the lives of his wife and daughter who are dying of malaria, and the terrifying night a boat trader gets the men of the village drunk and convinces them they should kill Daniel and his family. Still, beyond the survival of his family, this book is about more. It’s about a man encountering a people who think entirely differently than he does, and trying to understand their values from their language. And as Everett is challenged in his beliefs, so is the reader. Suddenly what you thought of as simply reality and common sense is thrown into question.
Should people help each other? I don’t think of that as Christian, I think of it as human. If a woman who’s giving birth all alone happens to develop complications and screams for help, should her sister help her? A no-brainer, right? That seems beyond a cultural value to me, yet the Piraha people hear her screams and let the woman die. Her sister does not go to help her. Emotionally I flipped out, and this was not a plot point.
Child-rearing is another one. Should children be protected from dangers they don’t understand? If a toddler wanders too close to the fire, should a mother jerk the child away or let the little guy get burned? An infant is playing with a huge machete, twisting it and flipping it and bringing it very close to removing body parts, and then he accidentally drops the knife. His mother kindly picks it up – and hands it back to him.
I had to slam on the mental brakes for these. They were violations of my cultural values that actually made me mad. This wasn’t anthropological. This was about basic human compassion. Wasn’t it?
The sexual openness wasn’t so hard for me to accept, although its almost comical to watch poor Daniel the Christian believer get pushed to the wall: he comes home to find his eight-year-old daughter watching wide-eyed as two naked men wrestle laughing on the floor together, grabbing each other’s genitals. When he scolds them, they look at him in complete bafflement. Didn’t the guy have a sense of humor?
My liability here is I’ve always found anthropology fascinating, ever since my first college course. To me this is utterly compelling stuff, but I need to be fair. I don’t want to inflict this on unwilling minds. I don’t want to have my literature-hungry reading group suddenly find themselves dumped unceremoniously into the heart of the Amazonian rain forest with a linguist.
Have I lost my mind? Is this really the right book for December – the story of a good Christian family who go native?
Who knows, but I’ve still got time to read another chapter before catching the bus to work.
