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Kirsten Møllegaard

Western American Literature, Volume 45, Number 2, Summer 2010,pp. 138-161 (Article)

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Bobby Ross. SANCTUARY. 2006. Graphite on Bristol board. 9.5" x 12.5". With permission from the artist.

Haunting and History in Louis Sachar’s Holes

Kirsten Møllegaard

To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it.

—Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (7)

Many landscapes of the US West, fictional as well as real, are haunted by specters of the past. Jacques Derrida noted in Specters of Marx (1994) that linear history cannot explain how the past saturates the present, nor can it explain how time seems to be out of joint when events from the past reemerge and provoke events in the present. Derrida coined the term hauntology to describe this phenomenon, thereby suggesting that states of non-being shadow reality and the nature of being—ontology. Specters of the past are always part of the present, not merely as revivals of the past, but as crucial cultural and political factors that set in motion events in the present. The relationship between haunting and history in Louis Sachar’s award-winning novel Holes (1998) and its 2003 film adaptation shows how Old West folklore filters into a tale of the urban New West and unsettles the fundamental premise of the legendary Wild West as a white mascu-line space, which forges “men with the bark on,”1 by positing women and minorities in subject positions. Since Holes is one of the few books evok-ing Wild West mythology and frontier history recommended on current junior high/high school reading lists, anyone interested in the literature of the US West should consider how this novel simultaneously deconstructs and infuses the notoriously “empty” landscapes of the West with specters of racial violence, rebellious women, and Wild West legends.2

Haunted Landscapes of the American West

Phantoms of the past often represent unfulfilled desires and wrongful deeds that need attention and possible correction. The undead will not leave the living in peace until things are set right. Ghosts have a pressing historical agenda to remind the living of what has been concealed and to bring to their attention troublesome, sometimes gruesome, events from the past. Indeed, as Walter Benjamin writes in “On the Concept of History,”

Western American Literature 45.2 (Summer 2010): 139--61

140 Western American Literature Summer 2010

“there is a secret protocol between the generations of the past and that of our own. For we have been expected upon this earth.” The secret intergen-erational pact suggests that the past harbors unresolved conflicts, things buried but not forgotten, ugly truths concealed beneath layers of lies, and the faint echo of a heteroglossia of muted voices, which emerge in the pres-ent to demand that the living revisit or rewrite events in the past. As Holes shows, what emerges from digging around for clues in an apparently empty desert is not one history, but layers of histories, legends, and myths, all of which are deeply entrenched in the landscapes of the West.

No other genre in film or literature depends as much on specific landscapes as the Western does. The Western genre in film and fiction acti-vates the mountains, deserts, rivers, lakes, prairies, buttes, and plateaus of the US West as gendered and cultural spaces for national discourses about masculinity and hardiness, bravery and perseverance. Sublime and wild, these landscapes function in western US literature as fields of dreams, whose apparent emptiness awaits settlement and nation building. Rob Wilson argues, “The genre of the sublime helped to consolidate an American identity founded in representing a landscape of immensity and wildness (‘power’) open to multiple identifications (‘use’)” (5). Thus, when Jim Burden, the narrator in Willa Cather’s classic pioneer novel My Ántonia (1918) arrives on the hardscrabble Nebraska plains, he takes a look at the wide, open landscape and declares, “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made” (8). In a similar vein of constructive pedagogy, it is the Warden’s philosophy in Holes that a close encounter with the harsh conditions of the desert will mold maladjusted juvenile delinquents from the city into upright, law-abiding citizens.

The Western genre has contributed immensely to the formation of a geocultural imaginary, which represents and imagines the West’s natural geography through a cultural filter that assigns and invests values to land features beyond their physical concreteness. In traditional Westerns, the landscape is represented as white, masculine space that excludes women and minorities from anything resembling narrative subject positions in the history of the West.3 Jane Tompkins observes, “There is no need to say that men are superior to women, Anglos to Mexicans, white men to black; the scene has already said it”—the scene here meaning the classic scenario of the white cowboy hero wrangling with fate, adversaries, and himself in a story set in the rugged majesty of the West (73).

New Western historians have also noted how Theodore Roosevelt’s “vigorous manliness” cultivated in the myth of the West transforms west-ern landscapes into highly gendered space (Roosevelt). As cultural geogra-

Kirsten Møllegaard 141

pher James Duncan puts it, landscapes are not neutral, passive sceneries, but rather “arena[s] of political discourse and action in which cultures are continuously reproduced and contested” (qtd. in Graham 21). Just as Duncan speaks of cultures in the plural, so does New Western historian Patricia Nelson Limerick contend that the US West consists of multiple “ongoing stories” rather than one metanarrative (86). Thus, by incorpo-rating the mobilization of landscape as social matrix into the analysis of literature of the New West, it is possible to discern voices silenced in the political discourse on the West as a national symbol. As British art critic Stephen Daniels observes, landscape imagery “is not merely a reflection of, or distraction from, more pressing social, economic or political issues; it is often a powerful mode of knowledge and social engagement” (8). Landscape’s archival function thus merges with its sentience and subject position in narratives of the West, past and present.

Holes represents the classic sentient western landscape as haunted by unpleasant historical events and with a history of reproducing romantic visions of the Old West. The Western genre’s oscillation between myth and history is indeed, as Alexandra Keller points out, the locus of its cultural meanings (240). Holes’ deceptive surface realism of there-ness of the urban New West (which the omniscient, albeit fallible, narrator repre-sents) is foiled by a not-there-ness of historical events and people who are made silent and invisible in the nostalgic geocultural imaginary on the Old West. Holes’ surface there-ness of the New West with its urban sprawl, disillusionment, and deflated American dream gets pulled into a mythic-historical orbit by ghostly apparitions from the nation’s past. Echoes of slavery and the legendary lawlessness of the frontier mingle with present-day systems of inequality and injustice, creating a strong tension between past and present. This tension surfaces as haunting. With its violent fron-tier history and mythopoetic traditions, the US West is a deeply invested symbolic space that condenses the essence of white masculinity and, by extension, also the values and ideology of the nation. Tompkins explains, “The harshness of the Western landscape is so rhetorically persuasive that an entire code of values is in place, rock solid, from the outset, without anyone’s ever saying a word” (74). The West’s sublimely beautiful open landscapes contribute to social imagination by silently communicating an ideology that seems carved in stone, immutable, and pristine. Holes deconstructs this ideology by showing, first, that structural flaws in cur-rent societal institutions (in particular correctional institutions and the justice system) perpetuate injustices against women and minorities and, second, that systemic inequality is mired in the past.


Holes (both film and novel) illustrates how “the turn to the supernatu-ral in the process of recovering history emphasizes the difficulty of gaining access to a lost or denied past, as well as the degree to which any such historical reconstruction is essentially an imaginative act” (Brogan 6). In Holes, storytelling constructs the reality of the characters. Stories provide frames for understanding bizarre occurrences, seemingly arbitrary acts of violence and injustice, and for establishing bonds and meaningful relation-ships between people. Holes offers both alternatives and parallels to the metahistory of the US West, thus illustrating Michel de Certeau’s observa-tion that “history relies on rhetorical and narrative strategies central to fiction in order to shape a coherent representation of reality” (Brogan 17).

Novel and film play on the apparent paradox that something can be hidden in the open expanse of the desert. But seeing what is on the surface is not always the same as knowing what is hidden underneath, neither in history nor in the archaeology of knowledge. By copiously incorporating the culturally loaded western landscape as an active, visible part of the narration, Holes constructs more than an adventure story for a young audi-ence. Its use of landscape symbols and metaphors also suggests an allegory about violent historical events and entrenched patterns of systemic injus-tices that still haunt the nation. In the film, the camera often pans across the dry landscape toward the distant mountains, lingering on the merciless beating of the sun and the stifling heat rising from the dusty sand. In the novel, the narrator frames the characters’ lived experiences with landscape-based binaries such as lake/desert, mountains/flats, greenery/dust, sun/rain, and similar oppositions that evoke the sentient, knowing landscape as a place of remembrance or, more pointedly, as a national archive of events that have been “forgotten” and now lie buried and unseen under the sandy desert floor.

With these tense binary constructions as the geographical narrative frame, Holes brings to light events that have been overlooked, ignored, or silenced. In a study on haunting and the sociological imagination, Avery F. Gordon argues that visibility itself, whether in history or fiction, points to a “complex system of permission and prohibition, punctuated alternately by apparitions and hysterical blindness” (17). Well-known examples of this phenomenon from US literature include Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which both deal with violence, racism, and social invisibility. In this context, it is worth pointing out that the absence of Native Americans in much contemporary literature of the West, including Holes, shows how the dialectics of visibility and invisibility, absence and presence, the living and the dead, expand beyond their mean-ingful construction as binary oppositions toward the desire, power, and


memory invested in constructing such stories. Visibility—being seen and being made visual—entails a subject position, which is empowering, even if the subject is an apparition from the past. Gordon observes, “The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (8, emphasis added). The social aspect of the specter concerns memory, his-tory, desire, and power. The ghost in Holes appears in a fleeting moment at the beginning of the film and never reappears, but its appearance trans-forms a seemingly neutral, dry wasteland into an invested place of remem-brance, which thus becomes a social space where human actions from the past linger and trigger unhappy consequences in the present.

The ghost in Holes has three functions that are similar to the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: first, it is a portent of tacit knowledge for the unsuspecting protagonist; second, it links the living to the dead; and third, it wants closure to a wrong committed in the past. Since the only way to resurrect the dead—other than by paranormal means—is to tell stories about them, storytelling has a prominent role in Holes, and most of the stories told are about gender and race, immigration and identity, in particular the formation of national identity based on the cultural inter-action between gender and landscape. Holes is a story with many layers, the most significant of which are those of race, violence, and gender. The novel emphasizes the narrative construction of experience through story-telling by establishing a dialogic relationship between myth and orality, history and contemporary experience, and the haunting presence of social injustice. History and fiction are closely related, as de Certeau remarks, in terms of their claim to representing reality and hence the power of dis-course and because both offer multiple viewpoints from which events can be narrated or suppressed. It is the haunting presence of wrongs commit-ted in the past that situates Holes as an important work in contemporary western US literature because it employs the metaphorical language of genre to create historical meaning concerning women and blacks in the West. The other’s loss of history and lack of representation in official his-tory writing are now recognized as unifying themes in many types of US literature, especially ethnic and immigrant narratives, and constitute what Stuart Hall calls “an act of cultural recovery” (19).4 Holes’ central theme is the need to finish unfinished business from the past in order to bring closure to its haunting intrusion in the present.

Herbert Marcuse describes haunting in social theory as being “con-cerned with the historical alternatives which haunt the established society as subversive tendencies and forces” (xliii–xliv). Haunting is an active social force, which, unlike trauma, makes it necessary to do something: to


right a wrong, to settle a debt, or to finish a task. The subversive nature of haunting, its non-material nature, and its great motivating effect establish bonds between the dead and the living and speak directly about contem-porary forms of repression, violence, and dispossession that affect every-day life. In her study of this phenomenon, Gordon explains:

[H]aunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, espe-cially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied (as in free labor or national security). Haunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed, although it usually involves these experiences or is produced by them. What’s distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely. (xvi)

Holes’ plot relies on the perception of history as an oral tradition of telling multiple stories, a sort of many-voiced discussion of events, that leaves out some things and embroiders others in order to tell a narrative, taking as its starting point the premise that life in the present is haunted by a curse from the past. That curse must be transformed into something positive.

Turning to the supernatural as a way of recovering the past is also an attempt to rewrite history and to reconstruct and re-imagine the geocul-tural imaginary of the US West. Brogan calls this phenomenon cultural haunting. She argues that US literature of cultural haunting deals with communal memory, the transmission of culture, and ethnic inheritance in ways that seek to recreate or recoup the past so that it can serve mean-ingfully as a way to understand the present (4–6). Storytelling is a form of narrative memory. It is a significant characteristic of cultural haunting to establish continuity between the past and the present. Brogan recognizes that this process requires a great deal of historical revision:

Stories of cultural haunting have everything to do with the cul-tural transformation engendered by immigration, as well as by those involuntary and violent movements of peoples that have rendered inextricable our senses of national identity and national guilt. They are centrally related to the questions of how cultural knowledge is transmitted and how identities are enacted in poly-ethnic America. (16–17)

The literary aspect of this process deals with the reconstruction of his-toric experience where subject positions in particular landscapes become


important indicators of gender and nation. In Holes, the past is never completely remembered, nor entirely forgotten, but neither is the present. The difficult task of remembrance, especially the remembrance of the consequences of trauma and violence, is negotiated through oral story-telling, which narrates and creates a sense of family and friendship. The transmittance of cultural knowledge by way of orality dynamically posi-tions the West’s spatial and regional localities in a much larger national historical context.

Haunting and History in Holes

Since the 1950s, US children’s literature (and juvenile literature in gen-eral) has shown a declining interest in the history and myth of the West.5 According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, “the last two decades of the 20th cent. have seen a reversion to the Victorian policy of providing books that reflect their readers’ background. It is also reminis-cent of 17th-cent. Puritan books, in that children are confronted with all the miseries of the human condition, nowadays ranging from drugs, child abuse, and dysfunctional families to war” (199).

Aside from the fact that this statement entirely ignores how the fan-tasy genre has sent social and historical realism in children’s literature off to hibernate in a distant galaxy, it is important to consider the cultural meanings of a successful contemporary, non-fantasy children’s novel that draws heavily on the myth of the Wild West in spirit and narrative content. Holes does indeed deal with some of “the miseries of the human condi-tion” that most US preteens and teens are aware of, at least on some level: racism, hate crimes, homelessness, poverty, entrapment by social class, broken families, the culture of thinness, political injustice, and abuse of power. But it also deals with some of the most culturally sanctioned aspects of the American dream: individualism, upward social mobility, triumph through perseverance, access to the sublime, patriarchy, justice, and divinely ordained destiny. Importantly, it draws its strength from the richness of western folklore by tapping into the collective pool of Old West nostalgia and melodrama in order to dramatize the present in the light of the past.

Juvenile fiction is a treasure trove of embedded cultural values and contradictions. What makes Holes particularly interesting is the way it imagines the nation by intertwining the (fictional) past with the (fictional) present. The summary that follows disentangles the stories that Holes tells as a knotted whole to show how the cultural significance of the Old West fuses with the social realities of the New West. The novel may, however, be read in a number of ways.6


Stanley Yelnats is an inoffensive, overweight, middle school student in a non-descript Texas city who lives a fairly miserable and unpromising life. He is an only child, has no friends, and gets teased about his weight. He lives with his parents and grandfather in a cramped apartment that smells of wet sneakers and foot odor because of his inventor-father’s exper-iments to find a way to make old sneakers smell like new. Stanley’s family is poor because of a curse: “Supposedly, he had a great-great-grandfather who had stolen a pig from a one-legged Gypsy, and she put a curse on him and all his descendants” (8). Therefore, whenever something goes wrong, the family always blames Stanley’s “no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather” (7).

One day, as Stanley is walking home from school alone, a pair of expensive sneakers falls from the sky and hits him on the head. Actually, the sneakers fall from a freeway overpass that Stanley is walking under, but to him, they seemingly come “out of nowhere, like a gift from God” (24). Moments later, he is arrested by the police for having stolen the shoes, which famous baseball player Clyde “Sweet Feet” Livingston had donated to raise money for a homeless shelter. The judge gives Stanley the choice between jail or a juvenile correction facility called Camp Green Lake. Stanley’s parents had never had money to send him to camp so he chooses Camp Green Lake, which is a nine-hour bus ride from the city.

In the film, as the bus crosses the sun-drenched, dusty flats of the des-ert, Stanley sees a man wearing old-fashioned clothes standing by the side of the track, holding a donkey with a cart.7 The man looks strangely shad-owy and undefined, as though he were not really there. The man, unsmil-

Julie Bozzi. TEXAS. 1978. Glair on paper. 2.5” x 9.375”. With permission from the artist.


ing, looks Stanley directly in the eye as the bus passes in a cloud of dust. Stanley looks back. The man and the donkey cart are gone. Apparently, nei-ther the driver nor the guard saw him. Later we realize that this apparition is Sam, the onion man.

There is nothing green and no lake at Camp Green Lake. Once Green Lake was the largest lake in Texas. “Now it is just a dry, flat waste-land” (3). The Warden’s philosophy is that “if you take a bad boy and make

him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy” (5). Stanley is assigned a smelly, lumpy cot in D tent, which he shares with six other boys. While his new tent mates look him over, the supervisor, Mr. Sir, and the counselor, Mr. Pendanski, inform him of camp routines, which include digging a hole five feet deep and five feet across every day and reporting if he finds anything interesting. Water is rationed, and each boy carries a plastic canteen slung across the back. They all wear similar orange jumpsuits. Showers are four minutes long. “Nobody runs away from here,” Mr. Sir explains. “We don’t need a fence. Know why? Because we’ve got the only water for a hundred miles” (15).

In parallel to Stanley’s miserable ordeal at the camp, his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather’s story is told. At fifteen, Elya Yelnats was a country boy in Latvia, hopelessly in love with the shal-low village beauty Myra. Another suitor, the fifty-seven-year-old pig farmer Igor, was also interested in Myra. So Myra’s father decided, in all fairness, that the suitor who presented him with the fattest pig on Myra’s fifteenth birthday should marry her. Poor and desperate, Elya sought the advice of one-footed Madame Zeroni, “an old Egyptian woman who lived on the edge of town” (29). She advised him to go to America like her son. Elya, however, was adamant about Myra, so she told him to carry one of her pig-lets up the mountain every day where “there is a stream where the water runs uphill” (30). Elya was to sing a special song to the pig while it drank, and on the last day, he was to carry Madame Zeroni up the hill so that she could drink from the stream while he sang for her. “If he failed to do this, he and his descendants would be doomed for all of eternity” (31). On the fateful day of Myra’s birthday, Elya did not carry the pig up the mountain because he did not want to smell of pig when seeing Myra. His and Igor’s pigs weighed the same. Myra’s father asked her to decide which suitor she


wanted to marry, but silly Myra, unfamiliar with making her own choices, couldn’t decide between Igor and Elya. Disgusted, Elya told her to keep the pig as a wedding present and promptly left for America, forgetting all about Madame Zeroni and his promise to carry her to the top of the mountain to drink while he sang. Eventually, Elya married an American woman and had a son. He made a fortune on the stock market in New York. But when he traveled with his fortune by stagecoach in order to start a new life for himself and his family in California, the outlaw Kissing Kate Barlow and her gang robbed the stagecoach and “left him stranded in the middle of the desert” (10). How he survived is a mystery; all he said was, “I found refuge on God’s thumb” (128). The Yelnats family had been cursed with bad luck ever since.

In another yarn that unfolds between the layers of narration set at Camp Green Lake, Katherine Barlow’s story is unraveled. When Green Lake was a lake back in the 1890s, she was a pretty schoolmarm with a knack for making spiced peaches. Her schoolhouse was at the center of a bustling frontier town more or less owned by Trout Walker, a rich, manipu-lative man with the same incurable foot fungus that would eventually plague the baseball player Clyde Livingston. “Most everyone in the town of Green Lake expected Miss Katherine to marry Trout Walker” (102). But Miss Katherine turned him down. Sam, the onion man, brought his sweet onions to market in town and often stopped to talk with Katherine. His onions cured everything from stomach aches to fever. He told Katherine that he grew them in a secret place where “the water runs uphill” (110). He fixed the leaky roof on the schoolhouse for her, and one day, as the rain was pouring down, he kissed her. “‘God will punish you!’” a shocked woman whispered, for Sam was black and Katherine was white (111). Soon a mob burned down the schoolhouse. Katherine appealed to the sheriff for help, but he wanted her to kiss him instead. Sam got away in his boat but was shot on the lake. “That all happened one hundred and ten years ago. Since then, not one drop of rain has fallen on Green Lake. You make the decision: Whom did God punish?” the narrator asks (115). Three days later, Kate gave the sheriff the kiss he had asked her for—after she shot him. For the next twenty years, she roamed the West as the feared outlaw Kissin’ Kate, famous for leaving the imprint of her red lips on the men she shot. Trout Walker eventually tracked her down. Now a ruined man, he wanted her loot, but Kate warned him, “I sure hope you like to dig. ’Cause you’re going to be digging for a long time. It’s a big vast wasteland out there. You, and your children, and their children, can dig for the next hundred years and you’ll never find it” (122). Then a venomous yellow-spotted lizard leaped at her and bit her, and she died laughing (123).


These stories all come together at Camp Green Lake. One day, Stanley finds something interesting as he is digging a hole, namely a lipstick tube (which looks like a cartridge) engraved with the initials KB. He earns the temporary favor of the mysterious Warden, a manipulative, sadistic woman who turns out to be Trout Walker’s granddaughter. Stanley befriends his tent mate Hector Zeroni, a.k.a. Zero, who escapes the camp and survives on jars of pickled peaches he finds under Sam’s old boat on the dry lake floor. Stanley runs away to search for Hector, and together, they trek across the hot expanse of the desert toward a mountain they call God’s thumb. Digging all those holes has made Stanley slim and fit. Zero is so exhausted that Stanley has to carry him up the mountain, where they find a spring and a crop of onions. While Zero drinks, Stanley sings him his old family lullaby, which happens to be the same one that Zero remembers his mother singing to him before she disappeared, namely the song Madame Zeroni taught Elya. Zero admits to Stanley that he was the one who stole Clyde Livingston’s shoes and flung them over the guardrail when the police were coming. The water and onions sustain them until they feel strong enough to return to the hole where Stanley found the lipstick. They dig out Elya Yelnats’s trunk with its treasure but are at the last moment intercepted by the Warden, who has been digging for Kate Barlow’s loot all her life. Luckily for the boys, the hole is swarming with the fearsome yellow-spotted lizards so the Warden dares not pull the trunk out of the hole. The lizards leave the boys alone because they smell of onions. Justice arrives in the nick of time in the form of Ms. Morengo, a lawyer hired by Stanley’s parents, and the Texas Attorney General. Camp Green Lake’s staff is arrested. As the boys leave the camp, “for the first time in over a hundred years, a drop of rain fell into the empty lake” (225).

It all ends well, of course. Ms. Morengo gets Stanley’s sentence over-turned. The two boys share the contents of the trunk, which makes them comfortably rich with about a million dollars each. Stanley’s father suc-cessfully invents a foot deodorizer from a mixture of onions and peaches, which Clyde “Sweet Feet” Livingston endorses. Zero is reunited with his mother, and the Attorney General closes Camp Green Lake. In the last chapter, the narrator acknowledges that the reader might have questions, but “you will have to fill in the holes yourself” (231).

Andrew Davis directed Holes for Walt Disney Pictures in 2003. Sachar wrote the screenplay, which is a close adaptation of his novel. The major difference between novel and film is that Stanley is not overweight in the film version and that the culture of thinness therefore is not an issue in the film. Some of the events listed as “facts” in the novel are changed in the film adaptation; for example, the novel says that Trout Walker’s boat


smashed into the boat carrying Katherine and Sam; that Sam was shot and Katherine taken to shore against her will. In the film, Katherine observes from shore that Sam gets shot and is not shown suffering violence at the hands of Sam’s killer(s). These changes are of little consequence to the structure of the story; however, the film embroiders Kate Barlow’s career as an outlaw and gives her more narrative prominence than Elya.

Holes’ landscape is haunted by several specters from the past, most prominently the main characters’ ancestors who took part in the violent conflicts that their descendants (in blood or spirit) now have to resolve. The only real ghost, however, is Sam, who makes himself visible to Stanley. Why Sam? Why not, say, Trout Walker who might be desperately looking for Kate Barlow’s loot, or Kissin’ Kate herself, who laughed as she died? Both of these unhappy antagonists would undoubtedly make splendid specters—Trout with his strong, unsatisfied desire for Kate’s body and her treasure and Kate with her desire for Sam. It is, however, a unifying theme in US literature on cultural haunting that ghosts function as literary meta-phors. Sam’s ghost reminds us of the absent presence of black people in the West. They were and are there, of course, as Michael K. Johnson discusses in Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature (2002), but were written out of the history of the West and rarely even figure in western fiction. Brogan argues, “The curious dual force of the ghost who makes present what is absent powerfully shapes the American story of cultural haunting. As both presence and absence, the ghost stands as an emblem of historical loss as well as a vehicle of historical recovery” (29). Sam’s ghost thus becomes a social figure that imbues the dried-up lake with remembrances of not-so-pretty occurrences in the past—murder, lynching, and the countless other instances of violence levied on black men—that the commercialized Old West nostalgia industry (including Hollywood Westerns) is silent about.

At a national level, such literary instances of haunting constitute the ongoing process of dealing with a shameful and troublesome past, most poignantly with slavery. It is the continued presence of this haunted mem-ory that Toni Morrison refers to as a “shadow” that, on one hand, darkens US self-definition and, on the other hand, becomes a hauntological/onto-logical device that constructs “a history and a context for whites by posit-ing history-lessness and context-lessness for blacks” (53). It is significant that Sam’s ghost is directly associated with the drying up of Green Lake and that he appears in the desert where the lake once was. His violent death put a curse on a thriving white pioneer community and reduced the source of its smug, self-satisfied prosperity to an arid wasteland. The exclusion of blacks and other minorities from the history of the US West


causes such disjunctions, where metahistory clashes with the retained memory of the minority group itself. This in turn leads to an awareness of the fictionality of mainstream historiography and historians like Frederick Jackson Turner, whose vision of a white frontier-driven America remains an active force in US national self-perception.8

Sachar evidently likes to play with the postmodern idea of historical blanks: places of historical loss that can be recovered through literature by the imaginative reconstruction of past events. The ghost is an important means for historical recovery because ghosts linger between the past and present. They hover betwixt and between in a liminal existence that com-municates tacit knowledge of the complex, contradictory past and con-stitute, as Morrison argues, “a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing” (33). Things concealed, hidden, or structurally repressed surface with the appearance of specters that haunt the living individually or collectively, or both. Sam’s ghost does both. He is the first sign Stanley sees that relates to the tragic love story, which is also a shameful story of racial violence and hence a guilt-laden aspect of US history. Sam’s ghost represents subjugated knowl-edge, that is, the marginalized, immaterial (often oral) knowledge that exists outside the canonized institutions of knowledge production, where official history is written. There is a parallel between Holes and Beloved where ghostliness also functions as the imaginative reconstruction of the past by way of trauma.

The visual aspect of Sam’s apparition ties in with the importance of the nation’s westward gaze for national symbolism and the emphasis on visibility as constituent of knowledge production. Holes’ plot relies on Stanley’s ability to piece together a coherent story from the things he sees: Sam’s ghost, the engraved tube of lipstick, the framed wanted posters of Kate Barlow in the Warden’s house, the phallic rock outcropping that looks to him like God’s thumb, and so on. This bricolage becomes the synthesis between traumatic memory (Sam’s murder) and historical con-sciousness (the mistreatment and death of millions of African American slaves). Stanley pieces together this story through the guidance of his own family curse. This illustrates Brogan’s point mentioned earlier that when the supernatural revolves around access to a lost or denied past, the process of recovering history becomes an imaginative art (6). Stanley’s resourcefulness, in this respect, is not a supernatural ability to look into the past but to understand the complex dimensions of racial inequality in the United States and to react to the guilt he harbors about participating (albeit involuntarily) in a systemic institution, Camp Green Lake, which obliterates unwanted people from its records. When Zero runs away, the


Warden instructs Mr. Pendanski, nicknamed Mom, to erase Zero’s records from the computer files. The Warden reasons, “As far as anybody knows, Zero doesn’t exist. Like Mom said, we got plenty of graves to choose from” (208). In other words, once Zero is out of sight, he will be out of mind as a result of national amnesia.

Stanley realizes that it is easy for the Warden to pretend that Zero never existed because Zero is a black, inner-city street kid, who comes from a social group that historically has had limited access to institutions of power. The only tie Zero has to his mother is a vague memory of the magical song that Stanley’s family also knows. The exclusive reliance on ID cards, birth certificates, and other forms of printed documentation to gain access to citizen rights in the United States makes it difficult for citizens without those documents, most of whom are blacks,9 to vote, get an education, and get social services.10

On one hand, it may seem as if Holes romanticizes Zero’s position as the representation of a cultural substratum to modern society in which memory and oral tradition signify deep history and rich folklore. But, as Gayatri C. Spivak points out, “A nostalgia for lost origins can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism” (291). Oral tradition must be afforded its own cultural space and not be reduced to the lesser in a binary relationship with literacy and the social institutions enforcing literacy’s hegemony. Besides, binaries are never entirely neat; they become hybridized over time as they negotiate political structures of reciprocity and obligation (Loomba 232). Zero’s silence and illiteracy must therefore be contextualized within the societal mechanisms that render him voiceless. His taciturn muteness at Camp Green Lake stems from the social construction of race and class in the United States and the silence imposed on him as other.11 If Zero is buried in one of the holes on the dried-up lake floor, no one will ever know. The Warden’s cleverly orchestrated project to unearth Kate Barlow’s treasure by using institutionalized boys as diggers also indicates a desire to bury and hide unpleasant moral dilemmas in the present, in particular the nation’s failure to educate and hence empower the children of socially marginalized groups.

Burial usually effects a final separation of the living and the dead, but in Sam’s case, the fact that he was never buried is another reason for him to appear as a ghost. He was shot on the lake, and his body was not recov-ered. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, a soul becomes restless when the body is not properly interred and given the social recognition associated with burial. The double connotation shows the historical lack of justice for black men killed by white figures of authority (Trout Walker and the


sheriff who turns a blind eye to the murder), and it puts in perspective the fact that black men are still more likely to become victims of violent crime than men of any other ethnicity.

Like many ghosts, Sam is tied to a specific place. He haunts the grounds where he was killed, making the landscape part of the awareness his ghostliness evokes. Sam’s fate on Green Lake is not an isolated trag-edy, however. Thousands of African slaves jumped or were dumped into a watery grave as the slave ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean, some ending their lives in suicide, others dying because of diseases and maltreatment on board. Sam’s ghostliness is therefore closely associated with the ghosts of the victims of the atrocious institution of slavery that sustained the “making” of the American nation with its large-scale plantation economy in the South until the emancipation of slavery in 1863. Zero, though not a direct descendant of African American slaves, is subject to similar systemic violence. His family line starts with Madame Zeroni in Latvia, but as is the case with Barack Obama (who is Kenyan American), Zero’s genealogy is subsumed by the othering of blacks as being one ethnic group in the United States—African American. This construction of African Americans as “a homogeneous Other” is the type of epistemic violence, which rears its head from the legacy of colonialism and Eurocentric cul-tural imperialism (Spivak 288). In the politics of ethnic hyphenation, a much deeper historical and ethnic national identity is afforded Americans of European descent. Buried in the African American identity marker is the repressed remembrance and knowledge of intra-African differences. Thus, in the fraught field of muted subalterns, unlearning systemic oppression involves learning to speak (out) (Spivak 295); for Zero, this happens when Stanley starts to teach him to read. Zero begins to speak and realizes that his shovel is not just a tool for digging. It can be used to slap the system, personified by Mr. Pendanski, in the face.

It was the politics of slaveholders to take away African slaves’ iden-tity and ethnic cultures by breaking up families and separating people who spoke the same language. Deprivation of vernacular language is yet another hegemonic way of silencing the other. In a modern parallel, Zero is treated as dumb by the staff at Camp Green Lake because he is illiterate, and no effort is made to educate him. When Stanley begins to teach Zero how to read, Mr. Pendanski is incredulous: “You might as well try to teach this shovel to read! It’s got more brains than Zero!” (137). When reminded by the Warden that the most important mission for the Camp is to have each boy dig a hole every day, Stanley protests: “Isn’t it more important for him to learn to read? … Doesn’t that build character more than digging holes?”12 (137). Deprived of the privilege to learn through reading, and


hence denied access to the empowerment of literacy, Camp Green Lake literally prepares Zero for a life as a zero—someone ill-equipped to become a fully functional member of society and therefore destined to be mar-ginalized by race and social class and silenced by lack of education. This may be seen as an indictment of the failure of the current educational system to give all youngsters equal access to education; but it is also a stark reminder that during slavery, it was against the law to teach slaves to read and that slaves who pursued education on their own risked punishment and sale.

The rhythm of this thematic flow between slavery in the past and systemic inequality in the present is set in Holes’ opening song, “Dig It,” which is rendered like a modernized version of a slave work song with a heavy emphasis on lament and soul. Traditional work songs set the pace of work with a caller and a chorus alternating in song. Such folksongs were extremely important for slaves as a means of self-expression and as a way to comment on their overseers and their harsh working conditions through coded lyrics. Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally), one of the better-known slave work songs, “Hoe Emma Hoe,” has a chorus line about digging holes: “Hoe Emma Hoe, you turn around dig a hole in the ground, Hoe Emma Hoe” (“Colonial Williamsburg”). In a different ver-sion of this song, the caller sings about the hard master, perpetual work, and the breaking up of slave families, and then sets these themes into a biblical framework that promises freedom after the years of enslavement:

Caller: Master he be a hard hard man.Chorus: Hoe Emma Hoe, Hoe Emma Hoe.Caller: Sell my people away from me.Chorus: Hoe Emma Hoe, Hoe Emma Hoe.Caller: Lord send my people into Egypt land.Chorus: Hoe Emma Hoe, Hoe Emma Hoe.Caller: Lord strike down Pharaoh and set them free.Chorus: Hoe Emma Hoe, Hoe Emma Hoe, Hoe Emma Hoe.

(“Colonial Williamsburg”)

In a similar way, “Dig It” emphasizes the Warden’s lack of mercy, the backbreaking labor, isolation from family and friends, and the inane repetitiveness of digging holes:

[All]Dig it, uh, oh, oh, Dig it.

Dig it uh, oh, oh, Oh. Dig it uh, oh, oh, Dig it. Dig it, uh, oh, oh, Oh.


Two of the verses go,

You’ve got to go dig those holes, with broken hands and whithered soles,

emancipated from all you know, you’ve got to go dig those holes

Your hands may blister, Your muscles, they sore.

You wanna break, Knock on the Warden’s door.

UH-HUH, UH-HUH.

(D-Tent Boys)

Literature is a powerful tool in the archaeology of knowledge. This term, borrowed from Michel Foucault, does not imply a way to find a whole knowledge or a coherent history, but rather to find a way to piece together shards of social memory that have relevance in contemporary society. The legacy of slavery is still chained to societal institutions and to structures of knowledge and power, which affect social relations in the present. As Frederick Douglass pointed out in the classic narrative of his life, slave songs express an identity different from the slaveholders (349). Holes draws heavily on the myth of the West to survey a culturally invested field scattered with layers of national treasures and broken dreams. This is why the unearthing of the past is, literally, what digging holes in the old dried-up lake is all about. The Warden’s search for Kate Barlow’s treasure leads to a revivification of the dead and to the traumatic events that now haunt the present in the form of historical guilt. The specter of this guilt is ever present in the social inequality that Stanley observes around him. The traumatic event, which animates Sam’s ghost, cannot be explained away by simply referring to the notoriously high level of gun violence in the Old West. The racial prejudice on the frontier and the taboo against miscegenation carry a history that cannot be separated from similar issues in the present, and this makes black kids like Zero vulnerable to revic-timization precisely because institutional forces continue to marginalize individuals such as him politically, culturally, and economically.

No lone hero can single-handedly bring justice to Camp Green Lake. Stanley’s family’s ability to finally hire Ms. Morengo to represent them in the legal system inaugurates the story’s climactic, high-noon-like finale. The lawyer represents a higher form of institutionalized power than the Warden, whose authority and command over the boys withers in the presence of Ms. Morengo. In the showdown between the two women, it


is inevitable that the Warden with her antiquated philosophy about mak-ing bad boys into good boys through something that resembles chain-gang labor must meet her destiny in the form of modernity. Ms. Morengo, with her education, upward social mobility, professional attire, urban sophis-tication, and elegant European car has superior access to much higher branches of institutional power (e.g., the Texas Attorney General) than the troublesome remembrances of things past that obsess the Warden. The latter’s western drawl, boots, belt buckle, cowboy hat, and 1950s Chrysler Saratoga become emblems of a cultural tradition that is vintage rather than vantage in the New West. In the presence of Ms. Morengo, the Warden’s mysterious allure, which once infected the camp’s male staff and inmates with a mixture of fear and desire, fades to reveal an insanely obsessed woman, who has spent her whole life chasing phantoms from the past. In this pursuit, she has perpetuated the pattern of inequality and injustice laid down by her grandfather Trout Walker. Like him, she has no respect for the law of the nation, but posits herself in the panopticon structure of the desert camp as the law, operating an unlicensed correc-tional institution with uncertified staff and outdated pedagogy.

The novel’s real avenger of historical injustice, however, is not the New West character Ms. Morengo, but the Wild West legend Kate Barlow. Kate’s character establishes a continuity of abstract principles (justice, hon-esty, and bravery) between events set in the novel’s mythopoetic past and its multiethnic, heterogeneous present. Simultaneously, Kate’s leap from schoolmarm to sharp-shooting outlaw links the West’s notoriously high level of gun violence and display of hypermasculinity to the sexualization of the female body in public space.

Since Sam’s death cuts her sexual desires short, Kate’s angry, pent-up sexual energy becomes a force of destruction that she levies against society as revenge for Sam’s murder. If the Warden is the novel’s “super bitch” (to use the vocabulary of post-feminist critic Rikke Schubart), Kate is its “action babe.” She creates a trail of male bodies, each imprinted with her trademark red lip marks on their foreheads, as a totem signaling the destructive power of a woman’s wrath.

Importantly, Kate’s signature kiss-after-death allows her to take charge of her own sexuality. In the film, when she enters the sheriff ’s office to kill him, she is dressed like a whore in a red velvet dress and a smart hat, swinging her hips, and purring her lethal message: “I’m here to give you the kiss you asked for.” The men in the jail cells rise from their cots, drawn to the bars by her magnetic sex appeal. Slowly, the leering sheriff begins to rise from his chair. These movements suggest a mounting, collective erec-tion in her presence. Then comes the anticlimax when she draws her gun,


shoots the sheriff, plants a kiss on his forehead, and rides out of town a changed woman. Her gender performance helps transform her blunt act of violence into a sexual experience. The sheriff had, after all, threatened violence when he demanded a kiss from her on the night of Sam’s murder. His lecherous gaze at her red dress and painted face on the day she comes to kill him saturates the scene with power, desire, and sexual tension. The look of desire on the faces of the prisoners after the sheriff is shot further underscores the event as one in which Kate’s capacity for cold-blooded murder makes her sexy. But her true glory as an “action babe” is her use of the gun as an instrument of self-actualization and as an ambivalent instrument of justice.13 Once a pillar of society, she becomes a pillager. She spends the next twenty years terrorizing patriarchal institutions such as banks and railroads, thus menacing the hegemony of men like Trout Walker and the systemic injustices he represents, while at the same time becoming a folk hero and an object of desire in popular culture.

The sexualization of women and guns is symptomatic of the desire associated with visual displays of power in Westerns and in the valoriza-tion of masculinity entrenched in the landscapes of the West. Gender is political and hence socially relevant because it is performed and staged under the same deep-seated cultural norms that influence the way land-scapes are viewed and imagined. Holes frames this cultural production with western lore and history but deconstructs its conventions by insert-ing other characters, women and minorities, into the subject positions reserved for white men in traditional western narratives. A text’s subject position offers a point of perspective from which to interpret, transmit, or construct cultural meanings and values. A subject position therefore enables a character “to act politically,” as Linda Alcoff explains, and hence represents an empowered position from which to question the hegemony of conventional social practices and white, middle-class values such as those the Warden employs to justify her methods at Camp Green Lake (433). In comparison to traditional Westerns’ use of the open landscape as an ideologically loaded backdrop for narratives that glorify a particular brand of masculinity, Holes shows that the geocultural imaginary of the Old West can be retold, revisited, and deconstructed to become a vehicle for multiethnic integration and inclusion into narratives of the New West.

The history of the West is excessively violent and traumatic, making recuperation of the past difficult. Ghostly apparitions in film and literature can open portals otherwise sealed by national amnesia. Brogan observes that “while the ghosts bear witness to the cultural rift that necessitates their existence, they also, in their refusal to be put away and forever forgotten, stand as figures for the mystery of cultural persistence in the face of power-


Julie Bozzi. CINDERBLOCK WALL AROUND HOMES. 1983. Oil on paper. 1.125" x 9.75". With permission from the artist.

ful incentives to forget” (171). In Holes, apparitions of the past, whether they be actual ghosts or shadows of long-gone social institutions, snatches of long-lost songs or life-long searches for buried treasure, are powerful portents of knowledge and suppressed history. Their haunting presence teaches two basic lessons. One, that the divide between the past and the present is never quite as self-sufficient and complete as it may appear to be; two, that the idea of the New West is a complex social process that con-tinuously wrangles with specters of the past. The dual aspect of haunting and history thus shows that the exclusion of women and minorities from the mythopoetic metahistory of the West produces ambiguity about the valence of such a geocultural imaginary in the contemporary New West.

Holes integrates Wild West mythology into a New West story about systemic inequality and institutionalized discrimination. The novel’s appeal as contemporary youth literature is to allow gender and race to remain ambivalent political and social identities in the “empty” western landscapes and in the urban New West. Since the many-layered history of the US West is haunted by cultural memories, local knowledge, and social imagination, the dual forces of haunting and history continue to produce meaningful dynamic perspectives on the West as a complex cultural space.


Notes

1. Men with the Bark On is the original title of an illustrated book by famous western artist Frederic Remington, published by Harper & Brothers in 1900.

2. Holes is recommended on multiple library and school reading lists for grades 6–12. It has won many awards, including the 1998 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and the 1999 Newberry Medal.

3. In using the term traditional Western, I am broadly referring to popular late nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives in the tradition of Owen Wister and Zane Grey and to the mainstream Hollywood Western. Although many subgenres exist, traditional Western narratives are organized around codes of honor, issues of justice, stereotypes of male protagonists, violent conflicts, and sets of tightly packed action events culminating in a shoot-out. Significantly, the Western features the pristine, “empty” landscapes of the US West as an integral part of the narration.

4. Examples of US novels that deal with the supernatural and ghosts as a way of connecting past to present include Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1988), Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997).

5. Compared to the generations growing up in the 1940s to 1970s, today’s school children are exposed to few western narratives aimed at their age group on TV or in other media. Joss Whedon’s show Firefly, a hybrid of Western and science fiction, is one of the few current attempts at ensnaring a young audience.

6. Holes is mostly read as a contemporary bildungsroman. Like several of Sachar’s other books, its protagonist has low self-esteem and doesn’t fit in. Benjamin notices how the literary device of an unlikely hero acting as protago-nist exposes the injustice of the social order. He writes, “By integrating the social process with the development of a person, it bestows the most frangible justifica-tion on the order determining it” (Illuminations 88). Sachar writes from within a humanistic tradition that places great emphasis on fate, the relevance of history in everyday life, the benefits of friendship, and individualism. The novel is widely read in middle and high schools, and there are generous study aids available for it online. Interestingly, none of them comment on the novel’s excessive amount of violence, which perhaps indicates the general acceptance of violence in con-temporary US culture.

7. The apparition does not appear in the novel; Sachar added it to the film script.

8. New Western historians have taken a revisionist approach to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. Trails: Towards a New Western History (1991), edited by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, outlines their manifesto.

9. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an estimated one million people, most of whom are black, do not have access to Medicaid


because they have no documents proving that they are US citizens. Many of these people are homeless, mentally ill, nursing home patients, or displaced by natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina (http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2223).

10. Not surprisingly, the birth certificate of the first black US president has been the subject of significant media attention. A type of conspiracy theorists referred to as “birthers” claim that Barack Obama is not a natural-born US citizen and hence is ineligible for office.

11. Spivak elaborates on this point in her critique of Western intellectuals’ unacknowledged “desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject” (271).

12. Stanley’s argument paraphrases Frederick Douglass’s often quoted state-ment: “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free” (www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/185536).

13. Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991) offers interesting parallels to the making of a female outlaw.

Works Cited

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LQ /RXLV 6DFKDUV +ROHV · of racial violence, rebellious women, and Wild West legends.2 Haunted...

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