Hate to love Myra?
I’ll be honest, I like Myra. I’m not a hater. She only inspires confusion with a good helping of disgust, most notably as I read the scene of Rusty’s rape. Even if I did hate her, though, I’d consider her a well-constructed character—a solid element and, quite possibly the anchor, of a good novel. She is outlandish, dramatic (to say the least), radical, creative, and destructive. As with Sethe and Beloved, she’s a mishmosh of contradictions, an attribute that makes her realistic and inrtiguing. With complex characters comes an intricate plot line—also piquing the reader’s interest. But interest, of course, isn’t the be-all end-all. I still believe a good novel should rouse the reader’s emotions so much so that she gets sucked in, becomes a part of the story herself, and feels genuinely sympathetic, angry, frustrated, confused (“WTF??”), even disturbed. A good novel isn’t supposed to end on the last page. It’s supposed to leave behind a lot of questions unanswered; you should be able to turn it over in your head and try and “solve” the novel.
Take the ending, for instance. I think it’s safe to say the general consensus resembled something like, “What the hell?” Although I’m pretty frustrated by the ending and its unsatisfying nature, I’m not sure I would have changed it. Regardless of author intentionality, I think this is the most perfect ending in light of this novel. To me, the disappointing shift from asexual/all-sexual Myra to heterosexual Myron is a slap in the face. As much as I disapproved of a select few of Myra’s actions (ahem), she was entertaining in her radical-ness and I rooted for her to change the nation and its rigid sexual rules and gender roles. And now we’re stuck with passive, bland Myron? Ew. But I think the end of the novel does just as much to comment on sex and gender in late-60s America as did the vibrant, crazy antics of Myra. Myra is put back in her place, which is as a he, because that was her biological gender. The heterosexual white male-dominated culture could not let Myra get away with bending the rules and blurring the lines between gender identity and between sexuality. So they—whoever “they” are, which could be Rusty or Buck like she suspected, or the CIA as Myra writes, or no one in particular at all—killed Myra. My only consolation here was that Myra tries kicking and screaming to regain her body in the sequel Myron. What Myra’s mission as well as the novel’s ending suggest is a problem bigger than the novel itself.
I’m all for leaving Myra in the curriculum. It’s an unforgettable book, to say the least, and I think students would benefit from reading something like they’ve never read before. Something really shocking. I’d probably teach it to upper level students, though, because I think they’d be more likely to take it more seriously than, say, freshman or even sophomores would. In hindsight, too, this is one of the best, most complex writing I’ve seen on gender and sex issues, so teaching it to that point, I think, would be successful.
S&M and the fight for dominant sexuality
I was surprised that Eisner’s article “Myra Breckinridge and the Pathology of Heterosexuality” raised and answered a lot of questions I myself had after finishing the novel. For Myra, Eisner says, the personal and political cannot be separated. The microcosm and the macrocosm overlap, and the actions Myra takes in the name of redesigning sexuality are also in the name of the injustices done to Myron. Rusty’s rape is the most obvious manifestation of this. Myra claims this is the beginning of the world’s salvation, since she is about to “cure” Rusty of his rigid sexuality. In almost the same breath, she thinks to herself, “I had avenged Myron” (150). Revenge is as much a part of her mission as reconstructing the American sexual norm.
Eisner writes that violence, or sadomasochism in this story, is necessary in breaking down heterosexuality because the heterosexual culture uses it to repress the queer. Sexual identification is power, depending on how you identify (if you don’t identify at all, good luck). It was interesting to me to see that Vidal and Myra shared similar views on power, since we can’t assume that the author’s ideologies align with those of his creation. Vidal believes that power makes the wheel go ’round, and that by denying the dark underbelly of political power, we pretty much enable the Mussolinis and Hitlers to take control. This brings me back to Myra’s casual musings about becoming a dictator. Was this a subtle remark on Vidal’s part?
On another note, woohoo for Betty Freidan and Margaret Singer and the like! Freidan denounced the lack of social mobility women had at the time, while Singer (although not mentioned in the essay) pioneered the use of birth control. Both, like Myra, look for ways to overthrow the domination of male sexuality. Eisner mentions that Myra didn’t become popular until “Vidal’s interests became mainstream” and until “gender blending was all the rage” (259). Was Myra really so avant-garde (or controversial) that the revolutionaries of the 60s and 70s rejected its ideologies?
Was it the rape of Rusty? Myra’s unrelenting and emotionally disconnected sadomasochism? According to Eisner and Myra herself, violence is necessary to “unman” the men, thus assigning a more fluid sexuality to the male. Camp, the style in which the novel was written, recognizes this violence in a humorous way. “To call Rusty’s rape camp,” writes Eisner, “is to attest to both the violence of queer representation and the violence of gender conformity [...] More important, however, this violence is conjoined with humor to undercut the violence” (262). Must be pretty dark humor, since I was pretty disgusted by that scene. If I had trouble seeing the comic side forty years after the novel was written, I suppose I can imagine even the social revolutionaries would have seen it this way. The question I posed in one of my earlier blogs still bugs me, though: Is violence the productive way to break down dominant sexual roles? Isn’t that continuing the cycle, if the queer utilize violence because heteros used violence to oppress the queer?
I could write a whole lot more on ideas in the article I didn’t cover, but we’re approaching deadline. What I’d like to find out more about is the history of Camp; although Eisner threw it around generously in his essay, I still feel like I don’t have a solid grasp on what it’s all about.
“Something unique under the sun”
Is this person Myra or Myron? I don’t think it’s a question of who this character is. She is Myra and he is Myron. It matters not so much about genitalia; it’s about who she or he plays. As much as Myra wants to deconstruct gender roles, she must engage in them to a certain degree or become a social outcast. In order to be Myra, the former Myron has to assume the outward appearance of a woman to align with the female inside. This means she applies makeup, dons a dress, and supplements the look with perfectly constructed breasts. This reminds me of something I read in Tabitha’s blog a while ago: she mentioned that all of Myra’s self-praise seemed indicative of insecurity. I agree, and it makes sense that perhaps she elevated herself to assure herself of her own femininity. Toward the end of the novel, she gazes at the revolving woman whom she’d been looking at throughout the novel, but now she notices that the perfect woman is “worshipped but not loved,” much like Myra herself.
Before Myra reveals who she had been, I had believed that she wanted to take some sort of revenge on men—in their entirety. But she informs her reader that it was the male sex, the “one-eyed beast” as she calls it, for which she carries such hatred. “Myron,” she says, “was tortured by having been attached to those male genitals which are linked to a power outside the man who sports them or, to be more precise, they sport the men since they are peculiarly willful and separate…” (190). The penis, then, controls the man, the way he acts sexually, who his sexual partners can be; it also constructs for him how he must look, stand, walk, think. “Indeed, he has a head of his own and twice I have punished this head. Once, by a literal decapitation,” says Myra, “killing Myron so that Myra might be born and then, symbolically, by torturing and mocking Rusty’s sex in order to avenge Myron…” (190). Why Rusty? Why one man? I understand that he represents all that the male sex inscribes upon him, but why pinpoint one when there are so many?
Myra ends up in a highly suspicious hospital situation after being told that she had been hit by a car, an event which she does not remember. She has a beard and no breasts because the hormones and the implants impede with the healing process. Along with chemicals, they feed Myra (what I believe to be) false information and ideals which are not her own. She suspects that Buck or Rusty set her up, and claims that “I will have his God-damned head or my name is not Myron Breckinridge!” Her name has carried much value throughout her entries—she used it almost like an invocation or an oath. Now she calls herself Myron, and whether by mistake or not, he is being resurrected.
To my dismay, Myra assumes the identity of Myron—I’m still unsure whether it is the “old” Myron or a “new” one. He marries Mary Ann and they raise silky terriers. At the novel’s end, he informs the reader of the “lesson” he has learned: “It is a proven fact that happiness, like the proverbial bluebird, is to be found in your own backyard if you just know where to look” (213). Is this what Myron wanted or needed all along? All he had to do was get rid of his penis and he would be the person he wanted to be? I think the witty Myra would have been the last person to end her collection of musings with such a cliched mantra. Buck Loner et. al. were afraid of the unknown, and killed it.
Watch out boys, she’ll chew you up
Yes, my friends, I have been listening to Hall and Oates. And I think there’s no doubt that Myra is a maneater in almost all senses of the word. Be awesome if she was their muse.
Anyway, like I mentioned in class, I think the form of the novel is refreshing and (can I say?) cheeky. We’re privy to Myra’s uncensored thoughts and schemes, kind of like poor Dr. Montag who, as her therapist, has to try and remain objective and unshocked in response to her confessions. Reading Myra seems more realistic and pretty innovative for its time, since Vidal not only “lets” her tell the story, but allows her to correct herself to remain ever in the (near) present. The compilation of her entries seems more personal and her meticulous attempts to be accurate in her writing lend her the characteristic of a no-nonsense, nothing-but-the-truth woman. Myra herself even mentions that there is “no point to writing made-up stories” (4). The ironic thing is that in the same passage she tells the reader that she has created herself and will create a “literary masterpiece” in the same fashion. And throughout the novel, she imagines herself in countless roles, mimicking or drawing inspiration from actresses in her favorite era in American film.
Myra is, obviously enough, constantly involved in a power struggle between herself and men, or rather, between herself and the gender roles our culture assigns to us. We can see this in her battles with Buck Loner and in her overall theories. She suggests, for instance, that much of the drive behind racism is the white man’s fear of the “Negro cock” (70). Not the first thing I’d think of, but her theories and ideas are very sex- and gender-driven. She writes occasionally about population control; my guess is that she envisions a culture where sex is on the woman’s terms and therefore does not necessarily reflect the “ancient” or “traditional” patriarchal ideal that sex yields first and foremost a new generation. While speaking to Rusty and Mary-Ann about this social problem, she offers the solution of homosexuality or bisexuality, both as a result of more fluid gender roles. The two, obviously, are appalled.
For her enthusiasm in reworking the way Americans “play” or perform their genders, I admire Myra. But she’s not a two-dimensional character, and is so consumed by her mission that she stoops to sinister levels to accomplish it. Maybe this is how she thinks she will attain complete power over the male sex. “To save Rusty,” she says, “I must change entirely his sense of himself,” adding, “having already destroyed subjectively the masculine principle, I must shatter it in the person of Rusty” (113). Poor guy. I mean, being sexually and psychologically abused as he was, it’s not surprising he didn’t magically change from a “stud” into a lover of males. I think the mistake she’s making is exercising oppression over Rusty, repeating the cycle from which she came and in effect playing the male she so detests.
I have to confess I channeled my inner book dork and finished the whole thing. Didn’t see that coming!
The Postcolonial approach
From the postcolonial perspective, I’ve found, the community matters a great deal. In order to break free of the context of colonial rules and from the self as a colonized subject, the individual cannot approach the task alone. The articles I found, for instance, argue that the moment Sethe becomes a free woman is when the community of black women arrive at 124. Elliott writes that “It is through communal support that Sethe is able to face the symbol of the colonial oppression in her life and thus enter the empowering social and psychological space of a collectively defined discourse” (194). She gains control of her self with the help of the song the women sing, the noise that is beyond language (beyond, Elliott points out, the colonizer’s language). Postcolonial discourse often discusses the confining nature of binaries. You’re either the colonizer or the colonized, and each is defined and exists because of the other. This suggests that, as is Elliott’s article, Sethe took the role of colonizer when she killed her baby, since she refused her child the chance of creating her own subjectivity and from discovering her own self aside from White definition. In turn, Beloved acts as the master to Sethe’s slave as she takes all Sethe has to give, never satisfied. Postcolonialism embraces multiple truths and contradictions in lieu of binaries, a concept that lends itself to the structure of the novel itself. Beloved herself is a contradiction and a melding of traits, of the souls lost in slavery. Postcolonialism faces the difficult task of unpacking the reasons why certain cultures and ethnic groups deemed themselves superior to others, thus giving themselves the right to “own” another people. As Morrison herself puts it, “This has got to be the least read of all the books I’ve written because it is about something that the characters don’t want to remember, I don’t want to remember, black people don’t want to remember, white people don’t want to remember. I mean, it’s national amnesia” (Hart, 120). Maybe this is the very reason why Beloved tops the Top 25 list.
One thing that postcolonial theory often mentions that didn’t appear prevalent in the articles I found was the double colonization of women of Color. It’s pretty interesting how the communal song at the end of the novel is performed by women. Black women, especially, are the “Other,” and must endure a side of slavery that is particularly violating, as when the schoolteacher’s boys took Sethe’s milk. I think it’s worth pointing out, too, that Sethe reaches a “peak” connection, for lack of a better word, with Denver and Beloved onlt after Paul D leaves the house.
Although postcolonial theory is intertwined with African American theory, it seems to neglect the postmodern notion of the timeless present, history in terms of chronology and the history inscribed on the body of the colonized, and even just time itself. I remember reading in some intro social work classes the difference in time concepts among ethnic groups; before then I never gave it a second thought that we could all approach time differently. For Sethe, the past is not a dead thing but very much alive, and Beloved lives only in the present.
Ghosts are political creatures, too
I’m the weirdo of my household who likes to watch the ghost hunter shows and the episodes on “Is a Loch Ness-type monster hiding in the bowels of Lake Champlain?” I also believe that horoscopes are true, Feng Shui works, and was a near-insomniac one summer because I convinced myself there were dead people chilling in my room. So when I typed in “Beloved” and “postcolonialism” in EBSCOhost and came up with an article on spectres and magical realism, I was pleasantly surprised. In Stephen M. Hart’s article “Magical Realism in the Americas: Politicised Ghosts in One Hundred Years of Solitude, The House of Spirits, and Beloved,” highlights the role of the supernatural in deconstructing colonial discourse in the novels. (House of Spirits, by the way, is written by Isabel Allende. I was abnormally excited.) He writes that by using ghosts, the authors illustrate the “ideological rifts within a given society,” noting that what is the reality of one group is not the reality of the other (121). The reason why whites are impervious to the spirits and supernatural happenings is, according to Hart, because to acknowledge them would be equivalent to recognizing the horror of slavery and past transgressions against slaves both dead and still alive. “The supernatural expressed in Beloved is, thus, an ethnicised, subalternised world in which points to the enormous chasm between white and black worlds” (122). For blacks, the dead are undead. Sethe cannot keep Beloved in her grave, nor can she keep her guilt or rememories at bay. What was so interesting to me is the fact that Morrison did not incorporate the supernatural and the unexplainable simply as a nod to historical or cultural accuracy; it’s a part of her own life, her own routine. According to the article, Morrison grew up with stories about the ability of black people to fly–stories which were not treated as myth but as true accounts.
As we’ve concluded, Beloved is not only the murdered baby resurrected but the face of those persecuted, lost, broken under slavery’s heel. Hart’s article describes our theory quite accurately: Not only is Beloved the “spirit of Sethe’s daughter, she is also the projection of the repressed collective memory of a violated people” (120). One of the common threads I’ve noticed in perusing postcolonialist critiques is the power of the collective, the group. Western ideology favors the “rugged individual,” encouraging him to pursue the path that will lead him to status and financial success. Build your future with your own hands. The non-Western, Non-European approach rejects this notion, favoring the community over the individual. You are a successful, enriched person if your efforts serve to lift up the group as a whole. A second article I found (the same as Alex, I just realized, so I won’t ramble on it) by Mary Jane Suero Elliott, “Postcolonial Experience in a Domestic Context: Commodified Subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” makes the argument that Sethe cannot live her life as a free black woman without the aid of the collective—her community. Deconstructing the binaries of colonial discourse—you are a slave because I am the master, and vice versa—must be done as a whole, not as an individual. It is the community of women at the novel’s close that keeps Sethe from re-killing Beloved as she did the first time, becoming the oppressor. Instead, she lunges for what the source of the confining definitions. The white man.
I still haven’t found anything specifically concerning the names in Morrison’s novel. Looking at them through a postcolonial lens, though, names are not just names, but very significant facets of identity. What the whites call you is one thing; what you call yourself is another. Naming yourself is paramount to owning yourself.
Who are you?
It seems to me that neither the identity nor the self in Beloved are concrete. More often than not they are fluid; the way a character defines him- or herself may change, or the identities of multiple characters intertwine so much so that it’s difficult to separate one from the other. We discussed Paul D and Denver at length today, and I see the common thread of wavering identities here. Before coming to 124, Paul D reflects upon himself as a wanderer, a man who enters a house and makes women cry. He is tough and resistant, keeping his own rememories locked in the tobacco tin he calls his heart. After his encounter with Beloved in the “cold room,” the tin is broken open and he begins to question who he is. He wonders at his own masculinity and is ashamed of the “feminine” qualities he believes he has taken on, one of which is his lack of control. “A grown man fixed by a girl?” he wonders. “It was more than appetite that humiliated him [...] it was being moved, placed where she wanted him [...] And it was he, that man, who could not go or stay put where he wanted to in 124–shame” (148).
We discussed how Denver, too, is fixing her identity on Beloved’s. It’s like she lives both vicariously through and completely for Beloved, and she pours all energy into Beloved’s happiness. Denver will gladly “forgo the most violent of sunsets, stars as fat as dinner plates and all the blood of autumn and settle for the palest yellow if it comes from her Beloved” (143). While retrieving the cider jug in the cold house, Denver loses sight of Beloved. Beloved pulls a malicious prank in the same room where she tortured Paul D: she teases Denver with the sound of her voice but doesn’t let Denver see her. Afraid her companion has “gone back,” Denver erupts into tears and thinks, “This is worse than when Paul D came to 124 and she cried helplessly into the stove. Then it was for herself. Now she is crying because she has no self” (145). She decides if Beloved, her “dream-come-true” is gone, she doesn’t want to reenter the world; she’d rather stay in the dark of the cold house and “let the darkness swallow her.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is the moment where she reviews the list of people that have left her, mulling on her history of rejection. If you’ve been repeatedly abandoned, you think it’s your own fault, that there’s a fatal flaw that prevents people from loving you enough to stick around. Beloved has passed the litmus test and is now Denver’s source of validation. If she leaves, there is no reason for Denver to continue to be.
I know I jumped the gun a little early with my last post since we weren’t technically supposed to read past section II (whoops), but the passages I wrote about in my last blog highlight the way Sethe’s, Denver’s, Beloved’s and the baby’s identities meld together. They speak about the other women using first person narrative: “You are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me who am you?” (256). After the incident in the cold room, Beloved reappears and points across the room: “Over there. Her face.” Whose face? “Me. It’s me,” she answers. I think I get the blanket concept that Beloved is Sethe is Denver is the baby. What I need clarified is how.
Beloved, Part 1
There’s a reason why I’d prefer group discussions in addition to solitary reading. Not to be cheesy, but others catch things I didn’t while reading the novel alone. When we were drawing the family tree the other day, I wondered why no one suggested Beloved’s name in conjunction with “crawling-already baby.” I had assumed that the two were one and the same throughout the entire novel, and didn’t even think that Beloved could be a whole different entity. Since Sethe slew her oldest daughter, and since Beloved entered the picture after Paul D had scared away the baby’s ghost, I drew the conclusion that she was the baby incarnate. I wonder if Morrison knew readers like me would make that assumption–mistake?–and I wonder if she meant for the character of Beloved to be ambiguous.
No matter who Beloved is, it seems to me like she has come from the place of the dead–if not dead souls, then dead memories or “rememories” that begin to inundate Sethe and her family. This is what prompted me to consider life and death in Morrison’s novel; the two, it seems, are inseparable and indistinguishable from each other. The dead do not stay dead, and the living are not present but trapped in a time gone by. You could say Halle, for instance, is living since he reenters Paul D’s and Sethe’s thoughts and conversation, or that he has been resurrected or reinvented by the accounts the two provide each other that the other had not known about him. But most interesting to me is that no one has concrete evidence of his death. Baby Suggs “felt” him go, and the others assume he didn’t make it, but every once in a while a character questions this assumption. Is Halle really dead? We’re left with another ambiguity.
Reverting back to Beloved/crawling-already baby, a pair of passages toward the end of the second section only seems to confuse me more. While going back to this section after the discussion, I looked for clues that would help me align one passage to the baby and one to Beloved. The passage beginning at page 248 and the one starting at 253 both begin, “I am Beloved and she is mine.” The first, however, adopts a different form and style from the second. This first Beloved speaks without punctuation, only spaces. Even with these spaces, the thoughts run together, like her stream of consciousness. No names are mentioned but Sethe’s, and the details are ethereal and often don’t make much sense. The way the thoughts are assembled–the way they are melded together without much transition–reminded me of the way children speak and think, and for this reason I believed she was the crawling-already baby. The next section is more coherent and organized, and the voice here sounds more mature. Within this passage is a conversation:
“Tell me the truth. Didn’t you come from the other side?
Yes [...]
You came back because of me?
Yes [...]
Do you forgive me? Will you stay? [...]
She said you wouldn’t hurt me.
She hurt me” (254-255).
It’s hard for me not to draw the conclusion, with a conversation like this, that Beloved is Sethe’s slain baby. Tabitha mentioned in class, though, that scholars have been debating this point since the novel was written, so I’d like to see what arguments support the separation of the two characters.
A random tidbit to end with: It was coincidental that Kim mentioned that Morrison had been a scholar of Faulkner. While reading the first “I am Beloved” passage, I thought of his As I Lay Dying. Addie, Anse, Cash, and Darl, especially, tend to reveal their thoughts through similar stream of consciousness narratives.
Whatevs, Franzen
To be blunt, there were certain passages of Franzen’s “Perchance to Dream” in which I don’t think he knew what he was talking about. It almost gives me the impression that he’s one of those people that likes to hear himself talk for the sake of it. I know we had a little “bash session” on the guy in class today but there are a few things I’d like to point out. This might not necessarily be directly related to the novel, but his treatment of the subject of depression pissed me off. He mentions that the ”social stigma” of depression “has disappeared” and that being depressed has become “fashionable to the point of banality.” Not to be too dark and somber, but I’ve seen depression at close range and fashion is the least of the issues of which the depressed are thinking. Like I mentioned before, the way he writes about it is loaded with self-pity and arrogance. “The invitation to leave your depression behind,” he explains, “seems like an invitation to turn your back on all your dark insights into the corruption [...] of the brave new McWorld.” Sure, if you’re Franzen.
My second bone to pick with him is the “poor white male” camp to which he assigns himself. I understand that, yes, there’s something to say about the pressure white men face in light of a diversifying world and the burden that comes with a history of being named the oppressor. But enough is enough, and if you go on at length about your plight then those who have seen far worse will be that much less likely to sympathize. Franzen writes of Herman Melville’s melancholy over failing to “appeal to popular taste,” his financial trouble, the failure of his “most ambitious work,” and I understand the significance of these events. What I’m saying, though, is that these troubles seem incomparable to, say, Frederick Douglass’ harrowing escape from slavery recounted in his narrative. Along the same self-pitying vein, Franzen whines that white men are more likely to succumb under the influence, if you will, of technology: “We are so much more susceptible to technological addictions than women are.” Pretty bold, with no stats to back it up. But that’s another argument, lest I blog all day.
I’ll give the guy credit, though; he’s right about the commodification of our world, including literature. He writes that “The consumer economy loves a product that sells at a premium, wears out quickly or is susceptible to regular improvement.” This thought in particular reminded me of a book I read last semester called Liquid Life by Zygmunt Bauman. He addresses the same concept, and he, too, writes that America has essentially become obsessed with the market system. The individual’s identity is a commodity to be sold first to that individual by the media, then projected from that so-called individual back to the masses. Echoing Franzen, Bauman writes that “full-fledged consumers are not finicky about consigning things to waste [and do so] sometimes with thinly disguised relish” (84). We don’t want the classics in the same packaging as ten or even five years ago; it must be repackaged, preferrably with a new foreword, if we are to consider purchasing it. Even then, we might not choose the classics over the chic, glossy coffee table book. In a sense, then, Franzen is right to bite his nails over the death of the novel. But again, he’s dragging his heels over something that could be accepted with a grain of salt. I don’t think the novel is necessarily dying. Perhaps the novel as Franzen wants it: preserved in a vacuum immune to time. But novels still exist–the content and substance are there, but perhaps the form has been modified. Maybe now it’s a graphic novel, or hypertext. Maybe it’s in the form of a dual-colemn novel, like Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory. It could be that I’m just too young and liberal-minded that I can’t see the big deal Franzen is making. Actually, it’s probably because I’m a fan of postmodernism.
What I read
When I was little, I hated taking naps, as most five year olds do. I was a weird kid, though, because what I liked to do in lieu of naps was write “books,” which were a few stapled leafs of computer paper with crayoned illustrations. As elementary as they were, that was probably the only time in my life so far that my identity was so closely tied with a piece of literature, since I was the one who created the “book” and wrote about exactly what I would want to read myself. Since then my identity has been linked with reading and writing, mostly because my parents and teachers kept reiterating that I was “good at English.”
Off the top of my head, the kind of category I see myself in among novel-readers could be something like “Whatever I have time to read” or “The novels I read in class that I happen to like.” In taking time to look within this seemingly confining group, though, I see a certain pattern. I like weird stuff. Probably because I think I’m a bit on the strange side, and I like to see that there are other people out there who share my fetish for the bizarre, then write about it. I like outrageous stories, like the ones I found in Isabel Allende’s The Stories of Eva Luna and Ana Castillo’s So Far From God. The characters here are like legends, like hyperbolic ordinary people, if that makes sense. Hermit peasant girls with saints’ healing powers and pining, shriveled lovers locked in basements. As Kim mentioned in class, I think it’s the magical realism that attracts me to novels like these.
Following up on the nature of these two novels, I’ve recently become intrigued by novels about Latino culture (even before traveling). The people, emotions, and stories are intense. What I find most interesting is the prevalence of the spiritual and the weight religion often bears. La Loca in So Far From God has literally gone to hell and back and is frequented by spirits. In Stories, the living are the spirits, growing old and wispy in a ballroom waiting for a dance partner or remaining a child in the mind of a haunted rapist. Probably most sick is that I find the theme of demise so attractive in these novels. Tragic endings for the characters lends a sense of unfinished business and I like a lack of closure sometimes.
As much as I hate to admit, novels are a sort of status symbol for me. I started reading The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons before they blew up. Once Da Vinci Code was everywhere, I lost interest; it was almost like the novel was ruined for me. I guess I like my novels to make me look smart or introspective or like someone that doesn’t necessarily follow the crowd. Someone who writes books at naptime, hee hee.
