Sometimes a Great Notion

Music is a regular motif in Sometimes a Great Notion. The novel’s title comes from the lyrics of a song by folk and blues artist Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly). There are frequent references to characters listening to music, whether via the jukebox in Teddy’s bar, or via the transistor radio Joe Ben wears as he drowns. Minor characters Ray and Rod serve as popular town musicians. Lyrics from several songs are scattered throughout the novel, from the anthem of the labor union cause, “Which Side are You On?,” to “Woody Knows Nothing,” a song by Erik Darling that Viv sings (425, 539).

Music can provide spiritual lift. When torrential rains miraculously end after Joe Ben dies and Hank agrees to side with the logging union, Jenny sings a song “to the tune of ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More’,” and Ray sings, “I got Blue Skies, and a clear road” (656, 661). These lighter moments turn serious, however. The rain returns, the narrator tells readers how Jenny became a prostitute at age 15, and Ray purposefully plunges his hands into boiling water in a moment of mental instability.

Similarly, one of the most significant scenes between Lee and Hank is a conversation they have about their mutual love of jazz. Despite their stark personal differences and fierce feud, the half-brothers each adore jazz. Even in this shared love, however, their differences show through, with Lee being enthusiastic about the music of John Coltrane’s album Africa Brass and other avant-garde pieces, while Hank prefers traditional jazz that he sees as more masculine and “something with a little more balls on it” (315). Lee names the difference in their tastes in racial terms as “White Jazz” and “Black Jazz” (315). Their conversation turns bitter, becoming a heated argument, and Hank storms out. Music, like nature, has the potential beauty, healing, and bringing people together, but is also connected to sorrow, tragedy, and conflict.

A hole in the wall between Lee’s bedroom and the former bedroom of his mother (and now Viv’s room) makes it possible to discretely see from one room into another. Shortly after Lee returns to Oregon and the Stamper house, he sits in his old room and is reminded of the hole by a beam of light that shines from Viv’s room, through the hole into his room. The beam of light through the “forgotten hole in [Lee’s] wall” symbolically connects Lee’s past and present (161). Lee recalls that as a ten-year old boy, he had peered through that hole to discover that his half-brother Hank and his mother Myra were having an affair. After he rediscovers the hole in adulthood, he sees Hank’s wife Viv undressing through the hole. Coming full circle, Hank later looks through the hole and sees Viv and Lee making love.

In strictly physical terms, the hole allows for the voyeuristic discovery of these secrets. Lee calls it his “eyepiece to the hard and horny facts of life” and even wonders to himself if Hank had “arranged for me to see the hole again” to taunt him (161). Later, Lee is gleeful to realize that Hank has caught him and Viv in the act of having sex.

The light through the hole illuminates the conflict between Hank and Lee. Lee notes the symbolic significance of the light when he first sees Viv, noting “that the girl—not the lamp behind her—was emitting the light” (225). As the light falls from Viv, through the hole, and onto Lee, the past trauma of his mother’s and Hanks affair connects to his return to Oregon in the present, and to the future he sees in hoping to get revenge on Hank by having an affair with Viv.