Analysis Essay #2: Tent City, U.S.A

                                                                

New Historicism Response to Tent City, U.S.A., by George Saunders

Mary Parker

maryparker@mycwi.cc

ENGL 201-002W

Professor Leslie Jewkes

Critical Theory Paper Two

11/17/2014

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Abstract

     George Saunders' Tent City, U.S.A. represents a modern movement of literary honesty in regards to the portrayal of the members of the homeless community. Saunders uses the format of a fictional investigation into the lifestyles of the homeless residents of Fresno California's tent city of 2009 to explore the ever complex question of society's obligation toward the homeless. Unlike many writers from earlier periods, Saunders and some of his contemporaries make an effort to portray both the positive and negative character traits commonly observed in dealings with the homeless, as well as the positive and negative effects of public aid in the lives of the homeless. This approach emphasizes the ethical implications of homelessness above the political.

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New Historicism Response to Tent City, U.S.A., by George Saunders

     Tent City, U.S.A., by George Saunders, depicts life for the homeless community of Fresno California with gritty, realistic detail. This is in line with much of contemporary literature, which favors increasingly realistic portrayals of the homeless and the conditions in which they live. This practice was not always so fashionable. Earlier works of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century drew a more romanticized picture. However, the modern controversy over what to do with the homeless population has spurred writers to explore the ethical dilemma more realistically. Tent City, U.S.A. represents the result of literature's movement from the portrayal of the homeless as bumbling or tragic caricatures, to a more complex, gritty narrative. George Saunders uses morally ambiguous characters to convey the complexity of the issue, while emphasizing the hopelessness of these people's situations in order to provoke sympathy, and perhaps, action on the part of the reader.

     Saunders' story is narrated by a writer who simply calls himself “PR”, or the Principle Researcher. He is the lens through which the reader encounters the residents of the homeless community, and therefore has the potential to attempt to bias the reader toward one political stance or the other. Yet PR remains almost neutral, allowing the reader to focus on the residents, rather than the politics. Although PR does discuss some of the ethical issues surrounding the homeless community, he keeps his commentary to a minimum. One of the few examples of this is the conversation surrounding PR's mid-study data. PR uses a line graph to discuss the basic tenets regarding the distribution of wealth in an ideal capitalistic society. The placement and duration of this section is telling; it is placed almost exactly in the middle of the story, and, without the illustration, is only half a page long. It is almost hidden within the story, with fifteen or so pages of residents' stories on either side of it to provide context for the discussion. This method allows the residents' stories to dominate the narrative, rather than political arguments. The focus of the story is the various conversations with the residents and the PR's experiences living among them.

     The first resident the PR meets is a woman named Wanda. Her character is significant because of the many contradictions she represents. Her foot is broken, and obviously infected, for which she deserves sympathy from the reader. However, her story as to how she broke the foot immediately calls her character into question. She claims that she was hit by a train, and that she did not hear the train coming because the conductor did not have the courtesy to warn her with the horn. Her injury, while gruesome, is not nearly bad enough to have been caused by a train, at least, not directly. Additionally, it seems unlikely that she was unable to hear or see the train coming whether or not the conductor used the horn. The more likely version is that she was intoxicated, heard the train coming, and hurt herself crossing the rails. It appears that her version of the story is probably an attempt to manipulate the PR. So the reader is immediately placed in a state of confusion; how much sympathy does Wanda actually deserve? Is her manipulative story a sign of the poor character that caused her homelessness, or is the poor character something that she developed as a survival tool to deal with her homelessness?

     This theme is repeated throughout the story, as the PR befriends other residents who seem to be alternately good-hearted and manipulative. The PR observes, “At times the Study Area residents seemed bumbling, sweet, hapless, and victimized. Other times they seems vicious, aggressive, and vituperative … self-defeating, excuse making machines, spoiled rotten by free food” (Saunders, 415). These contradictions in the residents' characters represent the difficulties associated with defining homelessness as a culture. The story's focus on the residents of the Study Area is not intended to sway the reader toward political action so much as it is an attempt to remind the reader of the humanity of the residents. If Saunders had painted Wanda and the others as either the innocent victims of society or the vile perpetrators of their own fate, he would have failed to represent the true complexity of the situation.

     This conscious attempt to write honestly about the good and the bad of homeless culture is less rare among Saunders' contemporaries than it was a hundred years ago. Traditionally, the homeless have either been ignored or caricatured in literature. If they appeared in stories at all, they often occupied only comedic or tragic roles. In the poem The Homeless Ghost, written by George MacDonald in 1893, a pedestrian encounters the hauntingly beautiful ghost of a homeless woman. The narrator describes her state, “Her hair by a haunting gust was blown, / Her eyes in the shadow strangely shown, / She looked a wanderer” (MacDonald). In this poem, the plight of the homeless is romanticized as beautifully tragic. Notice the ghostly woman's hypnotic beauty. “She sat a white queen on a ruined throne, / A lily bowed with blight … Her hair was dusk as night. /Wet, wet it hung, and wept like weeds / Down her pearly shoulders bare; / The pale drops glistened like diamond beads / Caught in a silken snare” (MacDonald). She appears somewhat worn, but otherwise has a mesmerizing effect upon the narrator. MacDonald's poem avoids the realities of the life of a homeless woman, such as the inability to maintain proper hygiene, and the destructive results of isolation from society. To the narrator, the ghost deserves sympathy, but only for the haunting beauty and mystery that a real homeless woman would never be able to achieve.

     John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, written in 1945, shares this tradition of romanticism. Some of the more outrageous characters in this novel are a bumbling group of homeless men, led by a man named Mack. These characters are portrayed as carefree and happy, constantly getting themselves into comedic trouble and picking themselves up again (Steinbeck). Mack and his friends' lives are romanticized, and their worry free lifestyle is almost praised as an enlightened response to the evils of ambition (Blue). What this novel does not address is the many hardships of homelessness. Instead, in order to portray them as happy and content, Steinbeck provides his characters with a warehouse to sleep in, a source of liquor, and certain level of respect within their community. This method allows him to sidestep the moral ambiguities associated with homelessness; if homeless people are simply carefree souls, then the wealthier members of society do not need to spend much time thinking about how homelessness should be handled.

     It is true that not all texts of the late 1800s to the mid 1900s dealt so casually with the topic of homelessness, but it certainly is difficult to find a text from this period that tackles the topic of homelessness with the same brutal honesty that the reader finds in George Saunders' text. This suggests to the reader a certain distance; the realities of homelessness were something that people simply did not want to consider at length, preferring instead to caricature the homeless to fit a more comforting narrative. While that attitude may still be present today, the current state of the homeless community has caused many to reevaluate the morality of remaining indifferent.

     Homeless communities such as the one depicted in George Saunders' text have sparked a passionate debate over the political and ethical dilemma of what should be done about the homeless. In Fresno California, 2006, advocates for the homeless won a major, though temporary, victory for the homeless community. Up to that point, the city had been conducting raids on homeless camps, periodically sending in crews to dismantle tents and seize possessions, in an attempt to discourage the formation of tent cities. An article from The Associated Press describes the devastating effect of these city raids, “When city workers tore down her hillside encampment, Charlene Clay lost her asthma medicine, sleeping bags and her only photos of her dead granddaughter. The people living there weren't warned, she said...” (Munoz). In 2006, however, a judge ruled that this practice violated the rights of the homeless, because it violated their constitutional rights to property, and that to deny them their rights was inhumane (Munoz). This case is very much representative of the climate in which Tent City, U.S.A. was written. There is a clear sense of the frustration with which city leaders view the “plague” of the homeless, opposed vehemently by the moral objections of a small, but vocal group of humanist thinkers. Both sides are frustrated, and writers have responded.

     An appropriate example of this is Rule of the Bone, by Russell Banks, which portrays the journey of a teenage boy, driven to homelessness by an abusive family life. “Chappie's” journey takes him to dark places, including the lair of a biker gang, and a pedophile's truck. Chappie is more than just a victim, though. Throughout the course of the book, he commits several crimes. At one point he steals a car and takes a joy ride, another time he loots a summer house for food and firewood. Some of his crimes are the inevitable result of need while others stem from Chappie's association with social outcasts. By portraying Chappie as morally ambiguous, Banks acknowledges the inherent problems associated with the homeless lifestyle as a whole, while humanizing his homeless character and allowing the reader to understand both the problem of homelessness and the need to treat the homeless with respect. And even though this novel does seem to favor the view of homeless people as tragic characters, as opposed to a more balanced approach, it does avoid the blatant romanticism of MacDonald's The Homeless Ghost or Steinbeck's Cannery Row.

     George Saunders continues this tradition, with perhaps even more moral clarity than Russell Banks does. His story, Tent City, U.S.A., unapologetically portrays both the good and bad in his homeless characters as well as the good and bad of the institutions supporting them in their lifestyle. The text avoids use of romanticism to dishonestly bolster one position over another. A good example of this is the PR's moral confusion over what to do about the red haired girl in the tent. The PR knows that she is being prostituted out, but he wonders whether or not anything he could do would help her at all. In the PR's conversation with himself, the reader not only sees the dilemma about what to do for the red haired girl, but the larger dilemma about what to do for the homeless in general.

The PR “reminded himself that the white girl with red hair had been a whore in that tent long before he arrived, and would be a whore in that tent long after he left. All of these people had been living thus before he arrived and would continue living thus after he went home. Anything he could do would only comprise a small push in a positive direction before the tremendous momentum of their negative tendencies reasserted itself…” Even so, by walking away, “... was he not essentially consenting to her continued presence back there in the tent? … Yes. Yes, he was” (Saunders 407).

The circumstances in Tent City, U.S.A. do not present a clear answer to the PR's dilemma. Some might argue that it is this quality that makes this text such a valuable response to the modern controversy over how to best take care of the homeless. Instead of promoting a particular political position, the text simply frames the question so that the reader can be aware of the utter complexity of the situation at hand, and the need for both compassion and a healthy understanding of the various concerns that shape this controversy.

     George Saunders' Tent City, U.S.A. is a work of artistic honesty. The characters are richly developed; often a single character possesses both endearing and disturbing qualities at the same time. In light of the highly contested public debate surrounding the treatment of the homeless in society, Saunders manages to avoid preaching a political agenda and instead creates opportunity for dialogue. This story is part of a movement to break with the tradition of romanticizing homelessness in literature, in order to honestly explore the causes and implications of homelessness in a supposedly wealthy country.

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Works Cited

1. Banks, Russell. Rule of the Bone: A Novel. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1995. Print. 
2. Blue, Denise. "Homelessness In Literature." Identities & Issues In Literature (1997): 1.Literary Reference Center. Web. 27 Oct. 2014. 
3. MacDonald, George. "The Homeless Ghost." Poetical Works Of George Macdonald In Two Volumes -- Volume 2 (1893): 62-67. Literary Reference Center. Web. 27 Oct. 2014. 
4. Olivia Munoz - Associated Press, Writer. "Judge Orders City To Stop Homeless Raids." AP Online (2006): Newspaper Source Plus. Web. 27 Oct. 2014. 
5. Saunders, George. "Tent City, U.S.A." GQ 1 Sept. 2009. Print. 
6. Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945. Print. 

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Bibliography

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