The idea that Black people are an inherently soulful people, never outraged or angry, rather compassionate and understanding is a racist trope unto itself, akin to saying that all Asians are good at math or all Italian men are seducers.
Black people are no more or less soulful that any other group of people. Among them you will find as many materialists and unsoulful folk as you will in the general population. But it is a wonderful/useful stereotype, since it sets up a cultural expectation for how a Black person should act–soulful and understanding, never aggrieved or resentful, and willing to help white people (re)gain what they lack. When Blacks deviate from this behavior, they are deemed uppity or ungrateful for not fulfilling their culturally mandated role.
My husband often talks about the bind he is in: when he is wronged, and he expresses anger over it, he lays himself open to the charge of being the “Angry Black Man,” which is the evil twin of the Magical Negro. But if I get angry at a wrong, I am not seen as the Angry White Man, or in your case, you do not become the Hostile Nazi. Society does not seek to control/tame our anger as it does the anger of Black people.
I agree completely. But I did not mean to say that this trope describes everyone.
It’s probably equivalent to the „wise old man“. We all know there are many old men who are not wise at all, nor are all young people partying all the time.
By that definition I strongly doubt that for example Mother Abagail qualifies. She’s a good, a positive character - but anything but docile or non-threatening. The way I remember her she’s outspoken to the point of telling her fellow survivors they do everything plain wrong and her religious fervour is depicted as quite threatening. Everybody who pushes themselves to the point of self destruction is a fanatical freak in my opinion. She’s magic and a prophet, but her impact is more that of a djinn than a benign black fairy godmother.
That would once more imply intent. But as we’ve established before, rightfully I think, it’s also possible to unintentionally use the trope. Intention isn’t necessarily a sign; effect would be. In that case I’m not sure King could be accused of said effect since none of his stories purport ideas of racial subservience or superiority.
His characters do what the tale demands them to do, regardless of colour, race or other traits. They are of course chosen to fit the demands of their role. But their traits don’t decide their fate, they themselves do. One of his earliest villains - in Firestarter - is John Rainbird, a Cherokee and Vietnam veteran. He’s a fearless and capable agent and killer, easily the best The Firm employs. But not because of his Cherokee ancestry but because he’s a clever and insightful psychologist whose empathy is so complete and devious because he actually lacks any empathy - a complex sociopath perfect at the mimicry of emotion.
And this is what I mean with characters serving the tale they appear in. In the end they all do, the main characters as well as the bit players. Take Sam from Underground Railway: he’s helpful, docile, non-threatening. Is he a magical white therefore? In my view his function is to be just what we see, what we read. A good-at-heart character, somewhat naïve (as many good characters in and outside of fiction are, perhaps?). But primarily serving his function for the tale at hand. To me this is the imperative of fiction, making the clockwork of the tale run smoothly. Making us forget it’s a tale.
And the only demand we can make on the characters is whether we can believe in them. It doesn’t matter whether they fulfil other duties outside the tale. In the story is what counts and there they have to convince.
Well, recently there’s been that trope of the Old White Men/Angry White Men and although that’s more of a hashtag thing it serves as a shorthand description of a certain kind of (reactionary?) knee jerk reaction to gender/metoo/progressive/so on so forth. It’s nowhere on the Magical Negro scale of cliché - but it’s evidently in use and sometimes even a rather good observation.
The Stand starts with a few friends having an evening beer and a chat in a Texan gas station in some godforsaken little town. It’s the end of the 70s, things are dire, unemployment and inflation are high and ordinary people are squeezed.
(Putting an image of the beginning of the book here because I’m on my phone and would like to illustrate a point without typing another two hours)
What we meet here are a couple of ordinary folks having a conversation like many people had them back then - and are having them to this very day. Archetypes? Clichés? Yes, absolutely. But not just. They are also authentic in their setting and their behaviour. Perhaps because people love clichés and like to behave like they were not entirely wrong. Maybe because they are not always entirely wrong.
One of these folks is Stu Redman (sic) who is as ordinary as can be, small blue collar job at a small plant, next to no life outside his hometown. No career either. Married early and became an early widower when his wife died of cancer. Quiet and having no aspirations other than living the rest of his life in peace. A man life had beaten into submission and capitulation early. Without Captain Trips he’d have spent most of his evenings drinking beer for the next 40 years and then died quietly, much like the way he lived.
He’s one of the survivors and becomes not just a main character in the book but also in the garbled community the survivors build up east of the Rockies. His is a major transition from a hardly noticeable bit player to a central - but not the central - character. And that transition is absolutely believable every step of the way.
Actually the entire book starts out with such archetypes, the coked and boozed rock star, the nesthäkchen having gotten involuntarily pregnant, the sad and fat boy hopelessly in love with the beauty, the deaf mute intelligent and charismatic guy, the retarded but strong and helpful - good and non-threatening - guy. And each of those archetypes is broken up and shown to have more depth and nuances than the archetype requires. They start as templates and become characters over the course of the tale.
Why then start out with templates? Why use templates at all?
Because they must also, like Sam in Underground Railroad (or The Lord of the Rings), fulfil their duty inside the story. Because we sometimes need a naïve or good-hearted or non-threatening character and they have to help our heroes.
For me that’s all that counts, not their race or shoe size or what party they vote for. But we‘ve also already established I may not be qualified to see beyond the function of a character and recognise their problematic traits. In my view the context of the Magical Negro may even only apply to John Coffey. I‘m not even sure if I reread that book with a mind on deciphering that trope I wouldn’t come up with other explanations to excuse it.
Anyone can be soulful, but when culture (using culture here in a broad sense to embrace diverse actors) starts ascribing a characteristic such as “soulfulness” to an entire group of people, we have the first step in creating biased tropes.
I am, by that marker, rampagingly uppity. I think I knew that anyway. Here comes a spectacularly uppity point, for the avoidance of doubt.
Always slightly intruiging that those of the paler persuasion, when chance comes to comment upon their characteristics, can find themselves labelled by their nationhood e.g Italian or Swedish, to make a point about differences in attitudes between them, but more often than not it’s “Black people” as a collective.
There’s more than one type of us. Truly.
I suspect I have very little in common with Western Nigerians who I believe have little in common with yer actual Kenyan. Don’t get me started on the south-east Ugandans. Rarely if ever are the national and regional subdivisions afforded to Paleface given equal opportunity. One big black mass sharing universal characteristics, just as one’s Italian is obviously absolutely identical to one’s Swede; apparently.
This is not offered as any sort of orginal observation but there is a smidge of a scintilla of a whsiper of a nuance of a hint of we folk being all the same. Perhaps we appear more conveniently threatening or dismissable or anthropologically easier as a mass concept, thus justifying… [I appear to have fallen off my soapbox. Ouchy-pops; my coccyx throbs so].
A key point, when pigmentation is used as The. Defining. Trait. of a person. Instead of the sum of their experiences, history, personalities, upbringing, social interconnections so on. And that’s just as much an issue for the readers. Different people will read different things in one and the same story.
The Magical Negro is not necessarily a Black fairy godmother type (though it can be), and if I gave that impression, I apologize. The docility I spoke of was a docility in terms of advocating for action on the part of Blacks against their oppression. A Magical Negro can be cussed (as they say where my husband comes from).
Also, if she is more djinn than Magical Negro, why did King make her Black?
The trope can be invoked unintentionally, but whether it is brought forth intentionally or unintentionally, the author is responsible for the consequences of invoking it. Ignorance of the law and all that.
I doubt that idea is there, but one is still left with King’s use of the trope, however unintentional it was.
Understood. But as soon as King assigns race, color, and other traits, he is bringing in/linking to a world of associations, whose consequences he is now responsible for.
What is the significance of the character being Cherokee and a Vietnam veteran?
I do not think so, but that may be a trope I am unaware of.
Agreed, and one of the ways to accomplish this imperative is to make sure that the characters act in accord with the various racial/sexual/gender/orientation/ethnic/etc. attributes and psychologies they have been given in the specific historical moment of the tale (unless the author is being meta-, and playing with anachronisms and such).
Again, agreed. If an author choses to make a character Black or white or a WWII veteran or a Vietnam veteran, they should make sure that they are believable as such characters. A reader needs to believe not just in their actions in terms of whether they serve the story, but also whether their actions would emanate from this specific character with these particular attributes in the delimited historical moment of the story.
The Get-Off-My-Lawn Angry White Male trope. Clint Eastwood rang a beautiful series of changes on it in GRAN TORINO (where he also commented on his own filmic and bodily images).
That is what characters should be: authentic in their behaviors and settings as determined by the racial/ethnic/sexual/gender/orientation/etc. particulars they have been given by their creator.
As they should–consistent with the above mentioned attributes they have been provided with.
True, but if a writer decides to make that character Black, then they have brought the trope of the Magical Negro into their work, and raise the issue of how they will deal with it.
Here is where we disagree. To my eyes, story mechanics are a priority for you, with the proviso that the behavior is consistent with what an abstract human being may do.
I do not think it is a matter of qualification. I believe that character psychology matters to you, and sociology/anthropology much less so.
I do not think you are trying to excuse it. Such concerns just exist on a lower register for you.
I wonder whether detecting a trope has become more important than experiencing a story and contemplating its success.
In the case of Mother Abigail I was convinced by King that she was a layered and sympathetic character. In no way I thought that this is how all old women are, regardless of their skin color.
Not did I think that Stu is typical for every working class man.
Characters, IMO, are only effective if they are not used to make blanket statements on their traits or heritage.
But during story conferences I often encounter executives who are so scared of offending anyone that they always assume that any character might be understood as such a broad and universal statement.
Which creates a situation in which classic films and novels have no chance but be considered as full of tropes.
But I don’t see, for example, Dr. No standing in for every Asian. He is one megalomaniac. Not even standing in for every megalomaniac.
I would say that today’s audiences are less accepting of people substituting tropes for nuanced and authentic depictions of characters and environments. People want imagination in terms of plot and action, and authenticity when it come to ascribing attributes and psychologies to characters.
For years, Black people (among others) had to settle for depictions where their lives were imagined and written by white people, the vast majority of whom knew nothing about Black lives and culture. There was the vague/unsatisfactory defense of writing about “human nature,” without any acknowledgment that whatever characteristics humans may share, they are expressed/made manifest in culturally specific ways.
A great reading strategy; you have done your part of the job–resisting the universalizing impulse. The question remains: how to deal with King’s use of the Magical Negro stereotype, which is a non-factor for you (just as the Bond/Oberhauser foster brother thing is a non-factor for me–I am absorbed with the movie’s mise en scene), but which is a factor for other people. Neither of us can claim that our non-factors should be non-factors for all. If we did, we would be guilty of engaging in the universalizing to which we are both opposed (and which contributed to the creation of biased tropes in the first place).
They are right to be scared, but if that is reason they are, they have missed the point. They should be afraid that their writers are relying on stereotype rather than experience/research. Nuance rarely gives offense (though some people can/will find offense in anything).
You are exaggerating. Classic films and novels will be judged as to how they use their tropes.
Great. Do you also see Joseph Wiseman’s performance as an instance of yellow face?
Again, by doing so, you have done your part of the job–resisting universalizing impulses. The question remains if the writer, through a combination of experience/research, has moved his characters beyond tropes (if they started there), and into the realm of authenticity.
Today, I do. But I still think it is a good performance because Wiseman does not play a racist stereotype but a man drunken with his own aspirations of power, trying to mask what his ambition has done to his body with supreme upper class pretension.
Hmmm, this is really hard to answer without looking closer at the stories they appear in. With Rainbird/Firestarter (rain/fire) some answers seem to be obvious - but it’s been over 30 years since I last read the book and it’s entirely possible
I may be missing/misremembering crucial details.
I think I’ve read one source of inspiration may have been Will Sampson’s Chief Bromden in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, another perhaps William Smith’s Falconetti character from Rich Man, Poor Man. But I cannot for the life of me remember whether that was even from a King interview or merely a fan hypothesis.
Where do characters come from? What’s there first, the character or the story? I can’t answer this since I’m not a writer - and if I was I couldn’t answer this for characters/stories I didn’t write myself. I suppose the one grows from the other. In some cases they are simply there, fully formed and flush in their roles. While in other cases they need to be carved out of the pages sentence by sentence. Or the writer - to keep with the theme of our common interest - chooses their personnel like a spy handler does their agents, tailored to the task and the story.
What I can say is, we really need the corpus delicti to get an idea of what we’re talking about and how it affects us and our judgement. And since a couple of sentences won’t do the trick here I’m going to post another few images of The Stand where Mother Abagail is introduced. I’ll delete them again after we’ve read them so those of us not familiar with the book can at least get a glimpse at the character in question…
Here we meet Abagail Freemantle for the first time, a frail old woman who has just witnessed most of humanity wiped out. And who has, after 108 years and everything she lived through, everything she lost and suffered through, an absolute and unwavering, unshakable belief in God. She is at once likeable, relatable - and deeply unsettling in her perfect, unquestioned trust in a higher force we never see or feel, but who, according to Abagail Freemantle, has killed off most people living on this planet for unknown (and never doubted) reasons.
The story of The Stand is heavily infused with supernatural machinations. But its supernatural forces are off stage and only appear through their main agents Randall Flagg and Abagail Freemantle.
Flagg, the agent of evil, is not so much a character as a void in the fabric of reality that’s filled with an evil, feral joy of suffering and destruction. He has little recollection of the past beyond having always been there when a mob torched and lynched and killed, when human dignity and empathy left the stage to human predator nature. Flagg doesn’t know why he acts as he does, only that he’s walking over torn and charred bodies and enjoying every second of it.
For this kind of evil force we need an antagonist that personifies the good sides of human nature - but not pure good as an angelic figure would be. Flagg is present but not as a character, rather an incarnation of an archetypal evil. His opposite must be a character fundamentally good in spite of what they’ve experienced. Abagail is just as clueless why God (God?) does what is done to the world. But she’s a material presence, over 100 years of lived and suffered life. And she’s still neither bitter nor resigned. She kept her faith and her optimism even though she knows her own life will soon be over and her last days anything but peaceful or easy.
To get back to your question at the beginning of this post, Abagail is Black because that’s just the character this story needs, with all upsides and downsides. I cannot imagine anybody else in this particular role. She’s the agent for exactly this assignment.
Agreed. We can be thankful that he does not do a Mickey Rooney in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S:
Wiseman’s yellow face performance is also a racist portrayal, and all of the other fine attributes you list may not serve for some viewers as the counterbalance they do for you. I agree that there are good things in Wiseman’s performance, but do not regard it overall as a good one–the use of yellow face stains it too much for me.
Sure he is, and Ilsa even refers to him as “the boy” at one point. I would argue that Sam’s portrayal is a milder example of Hollywood racism of the time, and that CASABLANCA remains a fine film despite it (also surmounting the sexual blackmail of Captain Renaud, which is played for laughs).
Then there are William Wyler’s THE LETTER with its yellow face, and his JEZEBEL with its portrayals of Black characters. My beloved Joseph L. Mankiewicz gets into the act with yellow face in THE QUIET AMERICAN and gay-signifying-evil/weakness in CLEOPATRA. I think both films are great, and I will continue to praise and analyze them. But I believe that my critiques must also contain accounts of the films’ biases and flaws, and how these aspects intersect and play off the works’ less problematic attributes. To ignore them is to repeat the initial error, and in some ways, less understandable.
For me, she really is not the „magical negro“ type but as you point out someone with unshakable belief in God, to counterpoint Flagg‘s Satan. She does not have magical powers like John Coffey, but she has visions. Something many characters in fiction have without being singled out as „magical“. And visions do have their place in King‘s work because his world(s) allow for the supernatural.
Up to a point all surviving characters in The Stand have these ‘visions’ - dreams/visions of the Dark Man, a black void, and Mother Abagail, a black presence. They are antipodes in the sense that Flagg is a supernatural being and Abagail an ordinary human. And magical in that they’ve been chosen for their respective sides.
But Abagail really has no supernatural abilities of her own - other than that God talks to her (which we’re not privy to; whatever God tells her stays between them). While Flagg displays a number of different magic abilities. How far he’s really able to control these powers, or they control him, is not quite clear. It’s not even clear whether Flagg is human at all - as opposed to an incarnation of the dark sides of human nature, which strikes me as the more fitting description.
The Stand is a novel of the apocalypse. But apocalypse is not the end. The religious nature of the tale is present throughout the story. But most of its protagonists don’t subscribe to religion, don’t even experience supernatural occurrences that couldn’t be explained as ordinary dreams and collective psychosis after a traumatic disaster of never before known proportions. It even seems the ‘faithful’ all die in the end while the wavering and sceptics survive to build up again.
That is a great point. Says a lot about King‘s own struggle with the conflict between organised religion (also applying to Flagg and his blind followers) and basic belief in hope.
And since Flagg is also the antagonist of King‘s THE DARK TOWER saga, Abigail is only one force of good trying to stand up to him. If she is right or also just one to project onto, might be open to discussion.
But she certainly is not a magical being, only someone who rises to the challenge, with another supernatural force leading survivors to her.
