I started a course for English Literature beginning teachers with this quote from Russell Banks' novel "Continental Drift". Two of Banks' novels have been made into movies: ' The Sweet Hereafter' and 'Affliction'. The quote is taken from his 'Envoi' at the end of the novel. Continental Drift is about a very ordinary furnace repairman (Bob Dubois) from upper state New York. He and his family move to Florida and Bob ends up smuggling Haitians (including Vanise and Claude Dorsinville) into America.
The conversation that resulted was very intense and we continually refer to it now, after Sept. 11.
Brian McAndrews
------------------------------------ A portion of Banks' Envoi ---------------------------
...And the lengthy, detailed history of such a man must celebrate or grieve, depending on whether he lives or dies, even though nothing seems to happen as a result of his life or death even though the Haitians keep on coming, and many of them are drowned, brutalized, cheated and exploited, and where they come from remains worse than where they are going to; and even though the men in three-piece suits behind the desks in the banks grow fatter and more secure and skillful in their work; and even though young American men and women without money, with trades instead of professions, go on breaking their lives trying to bend them around the wheel of commerce, dreaming that when the wheel turns, they will come rising up from the ground like televised gods making a brief special appearance here on earth, nothing like it before or since, such utter transcendence that any awful sacrifice is justified.
The world as it is goes on being itself. Books get written novels, stories and poems stuffed with particulars that try to tell us what the world is, as if our knowledge of people like Bob Dubois and Vanise and Claude Dorsinville will set people like them free. It will not. Knowledge of the facts of Bob�s life and death changes nothing in the world. Our celebrating his life and grieving over his death, however, will. Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives no, especially wholly invented lives deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book�s objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.
Russell Banks
�Continental Drift� Pg 365 - 366
1985
Harper Collins Pub.
