Term Paper On Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Reading a Sea of Stories (Pgs. 15, 19-24, 47-50, 119, 155-156, 185)

Many of the characters in Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories challenge the worth of creativity. Mr Sengupta and Khattam-Shud pose the question: “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?”—the implication being that these stories are, in fact, useless (Rushdie 20, 155). Haroun’s mother, Soraya, criticizes her husband Rashid for his active imagination and obsession with storytelling. Abandoning Rashid and Haroun for the more serious Mr Sengupta, she leaves Rashid a parting note:

You are only interested in pleasure, but a proper man would know that life is a serious business. Your brain is full of make-believe, so there is no room for facts. Mr Sengupta has no imagination at all. This is okay by me (23).

Soraya, Mr Sengupta, and Khattam-Shud uphold logic and pragmatism at the expense of creativity. As an appreciator of literature, their rejection of storytelling and imagination offends me. I believe that creativity is often a source of liberation and happiness. For a time, this seems to be the case for Khalifa family. Mr Sengupta, Rashid, Soraya, and Haroun live in “a sad city, the saddest cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name” (15). Despite the melancholy pervading the city, Rashid was a happy man before Soraya left him and “cheerfulness was famous throughout that unhappy metropolis” (15). Before Soraya adopted Mr Sengupta’s somber views, she was happy with Rashid as well:

To his wife, Soraya, Rashid was for many years as loving a husband as anyone could wish for, and during those years Haroun grew up in a home in which, instead of misery and frowns, he had his father’s ready laughter and his mother’s sweet voice raised in song. (15)

While everyone around them was sad, Rashid stories and Soraya’s singing enabled the Khalifa family to be happy. However, when Soraya no longer sees the worth of creativity and art, she stops singing and leaves Haroun and Rashid, who consequently loses his talent for storytelling. In the absence of creativity, the Khalifa family becomes sad like everyone else.

This part of the story reminds me of my parents. My father loves music. He is a self-taught guitarist and more recently taught himself to play the congas. His unfulfilled dream is to be a professional musician. When he was young, he wanted to play the guitar in a “du-op” band. Not long after he and my mother were married, he shared his ambition with her. Her response reminds me of Soraya’s note to Rashid. She said that playing music was fine for a hobby, but she had not realized he wanted to that for a career—the implication being that he should not pursue such an impractical dream, because life is, after all, “a serious business,” as Soraya wrote. My mother devalued the creative lifestyle by suggesting that it is not a worthy lifestyle at all; it is only fit for a hobby, a pastime, but nothing to which anyone should devote most of their time and energy—nothing to which anyone should devote their whole heart. But I just cannot understand how you can put your whole heart into something you do not love, into a career you pursue merely because it is pragmatic.

I think that, in general, our society emphasizes pragmatism, so much so, that we often suffocate spontaneity and creativity. We tend to perceive the pursuit of careers in artistry as impractical, and those people that want to pursue them as somewhat naïve, perhaps even immature. It seems like we define people by the work that they do. One of the first questions people often ask upon meeting someone knew is, “What do you do?” A person’s job becomes his or her master status—nothing else is quite as important—so that when someone plans on doing something ‘impractical,’ i.e. being a musician or a storyteller, we may have sarcastic thoughts such as, “Good luck with that,” as though it is an unrealistic dream, and would be better off left alone.

Perhaps I am projecting my own fear of rejection, because I enjoy writing stories and poetry. I feel as though Mr Sengupta and Khattam-Shud’s question, “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true,” reflects our society’s dominant attitude toward creativity—that it is of little or no value (Rushdie 20, 155). Because of this attitude, I believe that I cannot feasibly support myself by writing stories and poetry. If I want to write, I have to pursue it on my own time, but must find some other form of work that is more pragmatic. All too often, people ask me what I want to do when I graduate. What I really want to do is write and travel, but I have not yet decided what ‘practical’ career path I will pursue. I feel self-conscious about this, as though it somehow reflects negatively on my character—that being “interested in pleasure” and having a “brain full of make-believe” is in fact a negative thing (Rushdie, 23). But in all honesty, I just cannot see the point in living life without pursuing happiness—of living life in “the saddest of cities” and never doing anything to make it better. I do not see the “use” of wallowing in perpetual misery, and to me, life without literature, life without art, is a miserable existence.

Throughout Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie seems to reject logical thinking, or, (perhaps more accurately) narrow thinking that excludes the fantastical. This seems particularly evident in the Tale of the Moody Land. Moody Land was “a magical country that changed constantly, according to the moods of its inhabitants” (Rushdie 49). As Haroun, his father, and others are crossing Dull Lake, Haroun realizes that they are in fact in Moody Land. Everyone rejects this idea, including Rashid, who says that they’re “somewhere real” whereas Moody Land was “only a story” (48). In the film Waking Life, one of the characters says, “The worst mistake you can make is to think you’re alive, when really you’re asleep in life’s waiting room.” Rashid seems to make this mistake, by claiming that they are “somewhere real.” In claiming that we are alive or in reality, we often inhibit ourselves and become slaves to our situation. Because he believes he is “somewhere real,” Rashid believes that the awful weather on Dull Lake is beyond his control. Ironically, he not only has the ability to control the weather, but is actually creating and exacerbating those horrible weather conditions:

as Rashid sank into silent wretchedness the greeny-yellow mist with the toilet stink came rushing towards them across the Lake; and the water was angrier than ever…The mist enfolded the swan-boat once again…and the more shrieks and yelps there were, the rougher the waters became, and the hotter and more violent the wind. (Rushdie 49)

Haroun is the only one who realizes that Moody Land in not merely a tale, and that they all have power they all have over the situation. He realizes “the trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Cause if you can do that, you can do anything” (Waking Life). Haroun instructs his father to “Think of the happiest times you can remember,” and the weather calms down (Rushdie 50).

In thinking that we are “alive” or even “awake,” it seems as though we assume the things that happen to us are beyond our control and in doing so, may put up with those things that make us miserable. Another man in Waking Life says it seems like “everyone’s sleepwalking through their waking state or wakewalking through their dreams. Either way they’re not going to get much out of it.” When we assume that life is beyond our control, we are sleepwalking in the sense that we passively accept everything that happens. When we dream, we dictate what happens, yet, we are often unaware of the fact that we are dreaming, and consequently are unaware that we are controlling our experiences—like Rashid and the people in the swan-boat who did not realize they were controlling the weather. In Waking Life, the second character mentioned says we need to become lucid dreamers—we need to ask ourselves if we are in a dream, because if we are, we realize we can do anything. Yet, most people never ask themselves this question. But why should this power only be reserved for dreams? Rashid assumed Moody Land was only a story, but it was real, and their power to dictate their experience was real. How can we be sure we are not dreaming now when dreams themselves often appear real? How can we be so sure that the infinite possibilities that exist in our dreams do not also exist in waking life? When we live without the confinements of ordinary waking life logic, we liberate ourselves and are more like to find happiness, because we believe we can do or obtain those things that will make us happy.

In Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie contends that when we reject imagination, ironically, we become captives of our own imagination. We develop the misconception that our opinions, which are constructions of our imagination, whether they uphold pragmatism, logic or creativity, are correct. He writes,

We first construct pictures of the world and then we step inside the frames. We come to equate the picture with the world, so that, in certain circumstances, we will even go to war because we find someone else’s picture less pleasing than our own. It is very tempting to say that this behaviour conforms very well to the Hindu idea of maya, the veil of illusion that hangs before our limited human eyes and prevents us from seeing things as they truly are—so that we mistake the veil, maya, for reality. Dreaming is our gift; it may also be our tragic flaw. (Imaginary Homelands 377)

Khattam-Shud believes that “the world is for Controlling…worlds…are all there to be Ruled” (Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 161). Mr Sengupta believes that “Life is not a storybook or jokeshop,” and Soraya, for a time, believes that “life is a serious business” (23). In each of their worldviews, there is no room for storytelling, creativity, or art—they have narrow visions of reality. When we see the world in one particular way, we are not “seeing things as they truly are” (Imaginary Homelands 377). We begin believing that our conceptions of the world are right and that everyone else’s conceptions are either wrong or inferior to our own. Khattam-Shud, for instance, believes so strongly that the all worlds are meant to be controlled that he strives to annihilate stories because they are beyond the realm of control. His “picture of the world” as a place that is story free brings about war between the lands of Gup and Chup—he finds the Gup’s picture of the world as a place omnipresent with stories less pleasing than his own. Khattam-Shud’s desire to control all worlds and obliterate stories, though dark, is a dream as well. This is why Rushdie say’s that dreaming is both our gift and tragic flaw—dreams can bring us a great deal of happiness, and can potentially improve the quality of our lives, but they can also be harmful. We should not try to impose our own dreams on others. If other people accept our dreams and want to share them with us that’s wonderful—but if they do not, we should not try to make them conform to our image of reality.

Rushdie also discusses the importance of open communication and even argument in Imaginary Homelands: “Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable…understanding remains possible, and can be achieved without the suppression of the principle of free speech” (395). In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rashid is bewildered by the Guppees, who “were busily arguing over every little detail,” and he wondered, “How is it possible to fight a battle with all this chatter and natter?” (Rushdie 184). Yet the Guppees’ arguments are the reason for their victory: “All those arguments and debates, all that openness, had created powerful bonds of fellowship between them. The Chuwalas, on the other hand, turned out to be a disunited rabble…their vows of silence and their habits of secrecy had made them suspicious and distrustful of one another” (185). When we refuse to communicate, like the Chuwalas, we may become distrustful of one another. We may also become “stuck” in our own “picture of the world” and fail to realize that it is only a picture, and not the world as it really is (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 377). In order to remove the veil that “prevents us from seeing things as they truly are,” we must openly communicate with one another. In this way, we can come to understand one another’s points of view.

Rushdie fervently advocates Freedom of Speech, open mindedness, and communication, in part because he knows that these things have often been and often are rejected. Many people have been punished for their independence of thought. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Haroun observes:

Such was the freedom evidently allowed to the Pages and other citizens of Gup, that the old General seemed perfectly happy to listen to these tirades of insults and insubordination without batting an eyelid…

‘What an army!’ Haroun mused. ‘If any soldiers behaved like this on Earth, they’d be court-martialled quick as thinking.’

‘But but but what is the point of giving persons Freedom of Speech,’ declaimed Butt the Hoopoe, ‘if you then say they must not utilize the same? And is not the Power of Speech the greatest Power of all? Then surely it must be exercised to the full?” (Rushdie 119)

Freedom of Speech seems such a simple idea, something that every person should have, as Butt the Hoopoe indicates. Yet, Haroun’s surprise that the Guppees are not court-martialled for their “tirades of insults and insubordinations” reflects the reality that people are often denied such freedom, are, in fact, “court-martialled” for expressing personal opinions. This reminds me of the first Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay. Many of the colonists were “court-martialled” in a sense, for their “insults and insubordination” to Puritanical beliefs. The Puritans had a very clear vision of how life should be lived: “Winthrop and his associates intended to build a new Israel in the forests of Massachusetts, a Bible state of such compelling virtue that it would reform all Christianity by example” (Erikson xiv). They had stepped inside the frame of the picture they had constructed of the world, and in this picture, there was no room for diverging

opinions (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 377). During the Antinomian Controversy in 1637, when many of the colonists challenged the authority of ministers to “act as the final moral authority in civil as well as spiritual matters,” the clergy called a religious synod to define these colonists’ offenses against Puritanism:

before the synod ended, the clergy had engaged in a true orgy of heresy-hunting: they identified no less than eighty-two ‘unsafe opinions’…and capped off that performance by adding nine ‘unwholesome expressions’ to the list. The convention lasted twenty-four days, during which time the roster of potential heresies was drawn to epic length. (Erikson 72, 90-91)

Anne Hutchinson was one of the colonists singled out for such “unsafe opinions.” “Mrs. Hutchinson met with a delegation of ministers and announced that none of them were competent to preach the gospel…that the incumbent ministers of the Bay were not fit to occupy their pulpits…this opinion was quite enough to set the whole machinery of the state against her” (Erikson 80, 85). Anne Hutchinson championed freedom of speech and the Puritan authorities punished her for it. She was, in a way, a leader of the Antinomian Controversy. The controversy began with the religious discussions she held in her home, where she “loved to discuss the more obscure points of Puritan theology and who knew how to defend her opinions with a formidable display of Biblical scholarship” (77). Her home became “a kind of theological salon. As many as eighty people might gather in the parlor to talk about the sermon of the last Sabbath” (77). These gatherings remind me of the Guppees in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, with all their open discussion. Rushie would say that Anne’s religious discussions were important, that her challenge to the Puritan church was necessary for understanding. If the clergy and those Puritans who were outraged by Anne’s opinions had been open listeners, the colonists of the Bay might have established a sense of solidarity, as the Guppees had done with their open communication. Yet, the offended Puritans were not willing recipients of Anne’s opinions and wanted to silence her—an attitude similar to that of the Chupwalas. John Winthrop, serving as both prosecutor and judge, made this opening remark during Anne’s trial: “Mrs. Hutchinson, you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth and the churches here” (Erikson 93). Rather than seeing the value of “arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable,” John Winthrop and other authorial figures viewed such challenges as a source of evil (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 395). At the conclusion of the Antinomian controversy, the General Court banished Anne Hutchinson from the colony, “disenfranchised eight other persons from Boston who had been among the offending faction, and…rounded out the purge by disarming seventy-five persons in the country, including fifty-eight from Boston alone. (Erikson 91-92). It is unfortunate that many colonists were punished for their independence of thought. As Butt the Hoopoe, said to Haroun, people must be allowed to exercise the Power of Speech in full—this is the only way we can begin to understand one another (Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 119).

Works Cited

Erikson, Kai. Wayward Puritans. Boston: Pearson Education, 2005.

Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta Books, 1990.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books, 1991.

Waking Life. Dir. Richard Waking Life. Perf. Wiley Wiggins. DVD. Fox Searchlight Pictures,

2002.

Beasts of No Nation and Shocking Material

Melissa Brooks
November 20, 2008
Beasts of No Nation p. 1-75

Paul, I am, as you suggested, posting my email to you about Beasts of No Nation I wrote in August for my last post (I did revise it a bit).

The scenes that shocked me most in Beasts were those where Agu killed people with a machete or knife. For instance, when he and Srtika killed the woman and daughter:
"Then Strika is taking his knife high above his head and chopping and everybody is coming apart." (51).
"I am liking the sound of knife chopping KPWUDA KPWUDA on her head and how the blood is just splashing on my hand and my face and my feets. I am chopping and chopping and chopping until I am looking up and it is dark" (51).
The scenes where the Commandant molests Agu also disturbed me extensively. A combination of factors made this book shocking for me: the brutality of the violence (machetes), the pleasure the soldiers often seemed to take in killing and humiliating people, Agu's youthfulness, and especially the humanization of Agu--his anecdotes from his life before the war, in school, with his family; his fluctuation between pleasure and remorse about killing; his cognitive dissonance about his actions while he was killing. Agu makes me think about how people who kill can be regular people and are not necessarily seized by a moment of "insanity" when they kill; it puts people who have killed that much closer to me and every other person in mentality. This in turn reminds me that everyone has the potential to kill, and it just makes me sad. For me, killing, and many cruel or mean things, are entwined with empathy; I'm almost terrified to do things I wouldn't want people to do to me. When Agu or another soldier was killing someone, I often thought of myself in that victim's place, and that makes it much harder for me to cope with this book, and material of this nature.
I think part of the reason we may be drawn to shocking material is because they offer us mental stimulation. We seem to be desensitized to so many things now that stimulation is much harder to come by, so when we experience it we hold on to it. In general, I think people prefer stimulation (even if it's nauseating) to boredom. I also think that shocking material can make us more knowledgeable, aware, and open minded, the latter alone being reason enough for me to pursue the material. But with Beasts for instance, it offers a personal account of war and reawakens us to how awful it really is. It's easier to think about war with grown men in uniforms, attacking only other soldiers, and being very strategic, well planned, and confined to a site solely for war. In Beasts, kids are fighting, civilians are ruthlessly murdered, and the troop Agu's with seem to have no plan whatsoever, rather, that they're wandering aimlessly, hoping to stumble across something (however this could be due to the fact that we hear the story from Agu's point of view--being a kid he does not fully understand what is going on). Anyhow, my point is that I think these kinds of texts force us to face the uglier aspects of reality, and I, at least, want to accept things as they really are and not pretend they're different.

Alternate Interpretations

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi p. 1-183

I don't think the notion that events, books, films, poetry, art, etc., are all open to interpretation necessarily undermines that any of these things took place or exist. We can all interpret events differently from one another, while all still believing the events actually happened. The question of whether or not something has occurred aside, we have different perspectives on whether an event is important, and different perspectives on why it's important. We can also interpret people's emotions and motivations differently. One person might think Romeo and Juliet were star-crossed lovers, while another person might think they were immature people who barely knew each other, and were more in love with their ideas of one another as well as the excitement and danger of the situation that being in love with one another would create. These two interpretations do not call into question whether Romeo and Juliet actually had a love affair, were caught in the stranglehold of a deep seated family feud, and killed themselves. The interpretation that they were not actually in love also does not undermine the possibility that they honestly believed they were in love with one another.
Satrapi actually seems critical of questioning the existence of events and "the material world." On page 12, she depicts a conversation between Descartes and Marx. Descartes says the rock Marx is holding does not exist because "it's only a reflection of our own imagination." Marx throws the rock at Descartes head, who says, "Ouch! What are you doing Karl, you broke my skull!" His response seems to indicate that the material world is very real indeed, as are the events that take place within it. And supposing that they were not, it hardly seems to matter since we experience pain and myriad other emotions as a result of these events, and suffer physical injuries (i.e. Descartes' broken skull).
Satrapi's reason for writing Persepolis, in part, was because many people (probably many in the US and Western world in general) interpret Iran as a nation of "fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism" (Introduction p. 2). While events relating to all three of these things certainly took place, Satrapi says this a limited interpretation of Iran. It doesn't take into account the vast array of "Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom," such as her uncle Anoosh who was arrested and executed for being a "Russian spy" (Intro p. 2, 68-70). We can interpret events in different ways and still agree that they happened. Our view of a country's character, like whether Iran is fundamentalist or a nation of freedom champions, is the more crucial interpretation.

Final Entry for One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
November 5, 2008

People are more likely to expemplify determinism when they pursue a solitary lifestyle. Most of the members of the Buendias family experience ongoing solitude, and they tend to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. Garcia Marquez may be indicating that we achieve a greater sense of individuatlity (somewhat ironically) by reaching out to others and openly communicating with them. When we strive to understand and love one another, as well as when we pursue knowledge, particularly of history and literature, we achieve an individuality that we cannot have otherwise. Only when we are knowledgable and aware of the myriad choices and paths available to us can we exercise an individuality more reflective of free will.
Similarly, we can only over come "vices" through love and knowledge. Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano's child (the last of the Buendias) was "predisposed to begin the race again from the beginning and cleanse it of its pernicious vices and solitarly calling, for he was the only one in a century who had been engendered with love" (378). Perhaps the rest of the Buendia family, and in general people not engendered with love, are predisposed to solitude, and misery even.

October 30, 2008
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 244-291 and Jorge Luis Borges

From the Jorge Luis Borges' short story we read: "The Library [the universe] is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope” (5).

The idea of an infinite universe is supported in One Hundred Years of Solitude Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano "learned that dominant obsessions can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions" (378). The implication here seems to be that death is not an end. Although bodies die, the obsessions people have in life, such as Jose Arcadio Buendia's obsession with the truth of great inventions, continue living. The obsessions, the ideals we carry, transcend death. The apparitions or ghosts throughout the novel support this idea—these characters have died, yet their living family members still see and hear them. One of the questions on the magical realism handout asks, “Is there a metamorphosis in the text? Is it treated as something mundane?” The answer to both is yes. Death, rather than being an end, is a metamorphosis. We morph from physical entities to intangible ideas—the ideas we carried during our physical existence. The ideas books contain, as well as the ideas people possess, transcend physical existence and are thus immortal.

In his short story, Borges says that the cyclical nature of the universe has gladdened his solitude. I wonder then, if the characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude acknowledged their own immortality through their ideas, (as Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula realize their own immortality through their love for one another), would this ease their solitude, or rather, whatever pain they feel because of their solitude?

Colonel Aureliano Buendias seemed to experience a solitude more intense than most of the other characters: he “locked himself up inside himself and the family finally thought of him as if he were dead” (246). If he viewed himself as a solitary individual, isolated in time, this would exacerbate the solitude he experienced. He thinks his feelings are locked up inside of him, as though he were holding them in captivity, and they would consequently die with him. But if he were to view his obsessions as possessing him, he might be able to realize that they extend beyond him, do not belong to him alone. And they will continue living and thus keep him alive after his physical death, so that he transcends time as well and is actually connected to each of his ancestors and those born after he dies. A cyclical universe connotes a simultaneity of time. Acknowledging this, perhaps Aureliano, his family, and we can transcend solitude.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I began to think of the Macondo people as subalterns, and Latin Americans as subalterns as well. In writing this novel, Garcia Marquez is giving the subalterns a voice. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Garcia Marquez says that the "rational talents" of the world, (which I take to be "The West," namely, the US and Europe), "insist on measuring us [Latin America] with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all...the interpretation of reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown" (2-3). I began to think that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel Garcia Marquez (GM) wrote as example of a Latin American "pattern,"--a yardstick by which we could measure the region. If we approach it with open minds, this novel could be a way for us to understand the Latin American experience.
GM's assertion that rational countries don't interpret Latin America through a Latin American perspective resembles Spivak's argument that even well-intentioned intellectuals who speak on behalf of subalterns are serving actually to silence them; the problem is that, like rational countries, these intellectuals are not actually expressing the views of the subaltern. Spivak opposes essentialism, and essentializing the subaltern in particular. Yet, it seems that to even utilize the term subaltern and apply it to certain people is a form of essentialism. When you call a group of people subalterns, you imply that all of these people stand "in an ambiguous relation to power--subordinate to it but never fully consenting to its rule" (Spivak handout). The way I understand it, and the way we have been discussing it in class, it seems "subaltern" is generally applied to entire nations that are subordinate to other nations--often to colonial powers. Yet, there may be individuals within the colonized nation that fully embrace the colonizing power--Baby Kochomma in The God of Small Things seemed to whole heartedly revere English customs.
In relation to this, Garcia Marquez's statement that "the ravages of life are not the same for all" seems ironic, because, if I'm correct, he's speaking about Latin America in relation to the West. Because he's speaking about Latin America as a whole, or even if he is only speaking about Columbia, then his statement seems to imply that "the ravages of life" are the same for all Latin Americans. But Latin America, and any country or region, including "the West," is composed of myriad individuals, and those individuals "belonging" to the same place do not all think and feel the same way. Nationalism or a national identity seems to be just another form of essentialism, negating the diverse individuals that live in a given country. And this form of essentialism is especially problematic because it is leads to political chaos (often alongside violence) and war. To overcome essentialism, we would need to see each person as an individual, apart from the myriad groups with which we typically associate these individuals.

October 16, 2008
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, &
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Nobel Prize Lecture

In in his Nobel Prize Lecture, Garcia Marquez refers to "all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world." I'm trying to figure out what he meant by this. Are our lives not our own? And if not, to whom do our lives belong? Perhaps each of our lives belongs to everyone, or everyone we encounter. This seems to make sense, since our culture so heavily influences us. We adopt certain beliefs and practices of that culture that we take for granted. Considering that we cannot help the culture into which we were born, nor the family, city, and numerous other circumstances, and all of these circumstances shape our attitudes, beliefs, demeanor, etc., it seems as though we cannot even help who we are. We owe a large part of our identity to the circumstances of our life, and the people involved in those circumstances. So in a way, our lives do seem to belong to other people, and even to the environment and earth itself. Perhaps our lives belong also to the time period into which we are born--the people we study in our history classes, and any person we study in the academic setting, or any setting really, is tied to the time period they came from, and the way we talk about it, such as referring to "the eighteenth century," "the 60s," etc, the time period seems to be the dominant force that holds all the people involved in it.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, I also see this at play with the repetition of behavior patterns between generations. Ursula noted that all the "Jose Arcadios" seemed to be alike--something along the lines of bawdy and aggressive, and all the "Aurelianos" seemed alike as well, more contemplative and withdrawn, if I remember correctly. This lends support to Garcia Marquez's statement that believing you have a life of your own is an illusion. If each Jose Arcadio and each Aureliano repeats the actions and mimics the demeanor, behavior, and even physical appearance of those before them, then they're not really unique individuals acting freely. Its a bit fatalistic, in that it seems they can't help who they become. Our lives belong to our ancestors and the overriding force of fate. However, I feel at some point, with the twins Aureliano and Jose Arcadio, they may have disproved Ursula's observation. I know she was speculating that they might be contradicting her observation, but I can't remember the conclusion of this situation. It was confusing, because Ursula wasn't sure if each twin was really the twin they said they were.
Reading over the quote I started the blog with and the context, I think Garcia Marquez may have been referring to people in Latin America. He says many European leaders act as though "it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world," which I think are Europe and the US. Latin America is not granted sovereignty: they're denied originality in their "difficult attempts at social change" and "the social justice sought by progressive Europeans...cannot also be a goal for Latin America." Garcia Marquez may be saying that Latin Americans live under the illusion that their lives are their own, when in fact their not because the ruling countries deny them autonomy.

Blog Midterm Paper

Melissa Brooks

Dr. Paul Gleason

English 303

October 9, 2008

Thinking Critically

Before the semester began, my independent reading responses tended to be at the first level of reading development. When I read John Kennedy O’Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces, my response was limited to the various aspects I enjoyed. The main things I remember about this novel are its strangeness and humor, particularly in the character Ignatius Reilly. I thought about A Confederacy of Dunces primarily as a world in itself, without connecting it to the cultural context in which O’Toole wrote it. Similarly, when I began reading Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, I absorbed the information without really processing its relation to social discourse. Discussing Rushdie in our Nonwestern Literature class, however, helped me analyze the text on the third level. Learning about the basic features of Islam as well as the fatwa against Rushdie, I could place The Satanic Verses in its cultural context. For instance, Islamic belief contends that no one should disparage Muhammad. In The Satanic Verses, Mahound proclaims that a former statement he claimed came from God actually came from Satan. As Mahound represents Muhammad, the idea that he could make such a grave mistake, and the idea that God and Satan could so easily be confused with one another, offends many Muslims. Because I did not know much about Islam or Muhammad before we discussed them in class, I was not able to make this connection.

Currently, I think exhibit all three stages of reading development. In some respects, I seem to fit into the first stage of Text-Self. Most if not all of my responses include the personal pronouns “I” and “we.” While I never discuss whether I like a text or if it is good or bad, I incorporate my personal biases. Some of my blog entries were in part rebuttals fueled by class discussion. When we were reading A Wild Sheep Chase, I perceived a negative response to the novel’s strange elements from my classmates. This offended me because I love reading, especially books that seem to stray for normality. My blog response, then, was a way of defending both literature and my predilection for it. In my first blog entry on Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, I assert that we need to be more accepting of abnormal phenomenon: “The dream world of the bizarre is preferable to the mediocre reality we’ve created that excludes all that is illogical. If we (and the narrator) allow the illogical into our reality, we’d be more content living in it.” This remark contains overt bias, as I portray my personal preference for the bizarre as a social fact: acceptance of the bizarre would bring everyone a higher level of satisfaction. I also project my personal dissatisfaction with normalcy as a universal dissatisfaction, although many people are content with normalcy and prefer it. This response is rooted in the first level of reading development because it revolves around my personal feelings. At the same time, I think it pertains to the third level. I utilize a sociological perspective, implying that our societal norms uphold the logical and reject the bizarre. Yet, things are only bizarre because we define them as such. It may be beneficial then, to view them with a more open mind to broaden our perspectives.

An intermingling of multiple levels of reading development also occurs in my blog response for Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. Like the previously mentioned blog on Murakami, this entry was also a rebuttal to a classmate’s comment, thereby applying to the Text-Self category. This particular classmate did not find the racism in the film offensive but humorous because (from his point of view) the racism was intended to be ironic. This comment upset me for a number of reasons, one of which is that my brother carries a similar attitude and at times overtly expresses racial prejudices. “Claiming that he does not really adhere to racist attitudes, he thinks making these jokes is okay…Even if we do not truly believe stereotypes, stating them ironically on a continual basis (as well as hearing them) begins to affect our attitudes.” Once again, my response was a defense of my personal opinions. Yet in this same entry, I also incorporate the second stage of reading, as I relate my belief that ironic racism is a slippery slope to Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy. Tristram says that entertaining opinions even in jest eventually causes us to internalize them. This entry also incorporates a bit of the third level, as racism and stereotypes pertain to sociological discourse. Sociology purports that racism is something we learn, and by continuously hearing racist jokes or remarks, and even by stating them ironically, we internalize these values.

As the semester has progressed I feel I have increasingly incorporated all three levels of reading development. One reason for this is that in general, discussing novels stimulates responses that are more critical. My independent reading responses have often been at the first level of reading development because I do not have anyone with whom to discuss the text. Usually, no one I know is reading in conjunction with me. Without an outlet for discussion, it is difficult to respond analytically; it often seems that when I read independently, stories sit in a vacuum within my mind, whirling around apart from culture and social discourses. Discussing texts in class, however, makes me think critically about the novels we read and helps me make connections with other texts and discourses outside literature. The handouts we receive in class have also helped me progress in my reading development because they introduce me to new theorists and familiarize me somewhat with existing social discourses. In my last entry on Roy, for example I discuss Spivak’s discourse on the fallacy of essentialism, which I would not have been able to do without the Spivak handout. I cite examples of essentialism in films like Aladdin, The Lion King, and Pan’s Labyrinth, which portray villains as the epitome of evil. I think class discussions and continuously receiving and reading handouts on social discourses will continue to help me progress in my reading development. In terms of my independent reading, I have found that when I write responses to novels, or write comments in the margins, it helps me process the book and respond at the second and third levels. The blog entries themselves have helped me to process the novels we read. If I continue writing responses to the books I read, it will help me to continue thinking about them critically.

October 2, 2008
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy, pgs. 1-130; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

In the Spivak handout, it seems Spivak’s contention with essentialism is that it ignores the many differences between individual people. When we “romanticize the oppressed” by viewing them as pure and innocent victims, we turn them into a single static entity. Consequently, we’re not really acknowledging them as human beings, since people are dynamic. Every person varies from the next, and each person changes throughout his or her lifetime. When we villainize a particular group, we’re doing the same thing—we dehumanize them. While we ignore the flaws of the oppressed by romanticizing them, we ignore the redeeming qualities of those we villainize.
Essentialism can also cause us to stereotype people as individuals. By creating a “villain” category, for instance, we come to see people who do things associated with “villainess” as purely evil. This seems to happen often in books and films. Pretty much any Disney movie demonstrates this. For instance, I cannot remember a single time in Aladin that we see any redeeming qualities in Jafar; nor does Scar in The Lion King ever portray qualities that would allow us as viewers to sympathize with him. The film Pan’s Labrynth demonstrates this excellently, as Captain Vidal is probably the most awful sadistic villain I’ve ever seen, torturing and killing just about anyone that contradicts him. He is never portrayed in a positive light. This bothers me because I think it is a fallacy to purport that anyone is “worthless,” so to speak, and because it exacerbates hatred.
In Roy’s novel Comrade Pillai attempts to villainize Chako to labor workers: “Whenever he referred to him in his speeches he was careful to strip him of any human attributes and present him as an abstract functionary in some larger scheme. ..A theoretical construct…He never referred to him by name, but always as “the Management” (Roy 115). Dehumanizing Chako offers a Pillai a convenient means turn the workers against Chako, who Pillai believed was undermining him. It is much easier turning them against Chako when Chako is a nameless idea of corruption, stripped of his any good qualities they could sympathize with or relate to.

September 25, 2008

Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom; Director Steven Spielberg

The implicit racism towards Asians in The Temple of Doom may or may not have been a way of ridiculing racism and stereotypes; whether it was or not, I do not think that employing stereotypes of any kind becomes okay simply because you do not actually believe those stereotypes. Even if we intend our behavior ironically, others have no way of knowing that we are being ironic, unless we always make a point of saying so. Even if we did this, ironically reinforcing stereotypes or racism perpetuates their existence, thereby exacerbating the problem. While completely eradicating stereotypes and racism may be improbable, diminishing their prominence is feasible. It’s important, then, to do what we can to demote binary ways of looking at the world.

One of my brothers makes racist jokes quite frequently; claiming that he does not really adhere to racist attitudes, he thinks making these jokes is okay. Although my brother does not believe he is at all racist, he has often, quite seriously, made derogatory remarks about others because of their race. One time he ranted about some African Americans who were standing in the middle of the street while he was driving; they were giving him a hard time and wouldn’t move. He reiterated the offensive comments he exchanged with them; somehow, the fact that they so rudely blocked the road and refused to move was relevant to their being African American, thereby warranting racist remarks.

Even if we think we do not truly believe stereotypes, stating them ironically on a continual basis (as well as hearing them) begins to affect our attitudes. We’re so malleable that we often internalize attitudes without realizing it—even attitudes we initially believe are preposterous. In the novel Tristram Shandy, Tristram acknowledges how easily we subconsciously internalize the values and ideas we hear. Referring to the influence his father’s “odd opinions” and “skeptical notions” had upon him, Tristram gives “warning to the learned reader against the indiscreet reception of such guests [his father’s odd opinions], who, after a free and undisturbed entrance, for some years, into our brains,—at length claim a kind of settlement there…beginning in jest,—but ending in downright earnest” (Sterne 38).

Melissa Brooks

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami Pgs. 231-293

The strange man tells Boku, “When Karl Marx posited the proletariat, he thereby cemented their mediocrity” (113). I think Murakami is critical of menial labor, and perhaps any work that constrains people to rigid schedules that are out of sync with a person’s “natural” rhythms. What I mean by this is that many jobs are on a fixed schedule and consequently, every other activity in people’s lives work around this fixed schedule, even sleeping—rather than waking up because we are well-rested, we wake up to alarm clocks so we can be at work on time. It also could just be any job that begins to usurp a person’s own will (for instance, the strange man says his life has no purpose without the boss). As far as I can see at the moment, this criticism seems to pertain to pretty much all work other than that of the artist (writer, painter, sculptor, dancer, etc.), who has the freedom to work based on his or her own personal schedule. All other jobs seem to “dampen the spirit,” in a sense; this explains Boku’s unwavering daily routine, passivity and apathy before he embarked on the wild sheep chase.

The allegiance we submit to jobs we don’t really care about prevents us from “really living.” The manager of the dolphin hotel says, “I sometimes wish I could go off in search of something…I always thought that’s what life is like. An ongoing search” (194). Although he wants to go search for something, he never does. He stays tied to the hotel. Boku’s girlfriend also suggests that the marrow of life is in searching: “This is just the sort of thing I love. Let me tell you, it’s more fun than sleeping witch strangers or flashing my ears or proofreading biographical dictionaries. This is living” (171). Here, the girlfriend refers to each of her three jobs, with which she’s dissatisfied. On this sheep chase, however, she is really living. Murakami may be suggesting that each of us has to search for something…what that something is, I’m not sure. It could be meaning, truth, ourselves, maybe all of these, or something else. But whatever it is, we have to keep searching, because this search gives us spirit; if we get wrapped up in the mediocrity of jobs we don’t really care about, we lose this spirit.

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami Pgs. 1-150

“There are symbolic dreams…that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities…that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councilors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers” (67). This quote makes me think that dreams belong to another, very real, tangible world, separate from our own. The narrator’s life in this book symbolizes a dream from this other world. In this world, there is nothing unusual about a “sheep that by all rights should not exist,” has a star-shaped birthmark, a will of its own, and possesses people to enact its will (112). We have a tendency (at least, I think we do) to reserve all the bizarre, unusual phenomenon, people, or things for dreams. We shirk them in our daily lives and when we encounter them, we hesitate to accept them as real; we try to logically explain them away. But if dreams are real, (and even if they’re not) then everything that’s bizarre (this sheep, for instance) is real as well; maybe they just slipped out of the dream world into our own, just as we slip out of our world into the dream one.

I can’t help but think that our disbelief in the bizarre is debilitating. Our unwillingness to accept things that seem beyond reason has made the world “mediocre,” as the Strange Man says (113). The narrator is only “half-living” because he is stuck in this mediocre world: “Nothing changed from day to day…I woke up at seven, made toast and coffee, headed out to work, ate dinner out, had one or two drinks, went home, read in bed for an hour, turned off the lights, and slept” (40, 20). He sleeps so often in this text (or at least mentions it so much), and I think it’s because the dream world of the bizarre is preferable to the mediocre reality we’ve created that excludes all that is illogical. If we (and the narrator) allow the illogical into our reality, we’d be more content living in it.

September 4, 2008

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

“Language and imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human” (In Good Faith, 396). I think Rushdie is indicating that our ability to think at such an extraordinary level, and to imagine things and ideas beyond what we see makes us human. Forcing ourselves, forcing language and imagination into a narrow cell makes life mechanical. If we were to lose our imaginations, there would be no source for new ideas and our minds would stagnate. The good of stories that aren’t even true then, is partially that they exercise the imagination, thereby stimulating the mind and enabling us to grow as individuals—they make us human. The sea of stories exemplifies growth as a fundamental aspect of life. Because the stories were “in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive” (72). The stories were alive because they were constantly evolving; restraining imagination sucks a little bit of the life out of us; we become a little less human. Like objects, we become a little easier to define and categorize.

Bride and Prejudice

August 28, 2008
Melissa Brooks
Bride and Prejudice
Director Gurinder Chadha

As I was watching Bride and Prejudice (B & P), I kept picking out its similarities to Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Some of the names are consistent between the two, such as Darcy and Wickham, and every main character in B & P is closely modeled after a character in the novel. Lalita, of course, is based on Elizabeth Bennet, and her sister Lakhi is based on Elizabeth's sister Lydia. Lakhi and Lydia both fawn over a deceptive Wickham, although both Wickhams initially take interest in Lalita and Elizabeth. Lakhi and Lydia both also run off with their respective Wickams. Noticing the ongoing similarities, I never forgot I was watching a movie. Films that aren't spoofs off popular novels, such as American History X, allow me to forget I'm watching a film and allow me to accept the characters as real people. Parroting lines and circumstances from Pride and Prejudice, B & P constantly reminds us that the film isn't real. We can't suspend our disbelief because B & P's intertexuality irrevocably links the film to a fictitious text in our culture.