I'm taking a course in World Literature, at Writers Village University,
using the book Other Voices, Other Vistas edited by Barbara H. Solomon. I'm
enjoying this class no end-- the short stories and authors we're reading are
incredible. What follows are some of my postings for the class...
"Pigeons at Daybreak" by Anita Desai
I'm surprised by everyone else's views on Anita Desai's story. I found it to be heart wrenching-- so much so, that I almost couldn't speak about the effect it had on me.
Much of this may be due to my personal experiences of the last six years, watching my mother care for my father as he was dying, and then watching her get sick and being with her when she died. These experiences obviously colored my interpretation of the story.
As I read it, Mr. Basu has been suffering for a number of years with a multitude of physical and emotional problems that often plague the elderly-- asthma, depression, and failing eyesight. His wife, Otima, is the loving, understanding, but totally exhausted caregiver. [Basu ridicules and snaps at his wife because of his losing battle against time, illness, and death. Otima nurses him and humors him because she has loved him for so long.]
As the story proceeds, Otima reads aloud from the newspaper that there will be a planned power outage that night. Basu responds with an asthmatic attack, fearing the hot night to come with no electric fan to move the air. Otima decides they will sleep outside, up on the terrace.
Basu is no more comfortable on the roof and the night is spent in agony. At one point, he remembers bringing his grandson up to see the collectors pigeons on the neighbor's rooftops . This memory fills him with emotion. Remembering the sense of wonder that the boy had is a wonderful feeling but Basu is also saddened by the passage of time. [We know the boy was quite young when this occurred because he held on to his grandfather's thumb. It has been awhile since Basu has been able to spend time with the grandson and Basu mourns the time lost.]
Still unable to sleep, his discomfort too much, Basu says his grandson's name over and over to himself, like a prayer or mantra. [Having a granddaughter of my own, I have done this many times when I am afraid or upset. Repeating her name to myself, silently, in my own head, is a way of reminding myself of the good and sacred things in life.]
At daybreak, Otima goes downstairs to get Basu some iced water and discovers the electricity is back on. She runs back up to the terrace to help him down so he can sleep in his own bed for awhile. He refuses saying it is cooler up there now and tells her to leave him alone. [I think his gentle voice and words are signs of his resignation, acceptance, and preparation. Basu knows this is the time and place for him to die.]
The story ends with him laying "flat and still, gazing up, his mouth hanging open" and the pigeons hurtling upwards against the "dome of the sky, opalescent, sunlit, like small pearls". They turn into crystals, then prisms of light, then disappear into "the soft, deep blue of the morning." [This last passage is a near perfect description of death with the pigeons representing Basu's spirit leaving this world and journeying on to the next.]
The main character in this story is a simpering, spoiled, egotistical wimp. I cannot even describe him as pathetic because he has no one to blame but himself. He is a member of the upper class, has a loving wife, family, and an education yet refuses to work because he is too "sensitive" and work prevents him from "thinking his own thoughts."
He and his wife and children live with his mother, his brother and his wife, totally dependent on the brother’s earnings. This makes his wife sad-- she wishes they could move out and be on their own but he doesn’t really understand her feelings. He notes that women are "usually kind to him" and revels in his mother’s, sister-in-law’s , and wife’s devotion. (How anyone could be devoted to this guy is a mystery to me.) We’re told even the neighbor’s young daughter is taken with the character, trying to brush up against him each time he leaves the building.
His brother has arranged yet another interview, this time for a job with the government. The reader is told this is a good job with benefits and that the character will go even though he doesn’t really want the job just as he has never really wanted any job.
At the location of the interview, before his name is even called, the character has a panic attack and leaves. He stops on the way home, using his transportation money to purchase tea and cake. And as he sits at the food counter , he listens to and envies the (lower class) laborers who lunch together there. He thinks people like them seem to enjoy their lives so much more so than he does, despite all his advantages. He plans for his return home, where he’ll sleep until tomorrow so he won’t have to answer questions about the interview and fantasizes about having sex with his sister-in-law who is much more beautiful than his own plain wife. As in the other Indian stories we’ve read, his was an arranged marriage.
The story is told in first person probably because the character is so egotistical. It’s theme is haunting to me, especially now when I find myself depressed, unhappy with the work I’m doing. Am I like this totally despicable, lazy man in trying to find employment that fulfills me rather than just accepting the blessings I’ve been given? These are questions I don’t want to answer. But maybe for this reason, plus the story’s easy readability, I have to say I enjoyed it. I despised the main character, his mother and his sister-in-law. The wife and the brother characters were much more sympathetic but the author didn’t give us much information about either of them. Overall, I found the story to be very unsettling and disturbing.
Civil Peace by Chinua Achebe
The two proverbs which describe this story are 1)Happy survival and 2)Nothing puzzles god.
Proverbs that mean the same thing to me include: 1) Count your blessings, and the story of the man who wept because he had no shoes until he met a man who had no feet and 2) God works in mysterious ways, and Let go and let God.
Jonathon Iwegbu lost so much (a child, most of the family’s possessions, the house's windows, doors and part of the roof.) Yet he chooses not to concentrate on what he lost but rather what blessings he has remaining (3 of his 4 children, his wife, his old bicycle, and the walls of the house.) Even after the bandits steal his ex-gratia, he feels fortunate-- he didn’t have the money before & he’s thankful that’s all he’s lost in this frightening encounter.
It's hard to say I enjoyed this story-- the struggles Iwegbu dealt with are unthinkable. But his strength & optimism are inspiring.
We know he’ll do whatever to protect his family. And the thing that will remain with me is not the atrocities with which he has
had to deal but rather the fact that he is a survivor, a modern day Job.
When I first started reading this story, I had difficulty picturing the narrator as a man. I believe Bob and Janet were discussing this in the chat the other night. I don't know why but I'm still having problems with this. I continue to need to remind mysef the narrator was a man. I don't think this is because the author is a woman; I've not had this problem before with other authors who chose to use narrators of the other gender. I'm baffled??!!
I also had a hard time following the plot. For awhile I thought the story was about Elias. Then I decided it was about "he". But what about the narrator? I didn't like the narrator very much... didn't feel I had much information about him and the information I did have, didn't make me sympathetic to him.
The two occupations, architect and artist represent white & black differences in the South African culture. The white man is an architect, with more formal education. His position holds more prestige and economic value in society. Elias, a black man, is a sculptor. Though both architect and sculptor can be thought of as artistic, the sculptor's creativity is more innate but the architect holds more power.
Why does Gordimer choose to not give the other black man a name? I think since the story is told 1st person POV, for the narrator to name "him" would put the narrator at risk by association. A white man admitting friendship with a black man is bad enough, but one who is in prison is worse still.
"He" has been suspect all along because he’s been fortunate, able to secure a passport & travel freely, things not usually afforded a black men in South Africa.
"He" proves himself in the end by being imprisoned, a very hideous but natural thing to happen to a black man in this culture.
I didn’t enjoy Gordimer's story at first but by the end, I appreciated the insight it gave me into black & white situations, both
political and personal.
Reflections on Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges and his four basic devices of fantastic literature (the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage of time, and the double) have had a deep impact on me. The first story I ever read by this author was "The Book of Sand." I found it so compelling, I read four other stories: "The Circular Ruins", "The Mirrors of Enigma", "Borges and I" and "The Zahir."
In "The Circular Ruins", Borges writes the main character "wanted to dream a man...to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality... He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe." This is how I feel about the main characters in a book or story I'm writing. Do I know enough my main character? Is he or she worthy? And if the answer to either question is no, why even bother writing the story at all? Borges goes on to say his character dreams of "an atrocious bastard...a tiger and a colt...a bull, a rose, and a storm" whose name is Fire. Fire reveals that he can "magically animate the dreamed phantom, in such a way that all creatures, except Fire itself and the dreamer, would believe to be a man of flesh and blood." Isn't this the perfect description of the muse? Writers worship and, at the same time, fear this beast. At the end of the story, Borges writes "With relief... humiliation... terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him." Isn't this an author's worst nightmare: what if I myself am just a character in someone else's book?
"The Mirrors of Enigma", was equally disconcerting and fascinating. Borges paraphrases Leon Bloy who interprets St. Paul (talk about a work within a work within a work) "a skylight through which one might submerge himself in the true Abyss, which is the soul of man.... We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our hearts... If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exist in our souls." The beauty of these words and the significance of their meaning nearly render me speechless. Borges continues, "We see everything backwards...we are in Heaven and God suffers on earth.... no one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light." I started out reading this, thinking it was a essay--- now I wonder, is it not a prayer?
In "Borges and I", the author writes "The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to... It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me." Aren't we all dual in nature-- don't we all show one part of ourselves to the outside world while keeping inside another (perhaps more genuine) identity? Borges ends by writing, "Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him... I do not know which of us has written this page." Is it possible to let the other (the double) out? And if so, what happens to the first identity?
Borges begins the story, "The Zahir" by having the narrator, Dominus, tell us "My friend Borges once described a Zahir... a coin... Whomsoever saw this coin was consumed by it... and could think of nothing else, until at last their personality ceased to exit, and they were reduced to a babbling corpse with nothing to talk about but the coin, the coin, always the coin." Dominus is on his way to visit Borges. (The author placing himself in the story is another example of the double.) Dominus runs out of money and must stay "for two weeks in a small town in Argentina with an insane cripple... Funes" In spite of his craziness, Funes has a perfect memory of anything he has ever seen. A pepper-mill is introduced into the story. Dominus, Funes, and the housekeeper, Maria Fuentes, try as they might, cannot recall this pepper -mill anytime it is not in sight, even though they have everyday contact with it. Not being able to recall the pepper-mill drives Funes crazier still. At the end of the story, Dominus is struck by the irony, "Funes alone would have been immune to the Zahir, for the quantity and detail of his memory alone would have been beyond the coin's power to compass. But an Anti-Zahir, a thing which nobody could remember at all, no matter how often they saw it, was for a man with an otherwise perfect memory, the thing that most stuck in his mind."
Borges's stories are my Zahir and my Anti-Zahir. They name ancient archetypes of ideas, identifying that which before I knew existed but had forgotten and could not put a name to, and that which now, after having read the stories, I cannot stop thinking about.
