If I Didn’t Believe it, my Audience Wouldn’t

Supermarket is the debut novel of Bobby Hall A.K.A. Logic. Logic is known for his music that addresses topics of race, mental health, and substance abuse. The synopsis on the back of the book describes this novel as, “A darkly funny psychological thriller, Supermarket is a gripping exploration into madness and creativity.”

Before I even opened the book, I wrote on a post-it note several questions to carry with me throughout my reading journey. What sort of person would I have to be to take this work of fiction as real? How might I become a “submissive reader,” willing to take up the role projected by the text? Or will I remain a resistant reader and totally reject the projected role? How is the text written to move me from resistance to submission? Before I could determine whether I was submitting or resisting, I had to find the roles expected of the narrative audience. 

As seen from the synopsis and the description of the author, the audience knows that this book will be about the inner life of someone suffering from mental illness, delivered in a mood of dark humor. Bobby Hall tries for a “cinematic storytelling” writing style, as stated in the author’s description on the back of the book. The first chapter lays out a gruesome scene in which the narrator describes what he sees, smells, feels, and hears as he stands over the body of a dying man. The scene is sprinkled with minute details and I immediately wanted to take up the role of a detective and start picking up clues. I knew the book was a psycho-thriller so, from the onset, I questioned everything. As I read more, I realized the narrative audience was asked to play two roles. I thought of these as the madman and the detective. It was like being a double agent. These roles are really just being the ideal narrative audience and the narrative audience. The narrator is narrating his experiences that, he claims, provide the material for the writing of his novel. And so the narrative audience, in a strange way, is asked to regard itself as the authorial audience, the author’s hypothetical audience, and as such we must ask whether we are to take the narrator as the author even though this is still a work of fiction. The book is broken into two parts, the series of unfortunate events leading up to the climax of Flynn finishing his novel and then the time Flynn spends in the asylum fighting his demons. Superstore is being narrated by an older Flynn looking back on his past and presenting it all as real events from his life. 

In his article “Truth In Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” Peter Rabinowitz describes the ideal narrative audience as the audience who  “believes the narrator, accepts his judgment, sympathizes with his plight, laughs at his jokes even when they are bad” (Rabinowitz 134). The ideal narrative audience emerges and splits away from the narrative audience. The ideal narrative audience is asked to sit back and watch the cinematic writing unfold inside their mind’s eye. They must believe that someone could possibly drive themselves insane while constructing a novel; that someone can have an alternate personality that steals, cheats and commits crimes without their knowledge; that someone can fight their subconscious in a physical battle of wills,and that all of this can happen in the mundane world we are living in. It may not be hard to believe that real people experience mental illnesses such as Schizophrenia or Dissociative Identity Disorder. However, in order to believe Flynn’s story to be true, the narrative audience must believe that mental illness can lead to complete loss of control. The audience must also accept that Flynn’s perceptions of the world are accurate and credible. This was hard for me because Flynn shows that he is not a very credible narrator. The narrative audience is instinctively suspicious of Flynn’s perceptions of his life. 

The first instance I became suspicious of Flynn was right after his first encounter with his annoying new boss at the supermarket, Flynn says to himself, “I have no idea what came over me, but I snapped and punched him in the face.” On the very next page, Flynn snaps back to reality and thinks, “I had imagined the whole thing, caught in a daydream so vivid I didn’t even remember making my way to his office” (Hall, 11-12). Bobby Hall was not trying to be subtle. This scene has flashing red lights that say, “ALL IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS”! I knew a “game was afoot” and I must put on my Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat and seek out more clues. Being resistant was another role that the narrator was expecting the reader to assume.

Right then I realized I could be both a submissive ideal audience or I could be a resistant narrative audience. Raboniwiz describes the reason for multiple audiences by stating, “In the proper reading of a novel, then, events which are portrayed must be treated as both ‘true’ and ‘untrue’ at the same time” (125). There was value to both roles. As Raboniwiz states, “Much of the problem and most of the joy of reading irony comes from sorting out these levels, and feeling the tension among them” (135).The magic of reading is that as an authorial audience, I could play both. I could be a madman alongside Flynn living in the loop while also following the trail of mystery left by older narrating Flynn. Both are designed to make the audience see the book in a certain way. There were instances where I was pulled toward one type more than the other. Although I knew that Flynn’s perceptions were not reliable, there were still instances where I believed what he said to be true. For example, Flynn, while under the persona of Frank, slept with a coworker named Rachel. At this point I was fairly confident that Frank was a figment of the narrator’s imagination, but I was unsure which other characters were real. There was a scene on page 129, when Rachel says “Hi, Frank ” with a wink as she walked down the supermarket aisle. This really threw me off. Could Rachel see Frank? Was Frank actually real? It turns out that she was talking to Flynn and she thought that Frank was just his code name during their rendezvous. 

Hall used movie tropes and movie references throughout the novel to give the audience clues. He assumes that the audience would recognize these suspicious scenes, actions, and foreshadowing to follow the breadcrumbs he was leaving. I believe that the authorial audience would be aware of these references. For example, there are several references to Vanilla Sky. The zippo lighter that appears throughout the novel is engraved with the words vanilla sky and Flynn describes the sunset during his date with Mia to be a “vanilla sky.” After some research, I discovered that Bobby Hall could be referencing the Paul McCartney song, the Claude Monet painting or, more likely, the Sci-Fi psycho-thriller movie starring Tom Cruise. 

 

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I believed these three artifacts to be completely different works of art all referring to the same type of cloud cover. However, they are all closely related. Movie critic website, Rotten Tomatoes, describes the film Vanilla Sky as, “the story of a young New York City publishing magnate who finds himself on an unexpected roller-coaster ride of romance, comedy, suspicion, love, sex and dreams in a mind-bending search for his soul”. According to Wikipedia, “The title Vanilla Sky refers to the sky as painted by Claude Monet, specifically as in The Seine at Argenteuil (1873) which is featured in the film” and Sir Paul McCartney was asked to write a song for the soundtrack. The lyrics to the song say, “Your life is fine/ It’s sweet and sour/ Unbearable or great/ You gotta love every hour/ You must appreciate/This is your time/This is your day/You’ve got it all/Don’t blow it away”. The movie Vanilla Sky seems to tie all the references together.I have not seen the movie in question to understand all the intertextual references. I can however see the similarities between the description of Vanilla Sky and Supermarket. The rotten tomatoes synopsis of Vanilla Sky reminded me of the synopsis from the back of the Supermarket book,“Who know you could find sex, drugs, and murder all in aisle nine?”  For Bobby Hall to reference this movie as often as he did, it obviously means a lot to him and the creation of his novel. Just knowing about these artifacts does not help me to better understand the text. The authorial audience would not only be aware of these references to an obscure Tom Cruise movie, but actually understand the connections to the text.

To continue with his film motiff,  Bobby Hall/ Logic even wrote a soundtrack of thirteen original songs to accompany the novel. The authorial audience would know about this soundtrack and listen to it along with the book. 

The relationship between the narrative and authorial audience was rather strange in this novel. The narrator frequently broke the fourth wall, as rhetorical questions and Subiectio (a mock dialogue ),

“No? You don’t know what I am talking about? I can’t tell if you don’t know what I am talking about or if you’re just taken aback by my breaking the fourth wall on this page you’re reading” (Hall 8).

Breaking the fourth wall is often intended to remove the distance between the narrator and the audience. However, I felt that in this instance it created a greater chasm. Rabinowitz discuss how narrative audiences interact with “anitirealistic” novels by saying, “…we become more conscious that the novel as art, and tends to diminish our direct emotional involvement in it” (132). By addressing the audience directly, and pointing out that they are currently reading the word on the page, the spell of reading is broken. The narrator even points this out by saying:

“Well damn, hold on a second, maybe I shouldn’t bring up the fact that you’re reading a book. If you realize what you’re literally doing this moment, you won’t actually be living in the world I’m painting for you” (Hall 8). 

The narrator is conscientious in some moments and oblivious during others. The book is being narrated by an older Flynn recounting his experiences while writing his novel and the aftermath. The narrator should know what is truth and fiction since he is writing about past events. However, he points out some things to the audience, but in other instances, he purposely misleads the audience to believe certain things to be true. Flynn sometimes has moments of clarity like on page 90, his perception about the infallibility of Frank starts to unravel, 

“Frank wasn’t real like he claimed to be. He was a liar, and a goddamn good one… I could see right through him. I was struck with the panic at the thought of what this would do to my book” (Hall 90).

On the very same page, Flynn decides to ignore this new revelation and become a submissive character in order to finish his book.

“I forced myself to forget his fallacy, instead believing fully in everything he conveyed. I did it so the audience would do the same from page to page!… If I didn’t believe it, my audience wouldn’t” (Hall 90)