Before we see images, we hear the faint blow of driving hammers colliding with rock. In syncopated rhythms, with staggered impacts, the sledging sounds grow more distinct. “In black, we hear a chain-gang chant, many voices together, spaced around the unison strike of picks against rock. A title burns in.”2 Bleached words slowly develop onto the screen: “O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all the ways of contending, a wanderer, harried for years on end…”3 In between
hammered clanks, we hear a man call out, “Po’ Lazarus,” with each man down the line resounding the name, like an echo in a canyon. Then, nearly a full minute removed from those first sounds, our first image appears as the men begin singing: “Well the High Sheriff, he tole de deputy, won’t you go out an’ bring me Laz’us. Bring him dead or alive. Lawd, Lawd, bring him dead or alive.”4
The first images we see frame a flat Delta landscape in a wide-angle. The camera
1 Joel Coen, O Brother Where Art Thou?, directed by Joel Coen (2000; Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 2000), DVD.
2 Coen, O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?
3 Coen, O’ Brother Where Art Thou? See also Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, 1961.
4 James Carter and The Prisoners, “Po’ Lazarus,” recorded 1959, Southern Journey Vol. 5: Bad Man Ballads: Songs of Outlaws and Desperadoes, 1997, digital
proceeds through a series of establishing shots, alternating from ground-level low to horseback high, each revealing an up-close perspective on the singing men, chained together at the ankles, working on a road in the high-noon sun. The screenplay notes emphasize, as the chant continues, “wider angles show the chain gang at work. They are black men in bleached and faded stripes, chained together, working under a brutal midday sun. It is a flat delta countryside, the straight-ruled road stretches to infinity,” while mounted guards with shotguns lazily patrol the line.5 These sights and sounds open Joel and Ethan Coen’s film, O’ Brother, Where Art Thou, and frame three important themes for this project.
The first, and perhaps the most prominent theme of the film is the road. The first sounds we hear are of men working on actual roads; the film’s epigraph features the opening line of Homer’s Odyssey, an epic road narrative about a wanderer on a long journey home; the first song we hear tells the story of Lazarus, a disgruntled worker on the run from the law; our main characters are three escaped convicts on the run; and their central encounters are with racial others on the railroad and at the crossroads. From beginning to end, the symbolism and mythology of the road is a personified character in the film. The second prevalent theme in the film is American folk music. Truly, one could argue that the film may be more renowned for its Grammy award-winning
soundtrack than the actual movie. Similar to the prevalence of the road, the music is also a personified character in the film, intonating the musical styles of the period while also accenting the peculiarities of place. For instance, of the nineteen songs featured in the original soundtrack, sixteen feature some aspect of wandering or traveling, both secular
and divine.
The third,6 and final, motif that I want to focus on from the film is public or civic discourse. That is, the filmmakers, using the symbolism of the road and American folk music as a mythological and aesthetic backdrop, stage the dramatic relations of the film around a political campaign between incumbent Governor Pappy O’ Daniel and an up- and-comer named Homer Stokes. At the same time, this campaign, which features the candidates traveling through the region, using radio and public address, is used to establish the underlying political issue at stake in the narrative: race relations in the segregated south. Considered together, the themes related to the road, American folk music, and civic discourse join forces to form a powerful interconnected mythology, each connected by the underlying imagery and sounds of the road. This mythology
foregrounds the main argument of this project, that is, that the road is psychagogic, mediating our encounters with others and leading the soul toward a better life. In chapter three, I focus on this mythology in American folk music. In chapter four, I concentrate on this mythology in civil rights discourse.
I have outlined the thematic importance of this film to establish the fundamental claims and themes of this chapter and the remaining chapters in this dissertation.
Released in the year two thousand, O’ Brother, Where Art Thou is uniquely positioned at the crossroad of a new century and millennium to serve as an ideal representative
anecdote from which to consider the significance of the road as a mythology in twentieth-
6 There is a fourth theme, which I have tactically omitted. That is, the film enters into a broad cinematic conversation about the mythology of the road in American culture, drawing from a rich history of films about prisons and the road. Though the cinema may be the most popular means of disseminating the mythology of the road in American culture today, for generations, long before the photographic image or the cinema, American folk music and civic discourse formed the foundation for this mythology.
century American culture. It is one of the great cinematic stump speeches about the twentieth century in the new millennium. Specifically, the film offers valuable insight on how the mythology of the road gets disseminated in American culture. Its use of
archetypal myth, represented in the thematic tones of Homer’s Odyssey, characterizes the issues that are most pertinent to twentieth-century American culture, animating them on Delta roads in the Deep South and coloring them with Depression era hues. Moreover, the film further substantiates my claim to the road as a rhetorical encounter with the other through its array of character encounters and its meditation on race relations. But what is a representative anecdote and how does it establish my fundamental claims?
In an essay titled “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Kenneth Burke refers to the representative anecdote as a pattern of experience that is representative of the social. A “true vehicle,” Burke calls it.7 In this essay, writing in the midst of the Great
Depression, Burke seeks to apply the comforts of proverbial wisdom as a social tool for living to all of literature. Furthering this idea, in his essay, “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism,” Barry Brummett refers to the representative anecdote as a “trained awareness” toward types of dramatic form. It enables us to extract some semblance of order from the cultural chaos while also helping us decipher what a culture “most deeply fears and hopes.”8 Both Burke and Brummett give us a method for confronting not just our living, but in particular, that living in relation with others. With a representative anecdote, we can decipher patterns of experience from the confusing signals of cultural coding. In this case, I use the themes of the film to frame pertinent
7 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 300.
8 Barry Brummett, “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1 (1984): 174.
issues in twentieth-century American culture using the mythology of the road as my “true vehicle.”
To substantiate this Burkean idea, I turn to Gregory Clark, who offers an example of Burke’s representative anecdote in action, by applying the idea to Burke himself, namely his poetry, lending further credibility to the argument that I am making:
Maybe he can use this representative anecdote of the automobile, and his experiences driving one in the traffic of the continent, to make the problem of a technological identity immediate. He also can talk about how, driving in our cars, identified with them rather than with the others with whom we share the road, and not with the landscape itself that makes our lives possible, we are living at high risk, individually and collectively. Repeatedly in these poems, the technological displacement of nature is accompanied by a distancing of humans from one another.9
In other words, Clark sees the use of the automobile in the poetry of Burke, particularly “Tossing on the Floodtides of Sinkership,” as a way of framing the problem of identity and human displacement as it relates to technology. Similarly, I use the representative anecdote of the road, specifically, as an archetype animated by encounters with others, particularly in American folk music and civic discourse, as a way of situating the problem of identity and human displacement as it relates to twentieth-century American culture.
Moreover, as a final point of emphasis, O’ Brother is also an ideal representative anecdote because it appears in that most functional of frames, the comic. Specifically, Burke argues that the comic frame is the most serviceable in the handling of human relationships because it promotes a realistic sense of our limitations—charitable but not
9 Gregory Clark, “’Sinkership’ and ‘Eye-Crossing’: Apprehensive in the
gullible.10 More specifically, Burke writes about the motives we assign to our neighbors and ourselves, namely, that they are essential in the formation of both private and public relationships. In those relations, a comic frame of motives avoids the “sentimental denial of materialistic factors in human acts” and the “cynical brutality that comes when such sensitivity is outraged.”11 Put differently, the comic frame, as a “method of study (man as eternal journeyman),” is a better personal possession, marked by “mature social efficacy” and a more “adventurous equipment,” than a mere empty accumulation of facts.12 In this elaborately woodcut framework, O’ Brother equips Americans to be observers of their history and be liberated from their passiveness through a maximum consciousness that transcends the liabilities of our foibles—changing the rules of the game of life.13
At stake then, as Richard Hughes writes, “There is perhaps no more compelling a task for Americans to accomplish in the twenty-first century than to learn to see the world through someone else’s eyes.”14 Using rhetoric as a road, and road as rhetoric, this is the goal of this dissertation. To that end, what has existing road discourse, primarily as a genre predicated on socio-cultural rebellion in postwar America, done to help us understand the more complex dimensions of the road in American life? In my effort to address the questions, using myth as a methodological access point, I aim to see American culture through the perspective African American experience.
In our present moment, having emerged into a new century and millennium, I take this opportunity to reflect on twentieth-century American culture. However, given that
10 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Los Altos, CA: Hermes, 1959), 107. 11 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 170.
12 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 170-1. 13 Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 171.
14 Richard Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 1.
America is comprised of such a vast ideological landscape, it becomes essential to chart a particular route so as not to get lost. As I argued in chapter one, despite the broad history of the road in human history, much less American history, study of the road is quite nascent. In part, this may help explain any limitations to such studies. Indeed, I have argued that story simplex, or rhetorically, trained incapacities, often limit our abilities to see beyond the boundaries of dominant discourse. To counter this tendency, I have used the road as a way of conceptualizing rhetoric, and now, I put this reoriented rhetoric to the test by considering it in relation to the road in American culture. Put differently, the ethical character and implications of the road as an archetype have not been sufficiently explored and this dissertation seeks to mind that gap. Collectively, these two chapters work together to prepare us to enter into chapters three and four. In this section, I make the remaining component parts of this dissertation more explicit. That is, having delineated my intent with regards to rhetoric, here, I make clear what I intend by myth and the road in American culture.