Masculinity and violence in Searching for Intruders

Themes of violence and masculinity keep cropping up in the book Searching for Intruders by Stephen Raleigh Byler, and I think in some ways, these are the intruders on Wilson and Melody's relationship. In the story “Roaches” we learn that the the couple are sexually distant partly because Melody has the heavy task of counselling victims of sexual assault all day and is depressed by the connections between violence and sex that she sees all the time in her work. I think that Melody's pent-up physical/sexual violence from work takes an emotional form. While it's true that Wilson's character is often annoyingly helpless and bumbling, I find myself feeling sorry for him when Melody treats him so coldly and punishes him through different emotional blackmailing techniques.

In “Helper” we see emotional and physical violence intruding on a different relationship between a couple who Wilson spots fighting at the side of the road. Wilson points out somewhat naively, “If you two love each other, then you shouldn't be . . . beating on each other like that,” and this is the moment that the man backs down somewhat. Perhaps he realizes that it is the violence that is interfering in the relationship. In both of these stories, Byler doesn't really inform the reader what exactly the core problem in each relationship is. We know that there is probably some problem behind the fight that we are seeing, but because we don't know what initially triggered the conflict, the violence—both physical and emotional—of the fight becomes most problematic.In both of these relationships, both partners fail to see the conflict from the other's perspective. When Wilson attempts to understand the man at the side of the road rather than just having a fist fight with him, on the other hand, the man (while maybe not transformed) begins to at least listen to Wilson.

I think it's interesting that one of the few books/pieces of literature that we've read by a man so far in the semester is so much more centered on issues of violence than anything else we've read. It makes sense, though. Violence is stereotypically a more masculine attribute, which must make it difficult for pacifist Mennonite men to prove themselves and their masculinity in mainstream culture while still retaining their pacifism. These conflicting loyalties could be the struggle that Wilson faces and what makes him seem so inept. Traditional Mennonites were more separatist so men could be freer to express their more “feminine” pacifist beliefs and traits within the community without fearing judgment. But now that Mennonites are more engaged in mainstream culture, they struggle with double standards. Men especially face constant questions of identity when their pacifist and worldly values come into conflict.

Language and truth

I was really intrigued by Julia Kasdorf's claims about Mennonites' use of language in her essay “Bringing Home the Work.” She writes, “Mennonites have not been in the habit of changing details to suit the story: from our very first confessions of faith we've expected language to be a useful, solid bucket to hold truths as clear as water” (41). I suppose Kasdorf means that Mennonites don't traditionally pay much attention to the aesthetic appeal of language; they see language only as a transportation of the truth. This brings up the interesting question of whether language is ever completely truthful. By its nature, language is not the actual, solid, physical truth of what it refers to; it is only a symbol that attempts to communicate a single thing. But for different people, that symbol can signify lots of different things—each of which is truthful for each person. Anyhow, this idea that Mennonites try to use language that communicates truth as effectively as possible makes me wonder what sort of language/words are more truthful than others?

It seems that the advantage of using language solely to communicate truth would be that in this case, language can only clarify reality. I guess traditionally Mennonites valued the honesty of language and would see any deviation from the task of baring out the truth through writing as dishonest. This would violate both religious and cultural values of honesty.

But there are also lots of advantages to using language in more creative ways and being less concerned about always portraying the exact truth in writing. When I'm writing, I can't really get into a creative flow if I am constantly thinking about telling a story exactly as it happened. The part of the brain that is concerned with truth seems entirely different from the part that deals in imagination and creativity. Prioritizing truth also might sacrifice some of the poetic beauty of language. Some words just sound lovely together, and if the beauty of the sound can convey truth through emotions rather than facts, I think that language hasn't compromised honesty. When worked poetically, language can inspire me on an almost spiritual level, and it seems like Mennonites, of all people, should be able to recognize the truthfulness and the value in that sort of spirituality.

We talk a lot in our Memoir class about the distinctions between truth and fiction and how much we value truthfulness. I've been surprised that so many people feel so strongly that we need to stick to the absolute truth in our memoir-writing. I feel that making up details actually enhances the honesty of personal experience. I am more concerned about how I remember an event than how it actually happened—it seems that memory reveals more of the emotional truth of experience. While this makes “truth” more subjective, I feel that it also makes it more valuable. Also, because by its symbolic nature, language can never completely be “a solid bucket to hold truths,” as Kasdorf describes it, it seems less important that writers strive to express truth in exact, physical, realistic terms and more important that we let imagination reveal our more internal emotional truths.

Mennonite Ethnicity

Lately I've been thinking more about my own experience with religious ethnicities. Though my parents are both Mennonite (my dad by birth, my mom by conversion), there weren't any Mennonite churches anywhere around where I grew up. There were tons of church of the Brethren churches, though, and Brethren being the closest Anabaptist equivalent to Mennonite that we could find, I went to a Brethren church my whole life. I always thought that “Mennonite” and “Brethren” were pretty synonymous terms. From what I could tell, they both believed in pacifism and they both really liked the Sermon on the Mount—it was really only a little quibble about dunking or sprinkling baptism that divided them. Then I came to Goshen College and realized that culturally, Mennonites and Brethrens were in completely different worlds.

The Mennonites I met were so much more tied to their cultural heritage than any Brethrens I knew. They were so much more obviously a cohesive group with a fixed center, which was a direct descendant of their Mennonite past. Brethren people never played any kind of “Brethren game,” they never ate any kind of exotic foods from their Anabaptist past, they didn't use the word “community” nearly as much as Mennonites did, and they didn't uniformly brag about buying their clothes at thrift shops. Overall, Brethren people seemed much more mainstream than the Mennonites I met at Goshen. I am realizing only now that while Mennonite and church of the Brethren theology is fairly comparable, it seems that Mennonites have hung on to their heritage in a way that sets them apart as a distinct ethnicity, while Brethrens have more or less assimilated into the mainstream, culturally speaking.

Ann Hostetler writes in “The Unofficial Voice” that assigning the term “ethnicity” to a religious group is often mistrusted because it can exclude people on the basis of race. But exclusion and all, I think the term is aptly applied to Mennonites. I definitely feel a greater sense of inclusion/exclusion among Mennonites than I ever felt in the church of the Brethren. Fortunately for me, I do have ethnic Mennonite roots, so I can often pretend to be at the center of the community—until, that is, we sing 606 in chapel and I have to expose my inexperience by using the hymn book while everyone else sings from memory. When you have such a cohesive ethnic group, it seems inevitable that there must be some amount of exclusion to create the strong sense of internal community that Mennonites so value.

It's difficult to think about completely getting rid of the inside/outside paradigm in Mennonite culture, like Hildi Froese Tiessen talks about in “Beyond the Binary.” It's lovely to theorize about how nice it would be to get rid of the hierarchy of in-ness and out-ness, but if Mennonites erased those divisions, I can only see Mennonite ethnicity going the way that Brethren ethnicity has gone. As much as I would love to include everyone, I would not want Mennonites to lose their distinctive ethnic traits and become more mainstream.