"Twin Krishnas"

“Ugh.” has become the most common margin note that I make in the book, sometimes even arriving twice on the same page. And like last week, I still really want to talk about racial representation in the book.

My last post mainly criticized Dines for focusing on Eastern European immigrants as a site of racial otherness instead of black Americans. (I mean, it didn’t even have to be an either/or. He could have discussed both.) But this week I want to add another element to the mix: the bizarre invocation of Orientalism in the descriptions of Trip Fontaine and his father. (Side note: I’m still salty about the narrators unquestioned use of the word “iffiness” to describe the dad’s sexuality, especially since the only other gay character expresses visible inappropriate attraction to a minor).

Anyway, I think Dines really, really missed an opportunity to discuss how Trip and his father get exoticized and eroticized through a comparison to weird orientalist caricatures. It starts with the narrator’s obsession with their skin color. Their deep tan is constantly referenced, reminding the reader again and again how they stand in contrast to the other boys and men in the school and in the area who have pale skin. And this obsession then manifests a bizarre racial comment when the narrator states, “At dusk, Mr. Fontaine’s and Trip’s skins appeared almost bluish, and, putting on their towel turbans, they looked like twin Krishnas.” Ugh. I get that this whole book is about mythologizing and exoticizing people, but really? Haven’t spectral racial references been exploited as a method of exoticizing white people enough? This seems like the literary equivalent of Katy Perry’s new Dark Horse video (which you should watch with a barf bag handy).

The narrator doesn’t leave it there, though. Instead, he keeps going and turns it into a motif by referencing Trip’s car as an “aerodynamic scarab.” Again, ugh. I get it, Eugenides. You like imagery. But the repeated use of racial icons to exoticize and mythologize white characters isn’t something you should be doing, especially in a work that is already painfully white and unquestioning of its characters’ less-than-subtle racism.

Just ugh. Ugh. Lots of ugh.

These "ughs" have been brought to you by Jack Flynn.