For this exercise, pick one of the mysteries we have read (by Chandler, Fisher, Hughes, or Auster) and consider how social capital functions in that story. Begin by picking a character from the story and drawing that character’s sociogram. Make sure to include characters who are alluded to even if they do not directly appear in the narrative (parents, former business partners, ex-lovers, etc.). Then, in about 1 page of double-spaced prose or a little more, analyze a couple of the ties that have been depicted in the sociogram:
- How do they fit or not fit Watters’s definitions of either weak or strong ties?
- How do the characters’ roles as weak or strong ties intersect with their function in the plot of the story?
- What is the bigger picture of the diegetic world in this story or the purpose of hardboiled fiction based on your observations of these ties—what is your broader sense of how the city functions or malfunctions, or can you derive some kind of moral or practical message from these instances?
Right now what you have written I find very confusing—there
is a lot of very abstract language that I find hard to understand. I think it
may help to try and describe in more simple terms – and with more specific
details from the story – what you think weak and strong ties are supposed to do
and how different characters in the story are fulfilling or not fulfilling
those functions for Gillis. You don’t have to worry about having an
introductory paragraph or near transitions—don’t worry about writing an essay,
just go straight to the points you want to make.
One aspect of the Watters essay you might have misunderstood
is what he means by an “urban tribe”, because I don’t think we see that in the
Fisher story at all. Remember that an urban tribe is like the four friends
Samantha, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte in the Sex and the City episode – a
group of friends who all have strong ties to each other. Nobody in Fisher’s
story, City of Refuge, strikes me as having strong ties at all. I think Gillis
believes he might be developing a strong tie with Uggam, but the reader knows
that Uggam is just using Gillis (first to sell the dope for him, and second as
a patsy to take the blame for the whole drug-dealing operation). I agree with
you that there is a sense of the tie between Gillis and Uggam deepening (a
chance encounter creates a weak tie that seems like it gets stronger in some
ways), but I think it’s also important to point out that this closeness is a
ruse, and so not a genuinely strong tie as Watters describes them (nor a
genuinely helpful weak tie, the way weak ties are supposed to be—since the
“help” Uggam is giving Gillis is actually self-serving and malicious).
So my first suggestion is to explain these relationships (of
Gillis to Uggam, and Gillis to Tony) in more detail, and question whether they
fit Watters’s concepts of weak and strong ties. Maybe they do in some
ways, but in other ways they probably don’t; they are not simple,
straightforward weak or strong ties the way Watters has defined the concepts.
Based on a more detailed explanation of these relationships, you might then be
able to explain more clearly and concretely what your sense of the big picture
of the story is. A couple of words you used stood out to me that you might want
to think about further – you described the Harlem in the story as “tangled”,
and I think that is very true. With just a few characters portrayed, we manage
to see lots of surprising connections between them and how they impact each
other’s futures. However, you also describe it as “tight-knit” at one point, I
think, and that I’m not so sure of. It doesn’t seem likely anyone wants to
genuinely help anyone else out in this story, nor that anyone can trust anyone
else (except maybe that Tom Edwards trusts Uggam as a fellow criminal).
The only other thing I’ll mention is that the sociogram
itself could probably include a few more figures. For instance, there is the
Jamaican (the guy who used to work for Tony until Gillis steals his job from
him); there is Tom Edwards; possibly you could consider the Black police and/or
the white detectives to be on the sociogram; the abusive boyfriend of the girl
with the green stockings; and the people “back home” in South Carolina
(Gillis’s family and Uggam’s family) who are vaguely mentioned but don’t appear
in the story directly. Remember that in a sociogram, Gillis might be connected
to some of these people indirectly (e.g., the abusive boyfriend is connected to
the woman with the green stockings, whom you see as connected to Gillis). It’s
not that you have to map every possible person in this world, but it might be
useful in trying to think about the big picture of this story.