The WHAT of the Narcissus?

Andrew, Bianca, and I loitered in a Little Tokyo mall this week and played Trivial Pursuit. We used one of the initial editions from 1981, meaning the questions were at least 29 years old, all written before we were born.

The game was on pace to last longer than Monopoly, so we finally abandoned it. I don't fault us: we're smart smart people, one of us was even once a contestant on the Trivial Pursuit game show hosted by the former Peter Brady. The problem was the game was a mess of questions about countries that no longer existed, science that had been disproved, and people we never heard of. Cluelessly, I guessed "Spiro Agnew" often enough that it finally ended up being the correct answer.

Andrew had somewhat of an edge as a scholar of German and French languages with the game being so Euro-centric. Apparently in 1981, they didn't feel compelled to be inclusive enough to throw in an occasional Asian or African geography question. This probably stemmed from laziness on the part of the question writers.

For example, Bianca read me a question about the first foreigner to win a certain golf tournament. She hinted that it didn't sound like a real name, so I just through out a throwaway guess, and I missed the answer, "Gary Player." Immediately following, Bianca also landed on the Sports & Games category and Andrew asked her about the three most successful golfers of a particular era. "Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer..." she guessed correctly before pausing. "I'm trying to think who else has a drink named after him." "Can I give you a hint?" Andrew asked. "It doesn't sound like a real name." "Fuzzy Zoeller?" Bianca tried, prompting us other two to laugh uproariously. We couldn't even get the answers right when the game was trying to hand them to us.

But that wasn't the full extent of the laziness. We discovered a card on which all of the answers were "Paris." I asked what I had to do to have an entire Trivial Pursuit card devoted to me, and then we found another card where all of the questions pertained to George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, so I guess I might change my mind about that aspiration.

Before reading a question to me, Andrew prefaced, "You're not going to like this one." "Because it's racist?" I joked, but it ended up being yet another obscure one about France. A few turns later, I couldn't contain my laughter enough to read the card. "What is it?" Andrew asked. "Remember how I said that the questions were racist?" I responded before barely choking out the Arts & Literature question:

"Who wrote The Nigger of the Narcissus?"

Even three decades ago, I can't believe that a board game expected people to casually drop the N-bomb, especially for a relatively obscure novella from the 19th century (which I had to Wikipedia to learn about - apparently it was finally republished last year as The N-word of the Narcissus.) Author Joseph Conrad truly has a heart of darkness -- as does Trivial Pursuit.