rorriM eht ni fleS fo esneS

            Identity has been a huge theme in this semester’s books, from Howie to Clarissa to Jake to Gregor to Meursault to Antoinette, and lastly, to Milkman. In several of the books there have been key scenes in which the characters view themselves in a mirror and have some sort of major self-reflection: When Clarissa “assembles” herself in front of the mirror, when Meursault glances in the mirror and only notices the corner edge of a table, the “looking-glass” references in Wide Sargasso Sea, etc are all important moments that really show the protagonist’s character (or lack thereof) and their own view of themselves.  In Song of Solomon Milkman has a similar experience:

Milkman stood before his mirror and glanced, in the low light of the wall lamp, at his reflection.  He was, as usual, unimpressed with what he saw.  He had a fine enough face.  Eyes women complimented him on, a firm jaw line, splendid teeth.  Taken apart, it looked all right.  Even better than all right.  But it lacked coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self.  It was all very tentative, the way he looked, like a man peeping around a corner of someplace he is not supposed to be, trying to make up his mind whether to go forward or to turn back.  The decision he made would be extremely important, but the way in which he made the decision would be careless, haphazard, and uninformed.  (70)

Milkman’s life from the outside looks fine, even better than fine, but on the inside he lacks a clear identity.  All the tiny parts of Milkman’s life seem normal, but he hasn’t figured out how to put them together to create who he really is.  He has been told all these little bits and pieces of his family’s past from his father, mother, and Pilate, but has no definite truths that he can hold onto. 

            This one paragraph has so much more meaning after finishing the book than when I initially read it.  Milkman’s indecision to “go forward” to “someplace he is not supposed to be” seems to be a clear reference to him breaking into Pilate’s house and his quest for the gold. The uninformed decision he makes could be how he breaks up with Hagar.  It is an extremely important decision, even costing Hagar’s life, and is most definitely careless, haphazard, and uninformed.   This whole passage is extremely interesting in comparison with how Hagar reacts to seeing herself in the mirror. He does not care nearly as much and does not seem to really have a problem that he lacks a “total self”.  The “tentativeness” of his face also applies to his approach to all of his decisions.  He never truly makes a decision for himself in the entire novel besides hitting his father.  Morrison notes this when he is arguing with Guitar about how they are going to steal the gold from Pilate:

He felt a self inside himself emerge, a clean-lined definite self.  A self that could join the choruses at Railroad Tommy’s with more than laughter.  He could tell this.  The only real confrontation he’d had was hitting his father, but that wasn’t the kind of story that stirred the glitter up in the eyes of the old men in Tommy’s.  (184)

The gold not only drives the plot of the novel, but gives Milkman a sense of purpose and like he points out here, a sense of self. Milkman’s identity is formed through his quest for the gold, and more importantly, for his family’s history.

Who am I?

Who are you? Who am I?  What make me me, and you you? How are we at all different from each other?  What makes everyone different from each other is their identity, how they view themselves and how they show themselves to the world.  A HUGE part of our identity comes from our early years of life that we have no control over.  Our identity is formed by our community, our culture, our family,  etc, and even if we change our views we still carry a bit of them within ourselves.  As children if you don’t have this identity to latch onto, you often feel lost and completely helpless and could have major psychological problems down the road.        

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette has very little to latch onto as a child.  First of all, she has no support from her family. Her mother “rejects” her to deal with her own problems, her father is dead, her new step-dad completely does not understand or want to understand anything that is going on, and her brother Pierre is killed at an early age.  Second of all, the community that she grew up in and most “identifies” with hates her and her family and literally forces them out of their house and Coulibri.   As a child, this all is extremely psychologically damaging.  One of the most powerful scenes of the book is where Tia throws the rock at her face after the burning of the Coulibri estate.

“Then, not so far off, I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all that was left of my life as it had been. We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her. Not to leave Coulibri. Not to go. Not. When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.”  (pg 45/41)

            This passage shows how much attachment Antoinette has for Coulibri and for her childhood life that is now completely gone. Antoinette most identifies with Tia and desperately wants to live like Tia and be a part of Tia’s community. But yet she can’t, as the thrown rock indicates, and is rejected by Tia and her community because of her family and race.  Having all of this taken away at such an impressionable age really tears apart Antoinette’s identity.  Who is she?  She is most certainly NOT English, but is not accepted by the people in Coulibri or really anywhere in Jamaica.  The wide Sargasso Sea literally represents this:

for it is in between the West Indies and England, but doesn’t have any real definite boundaries or identity, just like Antoinette.

Who Are We to Judge?

In the just the first chapter of The Stranger, as a class we made several serious judgments on Meursault’s character.   After reading chapter 3 in Part 2, it seems that these initial judgments are the reason that Meursault is convicted:  In the whole court scene we NEVER hear about the actual events that occur in Chapter 6. Besides Meursault mentioning the brief “narrative of what I’d done,” (87) the entire court scene in chapter 3 ONLY talks about the events preceding the murder and each of the witnesses only talk of Meursault’s character.  There are no Arab witnesses and none of the witnesses discuss the murder. The prosecuting lawyer tries to convince the jury to judge Meursault on his character and for his reactions to his mother’s death.  The defending lawyer catches on to the prosecutor’s plan and says, “Come now, is my client on trial for burying his mother or for killing a man?” (96) Why can the jury not be convinced to judge Meursault for KILLING a man? Why is it that Meursault’s attitude towards life is the reason for his conviction, not his killing of the Arab?

            The court systems are clearly extremely racist.  Raymond gets away with physical abuse by just one testimony from Meursault.  Meursault could have easily escaped imprisonment by any tiny stretch of the truth.  Why are there NO Arab witnesses at the trial?  Why is it that Meursault is convicted because of his character and not because he shot an Arab?   It could be that killing an Arab is not a huge deal in the eyes of the court and can easily be justified, but Meursault gives no understandable explanation for why he did what he did. 

            I judge Meursault for shooting the Arab, not for his character.  Everyone has different ways of dealing with grief, and even though Meursault’s actions following his mother’s death are pretty socially unacceptable, we can learn a lot from how Meursault copes with death.  He simply accepts that it has happened, that is would have happened at some point in time, and that “grieving” for someone accomplishes nothing.  Even though I think he should at least think about his memories and relationship with Maman more, we all eventually come to similar conclusions, just not the day after.  

Sprachprobleme

            As we began reading Kafka, like with all the other books we’ve read, I began to think about Kafka’s writing’s characteristics and how one might Pastiche it.   Then I was like, “wait but this isn’t actually Kafka.”  We are reading Kafka through another person’s eyes.  This dramatically changes the way we can view and interact with the text. To analyze any passage in great depth you must go back to the original German text.  Going back to the original text is not only time-consuming, but is extremely difficult if you are not fluent in German!

Whenever there is a translation something is lost.  Words and phrases can never be “directly” translated from one language to another.  Even though we still get the general story of The Metamophosis, we are getting a very different narration of that story than what Kafka wrote.  Many words in English have different connotations than what the German word with the “same” meaning has. This is true of every language: what makes human language so incredible is how there is nothing that can convey each word’s exact meaning besides that one word.   We are completely unconscious of this, but when you start thinking about a particular word, take “particular” for example, how can you describe that word to someone who doesn’t understand what it means without using a sentence with it in it?  There are many synonyms and other words you can use to describe it, but the person does not really understand what it means until they hear it used.

The perfect example of translation differences, as Mr. Mitchell has mentioned several times in class, is the difference between the “feebly knocking” and “gently knocking” father: both feebly and gently come from the same German word, yet they have drastically different connotations in English. Yet it is amazing that we still can get so much out of Kafka’s writing without being fluent in German.  Even though we know it isn’t exactly what he is saying or exactly what he means, we still can see how Gregor thinks and can be told an incredibly thought-provoking story.

A Woolfy Moment in Hemmingway

            One of the most interesting moments of The Sun Also Rises to me is when Jake goes into the cathedral in Spain and is actually narrating his internal thoughts. This specific passage reminds me most of Woolf and lets the reader get a glimpse inside Jake’s head.  There are very few moments in the narration of the book in which Jake goes through his thought progressions.  Most of the book he is either describing things around him or going through dialogue with other characters. In this scene he chronicles his drifting thoughts while he is praying. 

“At the end of the street I saw the cathedral and walked up toward it. The first time I ever saw it I thought the facade was ugly but I liked it now. I went inside. It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big windows. I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bull-fighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bull-fights would be good, and that it would be a fine fiesta, and that we would get some fishing. I wondered if there was anything else I might pray for, and I thought I would like to have some money, so I prayed that I would make a lot of money, and then I started to think how I would make it, and thinking of making money reminded me of the count, and I started wondering about where he was, and regretting I hadn’t seen him since that night in Montmartre, and about something funny Brett told me about him, and as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time; and then I was out in the hot sun on the steps of the cathedral, and the forefingers and the thumb of my right hand were still damp, and I felt them dry in the sun. The sunlight was hot and hard, and I crossed over beside some buildings, and walked back along side-streets to the hotel.”

            This passage seems a little out of Hemmingway’s style and a little more like Woolf, with a multitude of commas and run-on sentences.  The second to last sentence is whopping 196 words.  That is INSANE for Hemmingway’s normal style of as short as possible, direct sentences conveying a single idea that is always more complicated that it seems. (“It felt good to be warm and in bed.” “The wine was good.” “I had a bad time.” etc) To me this also is one of the most relatable moments of the book.  It is very human to have thought digressions and here Jake is feeling ashamed that his thought digressions are drifting away from what he thinks should be in his prayers. 

I think that religion is an incredibly important part of Jake’s life that we only see glimpses of throughout the book.  He comes to the conclusion that he’s a “rotten Catholic,” but doesn’t feel that there is anything he can do to change that. He seems a little frustrated that he doesn’t feel very religious at that particular moment and hopes that maybe next time he would be able to concentrate better on his prayers. He is the only character in the book that ever gives any thought to religion besides Brett who says, “[God] never worked very well with me.”

There She Was

One of the most pivotal and important themes in Mrs. Dalloway is what one might call “identity”.  A big question that Virginia Woolf poses is, “What does it mean for one to truly know another person or one’s self?” We spend a huge part of the book viewing Clarissa’s internal image of herself and other people’s opinions and views of her, but yet by the end of the book we still cannot definitely say that at any point in time Clarissa is exactly one thing or another.  One of my favorite questions posed by Mr. Mitchell in class was, “Is Clarissa Dalloway happy?” This question does not have any correct answer.  Clarissa, like all of us, is in constant fluctuation, and Woolf’s internal camera shows us that even when she appears to be very pleasant and “happy” from the outside, there is always more going on beneath the surface.  Woolf dives so deeply into the central characters’ brains that the reader knows much more about each central character than the other characters know about them, but yet we still see that even those central characters are conflicted in their own views of themselves.

One passage key to Woolf’s sense of identity, which we mentioned briefly in class, occurs when Clarissa is alone in her room, looking at a mirror, trying to “assemble” herself:

“How many million times she had seen her face, and always with the same imperceptible contraction! She pursed her lips when she looked in the glass. It was to give her face point. That was her self — pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her — faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions…” (pg 36)

            The picture on the cover of the Scott edition of Mrs. Dalloway (see below) is extremely symbolic and connects well to this quote and Woolf’s views on identity. The abstract spheres, squares, and other shapes all are coming to one central point, like Clarissa’s pieces of herself coming together while she’s looking in the mirror. You can identify specific parts of the picture, but you cannot say what the picture is as a whole: you can say specific things about parts of Clarissa, but you cannot simply summarize her with these statements. Clarissa, like all of us, is in constant motion and her identity is always changing.  And yet there she was, on this mid-June day in London, doing what she does best: being Clarissa Dalloway.