Echoes of an Autobiography

Growing up, my parents would always question whether or not I had read the Bible that day. Some days I would have and would respond with some meaningful tidbit, but more often than my parents knew (at least so I sneakily believed) I did not and had approximately 30 seconds of pretending not to have heard the question to look up a verse. There are thousands of verses in the 66 books of the Bible, but my go to book was always proverbs. If I did a open and read, I might end up with the genealogies or a list of materials for the temple. It was always the safest to go with proverbs, short, sweet, and simple... so I thought.

Actually this is not true of proverbs. While short, they are often bitter and never simple. So how did Mafouz choose to write his autobiography? You guessed it... proverbs. Profound truths hidden within simple vignettes that more often than not extracted Mafouz. Some autobiography... right?

Some are easy. Others take thinking aloud. Still others, take chucking the book, moving on and coming back when I am old and wise to take another crack at them. But that is the point. Some lessons are easy to learn, others take time. Still others we try to understand, and try to apply what we think it may mean only to figure out that we were wrong in a continuous cycle of failure... only to maybe one day finally recognize the truth. At first I thought Mafouz was crazy (who writes a biography so?) and now I know that he is. But in doing so, by exposing his lessons learned through other stories, we too might also understand.



  

A Tale of Love and Darkness

When I first heard this title, all I could think of was a cheesy romance novel. Who names a book, especially an autobiography A Tale of Love and Darkness? It seemed absurd, but after the reading... perhaps this was accurate description?

A Tale of Love and Darkness is a collection of stories from Oz's childhood. He remembers so much, whether what he did, where he went, who he was close to or even the day to day routines of his life. I am a bit jealous of this ability. I am only twenty and can barely remember more than a dozen or so brief glimpses of an experience of my past. Memory, moments lost that can never exist again. Although, we may have the same people in the same place doing the same thing, the moment can never be regained. Because we are not who we were then. People change, our lives our experiences transform us. The places we inhabit also change around us reshaping within. Jerusalem, much less Amos Street was not the same from his childhood, having changed in the moment Oz was brought into the basement apartment. My roommate loves to say that time is linear, so it doesn't matter how much you procrastinate I will still have to face the test, struggle, or burden of tomorrow. It will always come (unless the Mayans are right after all). This moment following the next, building, towering on top of one another reaching past Babel into the sky to try and touch the heavens. Only  to never succeed. Autobiographies while allowing me to peer into the window of another live also in turn force me to re-examine mine own. My family, my place, my memories. How they have changed and how they have created me. It was because of Oz's experiences, his family, his city Jerusalem that he was molded into the man and the writer that he is. So to it is because of my family as loud and large as it is, and my place in the middle of nowhere, and my memories or the glimpses that remain to echo the pictures telling the past, that I am... me. While my mother has not struggled with depression or committed suicide and while my father is not an librarian dreaming of the academic world, and while I am not a writer, internationally known and respected. I too have a place. I too have had hardships that have changed me. I too am a collection of moments. I too am human.

Postmodern literature and Ecclesiastes

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” Ecclesiastes 1:2

I have known from early on that I am a plan person. I like plans. I enjoy knowing where I am going, how I am getting there, and what I am going to do. I like having a purpose. Early on in my childhood, I have memories of my father going over every minute detail of every road trip. The directions would be lying next to the jumbo-sized atlas with the path carefully colored out in highlighter. I knew that we would never get lost as we ventured, because my dad had a plan. We knew where we were going and how we were getting there. We had a purpose. Whether it was to pick up my glasses in downtown Johnstown or driving to the Church of the Brethren’s national conference, we always knew how to get there and why we were going. We always had a purpose. It wasn’t enough to just go for enjoyment or just the pleasure of driving, there needed to be a reason. Perhaps this is because the Crissman household was a very large and very thrifty. Or maybe this desire, to have a plan and a purpose, is more widespread than the Crissmans maybe it is a characteristic of humanity.  

In literary criticism, we were discussing postmodernism vs. modernism. I am no expert on either subject, but as we were speaking of the move away from reason and rationality to a period of questions and uncertainty I kept on thinking about contemporary world lit. Now whether these questions of purpose and identity just happened to be buried during the modernist period or people didn’t have them I don’t know. I am however aware that that the questions that postmodernism are now boldly voicing are not new questions. In fact they have been around for millennia. Now please do not mistake me for having any answers to these deeper questions of purpose and identity or their history across the age. Instead, journey with me to shed light on our culture and humanity, as we look at the reflections of humanity in contemporary literature and Ecclesiastes. I believe that the questions surfacing in Istanbul, Omeros, and White Castle echo those of Solomon in Ecclesiastes, and while humans asking questions is nothing new, but why do we keep  asking  these same ones of our purpose, our plan, our identity?  

Why Ecclesiastes? This semester I have begun attending a bible study where we are working our way through the book of Ecclesiastes with Dr. Hegeman. He calls Ecclesiastes the postmodern gateway to the rest of scripture. Others call it a melancholic, frustrating book. It is a written quandary of an individual’s life without God as he searches for meaning. In some ways making Solomon author of Ecclesiastes, king of Israel, and the wisest man, much like many of our modern characters, questioning.

In Istanbul, Pamuk puts a name to this feeling that is overcoming his city. The Turkish word for melancholy is hüzün. But Pamuk stretches this layered word even farther past “a cultural concept conveying the worldly failure, listlessness, and spiritual suffering” (91) to put a name to the “state of mind that is as ultimately life-affirming as it is negating” (91) of Istanbul and of Pamuk. Istanbul is the story of Pamuk and ultimately Istanbul as they together are coping with life in a fallen empire. When Istanbul was the height of society, were these questions asked? Or is it only in our fallen state do we and Pamuk search out the contrasts, of black and white, and the questions? Asking why, how it was that we got here. What happened to the order, to the plan? Pamuk thrives in the contrasts of black and white, poor and rich, happiness and guilt. These contrasts echo those of Ecclesiastes’ seasons. Why is there is the contrast between birth and death, sorrow and joy, love and hatred? Can we only understand the idea of peace after knowing the horror of war? Is light only understood in relation to darkness? Questions carry us along. 

Unfortunately it is around this time, after asking these deep metaphysical questions that we realize that these words are nothing new. Our ideas merely repeat others. In response to our toil, our questions, Ecclesiastes mocks back:

     What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again;

There is nothing new under the sun.

“Is there anything one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’?

It was here already, long ago;

It was here before our time.

There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come

will not be remembered by those who follow.” Ecclesiastes 1:9-11

And yet this burden of remembrance is laid upon Philoctete. “What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men” (Ecc. 3:10), Philoctete’s burden, his suffering, his pus-filled wound of his people, of remembering, cripples his body. Is this just? Is not Philoctete justified in drowning out his pain? What is the point of his suffering, to what gain, to what purpose? In White Castle the narrator and Hoja are also looking for meaning, looking for a purpose. They write fiction and search for science, only to fail. Their machine gets stuck, the villagers have no grave sin, and they are lost searching for something to fill the emptiness, some purpose behind their lives. But in the end are interchangeable with each other, not unique in themselves. Living out Dr. Hegeman’s words, “To look in the mirror and see a life without a face, eyes searching for meaning” so are their lives meaningless. 

The sentiment expressed in an article about the interpretation of a 16^th century poet applies to my interpretation of yet another poet’s, albeit postmodern, interpretation.  “It is part of the poem’s work to elicit these feelings so that we recognize them and take due action”(McCofey 100), but what action can we take? What defense against the meaningless, against the melancholy, against the purposelessness as we search for identity, a plan?

After Nietzsche’s claim of “God is dead, and we have killed him,” our postmodern culture is thought to be without God and also I think without hope. A hüzün is hanging over our world. But, perhaps it always has been looming over, only now, are we acknowledging it, in our books, in our poetry, and in our questions. Perhaps this is why I have felt discontent while reading some of our novels. I have hope. I have purpose. God has a plan. But our characters do not, nor does so much of our world. Rather than accepting the hüzün, the melancholy of our world or be abandoned in the searching, let us grasp at hope. Questions are our gateway to hope, but in order to reach through the darkness to the light let us turn to Ecclesiastes conclusion.

Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter:

 Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.

For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing,

 whether it is good or evil.

So let us ask our questions in the knowledge that God is sovereign and in control. While we may not know what our plan, much less our purpose is He does. So let us questions with our eyes on hope, as we walk through the hüzün carrying our burdens to Him. 

Omeros

Omeros. 

Omeros was like nothing else I have ever read......

 .....and I loved it. 

If you had talked to me, while I was reading the first book I would have told you that I hated this stupid book (maybe even more than Hannah) and that I did not want to read it. There were all of these characters, in all these places, and every word could mean 10 contradicting things.

 I hated it. 

And yet....I continued to read. 

Omeros is a postmodern epic written by Derek Walcott. It is confusing and annoying and most of the time you just want to pull out your hair. It is packed full of symbols, double meanings, flash backs, and every other confusing technique that you can imagine. And yet. It is wonderful. Will I ever understand every part of the story? No. Could I turn to any page in the book and come up with something I do not understand? Yes. But questions is the theme of Omeros. Everything by everyone is questioned. Omeros is an exploration for both the characters, the author, and the reader into our questions. Some of our questions are answered. Such as who Helen ends up with or how Philo's wound is healed. But others like  how can Walcott identify with both parts of his heritage or will Achille ever find peace or who is Seven Seas/ Omeros are much more difficult to answer. But that is what the book is all about. People and their quest for answers. People asking questions. Places changing people. Cycling round and round. We have many  characters both islanders, and white foreigners. Along with Walcott who is both. We are taken from St. Lucia, to the past, to around the world, looking for answers. Achille is looking for heritage, Helen for belonging, Maud for Paradise, Major Plunkett for history, Philo for healing, Ma Kilman for remembrance  Walcott for identity, while Seven Seas looks blindly on.  

The past, present, and future jumbled together leads our characters, narrator, and us through their journey to find these answers, what they were looking for along the way.

Meaning vs. Emptiness

This past Saturday, I finally was able put words to my confused thoughts on The White Castle. While I knew that I didn’t enjoy the novel I wasn’t able to state an exact reason. With other novels that we have read, I knew why I had particular feelings about the book. In My Michael, I disliked it because I hated Hannah and how she interacted with her husband. While in Please Look After Mom, I enjoyed it because the form was fascinating and the story drew me in. And with other books, I had a mix of feelings, as I enjoyed some aspects and not others. But I can usually at least identify what I my thoughts are, however this was not the case with The White Castle…that is until Saturday.

On Saturday, I went to a Bible study on Ecclesiastes, which is known as post-modern gateway to the rest of scripture. Ecclesiastes is where the hard questions are asked and no solutions are given. It is a written quandary of an individual’s life without God as he searches for meaning. When our leader said, “To look in the mirror and see a life without a face, eyes searching for meaning,” then it struck me why I was unsatisfied with the story.  The idea of Ecclesiastes that “emptiness is insufferable” and that life is meaningless, apply themselves to our narrator’s quest. He and Hoja are looking for meaning, looking for a purpose. They write fiction and search for science, only to fail. Their machine gets stuck, the villagers have no grave sin, and they are lost searching for something to fill the emptiness. Hoja and our narrator look to power and science. But in the end are interchangeable with each other, not unique in themselves.

Now I am not saying that the story wasn’t interesting at all. I found parts of it absolutely fascinating. The preface especially captivated me. After all who isn’t urged onward to flip the pages into a tale long forgotten found by a lowly government worker’s chance cleaning. But the tale becomes tainted by an endless cycle of emptiness and meaninglessness.  

I think I am an optimist and an idealist. But, as a Christian how can you not be burdened and filled with discontent as they cycle round and round looking for what we have. Meaning.

Expectations and Difficulties in Romantic Relationships

At the beginning of our course, we were asked to identify concerns of literature. As we discussed, I came to a conclusion that literature throughout history reflects our humanity, expressing our lives and our concerns. In contemporary literature, authors have a comparable way of addressing these concerns creating a similar thread in their stories.  While there are many of these threads that span across the four stories we have read thus far, I was particularly interested in the way these authors wrote about love as a reflection of culture and family. In each of the stories, the characters’ intimate relationships in every romantic stage of life reflect the difficulties of their cultural and familial expectations, connecting each story to each other and our own experiences.  

In Please Look After Mom, the oldest daughter and fiancé’s relationship reflects several of these difficulties from familial and cultural expectations. The oldest daughter has always been independent, single, and determined to stay that way much to the chagrin of her mother. However when her mother disappears in the Seoul subway system, she begins to reevaluate her interactions with her mother, and her mother’s wishes. The culture and tradition that her mother was raised in dictates that women need to be taken care of and start a family, like her sister had done.  As the appeal of appeasing her mother becomes greater, she becomes engaged to her boyfriend and promises that once they find mom then they would get married even though she  since her mother went missing hasn’t “been able to embrace (him) warmly since Mom went missing” (242).  In the final chapter of the story, the daughter is engaged and on a romantic holiday while not able to embrace her man, as a result of these expectations.  

In Omeros, Helen like the Helen of Troy is the woman that men go to war for. But, I think that she is often misunderstood. She is a proud, beautiful woman from an impoverished minority group and needs a source of income. So while it is wrong for her to string along Achille and Hector, her actions are also in her best interests, illustrated as Hector quits the sea and buys a bus to financially support her. This culture of poverty, minority, and survival on the island influences her intimate relationships as she uses her body to entice, but also provide for her needs. Perhaps as the story unfolds itself, a different side of Helen will be revealed. But as of yet, we have met her most often through evaluating others interactions. Helen stands aloof, proud, and unknown in all of her relationships, necessitated perhaps by her culture and the difficulties she faces.

Arabian Nights and Days is an episodic story full of a variety of relationships. There is only one happy romantic tale in the book involving the relationship between Dunyazad and Nur Al-Din. After being manipulated by the genies, their unfulfilled love is restored. This happy-ever-after is not often found in Islamic culture, particularly when the woman as well as the man is in love. However, the cultural and familial expectations leading up to marriage were vastly different for the two of them. Dunyazad always knew that she would be married to further either her father’s position or the sultan’s. The sultan actually promises her in exchange for money. And so when she awakes and realizes that she is no longer a virgin, becoming an object of shame in her culture, she goes to commit suicide.  However, while Nur Al-Din wants to find this woman and make love to her again, there is no danger for him. In fact, he may and many do have multiple wives. This male-dominating culture is furthered when this tale of infinite love and rejoicing of the newlyweds is soon broken two chapters later. When Nur Al-Din along with the sultan and other prestigious men are seduced by the genie, locked in a cupboard naked, and freed to face no punishment but his own shame. While if a woman like Dunyazad was caught in the same act outside of marriage, her death would be justified by both their culture and her family.

My Michael goes further than many of the other stories we read to describe both the courtship and the first eight difficult years of marriage.  Michael’s family doesn’t want him to get married yet, because they are afraid that he will not be able to live up to their expectations of him if he submits to marriage. However, the cultural premise during this time is that singledom for women is not acceptable or a solution. Hannah is expected to marry and settle down, and so she does. After getting married and pregnant, she gives up her studies while he continues. Their relationship is plagued by their pasts as she never had a good female role model and he never saw how a husband interacts with his wife. Their marriage is one of unbalanced confusion as they struggle through Hannah’s depression and desire for control, along with Michael’s complacency.

In Arabian Nights and Days, from the very beginning the sultan and Shahryzad’s relationship was built on difficulties. In One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, the pretext for Arabian Nights and Days is Shahryzad telling the sultan stories for 3 years to save both the other virgins and her own life. In the opening chapter of Arabian nights and days, the marriage is finally going to occur, but this does not mean that Shahrzyad is safe. Rather she is now married to a killer who still has the power to kill her at any time and who she abhors, for the rest of her life and. By most people’s definitions, these feelings of resentment and fear create a difficult environment to develop a relationship. The sultan later deciding that he wanted to leave, releases her from their marriage, which is counter-cultural.  However, she still never had the choice to leave or even be married.      

Another relationship in Omeros is Maud and Major Plunkett. There are three major strains or difficulties on their relationship. First is that he suffers with shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder, making it difficult for him to live from day to day with the memories and her with the his struggle. They are also childless, as Dennis ponders “(o)nly a son was missing” (29) . Later on as he investigates the island’s history this gap is again mentioned when he comes across the mention of a young Plunkett. Though this young Plunkett had lived long before, Dennis believes that “(t)his was his search’s end. He (Dennis) had come far enough to find a namesake and a son” (94).  The third difficulty is their conflicting views on paradise and where they should live as Maud’s desires to return to Ireland and he desires to stay on St. Lucia.

   Please Look After Mom, the relationship between the mother and the father reflects the culture and many difficulties. Theirs was an arranged marriage during wartime so that the mother would not be carried off into the hills and the father would settle down and as the oldest male child take on the familial responsibilities. Despite annual abandonments, other women, and her sustaining the family alone, they remained married. She chose to stay with him, having to fight at times for her place as the woman of the house, because this is what was expected in their culture. However their relationship is one-sided, that is until the mother is lost in the Seoul subway system. Only then does the father realize his error and his mistreatment of his wife, but then it is too late.

In contemporary world literature, the cultural contexts and familial expectations play a larger role than I ever would have expected. In some literature, both in the past and present day, romantic relationships are often idealized and glossed over to create the illusion of a happily-ever-after or the reader never hears from the female character again. However, in all of the books that we have read for Contemporary World Lit this has not been the case. The difficulties in building and maintaining a relationship are in fact emphasized by these authors rather than hid, along with highlighting the roles of culture and family in each relationship. While I have never been in any such romantic relationships, the difficulties that Walcott, Malfouz, Kyung-Sook, and Oz reflect are relative as shown through the characters in every stage of relationships. None of these tales ends in an illusion; the relationships are developed in a meaningful and similar thread through difficulties and expectations, connecting one to another.  

Hannah

My Michael has been a time of reflection, as I battle with my feelings toward the main character Hannah. As I began reading My Michael, I was not a fan of Hannah whether in her actions, her relationships, or her all around personality. But as I read further and discussed in class, differing ideas began to contradict my initial opinions. This made it no longer optional to dislike her without questioning my own motives. Why did I dislike a fictitious figment of some author's pen?  Is this dislike unjustly colored by her story being told in first person revealing both her motivations and thoughts? Why was Hannah developed in such a way by Amos Oz? Is Hannah justified as a wife, a woman, and a character? And as merely a reader, who am I to judge?

  

Realism, idealism, anti-heroism, psychoanalysis, are a few of the multiple terms and theories that I have analyzed in my attempts to answer these questions. However, I have neither the time nor the word count to detail my progression through every strand of thought, but here are a few of my ponderings. Amos Oz is a male telling a very intimate story of from the perspective of a woman. Why he made such an initial choice, I do not know. He must have felt qualified and confident in his knowledge what a woman of this turbulent time would feel or think. Hannah is a woman with view positive female role models as we can see in Aunt Jenia, Mrs. Glick, and Yerdina. Each of these are considered unsuccessful as a successful wife during this time. Hannah also has little interaction with or respect for her mother, perhaps explaining some of her own difficulties relating to Yair. Hannah instead was very close with her father and his role in the male-dominated world. Like her father and many men of this time, Hannah desires control and power in her life and in her relationships. While her desire began in childhood, in her dominating the twins, wrestling with other boys, and wanting to become a man, it is then carried over into womanhood. Her marriage is reflects this as Hannah continuously struggles for power and control. Consistently, Hannah pushes Michael to elicit a response from his cool exterior and gain power over his emotions, only to fail time after time. Why Oz developed Hannah in such a way and whether or not Hannah is justified in her actions, I think is left to each reader’s interpretation as we delve into the depths of both her fantasies and reality.