34: Binary oppositions
I haven’t read any theory, but I’ve certainly read several web pages about identifying, complicating, and destabilizing
Binary oppositions
Seller vs. customer: Not only does our seller fail to sell — even before he’s started selling, he becomes a customer. His “employer” requires he buy his own sample set. Even when he earns his only customer, he takes the product into his own literal hands, in fact puts the product literally into his hand.
Safety vs. danger: The binary is already complicated in the title: A sharp knife, the icon of danger, is famously still safer than a dull knife. It’s safer because it’s easier to control — and here we see that safety lies not just in the tool but in its user. The narrator’s accident is entirely his fault; the jackknife is safe, but his handling makes it dangerous. What else might the narrator make unsafe through his use? But in his defense: is any knife truly safe? Is anything truly safe?
White collar vs. blue collar: The knife sales job, like many sales jobs, sits between white and blue collar. The salesman is a working man, doing business out in the world, but he’s not a factory worker or a clerk at a register. Our narrator makes much out of the “professional” aspects of the job, and he buys the lines about “self-management” and making his own hours. (What hours does this young man need to make?) Next summer at the donut shop, he’ll work assigned shifts and wear a branded polo shirt and pocketless pants. But even at minimum wage, he’ll make more money and do less damage to his social capital.
Commerce vs. religion: The job is mercifully cut short by a missions trip. But missions work is a spiritual sales job, the Bible its catalog, the sermon its sales pitch, and the revenue counted in souls. (Unpacking the relationship between missions and extractive imperialism is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Work life vs. home life: The sales job turns the personal into the commercial. The narrator invades his prospects’ homes; he mines his family’s rolodex; he makes a commission off his father’s birthday present. Eventually his product invades his body, a punishment to fit his crime. Chastened, he re-establishes the binary with a more traditional job.
Mother vs. father: The narrator’s world is highly gendered and family-oriented. Mothers cook and clean and caretake. Fathers go to work. The mother’s roles are important and even powerful, but they are still in service of her husband and son. Any destabilization may lie in redefining “work” to include the mother’s labor. Another angle: The son’s urge to be a “salesman” puts him in kitchens, selling kitchenware: a service to mothers. The following year, he even sells baked goods, though he doesn’t bake them. (He will later become a father; he will clean and caretake and work, but he will never cook.)
There’s a man writing some kind of Ben Folds/Bo Burnham/Phoebe Bridgers dirge about feeling directionless and irrelevant in a post-COVID, AI-takeover world. He better release this in full, because skipping between three looping TikToks is exhausting me.
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