Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

(Romina) #1

32 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel


Rudy Williams is another character in the novel for whom it is
occasionally difficult to feel a great deal of sympathy. Like Irene,
Williams alters the morphology of his name—inexplicably shift-
ing from “Rudy” to “Rudi” in his many letters. Of course, the tone
and register of Williams’s voice represents a large departure from
that of Irene: while the latter projects a hauntingly tortured vul-
nerability, the former boils with indignant self-righteousness and
pride. Nonetheless, there are some significant similarities between
the characters and their respective social and material circumstances
that Phillips makes visible to the reader. Like Irene, Williams is also
an individual suffering from a crushing sense of social isolation and
detachment, albeit in more repressive circumstances. Spending most
of the time depicted in the narrative incarcerated in solitary confine-
ment in an American prison in the 1960s, he tells his story through
a series of desperate, angry, and often offensive letters to his friends
and relatives.
Perhaps the most conspicuous barriers to the reader’s sympathy
come in the form of the character’s bigotry and bullying self-righ-
teousness. Williams is an unabashed homophobe, persistently refer-
ring to homosexuals as “faggots” and “perverts” (pp. 107–144). He
is also a staunch Black Nationalist and racist who opposes integra-
tionist policies and endorses the hard-line segregationist ideology of
the early Nation of Islam movement (p. 115). Jesus, he argues, was
a “white faggot woodsman with long hippy hair who messed with
the Jews and got what was coming to him” (p. 76). His attitude
toward women is also far from endearing. Black women are there to
“listen to” and “support” their black husbands, and should “under-
stand that the full burden of American society’s dehumanizing bull
falls on the African man’s shoulders” (p. 77). Upon learning of his
sister’s pregnancy, Williams chastises her for being an “adulterous
dog [... who has] lost the world” for a “spasm of pleasure” (p. 160).
But what makes Williams even less likeable as a character is his
hypocrisy—while rebuking his sister for adultery and licentious-
ness, he boasts elsewhere of his own macho sexual conquests, tak-
ing “high fives all round” from his friends in a bar when he is told
(and brazenly denies) that he has made a fifteen-year-old girl preg-
nant (p. 86).

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