Brain Drain Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Apex Hides the Hurt’

The town gets renamed Struggle?

It?s honest. Too honest. It gets the hairs up on the back of my neck. I suddenly realize I?m not comfortable with all that honesty, perhaps because it?s such a rare occurrence.

This novel brings to mind how many times I?ve cringed at names while searching for a place to live. Having moved 13 times in my life, I?ve had visceral reactions to places like Newark (too often pronounced Nork), landing instead on the nearby Lincoln Street in Cranford. Perhaps choosing a house on that street name was my throwback to growing up with Harding, Kennedy, and Madison Avenues in the small town of Angola, NY.?(There, presidential power was?a delusion of granduer.) On the other hand, what 28th Street lacked in character was compensated for by the neighborhood of Murray Hill in a city with a choice of names, Manhattan, New York (never mistaken for Nork), The Big Apple, THE city.

According to our narrating nomenclature consultant:

What he had given to all those things had been the right name, but never the true name. For things had true natures, and they hid behind false names, beneath the skin we gave them. (182)

I wonder what, in honesty, I would name the places I?ve been? Angola. Social Cesspool, Backward Bend. I say this with mildly playful and wildly arrogant confidence because, well, the demographic there is hardly diverse. Point Breeze on Lake Erie was often referred to as Point Sleeze on Lake Dreary. The town is listed on epodunk.com. New York City, on the other hand, is too big. Too many things must be encompassed by just one name. I could never come close. (In fact, I just thought of another I hadn?t listed above, The City that Never Sleeps.)

Oddly, Struggle could be the name of any village, town, city, or country. Its the one word that represents every person?s internal workings and every relationship between people within its boundaries. It is the past, present and future. In essence, the name couldn?t be more perfect.

The problem is that people don?t want perfection or honesty. As our narrator reminds us:

Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then the light goes out of it? Once we knew the name of it, how could we ever come to love it? (182)

Honesty doesn?t provide hope for moving beyond struggle. It isn?t pretty or imaginative and yet it is the quagmire we all must face. The anti-apex.

(My apologies for the late arrival of this misfired synapse. I hit ?save? rather than ?publish? on Friday. ?Tis the season for abnormally high levels of brain drain.)

Whitehead draws some interesting connections between renaming a town, an adhesive bandage and a toy village. When asked about the town, our narrator says:

Winthrop is a traditional place-name, insisting on the specific history of the area and locating it in one man. The man embodies an idea, and the name becomes the idea. Standard stuff. The name New Prospera is what you might call the contemporary approach. Break it down into parts, and each part is referring to a quality they want to attach to the town. They bring the external in, import it you might say, to the region. (105)

Can Winthrop, one man who has long since passed on?as has his?defunct barbed wire company, represent an entire history of a town?s existence? Can the name New Prospera change what type of town the place becomes, erasing history and potentially creating something new?

Ehko International?s toy village, retooled, recrafted, revisiting the past in all that it had been and all that had been lost, according to the narrator, cannot be renamed. With the red, white and blue bricks of possibility, to create a new theater would also create new cinema, to dismantle the police station could perhaps dismantle crime, as if making a thing at once further?s it?s existence as well as calls into play it?s dichotomy. ?In the end, nothing was so pleasing as the image on the cover of the box and this was a lesson to be learned? (122).

This is symbolic of the struggle between the town?s third faction vying for power over the first two (with overlap between all three), rallying for the original name of Freedom. As Regina says, ?If I ask you your name and you tell me something other than what it is, that?s a lie? It should go back to Freedom. That?s it?s true name? (127). Perhaps it is a lie. Perhaps it is merely a new stage of history. One thing is for sure, everybody is talking about the full history of the place and that history, including the part about Freedom?is not lost… yet.

Enter the second to last toe on the narrator?s foot. Having stubbed it, our nameless nomenclature consultant places Apex, a multicultural adhesive bandage, over the injury. As he describes it:

The brown adhesive bandage was such a tone that it looked as if he?d never had a toenail at all. That he had never stumbled. Did it hide the hurt? Most assuredly so. (131)

Like the town, can the new name brand hide the hurt of those disappointed citizens who will lose the identity battle? Doesn?t the the name New Prospera fall short of assimilation as does the clear adhesive Band-Aid? Does?it matter?

My guess is that it matters a great deal. Apex may have hid the hurt, but I suspect that the toe continued to fester considering the fact that we know it was amputated. As with the town, a name may hide the hurt feelings of those who lose the battle for each name, and yet those citizens with attachments to what lands in the discard pile will fester with resentment. If the town?s name does return to Freedom, I suspect New Freedom will be in order. If New Luna, the soft drink, was a bit of foreshadowing, this is one way?of encompassing the history and possibility all in one. As the narrator says, ?The good ones always come back? (51). We shall see.

What?s in a name? In Apex Hides the Hurt, Whitehead?s narrator becomes a nomenclature consultant, stumbling upon the power of naming things while between jobs. He learns that a powerful and persuasive identity emerges once a product is named and the one who creates the name is also empowered. Prior to the naming, both the thing and the parties involved with its production are non-entities. Success depends upon what the name conjures in the public sphere and whether or not it is widely accepted. While Whitehead uses the conceit of corporate colonization throughout the novel, I also see a religious theme.

Marketing?seems rather god-like to me, particularly in correlation with Catholicism. The parental-client produces an unrecognized blob-child whose identity is nil until baptized with a chosen name. Only then is the possibility of eternal life breathed into the child-product, the seed of hope for the perpetuation of the system.

The original names of Adam and Eve, according to the book of Genesis, were handed down by God, the father himself. God then told Adam to name the animals and he would rein over their kingdom. In both cases, he who names holds?the power. Eve surely got the short end of the stick… but so did Jesus, so to speak. Then again, if the one with the most names wins, Jesus takes the prize. I digress.

In Apex Hides the Hurt, the job of naming goes to the all powerful and knowing marketing firm with a finger on the pulse of parishioner demographics. Our narrator ?came up with the names and like any good parent he knocked them around to teach them life lessons? (3). This is God the father?s test, offering?up free will only to see if his children will sin against him or remain true when faced with life’s obstacles.?

The relationship between god, parent and child (a holy trinity of the non-traditional sort) is not over once the name is assigned. The identity of all three hinges on the?loyalty of each individual part. For this reason, the parental-client makes a covenant with the marketing firm, accepting certain commandments. ?They had to stick to the rules if they were going to use the name? (38). After all, god is only as strong as the faith of his obedient disciples. Without a faithful and devoted flock, god?s power is bankrupt.

Naming is just the first part of the life cycle. The ability to create identity offers an “insurance policy to reassure people or make them feel less depressed so they can accept the world”(44). Faith in the marketing god heals what ails the good people of this earth, offering?a promise?for their general betterment and salvation.?

Spreading the word is the other side of the coin. The flock must increase to better serve god and also to offer fellowship and support to those in need (of bandages, pills and such). This is where branding comes into play. Name recognition and ?sacred logos? (37) offer comforting reminders to the populace. ?It was not the first time he had been saved by the recognizable logo of an international food franchise, its emanations and intimacies? (37). In moments of faltering faith and despair, whenever two customers or more are gathered in ?The Admiral?s? name, all is again right with the world.

Yes, we can rest assured that the corporate God is always here, reminding us of his presence with the ever-reliable change of season at Outfit Outlet. Our narrator ?had heard of people who had made regular pilgrimages to the windows? (41). Devoted sheep in awe of this great mystery offer generous tithes into the great collection plate?with?the high hope that they will have sacrificed enough of themselves to reach nirvana one day.