Remembrance of Things Past

By June Pulliam

07/04/2007

Little, Bentley. The Burning. New York: Signet, 2006. 391 p.

American amnesia about history makes the past a fertile field for horror, since this past is never really gone, but alive in how those people and events from long ago ultimately shape us.  So it’s not surprising that Little’s most recent novel makes use of part of our horrific national past to create a post-modern gothic tale of terror. The Burning covers ground not generally explored by authors, let alone horror writers—the fate of the Chinese laborers who built the railroads in the American West.  Between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the 20^th century, lynchings of Asian-Americans in the West were as common as the lynchings of African Americans by the KKK in the rest of the nation. One of the most notorious of these events was the Chinese Massacre of 1871 where a mob of over 500 white people murdered approximately 20 Chinese Americans in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. The event was ultimately part of a growing anti-Chinese sentiment in the country, fueled in part by unstable economic conditions at the close of the Civil War which caused many whites to see immigrants and minorities as competitors for limited jobs and therefore threats to their own financial stability. 

Little’s novel is concerned with this period of history, and he describes in hideous detail various lynchings of Asian-Americans throughout the American West in the 19^th century.  Whether or not he is taking poetic license with these lynchings, I am not qualified to say, but the violent indignities he describes as being visited on this population are very similar to what the Klan did to African-Americans (and to other non-WASPs, for that matter), in the 19^th and 20^th century. Also similar, and perhaps shocking to modern readers not familiar with the history of hate groups, is the public nature of the lynchings. Photographic images of lynchings are easily found in news papers and even in postcards from between the 1870s to the 1930s. While these images come from all parts of the country, what they have in common is that the participants posed for the camera with their faces uncovered after committing what should have been prosecuted as first degree murder, demonstrating how they expected to not be punished for their actions. [1]

While The Burning is rooted in the 19^th century, its ultimate focus is the 21^st century. The ghosts of those murdered Asians want more than recognition of their fate—they want revenge—and they make themselves known to whites and non-whites alike in a variety of ways. Ghost trains full of the spirits of the murdered dead roll throughout the nation, materializing occasionally to deface national monuments and break down the walls of the Oval Office. Unmarked sites where their bodies lay are haunted by an incomprehensible chanting, and eventually when their desiccated corpses are disinterred, the mold on the bodies transforms itself into the malignancy of an American spirit borne of a sinister inflection of American Exceptionalism which saw the United States as superior to other countries because it was controlled by racially superior WASPs who had to protect their unique heritage and the American Dream through preventing racial Others from overrunning and defiling the nation. And this malignancy has no difficulty grafting itself on whites in the 21^st century, where blacks and Latinos are often denounced as being responsible for ruining the public school system and taking jobs away from “real” Americans. In Flagstaff, Arizona, Angela Ramos’ white roommate who previously appeared open and tolerant now denounces her as a “brown bitch” and a “beaner” after coming into contact with the malignant mold, and Angela is forced to find a new place to live. Local college students lynch an older Asian woman, and indicate that her death is just the beginning of a larger blood bath to come. But this malignant racism is not isolated in Flagstaff, but rears its ugly head in small towns throughout the American West where in the past non-whites were lynched for the crime of being non-white. The ghosts, who want revenge, are inflaming the ugly passions of people throughout the country, causing racial violence to erupt. Uninfected non-whites and whites must come together and intervene to prevent the horrors of the past from repeating themselves in a sort of eye for an eye justice that leaves everyone blind.

The Burning can best be described as post-modern gothic. The Burning is gothic in that the events occur in an environment with an oppressive and brooding atmosphere just beneath the surface. As a Southerner I understand this all too well. Even visitors to the South have at least some idea of what occurred in what is now euphemistically described on many plantation home tours as the “servants’ quarters,”even if they are ignorant of the specific horrors perpetrated in the antebellum South and after the war during the Jim Crow era. But what is often less well-known is the extent of racist sentiment throughout the nation, not just towards African-Americans, but towards Jews, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and the Irish, to name a few. These sentiments from the past are exposed quite literally when the corpses of the victims of racial violence are unearthed everywhere from California to Missouri. But of course, the past is not linear, but is always present in ways we often don’t recognize. For example, Don Imus and some of his fellow shock jocks might have lost their jobs due to their off color remarks about people of color, but the money they made  for their bosses before they crossed the line enough to be fired is a testament to how we are perhaps not more enlightened than our ancestors.

Little’s fascination with groupthink, a concept he revisits in most of his novels, makes The Burning post-modern as well as gothic. Perfectly kind and reasonable people are capable of becoming monsters if exposed to the right stimulus, whether it be ideologies of hate that disguise themselves as rational ways of viewing the world or evil spirits or malignant black mold. In Little’s brand of horror, ideology takes flesh to become the monster, possessing unsuspecting humans who are not much more than automatons devoid of free will, and this is finally what makes The Burning so disturbing.