So, you might wonder how tattoos and literature are supposed to be related. Firstly, tattoos are becoming more and more popular these days and proportionate to their occurence also acceptance in society is increasing. Literature, then, has to reflect this societal change - at least it is my endeavour to find prove for this. Does the tattooed person per se get described differently in the more recent novels as in comparison to earlier ones (Melville's Moby Dick being an exception)? Or am I completely wrong in assuming that most tattooed characters in literature can be sorted into the category of 'bad guy' or are designed as characters on the margins of society being violent, uneducated, criminal, dirty, immoral ... and so on ... and so on. Therefore, a social component can be detected and of course you are invited to put forth your ideas for which reasons people will get a tattoo. What is their psychological motivation?
What books come to your mind? How are the characters described there? In case you should know of more than one book with tattooed characters, in which way do these characters then differ from one another - if they do at all? Do they confirm or rather contruct commonly held stereotypes and prejudices?
By the way, books does not just mean thick tomes or heavy volumes but also drama, screenplays, short stories or small dime 'novels'.
4 Kommentare:
Some references to tattoos in novels are indeed erratic and very short such as the ones in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club or John Grisham's The Street Lawyer for example. Then again, we have Herman Melville's Moby Dick where one of his protagonists, Queequeg, keeps us company for hundreds of pages. He is not just a tattooed savage from an alien land who is mentioned in a side remark but in the course of the novel, he becomes a well-rounded, multi-facetted character whose ferocious and sinister first exterior is gradually filled with a quite amiable and honourable personality.
Let us take up Palahniuk's novel first. In the entire novel, we find the word 'tattoo' only used two times and these two instances do not tell us anything about the persons who wear - or would want to wear - them. They do not serve as a comment, as a characterisation but simply seem to express that it is common nowadays to have a tattoo. Moreover, having a tattoo has become normal to that degree that Palahniuk does not even bother to tell the readers what kind of a tattoo it is and in which place on the body it has been inked or what the tattooee's intentions and motivations were to get the tattoo. Having a tattoo is just as normal and commonplace as owning a DVD-Player or a computer; the tattoo has become a consumer good - the modern version of conspicuous consumption. There is no inner meaning in the tattoo any longer as it was the case with Queequeg whose scars and tattoos are part of his thinking, culture, and spirituality. Palahniuk apparently makes no statement about the nature of the tattoo or about the person(s) wearing it, but why then mention it in the first place? The excerpt from Fight Club reads as follows:
"Skinny guys, they never go limp. They fight until they're burger. White guys like
skeletons dipped in yellow wax with tattoos, black men like dried meat...."
OK. Among those who flock regularly to the Fight Club's meetings are some guys who are tattooed, fine. So what?
With Grisham the matter is a bit different. In his novel The Street Lawyer where a lawyer for the homeless and stranded people in society reports:
"Next was a sight that shocked me: a white man, about forty, with no tattoos, facial scars, chipped teeth, earrings, bloodshot eyes, or red nose."
Here, the implication is clear and obvious: the under-privileged, the riff-raff get into fights, get tattoos and get drunk regularly. This is not necessarily Grisham's opinion but it is the point of view the middle-class, bourgeois newbie lawyer who tells us the story – as a representative for all others of his class – proclaims.
Are these two novels, Fight Club and The Street Lawyer, only two sides of the same coin? Is one the representation of a numbed and indifferent society and the other a representation of a bourgeois and basically square society?
Feel free to comment or to make suggestions of your own for new novels, dramas, etc.
I have collected a few suggestions for reading when it comes to tattoos in English and American literature. However, most references are very brief and the tattooed character's presence in the novel or story is also of a limited scope. But as I have said already, these are merely suggestions. It would be interesting to see whether anyone else can come up with additional recommendations for reading.
Andre Norton: Operation Time Search
Anne McCaffrey: The Coelura
Carson McCullers: shortstories
Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man
Charles Dickens:Hard Times
Charles Dickens:Oliver Twist
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club
Douglas Rushkoff: Cyberia
E. W. Hornung: Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman
Edgar Allan Poe: Hans Phall
Emily Prager: Eve's Tattoo
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Henry D. Thoreau: Walden
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Herman Melville: Typee
Herman Melville: The Piazza Tales
Herman Melville: Omoo
Herman Melville: Billy Budd Sailor
John Danalis: Uncle Lou's Tattoos
John Grisham: The Street Lawyer
John Locke: Human Understanding
Larry Niven: Crashlander
Larry Niven: Inferno
Larry Niven: Ringworld
Louisa May Alcott: Little Men
Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain: Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain:The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain: The American Claimant
Nathaniel Hawthorne: House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Lady Eleonore's Mantle
Ray Bradbury: The Illustrated Man
Ray Bradbury: Something Wicked this Way Comes
Roald Dahl:Someone like you: Skin
Robert A. Heinlein: Citizen of the Galaxy
Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped
Robert Louis Stevenson: In the South Seas
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Footnote to History
Stephen King: The Green Mile
Stephen King: The Cycle of the Werewolf
Tenessee Williams: The Rose Tattoo
various artists: The Bible
Willa Cather: My Antonia
William Gibson: The Bridge Trilogy
William Gibson: Count Zero
William Gibson: Mona Lisa Overdrive
William James: Varieties of Religious Experience
The book of Ray Bradbury THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is a fine example of how tattoos, literature and even the life skripts of persons can be connected. THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is a collection of eighteen, seemingly unconnected tales. The illustrations cover the man’s entire body and develop a life of their own with every breath, every movement, and every flexing of a muscle of their bearer. In assuming a life of their own the tattoos tell of other people’s dreams, follies, and delusions ultimately showing their mostly ghastly fate. Whenever people notice their very own lives (and sometimes deaths) depicted on the skin of a stranger, they evict him from their midst. For this reason the illustrated man has become an outcast, a vagrant comparable to the wandering eternal Jew. Here are eighteen startling visions of mankind's history, psychology, and destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin – visions as keen as a tattooist's needle and as colourful as the inks that indelibly adorn the body.
Right at the beginning, the illustrated man himself informs the narrator – and of course the reader too – of the nature of his tattoos, telling him that “each illustration is a little story. If you watch them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale. In three hours of looking, you could see eighteen or twenty stories acted right on my body, you could hear voices and think thoughts. It's all here, just waiting for you to look." The narrator is impressed with the artful and exquisite execution of the ‘illustrations’ and marvels at their beauty and the “riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and color that you could hear the voices murmuring small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body. When his flesh twitched, the tiny mouths flickered, the tiny green-and-gold eyes winked, the tiny pink hands gestured."
Even though the narrator’s encounter with the illustrated man merely serves as a frame that holds the eighteen stories, it still has something to say about tattoos and their significance and it may also say something about the author’s, Ray Bradbury’s, attitude towards them.
First of all, it is striking and unusual that an author should choose tattoos on a vagrant’s body to provide a frame for stories irradiating the human condition and mind. It could have been anything else ranging from a dream like in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrims Progress to an ancient book discovered by chance or a mysterious painting in some strange art shop located in a dingy side street. But Bradbury had deliberately chosen a tattooed person as the projection plane for his stories and thus testifies to a (presumably) friendly attitude towards tattoos and their bearers respectively. Then again, the readers cannot fail to notice that he was not able to entirely rid himself of the prevalent and all-pervasive preconceived notions about tattooed people (unemployed, run-down scum, vagrants … you name it!). Bradbury’s illustrated man is yet living on society’s margin for the reason of being tattooed.
What is striking, however, is he fact that Bradbury takes up the idea behind most tattoos, namely that their very essence is intricately linked to the tattooed person’s life script. Memorable occurrences, loved ones, epistemological convictions or simply the wish to express one’s desires are the soil from whence the flower of tattoo will sprout. In the case of The Illustrated Man the tattoos no longer are the pictorial manifestation of a person’s memory of instances in his life which have left an imprint in his mind or of believes which have been shaped as consequences of a long train of past experiences but they relate to future events in the lives of others, of complete strangers even. This inversion of principle brings about the illustrated man’s hardship and may also account for so many bleak and unnatural existences in the various episodes featured in the book.
Alright, I have to admit that tattooed people are not always the bad guys in a novel but are rather insignificant side characters. I presume (for the author’s sake) that his words are well chosen and that considerable thought is given to the presentation of each character in any given tale. Departing from this assumption, there needs to be a good reason why a person is described as being tattooed, which means that the author consciously draws on his readers’ conception of tattoos and tattooed people. Mostly, it is indeed not the kind or placement of the tattoo which is of importance but rather the fact of being tattooed. The motif as such is seldom explicitly mentioned with the exception of instances when we are confronted with a motto tattoo like in Stephen King’s novel THE GREEN MILE where a young prison inmate has the words “Billy the Kid” tattooed on his left arm. But the question is which images the author’s readership may connect with tattoos and in which ways he tries to evoke these stereotypes in the reader. Accordingly, it is crucial to take the literary figure’s environment, both in relation to place and society, into consideration.
In the following lines I would like to take up three additional works by Stephen King in chronological order of their publication. Firstly, from the year 1981: CUJO. King describes a male ‘model’ for Voit’s swimsuits. He is „a man who was the utter antithesis of the Miami beachboy. Standing arrogantly hipshot on the golden beach of some tropical paradise, the model was a fifty-year-old man with tattoos, a beer belly, slab-muscled arms and legs, and a puckered scar high across one thigh. In his arms this battered soldier of fortune was cradling a pair of Voit swimfins.”
Is this really the image King wants to evoke in his readers’ imagination when he shows tattooed persons in his tales and novels? Ugly people beyond their zenith who have failed to make the best of themselves and their lives?
Secondly, I will turn to Stephen King’s short story CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF of the year 1985. There, he portrays the last thoughts and moments of the tattooed bar owner Alfie Knopfler who – despite the common fear that pervades the little town – keeps his diner fearlessly opened. Once, he has been in the army and he feels a certain pride for the muscle he has built up there and kept until now. Alfie’s most beautiful love memory seems to be a long past quickie in the back seat of his car and his idea of knocking off work is spending the evening with a six-pack of beer. The only thing left to mention is that Alfie does not valiantly throw all his 220 pounds and his army training into the scale in order to dearly sell his life but that he first scalds himself with hot coffee and later trips over the coffee urn. Ultimately, he is dismembered by the werewolf. Again, it is rather difficult – as before – to speak of an identification figure. He is an innkeeper who can only subsist because his place is the only café in town.
Finally, I will devoted my attention to some phrases of one of King’s lesser known novels BAG OF BONES of 1998:
„When trouble comes and steps have to be taken, I find it's generally better to just stand aside and let the boys in the basement do their work. That's blue-collar labor down there, non-union guys with lots of muscles and tattoos.”
The overall direction becomes evident: The guys with the well-developed arms and the not so well-developed minds will take on the unqualified work. The fact that they are tattooed to boot further supports their membership to a marginal i.e. underprivileged, stigmatised group. The intended chain of association would read as follows: strong – stupid – unqualified – tattooed.
As the above examples (at least those taken from Stephen King) show, little has changed in the last twenty years when it comes to the image of tattooed people in literature. The phenomenon of tattoo predominantly remains a trademark of males from the lower classes and is closely connected to animalistic, physical power and absence of intellectual capacities.
But how about other authors? In society, the image of tattooed persons has undergone a change for the better in recent years and people have become more open-minded. Each and every writer, irrespective of his nationality, is a social being. Can we then detect the overall change taking place in society at large in contemporary literature? Which examples can be found?
Kommentar veröffentlichen