Is This Real Life? The Ambiguity of Time in Carolyn Chute's "The Beans of Egypt, Maine"

Today in class we had a striking conversation on Carolyn Chute's highly provocative novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine.  In particular, I liked Faye's point about the ambiguity of time in the novel as it serves to represent the cyclical, inherited, and inevitable nature of poverty for the rural working class.  However, after more thought on the novel and its characters, I would like to expand on this interpretation and suggest that the ambiguity of time also forces us to interrogate our understandings of today's impoverished as not only anti-evolutionary but symbolically anachronistic.  This anachronism ultimately works to suggest that we as a society, so obsessed with the notion of progress, speeds forward blindly often forgetting those without the means to keep up.  It is only when we have the opportunity to look back through the lens of literature (like that of Chute's) that we can see how exclusive our progress is and how much it has inexcusably behind.

Often at times in the novel I found myself wondering, "what decade is this??".  The novel is so conceptually foreign and at times, disturbing, that I found myself unable to imagine that such a scene, and such a grotesquely marginalized family, could live in the same world that I do.  However the novel's plot is one that is almost a layering of short stories becoming intertwined and seems to move in bursts rather than with a steady linearly narrative progression (a temporal movement so evenly organized that we are subconsciously jarred by its literary fracture).  In this rupture of our most normative interpretation of temporality, Chute offers the notion that rural poverty like that which the Beans inhabit transcends time, forcing us to see that yes, the collective 'we' of readers inhabit the same world as the Bean family.  As Sam mentioned in class as well, it is hard for us to reconcile our participation in a Capitalist system that has likely worked for the majority of our families with the fact that this same system has left families like the Beans without healthcare-- a major point of interrogation in the novel.

In essence, the Beans are metonyms of an often-overlooked form of poverty: that of the rural working class.  They force us to see that today's poverty is not necessarily the inability to put food on the table (which the Beans also face) but is the ignorance to know there is a way out, an escape.  The Beans, in their ambiguous temporal shifts, are real most definitely real life, and they finally rise to the surface of a society that does not always want to acknowledge them through the graphically descriptive advocacy of Chute.