Nineteen Eighty-Four

This dystopian novel by George Orwell was first published in 1949. I read it in the 1960s and taught it to first-year college students in 1984. Last night I saw a dramatic performance adapted for the stage by Michael Gene Sullivan.

In the 60s, those of us who were active in the Vietnam War protests battled the barrage of government propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation regarding the origin of the war, the need for the war, and the progress of the war.  Orwell’s concepts of Newspeak, Doublethink, and even Thoughtcrime (Vietnam protesters were labeled unpatriotic and subversive for opposing the War) seemed to apply. FBI surveillance of Vietnam protesters seemed to mirror the watchful eye of Big Brother through the widespread use of government cameras to keep citizens in line with the Party.

When I taught the book in 1984, it seemed far-fetched.  And since then, we’ve grown accustomed to the prolific use of surveillance cameras by law enforcement and private citizens alike to deter crime. 

With the Trump presidency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has become relevant again. And the stage play was frankly terrifying, as the comparisons were unmistakable.  Instead of Newspeak and Doublethink, we have “fake news” and conspiracy theories, bolstered by doctored photos/videos and the deliberate spread of propaganda, not only by elected leaders and their staffs, but also by private citizens on social media, not to mention other countries. 

As in the original novel we now have blatant disregard for facts, science, rational thought, and the direct experience of our eyes and ears.  Trump and others publicly deny they said something that is right there on unedited video or audio transcript for all to see and read. 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four the Thought Police enforce conformity to the Party line with the use of torture.  In the stage version Winston Smith is subjected to increasing levels of electric shock until he finally agrees that two-plus-two is five and that he loves Big Brother.  That is scary enough.  What is particularly scary today is how many of our fellow citizens are willing participants in the campaigns of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation to which we are all subjected.  Too many of us are uncritically willing to believe what we want to hear or think we know rather than to take the time and exercise the discipline it takes to at least come close to the truth.

Today the government and the Party do not need Thought Police and electric shock because they have partisan loyalists and sycophants whose eyes and ears are closed as they open their mouths to readily ingest toxic, false messages and then turn around and spew those messages out to their own followers on social media.

George Orwell envisioned a citizenry of helpless victims subjected to Big Brother’s totalitarian power; he did not envision a citizenry of willing participants fully cooperating in their own manipulation and delusion.

What I am grateful for in the scary times we live in is (1) an educational system that is hopefully teaching critical thinking and evaluation of sources for reliability, (2) freedom of the press that allows for competing points of view, even as some media outlets toe the Party line and help spread false information, and (3) freedom of speech that allows those who value facts, evidence, and reason to counter the propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation, even as it also enables the false narratives.  Unlike the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we have the right and the power of dissent. 

So let us use that right and that power to educate others, as best we can, in reliable methods of research and responsible methods of determining truth; to analyze our own sources of information for reliability and discipline our own thinking to rely on facts, evidence, and reason; and to raise our voices to counter those who would misinform, mislead, and manipulate. 

 

 The stage for the play was a hall of mirrors.  You can see the reflection of the audience. Look in the mirror, America!

The Housekeeper and the Professor

I would love to see a mathematician find a complicated mathematical system in this 2003 novel by Japanese writer Yoko Agawa.  I am certain it must be there, but finding it is above my pay grade.

What I can attest to is how the novel demonstrates that, like mathematics, art can transcend the disorder of lived experience and bring order out of chaos.

The Housekeeper is the daughter of a single mother who was abandoned by the father, and the Housekeeper is in turn a single mother raising her son alone, having been abandoned by the father.  The Professor is suffering from memory loss since a traffic accident in 1975.  He can remember nothing after that date except in 80-minute segments.  The Professor’s sister-in-law, now widowed, allows him to live in a cottage near her house and hires the Housekeeper to make his meals and clean for him, but she seemingly wants to have nothing to do with either of them—no visits, no phone calls, no communication whatsoever.

The characters represent broken lives, broken relationships, and broken memories.  Of course their identities are affected and perhaps that is why we never learn their real names.  But mathematics, the Professor’s field of study, becomes the unlikely means by which memory loss is transcended, new bonds and new identities are formed, and a new family is made.

The Professor has not forgotten his numbers, his equations, or his mathematical theories.  He spends his days working on (and winning) mathematics contests, and he uses math to relate to every character.  Every day when the Housekeeper arrives, he greets her as if they have never met before and asks her birthdate, which he then uses to espouse the meaning of the numbers and how they fit into a mathematical system.

He delights in teaching the Housekeeper and later her son, challenging them with mathematical problems and puzzles.  Though the Professor does not remember the Housekeeper or her son more than 80 minutes at a time, he relates to them, not only at the level of math, but at a human level, discontinuous though it may be.

When he learns the Housekeeper has a son who must wait at home every day for his mother to return from work, the Professor insists she allow her son to come to his house after school.  When Root, as the Professor nicknames the son, accidentally cuts his hand with a knife the Professor is overwrought with worry and fear for the boy’s well-being.  The two bond over a love of baseball, although the Professor thinks the players and teams are pre-1975.  While Root carefully and cheerfully indulges the Professor in his pre-1975 memories, they are able to combine baseball and mathematics in their study of statistics.

Eventually the three characters begin to act like a family, the Professor becoming like the father that Root never had, the Housekeeper looking after him as she might care for her own aging and unknown father.

Mathematics is the means by which they transcend not only their own personal brokenness, but also the social disconnections of class, age, and gender.  The Professor is a highly educated man of professional class, while the Housekeeper works at a menial job as a domestic.  The older Professor could be her father and her son’s grandfather, but neither class nor age differences prevent them from forming a meaningful relationship.  The Professor’s love of mathematics transcends any bias against a working-class woman and her son being able to understand sophisticated mathematical theory. 

It might be possible to read some kind of erotic attraction into the relationship of the Professor and his Housekeeper.  A certain domestic intimacy develops and even a degree of personal intimacy as the Housekeeper cares for the professor’s physical needs when he develops a fever.  Certainly the sister-in-law becomes suspicious when the Housekeeper and her son spend the night at the Professor’s cottage during his illness and goes so far to have the Housekeeper fired.  Later we learn of a past romantic relationship between the sister-in-law and the Professor.  Could she have been jealous of the closeness between him and the Housekeeper?

In any case, once again it is mathematics that transcends the enmity between the sister-in-law and the Housekeeper, restores the domestic arrangement, and eventually leads to the formation of a larger circle of all four characters when the Professor is moved to a care facility and receives regular visits from his sister-in-law, the Housekeeper, and her son.  It is a mysterious mathematical equation, with special meaning between the Professor and his sister-in-law, that leads to the final resolution and the expanded circle of relationship.

The Professor believes that numbers existed before humans and that a mathematical order exists independently of the natural universe and the human realm.  His faith in an invisible order comes to sustain the Housekeeper as well as himself.  “Eternal truths are ultimately invisible,” he says, “and you won’t find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions.  Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression—in fact nothing can prevent it from doing so.”

This Platonic conception of an abstract reality transcending that which we can know with our senses becomes a source of reassurance and peace to the Housekeeper as she contemplates the Professor’s explanation of a “true line” extending “infinitely in either direction”:

 

                …I realized how much I needed this eternal truth that the Professor had described. I needed the sense that this invisible world was somehow propping up the visible one, that this one, true line extended infinitely, without width or area, confidently piercing through the shadows.  Somehow this line would help me find peace.

Thus does this seemingly simple but remarkable story of a domestic arrangement that evolves into a family circle suggest a much larger significance, with philosophical, even theological, implications.

As for a mathematical order in the story, it is perhaps notable that there are 11 chapters in the novel and that the central chapter, number six, contains the crucial crisis point when the Professor develops a fever, when the Housekeeper with her son spends the night to watch over and care for him, and when the sister-in-law, having observed this breach of what she considers the Housekeeper’s appropriate role, has her fired.  The first five chapters lead up to this crisis, and the last five unravel the resulting tangle of confusion and disruption to arrive at a final resolution.  This kind of symmetry is commonly found in art, and, like the mathematical system it is based on, brings order out of the chaos of lived human experience.

The Round House

Speaking of Coming of Age stories (see end of previous post), Louise Erdrich’s recent National Book Award-winning The Round House certainly qualifies.

Young Joe is the son of a tribal judge on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota.  His mother is raped and sinks into a deep depression. The 13-year-old is determined to solve the crime and heal his mother.  At first his father allows Joe to participate in the review of case records, looking for clues as to anyone who might want revenge on the judge.  As Joe, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of his friends, begins to investigate on his own, however, the judge becomes more circumspect.  He does allow Joe to sit in on attempts to interview his mother, and, after a few false starts, Joe eventually puts enough pieces together to identify the rapist.  The problem is that because of legal complications over who has jurisdiction over the crime, it is unlikely the white perpetrator will ever be prosecuted.  With that, Joe takes justice into his own hands, in an act that might be considered more one of revenge than justice.

His quest for justice is accompanied by the usual adolescent adventures with alcohol, sex, and even religion.  It is often hard to separate comedy from tragedy as the deadly serious detective work intersects with and gets sidetracked by youthful escapades and a tangled web of native and non-native relationships, some  of which help in solving the crime and some of which hilariously distract from it.  In the end, though, comedy gives way to tragedy and death.  Similarly, mainstream American culture blends with Native beliefs and practices, and both cultures contribute to Joe’s initiation into adulthood.

As in the typical Coming of Age story, Joe encounters, not only the evil in the world, but also the evil in himself, and one wonders at the end what direction he will take.  Will he come to terms with his experience, make peace with it, and develop into a healthy maturity?  Or will he be eaten up with disillusionment, distrust, and guilt?  Though we are told that Joe goes on to marry and graduate from law school, we don’t really get a good answer about his psychological health, although he is able to narrate the events of that traumatic summer with painful honesty (and perhaps we are to believe that in the fictional world the writing is therapeutic). 

At the end of the novel, Joe returns home with his parents, who “knew everything.” There were no tears, no anger, not even a word spoken “after the shock of that first moment when we all realized we were old.”  They pass the spot where on his “childhood trips” they had always stopped for ice cream.  This time they do not stop.  Childhood is over.  “We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.”  This does not sound like redemption; it sounds like living on in the wake of injustice and tragedy.

In Louise Erdrich’s Afterword to the novel, she cites a 2009 report by Amnesty International called “Maze of Injustice,” which documents the shocking statistics on the rapes of Native American women, most of which are perpetrated by non-Natives and very few of which are ever prosecuted, partly because of neglect and partly because of legal confusion, not to mention the ones that are never reported.  The statistics on vigilante justice, if any exist, are not mentioned.

It is ironic that Joe goes on to follow in his father’s footsteps in the legal profession.  Are we to hold out hope that he can play a role in righting some of the wrongs against his people by legal means?  Could that be the redemption for his illegal method of “righting the wrong” against his mother? Or is it merely an ironic extension of his life as a Native person trapped in a “maze of injustice,” even while working in the “justice” system?

To what extent is the novel an instance, an image, and an allegory of the plight of Native people, whose contemporary lives are a constant reenactment of their history, a history of oppression by white society, of victimization by a white legal system, and of entanglement in an elusive, often tragic, search for “justice”?

 

 

Life of Pi

It has been years since I read this 2001 novel by Yann Martel, but the recent film seemed pretty close to my memory.  The movie left out the part about Pi, as a boy, reading manuals about how to train animals when his father owned a zoo, and I didn’t remember him being married (with children) in the book, but mostly the film fit with what I remembered.

I’ve seen it categorized as magical realism, which certainly fits, but it could also be read as traditional romantic fiction, in which an unreliable narrator tells a fantastic story, which, however incredible, embodies a powerful truth.  Even the alternative, more believable, version of the story qualifies as romance rather than realism, since it is, however credible, an amazing, extra-ordinary, improbable story in its own right. 

What is untraditional is the presentation of both stories, two different versions of the same events, one fantastic, one possible (if not probable) and the choice given to the reader to choose the better version, not only which is the better story but which is more truthful.  From a post-modern perspective, the novel presents the truth as rhetorical, rather than a matter of objective fact.  From a traditional perspective, it presents a modern version of Pascal’s wager, namely, since it is impossible to know objective truth, then bet on the one that is more imaginative and beautiful, however fantastic.  In religious terms, a world with supernatural possibilities is far preferable to a world of bare natural facts.

Another way of reading the two stories is in terms of allegory vs. realism, or internal vs. external.  One story offers an allegorical version of the internal, subjective experience, while the second story offers a “realistic” version of the external, factual experience.  In this case, both stories are equally true, one from a psychological perspective, the other from an empirically observable perspective.

To reverse the order of the stories in the novel, let’s begin with the more believable story.  After a shipwreck, the teenage Pi is trapped on a life boat with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, and the ship’s cook.  The cook kills the sailor to use for fishing bait. When Pi’s mother objects, he threatens her and Pi.  She gets Pi to safety on a raft and is then killed by the cook.  Pi then kills the cook and, alone on the lifeboat, manages to survive until he makes landfall in Mexico.

Keep in mind that, from childhood, Pi has been a religious seeker.  Raised as a Hindu, he also follows Christianity and Islam.  Like a good Hindu, he is a vegetarian.  His father, lost in the shipwreck, was a rational, scientific man, who taught Pi the value of fact and logic.  His mother, on the other hand, believed that science could only tell you about external truth, not the truth of the human heart.  She supported Pi in his religious quest.

At the mercy of the elements and the competition for survival, Pi’s mother holds to her values, berating the cook for killing the sailor and sacrificing herself to save Pi.  Pi, however, puts his own survival first, killing the cook and becoming a carnivorous fish-eater in order to save himself.  When he tells this version of the story, he tearfully acknowledges his guilt and the “evil” within himself that made his survival possible.

In the allegorical version of the story, Pi is trapped on a lifeboat with an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger.  The hyena kills the zebra and orangutan, and the tiger kills the hyena, leaving Pi to match his wits with the tiger’s natural predatory nature in order to survive.  Confronted with the parallels between the two stories, Pi admits that in the second version he is the tiger.  Allegorically, then, in the second version (the fantastical version that takes up the main body of the novel), the tiger represents the predator, the carnivore, and the will to survive within Pi, the religious vegetarian, who seeks to hold the tiger at bay, feeds it, keeps it alive, finally tames it, controls it, and ultimately befriends it.

 In one episode Pi and the tiger land on a mysterious island populated by meerkats for the tiger, vegetation for Pi, and fresh water for both.  At night, however, the island itself becomes carnivorous.  Pi and the meerkats survive by climbing into the trees; the tiger retreats to the lifeboat.  When Pi realizes the underlying predatory nature of the island, he takes the tiger and the lifeboat back out to sea.  This is the part I liked the least when I read the novel.  It seemed extraneous to the rest of the story and a step too far into fantasy, beyond improbable, into impossible.  When I saw the film, though, I realized the allegorical point, namely the duality of nature, which gives life by day, and takes it by night. 

Similarly, the tiger, which threatens Pi’s life, also gives Pi a sense of purpose which aids in his survival.  And Pi himself, the religious vegetarian, harbors within himself the predatory carnivore.  Human nature itself, like the island, is capable of both life-giving power and death-dealing force. Like Pi and his mother, we are capable of moral values and of religious yearning for higher life, and, like Pi and the tiger, we are capable of feeding off of other lives for our own survival.  Pi is able to survive by taming and befriending the tiger, not by denying it.  He imagines the soul of the tiger, the spiritual power behind it.

When they make landfall in Mexico, Pi is deeply disappointed and hurt when the tiger disappears into the jungle without a backward look.  Once in civilization, he can return to his vegetarianism, his moral values, and his religious quest, but not without a sense of loss in the accompanying alienation from his natural self.

Which story do you prefer?  But why choose?  Together they tell the human story in greater depth, breadth, and nuance than either one alone, just as Pi’s father’s scientific world view and his mother’s religious sensibility together offer a more complete vision of truth than either one alone.

In the traditional “coming of age” story, a youth begins in innocence, comes to experience the evil in the world, including the evil within, and then must decide how to come to terms with that discovery.  One can make one’s peace with it and advance into healthy maturity, or one can become stuck in disillusionment, bitterness, and cynicism.  Life of Pi follows that pattern.  Pi can become stuck in the “realistic” version of his story, living out a life of guilt and self-loathing, or he can make peace with his own human nature through imaginative yearning and go on to live out his aspirations for higher life.

There is herein a lesson for all of us:  Know the “evil” within yourself; do not submit to it, but recognize it, respect its power, tame it, control it and befriend it.  Know that you could not survive without it.

The God of Small Things II

In a Book Group discussion of this novel, I bemoaned how sad it is, how hopeless, how lacking in a redemptive message.  Some argued that the reunion of the twins and even their incestuous act, symbolically at least, offered hope for healing, but I was highly skeptical.  To me the incest could just as well be one more nail in the coffin of the Ipe family demise (see previous post).  Unable to find a sign of redemption in the novel, I was tempted to view it as a kind of modern gothic, offering a grotesque view of reality.

A friend who has traveled in India more than once suggested that from an Indian world view, the novel could be deemed realistic rather than gothic.  She said the Indian world view is very fatalistic, accepting the cycle of life and death, success and failure, joy and suffering, love and hate, and of the inevitable turn of events that is beyond human control.  As the narrator repeatedly states, “things can change in a day,” regardless of one’s intentions.  Yet, the narrator also states that a day can be traced back to ancient times, far beyond the control of humans in the present day:  “…it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made.”

All this begins to sound more mythological than historical.  The cycle of myth mimics the seasonal cycle, from the spring of creation and new life; through the summer of maturity, romance, and success; through the autumn of decline; to the winter of death.  In that cycle death, destruction, and apocalypse are followed by rebirth, resurrection, and renewal. From this perspective the last word of The God of Small Things –“Tomorrow”—offers a promise of redemption to follow.

However, though “Tomorrow” is the last word of the novel, it is not the last word of the chronological story.  It is uttered by Ammu and Velutha after their first night of lovemaking.  When we read that word, we have already read of the events that followed—the drowning of Sophie Mol, the false accusation of rape and kidnapping, the brutal beating of Velutha, Estha’s betrayal of his beloved friend, the beating of Ammu, the separation of the twins, the self-exile of Chacko, the death of Ammu, the closing of the pickle factory, and the deterioration of Mammachi and Baby Kochamma, not to mention the twins’ incestuous act.  In such a context “Tomorrow” sounds as much ironic and cynical as hopeful.   It takes a good deal of faith in the mythological cycle to find the redemptive message.

At the same time the final scene of the novel, the lovemaking between Ammu and Velutha, is perhaps the most beautiful in the entire narrative.  That the author chooses to end with that scene and with that word suggests, perhaps, her faith that if “things can change in a day” for ill, they can also change in a day for good.

In a sense the entire mythological cycle is covered in the novel—the young, innocent twins and their child-like perspective on the world represent the newness of creation.  The romance of Margaret and Chacko and later of Ammu and Velutha, the success of the pickle factory, even Baby’s ornamental garden represent the height of romance, maturity, and achievement.  Inevitably, however, the zenith is followed by divorce, failure, trauma, deterioration, and death.  Whether one reads the ending with mythological faith or modern despair may depend more on the reader than anything else.  The narrative seems to leave it open.

A mythic reading locates the novel outside of history, suggesting a universal human experience regardless of time and place.  Like incest, themes of twinship; kinship; coming of age; quest, trial, and ordeal; deities; the scapegoat; tragic loss, death, and destruction can be found cross-culturally in story, song, literature, and legend.

In The God of Small Things the twins themselves carry special symbolic significance.  They are fraternal, not identical, male and female, closely bonded from childhood, yet separated for most of their lives, silent and empty, the same but opposite.  They are but one example of countless dualities in the novel: small things vs. big things; Untouchables vs. Touchables;  Marxists vs. Capitalists; Christians vs. Hindus; Indians vs. Anglos; family unity vs. family discord; marriage vs. divorce; love vs. hate; loyalty vs. betrayal; parents vs. children; sisters vs. brothers; mortals vs. deities;  dreams vs. reality; good vs. evil; history vs. myth.  Like Estha and Rahel , these dualities are opposite and separate, yet closely bonded.

Big things overwhelm small things, as when history, religion, culture, and family “honor” all come crashing down on the private love affair of Ammu and Velutha.  Yet, it was that small thing, that small, private love affair between a Touchable and an Untouchable, a Christian and a Hindu, a member of the bourgeoisie and a Marxist that transgresses culture, religion, politics, and history; destroys a family, disrupts a community, brings down a factory, and leaves a wake of psychological trauma for more than one generation.  Human nature and human experience, it seems, are caught in an endless conflict between twin dualities.

As an example of how dualities pervade the narrative, consider that when Velutha is accused, pursued, beaten, and arrested, his fingernails are painted red because he had been playing with the children just before the catastrophic events unfold.  The Marxist leader and the police note this anomaly.  A minor detail, perhaps, but one more duality, that of male and female, one that links his beating with that of Ammu and his oppression with that of all women under patriarchy.  Further, the suggestion of androgyny lifts him above history and enscribes him in mythic terms.

Kinship as well as twinship is a major mythic theme of the novel, as both blood and social relations of family over generations create their own legacy, whether it take the form of blessing or curse.

The story of the twins is also a coming of age story, the transition from innocence to experience.  At an early age their childhood innocence is overshadowed by their parents’ divorce, Estha’s sexual molestation, their implication in the death of Sophie Mol, the beating and death of Velutha, Estha’s betrayal of Velutha, and their separation from each other.  The world goes from being a place of goodness and light to one of suffering, evil, and darkness.  The psychic trauma leaves one of them mute and the other, it seems, perpetually depressed.  Their reunion holds out hope for healing and recovery, but their act of incest leaves their future in doubt.  While their plight may not be universal, all of us must make the transition from childhood to adulthood.  Some of us arrive at a healthy maturity, coming to terms with the evil and suffering in the world without losing touch with goodness and joy.  Some of us, like Estha and Rahel, get stuck in pain and guilt.

Like all of us, also, each character is on a quest—for identity, power, love, honor.  Each undergoes his or her trials and ordeals but enjoys only temporary successes.  In the end there are more failed quests than heroic triumphs in this novel.  Whether Estha and Rahel will eventually recover and achieve psychic health and wholeness is left to our imaginations.

While there are references to religion in the narrative the major “deity” referred to is “the God of small things, the God of Loss.”  Here is yet another major duality, for this deification is conferred on Velutha, the Untouchable, the smallest of mortals.  As a child Velutha had artfully made tiny paper objects to entertain Ammu, holding them out to her on the flat of his hand so she could take them without touching him.  Later he becomes a “proletarian” worker in the Ipe pickle factory, and the friend and playmate of Ammu’s small twins.  Ever associated with “small things” and ultimately with utter loss.  Velutha takes on mythic stature as a scapegoat, who carries the sin and bears the punishment for the Ipe family, though they, of course, do not escape their own punishment.  As a “god” he is associated with Osiris in Egyptian, Dionysius in Greek, Quetzacoatl in Aztec, Odin in Norse, and Jesus in Christian myth.

In traditional scapegoat and “dying god” myths, however, the sacrifice serves to “save” or redeem the hero’s people, whether it be a family, community, society, or the whole human race.  And the dying god is typically resurrected to symbolize the return of life, health, goodness, and prosperity.  Velutha’s sacrifice, on the other hand, is followed by no resurrection, rather by yet more punishment and pain.  From a mythic perspective the story seems truly apocaplyptic, as far as the Ipe family is concerned.

In the Christian apocalypse the end of the world is followed by the coming of the Kingdom of God.  In the world of the novel that Kingdom would raise the Untouchable, the proletarian workers, women, children, and the world’s oppressed to their rightful places in an egalitarian global society.  The Hindu apocalypse is merely the low point of the endless mythic cycle from birth to death, and from creation to destruction.  In either case, The God of Small Things ends before the wheel of fortune begins to turn and largely relies on the faith of the reader for any hope of redemption “Tomorrow.”

The God of Small Things I

It has been noted frequently in this blog that there are two broad ways to read literature (and many sub-divisions of both): historical and universal.  Debates abound on their relative validity, but I prefer the both-and approach rather than the either-or dilemma.

Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel offers an excellent opportunity to compare the two ways of reading and hopefully appreciate both.

The God of Small Things can be read as a post-colonial Indian novel that reflects the blending of cultures (Indian, British, American) and religions (Hinduism, Christianity), the corruption of India’s natural environment by capitalistic ventures, the historical conflict between capitalism and Marxism as it has played out in India and the persistence of ancient Indian traditions in a global environment.

None of these “big things” (culture, history, politics, religion) come off well in the novel, which portrays a world grown putrid with exploitation, oppression, dislocation, and corruption.  Even, especially, the family unit has deteriorated into a hotbed of physical and psychological trauma.  At best the novel can be read as a protest against patriarchy, class and caste,  divisions based on skin color, family “honor,” environmental destruction, the raw exercise of power through social structures, and the corruption even of those (Marxists) who would reverse the power structures and deliver the oppressed from suffering.

Above all, it interrogates the “Love Laws” that determine “Who should be loved.   And how.   And how much.”  The novel demonstrates the destructive effects of both violating the love laws (pedophilia) and of following them (religious restrictions).  In some cases it registers a silent protest against the love laws, as when class, caste, and color forbid the relationship between Ammu and Velutha and the breaking of the taboo leads to violence, deceit, and the exploitation of children in the name of family honor.  In other cases, as when Estha is molested, the love laws are affirmed.  Adultery and divorce seem to pass unjudged. 

The most ambiguous act is the incest between Rahel and Estha, shared not out of “happiness, but hideous grief.”  Whatever aftereffects they might experience are left to our imaginations.  They are not shown to suffer from the act, nor are they shown to benefit, though one can infer they experienced some short term comfort.

Anthropologists have identified incest as an almost universal taboo, though it has been practiced historically in some cultures and has been defined differently in different cultures.  While it occurs in nature, there is evidence that more highly evolved species prefer to mate outside their biological family.

To the close-knit twins the act might feel like an entirely natural coupling (though they had been separated from an early age).  Yet, one wonders to what extent their intimacy may result in yet more guilt and trauma.  Or, perhaps it is their shared childhood guilt and trauma that lead them to turn to each other for comfort.  What is ambiguous is whether that mutual comfort is part of their healing or part of their psychic damage.

For whatever reason, incest is a recurring literary theme, often associated with the tragic fall of a family, whether it be in Greek drama (Oedipus the King), Shakespearean tragedy (Hamlet), gothic fiction (“The Fall of the House of Usher”), or the modern novel (The Sound and the Fury).  In its prime the Ipe family was highly educated, well-respected, and accomplished.  When the patriarch of the family Pappachi fails to get credit for the discovery of a new species of moth, the decline begins, as the family loses its chance for lasting fame.  Pappachi’s bitterness leads him to abuse his family.  Mammachi bears the scars of Pappahi’s beatings and their daughter Ammu enters into a bad marriage to escape the harsh family environment.  Although the family pickle factory is successful, the marriages of both Ammu and her brother Chacko fail, and their aunt, called Baby, who never marries, becomes as bitter and spiteful as Pappachi, grieving over her unrequited love for a priest.

Ammu’s affair with the Untouchable Velutha; the accidental drowning of Chacko’s daughter, Sophie Mol; Baby’s false accusation of rape and kidnapping against Velutha; Estha’s near-coerced betrayal of his beloved Velutha and the latter’s death at the hands of the police; Chacko’s beating of Ammu; the separaton of the twins; and the subsequent failure of the pickle factory leave the family in shambles.  Chacko emigrates to Canada, Ammu dies at age 32, Estha becomes mute, Rahel becomes “empty,” and Baby neglects her ornamental garden as she and Mammachi live out their days watching American television and allowing the house, as well as themselves, to deteriorate.

 In such a context, Estha and Rahel’s act of incest suggests that the family has reached its nadir and that the only hope of a new generation is utterly blighted. 

 As long as we are examining the novel from a historical perspective, we must take note of the History House.  Chacko speaks of the family history as “a long line of Anglophiles,” who have become “trapped outside their own history” by the history of colonialism.  Their true history is found in a metaphorical “History House,” from which they have become alienated. 

The young twins think Chacko is talking about the abandoned house across the river, said to have been the home of an Englishman who had “gone native,” speaking the local language and wearing Indian clothing. Explicit references to “the heart of darkness” refer to both Conrad’s novel (see blog post April, 2010) and the darkness to be found in colonialism.  Ironically, it is not only the colonized who become alienated from their own history and culture, but the colonizers as well.

And the literal History House across the river becomes the site for the secret meetings between Ammu and Velutha, the hiding place of the twins after Sophie Mol drowns, and for the brutal beating of Velutha by the local police.  “Darkness” takes on the meanings of forbidden love, secrecy, tragic loss, and savage violence.  The big things (culture, history, politics, religion, the Love Laws) and the small things of individuals, their private feelings, and their human experience all intersect in the History House, both Chacko’s metaphorical one and the twins’ literal one.  And that intersection takes place in “the heart of darkness.”

Is the Ipe family a microcosm of the Indian nation?  In its larger historical context the novel can perhaps be read as a lament for modern India, an indictment of the colonial legacy, or even as a grotesque warning about the coming global catastrophe. The prospect of globalism and a cross-cultural world community offers no solace.  It is difficult to find any promising or redemptive message unless the writing of the novel itself implies some hope that its dystopian vision might be reversed.

In the next post the case for a more optimistic conclusion will be considered in more depth, but a historical reading yields little to be hopeful about.

The Namesake

This 2003 novel by Jhumpa Lahiri captures both late 20th century American immigrant experience and a timeless coming of age narrative, with all the complexities, conflicts, confusions, and compromises that both stories entail.

The immigration of an Indian family to the American Northeast is complicated by the father’s love of Russian literature and the somewhat accidental naming of his son after Nikolai Gogol, transforming an immigration and assimilation story into one of more broadly multicultural significance. The three cultures-- Indian, American, and Russian—could hardly be more different. Yet Gogol must navigate himself and his identity through these conflicting shoals of influence to find his way toward authentic selfhood.

His parents were joined in a traditional arranged marriage and remained faithful to each other throughout their life together. Gogol and his sister, born and raised in the U.S., marry for romantic love. Gogol, by the time he marries, has already engaged in pre-marital sexual relationships, including an affair with a married woman. His own marriage to another second-generation Bengali immigrant ends in divorce after he learns of her adulterous affair.

Marital fidelity is just one manifestation of a larger fidelity theme—fidelity to the past, family, and cultural heritage, not to mention one’s name. Gogol resents his name, and, it seems, his Indian heritage, which sets him apart from his American peers. He loves his parents, though, and constantly struggles between loyalty to them and rebellion against them.

At an early age, he rejects the formal name, Nikhil, that his parents seek to bestow on him, preferring Gogol, but later, as an adolescent he comes to hate the name Gogol and eventually changes his legal name to Nikhil. Such is the confusion and conflict that plagues his struggle to define his own identity, as a Bengali, as an American, and as the son of a father who reveres a Russian writer.

Grief-stricken by his father’s sudden death, Gogol finds consolation in his family and Indian heritage. Later he falls in love with, and marries, a Bengali woman, whom he has known from childhood, after his mother urges him to call her, a kind of compromise between a traditional arranged marriage and a Western style romantic marriage. They even observe the traditional Bengali wedding rituals.

Though Gogol is the main protagonist, the novel is structured by shifting points of view--from the perspective of his mother as a newly married woman in a strange country, where her husband is an engineering student at MIT, to his own perspective as a youth and young man finding his way in his multicultural world, to the perspective of his Bengali wife, Moushumi, a feminist studying for her doctorate in French literature (yet another cultural influence in Gogol’s life).

This organization throws into relief the contrast, not only between first and second generation immigrants, but also between the traditional Indian wife and the modern “liberated” wife. It’s hard to say which is the greater burden—obedience and fidelity or modernity and liberation.

In the end, Gogol, having rejected two serious Western girlfriends and divorced his Bengali wife, seeks reconciliation with his past, his family, his culture, and his namesake. At the age of 32, for the first time, he opens the book by Nikolai Gogol his father had given him long before and begins to read.

We can only speculate on how the young man will come to terms with all that he has inherited, all that he has chosen, all that he has become, and all that he may yet be. What one hopes is that he will come to accept himself as a global citizen.

Beloved I

This 1987 novel by Toni Morrison might be her most “beloved.” It also might be the richest, most complex, most difficult, and most rewarding of her works.

Often categorized as “magical realism," it can also be read as a historical novel, a fictional slave narrative, a socio-political study, a psychological novel, a gothic romance, a re-enactment of Biblical myth, or a mythologizing of African American experience in universal terms.

Historically the characters and their stories represent the African American experience of slavery and its aftermath. Like the traditional slave narrative, it recounts Sethe’s escape from captivity to freedom, but its main focus is her post-slavery quest for liberation from the psychological and social legacy of slavery and achievement of full selfhood, independence, self-worth, and dignity as a human being.

The novel’s roots in history include the actual story of an escaped slave mother who murdered her own child rather than have her recaptured, a story that Morrison researched in newspaper archives. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beloved_(novel). Its roots in slave narrative can be traced to Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in which Jacobs confesses that at one point she thought she would rather see her own children dead than to suffer the indignities and cruelties of slavery. The myth of the Terrible Mother can be found in pagan traditions of the Earth Mother or Great Goddess, a personification of Nature, who not only gives us life but also takes it. A monotheistic parallel can be found in the Old Testament Jehovah who not only saves and protects his “chosen people” but also punishes them, sometimes with death and destruction, a la the great flood.

Mythological and religious references abound in this story of the murdered child, Beloved, who returns to haunt and “possess” the mother who killed her until the “devil child” is finally exorcized and purged by suffering, perseverance, love, family, and community.

At one level the story represents Sethe’s guilt and atonement for the murder of her child (or, in other terms, her psychological illness and recovery), but the historical and mythic contexts lift it to another level, in which Beloved represents the burden of slavery carried, not only by the fictional Sethe and her family, but by all African Americans, a burden that must be lifted before full “salvation,” psychological health, and ethnic pride can be fully achieved.

This story of redemption likewise rises to the level of universal myths of birth and creation, fertility, quest, death and resurrection, sacrifice and salvation. At the same time it addresses a contemporary social and political debate over the extent to which individual behavior is the result of genetic, biological, psychological, social, economic and political circumstances and the extent to which it is the result of free will, choice, and personal responsibility. Though Sethe’s act of infanticide can be explained in terms of her brutalization in slavery and the psychological damage she has suffered as a result, the novel does not let her off the hook as an individual responsible for her own actions. We might be tempted to judge her “not guilty by reason of insanity,” but the novel holds her accountable and insists that she undergo a necessary penance before she can achieve both moral and psychological “at-onement.”

In the end, in a work that is filled with images of fertility, birth, and creation, Sethe experiences a kind of moral and psychological death followed by resurrection and rebirth.

Similarly, the novel suggests, African American culture and community, having suffered the destructive effects of slavery, will be reborn into health and vitality. For all the horror and tragedy that the novel depicts, it is a redemptive narrative that offers hope to all individuals and communities, of whatever ethnicity, who have been victimized, brutalized, and terrorized by history.