Sag Harbor: realities behind insult formulas and alpha dog olympics
I found Benji in Sag Harbor struggling through the same pressure of rules following and fear of embarrassment from friends as Jason Taylor from Black Swan Green. Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead follows 15-year-old Benji and details his journey navigating the African American community in the summer. Similar to how Jason follows unspoken social codes on clothing and names they’re supposed to call each kid (details on Jason check my other blog :)), Benji and his friends are also bound by rules for creating the correct insults. In the second chapter, Benji graphs out a table to correctly construct insults: First come the modifiers, followed by the -in’ verbs, and ending with the object (Whitehead 52). This formulaic approach suggests how performative these teenagers’ daily lives are. They are constantly insecure of making lame jokes or weak insults in front of each other. The formula shows their daily expressions, jokes, or insults aren’t natural and relaxed. They all learn the patterns of the right insults and repeat them to impress others.
The element of performance can be further identified during NP and Bobby’s argument on the definition of the word “sacadiliac.” The whole incident was started by Benji mishearing a lyric and telling Bobby a funny definition of the word. Later, Bobby makes a joke using “sacadiliac” in front of NP and their girl friends, and NP questions Bobby about it. This whole incident could’ve stayed a trivial quibble. Yet, NP further intensified the argument by betting one hundred dollars. While this whole debate is relatively meaningless, Benji notes Bobby taking on the challenge as he “couldn’t back down” because “his girl was watching (251).” Bobby’s behavior is shaped by the fear of humiliation. Teenage masculinity pressures him to appear perfectly controlled, knowledgeable, and confident in front of girls. How both boys choose to escalate the matter suggests the conflict is less about the word itself but a competition over their dominance and intelligence. In Benji’s words, NP and Bobby were fighting over ‘who was the alpha dog in this double date (251).”
Throughout this story, Benji and his friends constantly restrain themselves and monitor each other, deeply afraid of being perceived as awkward or uncool. Either through carefully engineering insults or blindly entering pointless arguments just to assert dominance, Whitehead shows how teenagers often use performance to conceal their insecurity.
Thank you for reading! Any feedback is appreciated :D
Toodles!
Works Cited:
Whitehead, Colson. Sag Harbor. Anchor Books, 2010.
Hello Ruijing. Something I find interesting about the whole name-calling dynamic is that Benji is probably the only person in that friend group who ever thought to write out an entire flowchart to analyze the patterns of name-calling among the group and figure out what words he should and should not use. I would bet that the other kids in the group never thought that deeply about it and were just acting on instinct. It just goes to show (a) how much of an overthinker Benji is (much like Jason Taylor) and (b) how much nerdier he considers himself to be compared to his peers, which is something he struggles with a lot throughout the book. Great post!
ReplyDeletePoor Benji! I remember googling what a garanimal was in relation to the clothing-related insults, and I found out that it was this children's clothing brand with animals on it, and you're meant to... match the animals to make outfits? In any case, it's clear that the kids (and they are still kids) are eager to throw off the trappings of childhood and make their way into performing adulthood, as is especially seen in the UTFO concert chapter. That being said, their mock instults and actions to be tough are just that, a performance. They are paper tigers. However, in the last chapter we can see that when it comes to the harder part of adulting, that of taking responsibility, they are instead immature enough to choose the fun option (drinking) over taking responsibility and stopping Barry David from reenacting lord of the flies/Duke basketball home games.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is something performative about the insult-comedy dynamics among this group of friends, and that Whitehead signifies this in part by sharing the unspoken "formula" they all use. It sure seems like this formula serves to mock them gently for their bluster and their lack of originality, but I would suggest instead that the "formula" provides structure and context for the insults, but that there is still a premium placed on creativity and original embellishment. You can't just recycle the last formula-generated insult--you have to come up with something new, and it has to "hit home" (as with the reference to the knockoff Member's Only jacket).
ReplyDeleteI would make an analogy to rapping, which these guys also like to "perform" for each other. Rap at the time was strongly focused on displays of verbal prowess AND originality ("biting" is the worst possible offense), but the form--rhymed couplets over a 2/4 beat, for the most part--is common. So "style" and "originality" come from what you do WITHIN that formulaic structure. An original voice in rap often did entail spinning ingenious and hilarious new put-downs, but for the lyrics to be effective in a battle, they also need to fit the meter and rhyme scheme. So performative style and originality consists of a combination of improvised originality and formula. I think we see something similar among Benji's crew spinning creative insults at each other.