To the boys it seemed that they were making their way through a separate, lampless world, out beyond some obscure threshold, with its own economic life, social habits, and codes, aware of itself as having little if anything to do with the official Fair. . . .
* * * * * * * * * *
I know I can't read every book one precious line at a time, taking a moment to ponder and think about it at length, because I'd never finish another book. I finally stopped writing about every chapter of Vonnegut's Player Piano simply because I need to be able to read a fucking book without losing myself in an endless cycle of dissection and vulgar joke commentary. But if I don't stop to consider every line, I'm more than likely to simply pass up a line like this as the story runs past it on its way to the Donkey Show scene where I would stop no matter how I was reading this book so I could text everybody I know and be all, "Hey! Did you get the donkey show reference in Against the Day?!" When I realized that letter from Pelafina in House of Leaves had the "first letter per word code" that read "My dear Zampano, who did you lose?", I got on the communal phone at work (I was reading on break!) and called everybody I knew to say, "Oh my God! Oh my God! What does it mean? How does Pelafina know Zampano?! What the fuck?!"
What I'm trying to say is that this sentence has my mind roiling and it hasn't settled down yet enough to explain why so I'm vamping here!
Before I start, this sentence ends in a "this sentence is over even though it has more to say" end stop ellipsis. I just want to mention that because the next sentence might shed more light or change my perception of this sentence after I've read it. I have not read it yet so my feelings (and, yes, there will be feelings. My apology to the rationalists out there who expect commentary on literature to be some kind of scientific dissection of what the text and author are doing, providing examples from theorists and using loads of big words that I have to look up every time I read other people use them and then never add them to my own vocabulary because fuck making people do that kind of work when what they really want is just a solid punchline about a guy's dick) are purely based on this sentence alone (and, I mean, what's come previous. I can't divorce every line from past context, no matter how demanding my Children's Lit professor in college was that I do exactly that).
First off, the boys have almost certainly entered the Fair through a fake entrance created by some conman cutting a gap in the fence. They are absolutely not quite in the Fair. They are in a liminal space (if they aren't actually in a liminal space, just realize this "liminal space" shit is going to be a running joke throughout my reading of this book and sometimes I'll get it right and sound like a genius and other times I'll get it wrong and not sound like a genius but those are the times I'm joking and also Jesus was carrying me) between a lighted world and a world submerged in darkness. This is both literal and figurative (and by "literal" I don't mean "figurative" in the way "literal" is commonly used in modern times). The literal meaning I don't need to explain because it's literal. The meaning is what was stated! But the figurative is where this sentence really shines (not a pun on the light versus dark thing).
This is obviously a statement about race in America. About immigrants and poverty and a class structure in a supposed classless society. The Fair is white America and how white America views itself: it is progress and education and light in the darkness, knowledge and technology and continued advancement. It is structure and order and the center of everything. Maybe they don't even see it as "the center"; they simply see it as all-encompassing. But there is an obscure threshold where people live knowing there are different rules for them in that "center" and so they have developed their own society and their own structures within a framework and boundaries unseen by those blinded by the lights of the Fair. They are often, for the most part, simply unnoticed. Until, of course, there is trouble. And then a spotlight is shone on their way of life, on their different ways, on their different codes and clothing and manners of speech. And it is then that the people in the center will say, "Why must they be this way? Why can't they try to fit in? Why must they make things so divisive?"
"aware of itself as having little if anything to do with the official Fair. . . ."
Look at how much work that full stop ellipsis is doing. It's saying, "You know what I'm saying! Y'all know what I'm talking about unless you're so enthralled by the Center that you can't even contemplate the systems happening around you. You deny yourself the knowledge of injustice and unfairness and you believe that if others do not fit into the Center's system, it is somehow by their choice or by their failing. And if you can't see any of that, why should I take the time to explain it to you? It's all here for anybody with the desire to see." But those out past that obscure threshold are aware. "Aware of itself as having little if anything to do with the official Fair." The people out past the threshold know they have never actually been included in the thoughts of those running the Fair. They know they're on the outside. Which is why they go about their own business, creating their own world, and just trying not to be noticed by those who never take the time to notice them.
I can't think of this bit without thinking of the ending of Jordan Peele's movie Get Out. How the movie tries to show the audience a person living past this threshold and how they aren't part of the Fair. We see how the Fair treats them and then Peele puts the final end stop ellipsis on the movie by having the police car arrive at the end. That's supposed to be the moment when, if you're part of the Fair, you know you're safe; the bad guy cannot harm you now. But in Get Out, this moment is completely subverted and ominous. Here is a Black man with a white woman standing over a dead man when the police arrive. Everybody, even those who have chosen not to believe in it, understands how ominous and terrifying this moment is. Here is a man past the obscure threshold having the light of the Fair pull up suddenly on him and we all know that it means trouble and death. It's a magic trick that many of us understand and a testament to story telling that Peele did such a great job putting anybody viewing that movie in the place of a Black man having cops suddenly pull up on him.
