Roll Away the Stone | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Grace and redemption in Vernon God Little

    I smiled on the Wabash the last time I passed,
    Yes I gave her a wink on the passenger side.
    My foot fell asleep as I swallowed my candy,
    Knowing her was in heaven before he died.

      John Prine


    Encrypted in the heart of Time lives a code, an improvisational theme that modulates by the second then returns again - not dead, not even gone - a code the writer attempts to break, a code DBC Pierre attempts to break in Vernon God Little, a code that explains the nature of Grace, the redemption of spiritual sight in a society controlled by Popular Culture.

    Texas, issues of conquest and independence, the legacy of the cowboy and the outlaw, salon girl--in dark theaters kids watch Texas grow up: from childhood, starting with silent films like Hell's Hinges, Stage Coach and The Great Train Robbery; to adolescence, moving on to John Wayne in Red River and Angel and the Bad Man and The Alamo then to young manhood in a barrage of Jessie James stories, complete with Bloody Bill Anderson and Quantrill's raiders subplots and Billy the Kid blurred picket wire between good and bad. Everything fades to gray in Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show, Horseman Pass Bye and the film Hud then gallops to full maturity in The Missouri Breaks and Young Guns.

    Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men ushers in a new image of the new killer elite. All The Pretty Horses illustrates the difference in love laws from country to country in a land on the verge of drastic change, the end of chivalry and luck of the draw. Annie Proux's Brokeback Mountain breaks a time honored code while along the life of the western a plethora of musical artists from Bob Wills to Kinky Friedman punctuate our view of the Lone Star State. Vernon God Little joins the artistic mix as a self proclaimed A 21st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death, a Dante's Inferno to a Lyle Lovet two- step.

    Through the eye of a fifteen year old kid, Peter Finley/DCB Pierre examines the mimetic space between reality and myth that underpins Texas culture, how media and socio-ethnic powers of the world form a narcissistic "collective" with the power to shape identity. Vernon's definition for learning - that to learn "true things is a curse," "because then you can't see with the full confidence of dumbness anymore--sound more like Ron White's mantra "You can't fix stupid." Vernon's case is more Dionysian, a psychologically intoxicated version of reverse narcissism. All of us know the type, the narcissist: the man, still a kid; the girl who exploits the weakness she creates in others; the charming people that seem so talented at making us feel dependent on their approval; people we never argue with for fear of retribution. Now apply-- these attributes to a concept, a "collective" comprised of film, media, advertising, music, and relate your definition to the story as you read, annotate, internalize, and do your part for artistic expression.

    Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness, uses the double edged sword of colonialism to explain the co-existence of good and evil in the world, the innate darkness in the hearts of all men, and the colonial mind. In Vernon God Little the darkness seems to be both what lies behind the stereotypical face of Texas, part the subliminal messages movies imbue within the teenage mind. In Vernon's case, the fear that he will never be able to measure to what the world wants, demands, and says he can have and be results in a regression survival mechanism that requires total inwardness as far as the real world is concerned. There in the astonished desert, the purple hilled badlands, where the ghost of 100 dime novel outlaws make their getaway Vernon's secret passions lay as fixed faced and fist held as Wild Bill's aces and eights - future, past, and present all jumbled together like marbles in a sock. In the end, although saved from death, the sentence remains, underpinned by the knowledge that lost causes, especially when bedded down with self pity and the whispering bones of the past, can be as cement leaden as hip boots in deep water. Although labeled as satire, the novel assumes a life of its own, taking us into a land where feral desire, the gnawed bones of frustration--hatred for the old, lust for new land - long for the swelling roots of rebirth, the late blooming heart of hope for anything good.

    In a conceptual, colloquial, extended metaphor the battle will be fought against an American leviathan, placing all Texans, and Americans, under one big "Barbecue Chew Barn" revival tent. Although saturated with a bizarre out-back imitation of border dialect, Vernon God Little is punctuated with symbols and allusions that suggest not only ignorance and dysfunction, but second chances, as the author DCB Pierre explains in his interview with The Observer.

    I'm essentially homeless. My search has been to try and find a group that I could fit into, but I eventually gave up. There's a certain freedom in that. It's like people who live on or near a border - they start to think differently about everything. They are more adept at surviving, at adapting to survive. That's an interesting place to live, for a while at least. Sometime you see things a whole lot more clearly from the margins.

    Homeless - in Vernon's mind the world is the cuckolded of all life, the Fagan that orphans all poor people. Pierre's sentiments foreshadow the very presence of Vernon, his buddy Jesus, the old Peter Finley, and Kris Kristofferson's Me and Booby McGee - Freedom's Just Another Word for nothing left To Lose - the Texas borderline in this sense as much a metaphor, a space for extra-vagance, as the borders and boundaries in Arundhati Roy's God Of Small Things. The question is age old as the theme in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, shades of truth, the difference between a Cactus Rose and an American Beauty, the yellow journalist's, dime novelist first commandment - "when the myth becomes larger than the facts, print the myth," Charlie Kane's line in Citizen Kane - "you create the headline, I'll create the war." Although Pierce paints a very dystopian portrait of youth, his true ministry involves just that-- illuminating the space between myth and truth in the double wide under bellied mind of kid who's views on life have been smelted from the pig iron, plastic imaginings of music, media, and myth.

    In spite of the authorial "situational" ethos in Vernon God Little - the drug addiction, thievery, and general moral brigandage - the "intended ethos," what surfaces from the dark sea of Vernon's dreamy imaginings, mirrors Pierre's quest for redemption, not just for himself but for the greater archetype Vernon represents. Just as Vernon wants to understand what happens to fall-between-the-crack-kids who can't afford the visuals that equal success, how hypnotically intimidating the world can be - I hate it when you go to meet somebody, and they spot you. You feel like your steps bounce too much, or your shoulders are too dangly or something. You hold the same dumb smile - Pierre's first novel is a proving ground, evidence that although once disenchanted by world of rules and obligations, by way of the maze of Mankind's fallen state in Marticio, an honest sense of hope transcends the Vernon's narcissist, sarcastic view of life ...

    Velcro spiders seize my spine. You know gray areas are invisible on video. You don't want to be here the day shit gets figured out in black and white. I ain't saying I'm to blame, don't get me wrong. I'm calm about that, see? Under my grief glows a serenity that comes from knowing the truth always wins in the end. Why do movies end happy? Because they imitate life (135).

    ...When from the same mouth abrupts a bold profession of caring: "The greatest thing you'll ever know is just to love and be loved in return" (35), from which compensation, forgiveness and redemption form a trinity, especially when the novel serves as penance for falling prey to the voice of the world rather than the heart. Like Gangster rap to upper class suburban kids, Pierre finds the persuasions of a privileged life overshadowed by the scream of border land poverty. Mexico, with its contrasts, its crushing poverty and sparkling wealth, its institutionalized corruption and cultural wisdom, its love of life and its embracing of death, undoubtedly set me on a path toward the deep end, philosophically and emotionally speaking. A fast and careless life had put me in tune with the common man, for whom a throw of the dice would mean life or death. When, as a teenager, I set out for Texas to bring cars over the border, I saw that the same divides applied to the richest country on earth. Truest kinship was found in a group of homeless derelicts who camped under a bridge beside where I used to stay. It is in their broken-down lives that the seeds for Vernon were planted.

    Pierre's belief in Vernon God Little seems based on fate, synchronicity. Minutes short of an hour "before being offered a publishing deal," the first hijacked plane flew into the World Trade, the "dark destiny" henceforth surrounding Pierre's luckless 15-year-old anti-hero's personal Paradise Lost. Texas. But there is more, the reverse narcissism created by a media collective; one Pierre calls "a frustration issue, like waving meat at a dog," a force that keeps people "thriving on promises that are never fulfilled [either] politically and from the markets." Underneath Vernon's crude socially shellacked veneer is an intelligent astute kid who, like author Peter Finley (aka DBC Pierre) longs to escape a dysfunctional existence. However, Vernon's "wordsmith" poetics - the "clouds of fate" that doom him, the "jungle of clouds grown over the sun which [rekindle] the smell whiff of damp dog that always blows around here before a storm burps lighting without a sound (30)" - support the "cause and effect" ideology Vernon's Mama says is so universal, the solidarity of his friendship with Jesus, and perhaps most significant, his media driven narcissistic view of the world, and Kant's concept of the inner and outer self.

    Man, remember the Great Thinker we heard about in class last week, the one that sounded like 'Manual Cunt'?

    Yeah, who said nothing really happens unless you see it happen (32).

    In the most basic terms, Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason discusses the two voices, and two impetuses that shape identity and decisions. The song that follows, Glenn Campbell's "Galveston," provides a transcendental Melvillian kind of support. Jim Webb's song illustrates how the power of the sea metaphysically makes a home out of Vietnam. Crashing waves the violence of sexual intimacy, fierce patriotism, and anger, or resentment toward the land of freedom which has imprisoned him in a place of terror.

    However, if the point in the novel is "missing the point," the introduction of allusion makes perfect sense, as natural as introducing the girl Vaine Gurie "hunched over a wedge of pizza "stuffing emptiness into her void, while "staring at his New Jacks...detached, sad, and furtive," wondering what kind of world feeds a person emptiness. Vernon God Little is a novel about the unresolved conflict the world and the media suggests can be eradicated. If the novel is about how the world shapes visions of love and life and self, the world also shapes needs, what Vernon needs from Jesus Navarro, his mother, from God, from the world itself, that that the "collective" claims he can intuit, then denies him. Vernon's regressive introversion is a part of the narcissism purchased from a "giant warehouse of archetypes," each a "conscious representation of adaptive behavior, his regression merely a coping mechanism. Like Pierre's criminal life and drug addiction, regressive narcissism is a way to be at "peace with [his] environment. Vernon's attitude--"the world revolves around me," and should "cater to my ideas, opinions, thoughts, and feelings-- only reflects the commitment the collective expects from him. Still Vernon's RCA vision of people and the world is not far from Kant, the notion that life is cause and effect, "a kind of theatre where perceptions make their appearances, pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety." The imperative, however, always involves sight and the imagination in Chris Cross's song "Sailing," the tune that bookends the novel.

    Well, it's not far back to sanity
    At least it's not for me
    And when the wind is right you can sail away
    Find serenity
    Oh, the canvas can do miracles
    Just you wait and see
    Then you'll believe me

    For Vernon, "the loner," the boy with few close friends, given more to playing on his computer and reading (pg 56) - who believes there are only two kinds of people, glorious, powerful boys, and prisoners "(70) - an allusion to I Spy or Mission Impossible merely supports Kant's theory on memory. Even Vernon's initial arrest evokes the theme and metaphor of Mission Impossible, the interlacing complexities - the invisible enemy in the darkness swelling in the street outside the kitchen window, the storm clouds of dissent, war, sexuality, peace, hate, loves. The "collective" for Vernon assimilates memory and real events in a time warp that travels with him - a friend, a companion - like the impossible mission entitled Memory ( episode number two 1966) the "Manchurian Candidate" - like plan to make a top Russian spy look like he betrayed his comrades. One might even see Jesus as a spy in the "enemy's camp," one who finally, exhausted by class bashing and sexual slurs, finally blew his abusers brains out.

    Predictable or not, to the inquiring mind, Vernon God Little is the quintessential 21st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death, one that explains why the "dumb ones" who roam with the herd, without thinking about every little thing" are better off, ones perfectly satisfied with government assistance, satisfied with life as long as they have a trailer and the "Barbecue chew" Barn. Vernon's so-called "learnings," are all be the same," based on the proposition that that "all the money, and folk's interest in fixing things" simply parades around the center of town then spread outwards in a dying wave." Case in point--the charade surrounding Vernon's arrest and conviction present movie archetypes even without the allusion...but always with a fly in the ink. Vernon sets up each allusion and archetype and memory with an image or recalled event. In Martirio, "although hot as hell," the "porch is icy cold with news," and "tears of regret," because "when the truth comes marching in, and it always comes, you know it."

    Just "watch any movie" Vernon dares us.

    Remember Vernon is the loner kid who likes to read and stay on the computer, who when fate fucks with him threatens to "load [his] pack, and lope way... like you see on TV." Consider the unnamed father/son shows of the 60s, and Peter Finley's/Pierre's life with diplomatic immunity and all the money in the world. Despite Pierre's epic debauchery, much like Joseph Campbell's Man of 1000 Faces, the father figure in the novel is absentee, no "Father Knows Best," no Fred Mc Murray, Andy Griffith, and Hugh Beaumont. Vernon, who barely remembers his blood father, imagines actor Brian Dennehy as a choice. At his mother's suggestion he hides his father's rifle in the abandoned mine at Keeter's Field where he and Jesus Navarro stash drugs and hang out. Still his dream choices and comments have larger implications, especially for a kid who chooses Jean Claude Van Dam, instead of Buford Pusser, as the world greatest bad ass. Quite a combination--action figure hero, alien caretaker in Cocoon, Arena fight trainer in Gladiator, corrupt Sheriff in First Blood, corrupt warden in The River Rat. Because these archetypes exist in memory he must reward his regression (regression as an adapting mechanism) by validating their existence. The reporter who wants his story; the warden who wants to kill him; the alien being that will carry him away from Marticio, another trinity to remind him that only chaos and violence recognize insignificance.

    Sometimes seems Jesus is the surrogate everything for Vernon, "with his retreaded, second-hand Jordan New Jacks... goddamn alternative lifestyle," whose character used to fit him so clean, like a sports sock (30)." How does a brand new sport's sock - clean, white, right out of the Trade-Mart package - fit a foot? Like an ideal life should, a life full of love and beauty and beauty where even the killers in Capote's In Cold Blood are, if not by social law, redeemed by the unwritten spiritual mitigations that always occur in film. When Jesus dies, the movie reel breaks. Once Vernon realizes the insignificant space Jesus occupies in the hearts and lives of the people, he runs to old Mexico. Where else would a killer like Perry Smith, Dick Hitchcock, and Billy the Kid and Vernon Little go?

    The philosophical tug-a-war between Vernon's existences-- real, imaginary - compete with Vernon's own personal movie. Vernon is the camera lens. Peter Finely produces. DBC Pierre is Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train, the auteur who loves the scene within a scene, an old movie, maybe W.S. Hart's Hell's Hinges, maybe even unconsciously Birth of a Nation...Texas. Most people, perhaps because of John Wayne, Walt Disney, and the Howard Hawks film think border country is perpetually hot as hell, full of sombrero descendents of Santa Anna making burritos and dreaming of freedom, that the barren walls of the Alamo symbolize nothing the resilience of the human spirit. Dressed in army brown, the West, in Vernon's dream resembles tin types of the top of a mantle. Maybe when Jesus dies he again recalls Kant, some vague nothing of duality, the spiritual alchemic failures in his life, the song - oh, what was it?

    How can you just walk away from me,
    you're the only one,
    who really knew me at all,
    'Cause there's just an empty space,
    There's nothing left here to remind me,
    Just the memory of your face,
    So take a look at me now,
    'Cause there's just an empty space,
    And you coming back to me, is against the odds,
    And that's what I've got to face(Collins).

    The allusion to the film Against All Odds could perhaps be the quintessential plight of the outlaw, the killer, reflects the dramatic irony of love, the suspension of disbelief in love. In John Ford's The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance, Lee Marvin, the bad guy, is the modern thug, the gangster mentality, the thief megalomaniac bad guy in 1000 western, but also a myth Jimmy Stewart's life is a lie. Ransom Stoddard kills the symbol, the type of man, the one time will resurrect and sent back to the world to finish things, to remind that all things live in opposition of something-- heart, mind, soul, even roses. Jesus' desperate attempt to be significant, and the symbols -- John Wayne's cactus rose, the wild adornment of a prickly green desert life saver; and Stoddard's cultivated, tame, rose, the effeminate symbol of aestheticism of culture, and the rhetorical question ...

    Have you ever seen a real rose, Hallie?

    Consider the temptation and the similarities. Hallie - the girl illiterate to books, but not the world, tempted to believe the West will be better infused with eastern freedom and progress; and Vernon, caught between two darkness, the fatherless one in Marticio and what media claims is real - whose only claim to fame is his kinship with Jesus--the memory of a time when they were "kings of the universe," a time " when the dirt on a sneaker [matters] more than the sneaker itself, when the two of them raze the wilds outside town with his dad's gun, [terrorizing ole beer cans, watermelons, and trash with a voice over ...

    It's like we were men before we were boys, back before we were whatever the fuck we are now.

    Growing up fast is a "learning" because "deep shit sweetens your plans like crazy." "Better Man" by Pearl Jam, the song about the girl who dreams of "when she was bold and strong, waiting for the world to come along, a better man to take her away." Movies replicate dreams, subliminal wish, even murder. Vernon relates his situation in a dead pan style, like the anchor on the 6:00 news, dispassionately ...

    I stand accused of just about every murder in Texas between the time I left home and when they hauled my ass back. With my face all over the media, folks started seeing me everywhere (205).

    Finally Vernon is significant. Still the meaning is clear; the very thing movies do for violence and tragedy. Movies can be judge and jury, during and after the fact - OJ Simpson, Gary Gilmore -while films like Dead Man Walking, A Time to Kill, The Green Mile illuminate in eternal non-closure involved, the line between spiritual and moral law, making a dollar out of death. What Vernon calls "the ultimate reality TV," the place "where the public can monitor, via cable or internet, prisoners' whole lives on death row," which "can live amongst them and make up their own minds about a convict's worthiness for punishment" merely reflects the fishbowl poor people live in. Like a reporter, Vernon elaborates on how" viewers [from] across the globe...cast [votes in regard to] which prisoner [should be] executed next," calling it "humanity in action, the next logical step toward true democracy" (250).

    Vernon God Little's "existential leap of faith" occurs, as is fitting, at the end, where concepts of grace, redemption, and forgiveness are on trial, or when in jail obsessively toying with the "cause and effect balls" of life (240). The irony appears in face and advice of an axe murder character of LaSalle who challenges Vernon's concept of God, that he should wake up to the fact that he remains "stuck in a "snake-pit of human wants, wants frustrated and calcified into needs," and realize this his predicament merely is the "effect" resulting from the fact that her got "in the way of another man's needs."What were Jesus' real needs. Perhaps he loved Vernon in a way he could not reciprocate because of some obtuse concept of faith. Vernon, according to LaSalle is "too darn embarrassed to play God," (261) that if he had set out from the beginning to "give the people" what they wanted he could have avoided the predicament he finds himself in (260).

    Understanding the collective is the key to understanding the darkness in the novel Vernon God Little, but it is more than just the media. Free will requires making decisions, deciding what is true for the individual, "rather than look to Sky, LaSalle argues ...

    Look down here, at us twisted dreamers.' He takes hold of my shoulders, spins me around, and punches me towards the mirror on the wall. 'You're the God. Take responsibility. Exercise your power.'

    Although the "order for my execution, effective six o'clock" results in Vernon" [falling] down on my knees and praying to God, the words "See me and suffer" and "everybody needs someone" elicit a "terminal learning" that perhaps offers a, objective correlative (288).

    Vernon's words remind of my father's fears for me and the ways things turned out after thirty years of living a tail-gunner's turret life style. On those days when I refused to see the value in education he would shake his head, embarrassed of the sixth grade education he traded for one lost summer on a Mississippi dredger, dreaming of New Orleans and women, admiring the great flotillas of drifters, black and white, the depression had left with nothing but their imagination to justify vagabonding between social and spiritual voids. One day he knew, like I assume Peter Finley's father knew. that I would have to redeem myself, that in spite of the mound of literature in the world I had the right to contribute at least, one, good, verse. When I read DB Pierre's biography and Vernon Little I thought of the crude talk I heard in the country where Mama was from, the dirty jokes and limericks-- John Prine's "Bruised Orange."

    Critics call it biting satire, whimsical farce. I call it what I remember about Mama's kin. Even in the middle of the summer, my nephews and cousins I could tell had been coerced into wearing their Sunday best when they came to town, even though they were going no farther than our house. Ingrained, no, branded on them was a stamp, invisible to them that wore it and clear as day to anyone else, that bottom of the barrel stamp signifying the recognition and acceptance of class. Sure-- Papa's brothers and even Papa himself had risen out from the under the memories of moving in the night to rented places that had never known one speck of love , walls that had never heard a mumbling word of kindness, praise, or tenderness. As for Vernon I think of No Country for Old Men... .

    There was this boy I sent to the electric chair at Huntsville here a while back-- my arrest and my testimony. He killed a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it; told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember; said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes.

    I smile: maybe there is a grotesque kind of eloquence, a sublime beauty in cruel poverty of pocket, of spirit, the Dionysian heart of hate - Pierre's prose suggests as much, and rings as true as Agee's cubistic syllogisms - trailer park heaven Texas, hard scrabble Alabama - same geometric designs of failure, same pentagonal shaped houses, lopsided by wind and wear; the rattling, bare ribbed gambrelled roofs; same dead eyed, wind sucked, hollow cheeked faces jawboned with worry, truth, vision, and redemption, rolling away the stone.
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