‘J. catches up with Dave Brown in the parking lot of the Talcott Motor Lodge. The night is clear and naked and swarming with so many anxious stars that it almost seems to him an invasion, a celestial troop movement auguring nothing good. In the cities it is safe because there are no stars, the light from a million apartment windows provides protection: they reduce the night into a vast purple mediocrity shielding against higher thought’.
“John Henry Days”, Colson Whitehead
John Henry Days is a novel by Colson Whitehead that received outstanding praises from critics of modern literature. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This piece of fiction presents a panoramic view on American culture and history, and gives insights into people’s strives of both of the Information Age, and of the Industrial Age. Such a scope is achieved via intertwinement of two stories: the story of a favorite American hero who lived in the 19th century, John Henry, and the story of our contemporary, a young freeloading journalist, J. Sutter, who got an assignment to cover the festival, devoted to John Henry. The author uses an allegory, comparing and contrasting these two Afro-Americans, fighting their fights.
John Henry was an incredibly strong man who worked for a railroad company as a steel-driving man. One day he decided to compete with a steam drill. John won, but at the cost of his own life, as his heart exploded soon after his victory. That was a noble, though futile, attempt to demonstrate that a human-being was not less capable, than a machine, and of a much greater worth and dignity, and an attempt to protest against soullessness of machinery and the upcoming substitution of humans by them.
Unlike John Henry, Sutter does not provoke thoughts about human dignity. He is a true hero of our time – of the Information Age, whose head is full of junk and popular memes of successful, but at the same time, lightsome life. ‘The novel introduces him as a spendthrift and freeloader whose primary concern is where his next free meal will come from… The novel is a stylistic delight that deftly moves between Sutter’s meandering existence and versions of John Henry’s focused attempt to beat the machine’ (Hamilton and Brian 2010, 386). In contrast to the Industrial Age hero, fighting a great fight with a steam drill, his contemporary’s only purpose is to break the junketeers’ record – a pointless struggle, exposing the shallowness of the character. He is a typical product of postmodern, media-infested America.
Bell (2004) retails the idea that ‘John Henry was killed by the Industrial Age; Sutter suffers the insidious effects of the Information Age’ (329). Unlike John Henry who won, Sutter decides not to conduct his battle and, as a result, he surrenders to intellectual death. The novel itself describes this state as being ‘devoured by pop’ (Schur 2009, 106).
The passage from John Henry Days that I used as the epigraph can be regarded as the conceptual medium of the whole novel, and it characterizes the main protagonist’s inNtellectual death best of all. Modern people contain shallow knowledge, billions of segmental pieces of information in their heads, but do not want to overload themselves with something that is deeper; instead, like Sutter, they would prefer to have a shield ‘against higher thought’.
Nevertheless, the novel leaves us with some hope for the possibility of change for the better. As Schur (2009) notes, ‘the novel … does not provide a clear resolution to its main conflicts but implies that the cultural logic underlying the John Henry myth must be transcended so that the main characters can find real freedom and escape the ubiquitous and pernicious influence of popular culture’ (106).
References
Bell, Bernard W. 2004. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Hamilton, Geoff and Jones Brian. 2010. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Works. New York: Infobase Publishing.
Schur, Richard L. 2009. Parodies of Ownership: Hip-hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law. San Francisco: University of Michigan Press.