Canon Fodder: Yoknapatawpha, New Jersey

I’m about to commit an act of literary heresy. Neither Hail Marys nor Edna Pontellier-like baptisms can save me from the sin I am about to commit. Hades has a special place for me. Hopefully I have a seat next to Huck Finn.

It was inevitable, really. In my defense, I don’t blaspheme on purpose. I blame it on reading with the television on. A habit so hard to break you’d think nicotine was involved. Falling asleep while reading and watching television is even worse. Sometimes the dreams make sense: Papa Smurf as Karl Marx seems a thoroughly apposite reverie to have while a drool moistened copy of The Communist Manifesto peaks and valleys on the chest of a body in repose; The Smurfs theme song looping over and over again in the mind, the soundtrack to REM-sleep–surely a symptom of catching clips on youtube. Other free association games seem less apparent and, often, non-sensical. Still, I must confess my latest television-imitating-literature epiphany, and use the space here to argue my rationale. Forgive me, Father, for I know not what I do:

The strangely compelling force that drives this latest season of The Real Housewives of New Jersey is totally Faulknerian.

Neither Jesus nor Kanye West can save me from the effects of such sacrilege. (I prayed to both of them; neither answer.)

I came to this conclusion last Saturday afternoon while lying in bed, attempting to recover from the insobriety of Friday night. Cake, sushi, and Bravo afternoon marathons are suitable for such convalescence. As I watched episode after episode of RHoNJ, it became increasingly clear to me that a precedent for the Giudice/Gorga feud can be found in the work of one William Cuthbert Faulkner.

If I wasn’t already, I’m officially the Judas of my graduate school cohort.

This third season of RHoNJ features a few new cast members, all of whom are related to and on one level or another in conflict with Teresa Giudice, the most popular New Jersey housewife. This season’s main storyline concerns the tension between the Giudices (Teresa and her husband, Joe) and the Gorgas (Teresa’s brother, Joe and his wife, Melissa). Although the source of this conflict is difficult to discern, the couples’ disdain for each other jumps through the idiot box immediately. Bravo made no secret that it planned to rely upon the Giudice/Gorga feud to propel ratings. The first episode centers on the christening party of the Gorga’s newborn son. Aunt Teresa shows up late–as usual–to the baptism, and apparently waited too long to congratulate her brother Joe, who responds by calling her trash (blame it on the alcohol), a move resulting in a fracas between members of both families. As the season continues, other possible sources of the tension between the married couples emerge: Melissa maybe being a gold digger; a (poorly worded) quip in a greeting card that was interpreted as a slight (“God bless you guys in your re-done home!”); not being officially invited to a book signing; etc.

Perhaps it was an overdose on icing or staring at Teresa’s hairline too long, but the stated reasons behind the Giudice/Gorga beef seemed incredibly asinine to me, even for Real Housewives standards. Post-holy water fisticuffs should be warranted. After all, Old Testament God was presumably still paying attention. Yet my thoughts about the show slowly (d)evolved from “This shit is so stupid. Why am I watching this?” to “This shit is totally incestuous. I must blog about this.” The Giudice/Gorga feud reeks of Compson-ness.

Here’s my theory, how I understand the story Bravo editors have woven for us: Teresa and Joe (Gorga), understanding that they cannot engage romantically with each other, project their anger onto the other’s partner, using any and every silly little thing to fuel a family feud that has nothing to do with bringing the wrong cookies to a Christmas party, in order to obscure a thoroughly illicit sexual impulse. The siblings make it quite clear that they were incredibly close until their respective partners were added to the equation. Indeed, Teresa and Joe (Gorga) are upset with each other; yet they’re furious at each other’s partners. What emerges between Teresa and Melissa is the kind of frenemy relationship that women-centered reality television relies upon in order to feed our schadenfreudian appetites. They compete with each other in arenas of the domestic sphere: the bigger house, the cuter kids, the better cook. Meanwhile, Joe and Joe vehemently express their disdain for each other through threatening text messages, violent monologues directed at their wives, and the occasional Last Supper Brawl. The siblings understand that they cannot articulate their romantic love for each other. Consequently, Teresa and Joe (Gorga) lash out at the other’s partner, who they subconsciously feel is occupying their rightful place. And it’s all must see tv–and very Compson-esque.

Faulkner’s 1929 masterpiece deserves so much more than being dragged down to the level of my television watching proclivities, but I just can’t help myself. There is something about the intense strain in Joe (Gorga) and Teresa’s relationship that reminds me so much of Quentin and Caddy. The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s novel about the slow deterioration of an aristocratic southern family, partly centers on the relationship between Quentin and his sister, Caddy, and the former’s incestuous feelings for the latter. Of course, Caddy symbolizes a myriad of things to her brother: the demise of southern womanhood, an end to the glory of the Compson family name, the termination of the ostensibly peculiar nature of upper-class southern culture. Yet in the end Caddy is Quentin’s sister, and all that she symbolizes coalesces into the (Da)muddy drawers of her sexuality and his sexual desire for her, to the extent that Quentin threatens to kill and attempts to assault Dalton Ames, the young man who seduces Caddy and impregnates her with an illegitimate child–a girl eventually named Quentin.

Two Quentins. Two Joes. A sister being called trash because her brother does not approve of her shift in loyalty from him to her husband’s family. It’s all there. Last episode, Joe (Giudice) admitted that he briefly ended his relationship with Teresa because of her brother, and there is a kind of your brother or me rhetoric implicit in his drunken rants. Meanwhile, Teresa seems committed to indirectly expressing to Melissa that she will never be good enough for her brother, but more importantly that she is precluding a union that, although elicit, is the correct one. The boorish manner in which the men express themselves, the conspicuous consumption that inadequately masks an emptiness in the women seem ripe to be likened to the Southern gothic Faulkner was known for. Bravo helped us along by pairing the first eruption of the Giudice/Gorga feud with Caroline’s family having a southern style dinner. The viewers’ simultaneous curiosity and revulsion of the Real Housewives franchise, the New Jersey version in particular, seems largely based upon the grotesqueness of these reality characters: we are disgusted by their lifestyle, yet we empathize with–and therefore watch–them.

And, I suggest, we are drawn to our flatscreens every Sunday night partly because we can see the romantic intensity brother Joe and sister Teresa are attempting to quell. (Some lightweight Flowers in the Attic type shit, if you ask me.) Yet perusing Faulkner teaches us that such desires are rarely contained for long. An implosion (see: Compson, Quentin & the Charles River) or explosion (see: Sutpen, Henry & Bon, Charles at the gate of Sutpen’s Hundred) of some sort seems inevitable. With Bravo at the helm, though, I imagine an anticlimactic season finale that hardly matches what the commercial trailers promise. A decent consolation might be an episode of Watch What Happens Live! that reunites the quasi-estranged Gorga siblings, where I can witness enough sexual tension to justify my sound and fury, and prove that I learned something in my Faulkner reading course. And maybe, just maybe, Andy Cohen will wear socks.

Until then, I await the wrath of the literature gods.