For this project, we were told to create any two genres to represent or shed light on a topic from one of four novels we chose to read for the course. My novel choice was Victor LaValle’s “The Devil in Silver,” which is a story that takes place in a mental institution and blends a varying amount of genre to bring out this beautiful story which presents the horrors of a mental institution through the eyes of its patients.

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First genre: poem

Pills are chains too.

…The drugs I use to tame the devil…

Make me tremble softly in my decrepit chair.

Make me want to close my eyes and sleep,

make me want to open my eyes and see the world.

They cage me in the thin blurry line between…

Numb and dead…

The once tender blue sky is now a muck of indifferent shades.

…The drugs I use to tame the devil…

Only whisper to me that I’ve been the devil this whole time.

They course through my body and steal from me the sweet and basic indulgence of conscience.

Is this my punishment for being the devil?

I want to scream out for help, but the world can’t hear a dead man’s wailing when he’s being dragged to hell.

Second genre: drawing

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-My rationale for why I chose these genre…

The book that I chose to read for this course and to do my project on was Victor LaValle’s “The Devil in Silver.” The novel was amazing in the way that it blended in so many different genres from comedy to horror and even the beautiful struggle of romance in a hopeless place. The language of the text and the way LaValle interacted with the reader was also very comforting and enjoyable, it helped soften the harsh themes that the story dealt with and allowed for a deeper connection to form between myself and what LaValle was trying to shed light on. For starters, my two genres focus on the feeling of hopelessness that the patients–mainly Pepper and Mr. Visserplein(the Devil)–felt at New Hyde both with their constant comatose state that made them lose touch with reality and the internal conflicts they had to face in questioning what being the “devil” meant.

The two types of genres I chose were a drawing and a poem. I chose these two as my desired genre for their brevity and depth. With the poem, I was allowed to be free and add depth to my thoughts while still expressing what the book made me feel through the eyes of Pepper and his interactions with “the Devil.” With my drawing, I wanted to briefly manifest what I constantly saw and felt when reading this story since there were no images in the book itself. I wanted to show the patients “drowning” from their entrapping life in New Hyde. The audiences I want my genre to reach are patients in psychiatric institutes, society as a whole, and everyday people struggling with mental illness. I am targetting this audience because I want them to see a reflection of their broken world, I want them to come to an understanding with the many challenges and battles they may be facing and I want for them to know that all around the world people are struggling in the world too. And with this I hope  they can feel a sort of understanding and comfort when looking at my genre.

As I was creating both the poem and the art I put my own emotions and mixed them in with the emotions of both Pepper and Mr. Visserplein as well as the patients in New Hyde. With the poem, I wanted to reflect on what I felt when pepper described his state of comatose and also when pepper realized that the devil was just a man who had lost his touch with reality and was abandoned by the world. With this in mind, I decided to bold and repeat the line  “…The drugs I use to tame the devil…” Because I wanted the reader to put themselves in the shoes of this “devil.” I wanted the reader to feel the loneliness and detaching feeling these patients, including Pepper and Mr. Visserplein, were forced into because of the comatose these pills caused. With my drawing I simply wanted to recreate the metaphorical meaning of someone drowning, I wanted to give life to the thought that Dorry expressed on how “everyone in New Hyde is trapped, in some way.”[1] The main point I want to emphasize is that I didn’t add colors because I wanted it to remain bleak and lifeless…I wanted to emphasize that when you’re “drowning” all alone with nobody to save you the world isn’t colorful or beautiful it is monotone and depressing. The words I etched into the drawing I added as a frantic plea for help, even though nobody can hear it and nobody can see them some of us still try in our own way to seek help out of this entrapping life.

All in all, I want all of my work to seem like a pit stop for people to just see a bit of themselves in it, to realize and accept the horrible muck that life is but also the beauty that can be found in that horrible muck.

Citations

[1] Victor LaValle. The Devil in Silver: A Novel (Kindle Locations 1912-1913). Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition.