Connections / Realization / Analysis
(I didn't read all of the 4 posts, so hopefully this is something not yet said…)
Connecting Aspects of Jack's Emotional Self
and The Disintegration of the Great Twitch
I'd like to discuss the culmination of Jack's denial -- his final acceptance of responsibility. As events set in motion earlier in the book begin to come full circle and further spiral inward, we see the Spider Web theory in action -- Jack is finally able to live up to the responsibility that Cass Mastern embodied that he couldn't possibly understand in his college mindset. The circumstances of the Judge's (his father's) death are remarkable in their full-circle nature. Jack realizes this and bursts into laughter, a rare showing of genuine emotion (even if it has that Jack-esque sardonic edge).
Jack's self-denial was so extensive that the last time, before the floodgates of emotion break after the Judge dies, that he shows emotion was, essentially, when he was deeply in love with Anne at age 17. This part of the novel comes full circle too when he finally marries her. When he finds out that his mother, whom he previously thought was cold and incapable of love, is actually tender and loving of the dead Judge, it is cathartic for Jack's emotional body. It really helps him grow up to learn this. He also feels good about placating his mother with the lie that he was in no way responsible for the Judge's murder. We as the reader can sympathize; his mother has already gone through a great deal. This release of emotional blockage relating to his mother helps him fully actualize his love with Anne because he now has an easier time with his own emotions. His emotional self matures throughout the novel.
Furthering the discussion of Jack's emotional body is the intertwined sense of responsibility. As Jack is forced to confront himself and his responsibility in virtually all of the affairs which eventually culminate into the deaths of Adam, Willie and the Judge, he sheds his idea of the Great Twitch, opens emotionally, and develops tremendously as a character. Jack sums up his life with "For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and the man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not." (Warren, 605) This quote perfectly characterizes the novel because by extension it reveals that eventually, throughout the course of the novel, Jack does learn to differentiate that responsibility. The first step is, at the very least, to identify when he causes certain things--he recognizes his role in the Judge's suicide, for example. He begins to wake up to his own sense of responsibility much the way an adolescent does--through trial and error. The entire novel I have seen Jack as being very fragile and simultaneously insensitive. He was fragile because he was unable to fully understand the events around him and his place within them--it was all kind of a grey swirling mass of time happening and people and roads and memories. But he was insensitive to it because he removed himself from it. He was, to himself, essentially, the Great Twitch itself--an in cohesive piece of life, meaningless and randomly placed.
The unraveling of the Theory of the Great Twitch is analogous to Jack's own emotional development and his responsibility-development. These things are broiling throughout the novel, the Great Twitch theory ebbed on by his frustration around Anne's affair with Willie. This event further weakens Jack's already fragile self-esteem and weak sense of self. He thinks, for example, that Willie got Anne because of a certain confidence and sense of direction that Jack doesn't (didn't) possess. . At first, when the Great Twitch is formulated, it is his way of "justifying" or further encoding a covert emotional response--covert in a numb body, a twitch of randomness among nothing, disconnected from everything. This shows how Jack's Great Twitch was just an excuse for denying his own frustration, anger and sadness surrounding Anne's affair and, by extension, his life.
Several factors converge to create the perfect impetus for Jack's emotional blockage to be shattered. The deaths of Willie, longtime childhood friend Adam, and the Judge are certainly the focal points. Also, Jack's role in each of these and relation to the deaths. The most important catalyst, however, is his closure which is parents--simply finding out that Judge Irwin is his father. The bittersweetness of this helps Jack to realize that the Great Twitch is a great lie invented by himself because he sees how everything connects and works in spiraling connections. He feels his partial responsibility in the Judge's suicide and feels the irony of it sharply causing his abrupt burst of laughter followed by intense tears. His reaction to the Judge's death is not immediate, but shows this emotional freeing: "'The poor old bugger, the poor old bugger.' It was like the ice breaking up after a long winter, and the winter had been long." (Warren 494) This new "relationship" to mom and dad give him the closure (rather than just not knowing where his father went, or assuming that his mother is cold) his emotional Self needed to survive.
Often in life it is only after great shock and life's traumatizing wake up calls that we can gain the strength or emotional spark that will carry us into a time of transformation and more cemented self-actualization. This is what the entire book has been setting its reader up for, and it is potent. By taking in his "stronger" father, the Scholarly Attorney, in old age, it is a redemption of sorts for Jack's morality and it shows a stroke of tenderness previously virtually inconceivable. He doesn't do it out of spite or anything.. It is more Warren showing us that indeed Jack does understand responsibility.
Finally, this continues for Jack's life because he understands history and time more fully now. He sees himself in its fabric and sees himself in the fabric of life, able to effect and be effected. Perhaps this is why Anne finally decides to marry him. An example of how life begins to show Jack how it folds back around is when he sees the snot-nosed reporter and sees himself. Just this recurrence of the past (in a sense) helps to stir thoughts in Jack. Jack is eventually able to start realizing the consequence of time, "that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time." (Warren, 609).
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