Sylvia Beach's blog

Frank took my hand.

“Thank you God…”

I tried to keep my eyes closed, but the urge to examine the table, the people, Brian – who I had looked at many times before, but was somehow different – was overwhelming. The prayer droned on and I closed my eyes again and waited for something terrible to overtake me. The plane ride had been filled with admonitions about what I shouldn’t say and shouldn’t do and shouldn’t be. Without saying anything at all, he had transmitted these fears through the stale, chilled air of the coach cabin.

My hair felt too short against my neck. I couldn’t free my hands to adjust my sweater to hide my androgyny. I was stuck exposed with what I was sure was atheist, feminist whore written on my forehead. An itch began to creep up my arm. I breathed deeply and practiced acceptance. Jesus looked down from above the mantle, chiding me for my feeble attempt at Buddhist practice.

“…and thank you Jesus for bringing Brian and Marisa safely from New York to be with us on this special day. Amen.”

Brian squeezed my hand.

It was the first time he had acknowledged my presence since we’d arrived.

The drive from Milwaukee was the first indication that I would be spending the holiday alone with his family. His mother nervously asked him to drive. The humming silence of the engine and the tires on the road was broken only occasionally by church gossip and exits fast approaching on the left and right. I sat quietly passing judgment about the infrequency of his calls home and the wayward brother he never talked about and the religion he had so wholeheartedly forsaken in exchange for anger and regret.

His childhood home was unassuming. The siding matched the sparse lawn and said nothing of the trauma contained within its boxy four walls. I couldn’t remember why we’d come here. I thought maybe after five years some of the pain would have washed away. Selfishly, I wanted to see where he’d come from. I wanted to tell him that it actually wasn’t so bad. I wanted to erase his memories. F

rank finished eating and got up without a word. The television flickered back on and, beer in hand, he faded away.

I asked Margie about her job and about the renovations in the basement, but the words seemed hollow.

I washed the dishes while they looked up cell phone plans and Black Friday sales on the internet. The kitchen felt cold.

Rather than argue in the house, we went out and cranked up the heat in the car. I wanted to tell him to come back. I wanted him to know how much it hurt to be in the same room with him and feel alone. I wanted to shake him and see the light come back on behind his eyes. But we didn’t speak. We didn’t say a word. The radio clicked on and we sat staring straight ahead listening to the Christmas music they erroneously play before Thanksgiving. I glanced over at him and he was looking back. The tears ran down his face. I took his hand and we waited for the words that could, however inadequately, express the moment.

Several days and at least 3 or 4 drafts later, I'm still struggling to communicate my ideas.

I was quite interested in the "inexpressibility topos". Hence the struggle. I actually picked up a book about Montale by Clodagh Brook that specifically tackles the inexpressibility topos in Montale's work. While much of it was irrelevant, it developed a useful history of the idea (Dante through the Modernists), which I found quite illuminating.

There is certainly more than one connection to be made with Sputnik Sweetheart, but a few stood out:

(1) Brook highlights the significance of WWI for the Modernists - “One of the primary theories to emerge is that a world which had undergone such radical transformations in those years needed a concomitant upheaval in its means of expression” (Brook 6). I wonder if the same might be said of the impact of the Tokyo gas attacks on Murakami. On reading Underground, I found a number of places in which he questions his own capacity to represent the realities of the individuals he interviewed. He was especially struck by an interview with Ms. "Shizuko Akashi", who, as a result of the sarin attack, lost both her memory and ability to speak. When faced with the necessity to speak for her, he questioned "just how vividly could [his] choice of words convey to the reader the various emotions (fear, despair, loneliness, anger, numbness, alienation, confusion, hope…) these people had experienced” (236). This problem takes on even greater meaning in the second section of his book when Murakami suggests that terrorism and perhaps violence in general is the manifestation of a need for self-expression that exceeds the capacity of words and language.

Given the timing of Sputnik Sweetheart's publication, it seems likely that many of the themes and issues that the Tokyo gas attack provoked for Murakami were still reverberating as he penned his novel.

(2) Having already strayed off the path of a formalist reading of the novel, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine Sumire as a kindred spirit to Murakami. She seems to share his uncertainty about the capacity of her prose. By her own account, her writing is lacking something essential. “Problem is, once I sit at my desk and put all these down on paper, I realize something vital is missing. It doesn’t crystallize – no crystals, just pebbles.” In response, K recounts the story of the Chinese gates built with the bones of soldiers who had died in war. “When the gate was finished they’d bring several dogs over to it, slit their throats, and sprinkle their blood on the gate.” The ritual was thought to revive the soldiers’ souls and complete the gate. Although Murakami returns several more times to the baptismal blood bath, its meaning is never revealed. Through his use of metaphor, Murakami extends the practice of elevating the ineffable. The very thing that would make Sumire's writing complete and perhaps, because of her sense of the inextricable link between her idea of self and her capacity to express, would Sumire herself whole is "some form of truth harboured beyond the word" (Brook 1).

(3) All of these themes come to a head with Sumire’s last words, so to speak. Sumire’s epiphany at the end of the document that K reads on her computer is simultaneously revelatory and dissatisfying for the reader. It on the one hand offers an acknowledgment of the coexistence of two worlds and hints at an explanation for Sumire’s disappearance (which would be an epiphany for the reader) and on the other hand denies the reader closure by ending with an unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question.

“I’m in love with Miu. With the Miu on this side, needless to say. But I also love the Miu on the other side just as much. The moment this thought struck me it was like I could hear – with an audible creak – myself splitting in two. As if Miu’s own split became a rupture that had taken hold of me.

One question remains, however. If this side, where Miu is, is not the real world – if this side is actually the other side – what about me, the person who shares the same temporal and spatial plane with her?

Who in the world am I?”

There is an incapacity of language to answer the question of her own reality. The novel is ultimately just an ellipsis, a sort of meta-aposiopesis, “pointing towards it without voicing it” (Brook 11).

In Underground, Murakami writes, “Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you’re no longer talking about reality” (363). This is undoubtedly what we encounter in the novel. Each effort to pin down some truth about the characters (K’s evasion of self-description, Miu’s trauma, and indeed Sumire’s disappearance), leads further away from reality. Words become increasingly inadequate to express the multiplicity of selves each character ostensibly represents. As Murakami concludes in Underground, “The mountains are not mountains anymore; the sun is not the sun.”

Not everything is as it seems...

I have often thought about what is lost in translation. I have spent hours comparing lines of poetry, trying to understand what falls between the cracks when moving from French to English. But reading Sputnik Sweetheart, it hit me like a revelation. More than the meanings of individual words are obscured. The cultural resonance of a text easily eludes the foreign reader. What is foreign and controversial to one reader, might be familiar and banal to another.

I was struck in Sputnik Sweetheart, as I had been when I read Norwegian Wood, by the strong sexual elements. I blushed a little as I read certain sequences on the subway, looking up occasionally to be sure no one was reading over my shoulder. A little Google research revealed that explicit sexuality in Japanese literature is hardly a novelty, which was something perhaps I could have guessed from graphic portrayals of sex in anime and the popularity of Lolita fetishes in modern Tokyo. Despite the proliferation of pornography and sex zones touting over 3,000 sex shops, peep shows, telephone clubs, and “soaplands”, Japan is reportedly one of the most “sexless societies in the industrialized world.” The parallel this offers to the recurring theme of alternate worlds and the instability of reality might easily have escaped me.

In the same way, the allusions to Freud, of which the dream sequences and references to repression are just the surface, seemed obvious and omnipresent to me, a Western reader, but would they have stood out to a Japanese counterpoint? It is unclear. However, it seems especially important given the concerns particular to Western psychoanalysts and theorists, ranging from Freud to Foucault. From that perspective, what is real? Is it the world that is saturated with sexual permissiveness? Or is it merely a cloak for a more conservative reality, in which what Foucault would term Victorian values reign? Or, to tumble further down the rabbit hole, is the conservative underbelly merely repressing a wanton unconscious?

It is perhaps this reliance on traditions from both the East and West that makes Murakami so compelling and intellectually satisfying. And if the contrast between East and West provides yet another parallel to that between reality and some alternate dimension, it is similarly unclear which is which.

Christian Mission to China (1868)

“[A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers] succeeds in luring the western reader into an alien way of thinking” (Ursula K Le Guin, The Guardian)

In addition to the shortcomings of Guo’s linguistic project, which inhibit any possibility of an authentic narrative, the discourse played out in the novel fails to present any alternative to the hegemonic order. Beneath the veil of Guo’s contrived, literary gesture is a subtext that seems to unwittingly comply with patriarchal and colonial norms. For all of Z.’s skepticism of London’s social mores and her insolence in regards to sex, which can be read simplistically as a defiance of the fetishized Asian female stereotype, her transformation fits right into the meta-narrative of the civilizing mission.

For all of its complications, the novel is, in fact, uncomplicated. “It sees Asia through western eyes, and only rarely does it criticize the image. It has a vaguely, squishy and shifting ideal of the East, but also a narrowly apolitical one.” While the quote references the Guggenheim’s recent show “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia”, it might as well be describing Guo’s novel. Despite her status as a Chinese author, Guo hardly seems to escape the colonial mindset.

I spent a good many hours wondering how such a “winsome”, “endearing”, and “breezy” love story could possibly fit in an academic setting. If this novel is making its way into the canon of accepted literature in academia, this problem hardly sets it apart. In fact, Achebe and others would argue that it is in good company. Perhaps it fits quite well, but for all of the wrong reasons.

Given the difficulty of articulating a single definition of feminism, it is simplistic to argue that The Comfort of Strangers threatens feminism as a whole. Its subject matter is on the surface quite controversial – a battered woman becomes complicit in her abuse by engaging in sadomasochistic sexual play, which leads ultimately to her transformation from victim to perpetrator when she orchestrates the ritual killing of a young man on holiday – but is it anti-feminist? I was intrigued by such accusations. I was unable to find specific objections to the text, but after a bit of reading about Second Wave feminism, I was able to glean what the critique might be.

McEwan presents complicated female subjects that repeatedly fail to comply with patriarchal norms. Through his portrayal of Caroline, McEwan defies typical representations of sexualized women as described in Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic. He highlights the notion that the ‘personal is political’ and complicates any attempt at an impersonal sexual politics. Finally, he links Colin and Mary’s failure to communicate (i.e. their silence) with their ultimate demise – exposing a larger question: “If silence is complicity, what form should speech take?” given the post-structuralist evaluation of language itself as patriarchal. It seems that even as McEwan identifies patriarchal norms, he subverts and/or problematizes them. Perhaps, then, rather than posing a threat to feminist ideology, The Comfort of Strangers is often damned because it exposes a weakness.

While part of McEwan’s literary genius is his ability to infiltrate the psyches of complex characters, he pushes the boundaries of politically correct male authorship by encroaching on the forbidden territory of women’s experiences. He, of course, doesn’t stop there. He universalizes sexual perversions, emphasizing sadomasochism, but including voyeurism, exhibitionism and scopophilia. While The Comfort of Strangers predates Judith Butler’s declaration of the performativity of gender, the rise of queer theory and politics necessitated a permissiveness of alternative/non-heteronormative sexualities. For obvious reasons, proponents of queer theory resist any inhibition of sexual freedom. They do so, often, by locating sexual desire within the domain of the inalterable - the “natural”. Therein lies the weakness and indeed the perceived threat to feminist ideology. If sadomasochism is a wide spread, if not universal, component of sexual desire, if it is natural, what does that imply about the patriarchal system of male dominance and female submission that the perversion replicates?

I penned the title in reference to the tag line to a Gap ad featuring Jack Kerouac and Reebok’s posthumous tribute to the artist, Basquiat. I imagined writing a polemic about how art that starts out as a radical project often gets folded into the very consumer culture it initially set out to subvert. I wanted to throw in Marxist-inspired rhetoric like the ‘commodification of the avant-garde’ and ‘petty bourgeois morality’. But that level of angst was more fitting for a younger self, hypnotized by the “explosion of consciousness” expressed in On the Road, or a self in the first hour of “a mind-expanding trip into emotion and sensation, drugs and liquor and sex, the philosophy of experience and the poetry of being,” as the dust jacket on my well-worn copy proclaims.

The novel was for me and, for my taste, too many others a mystical departure from the bleak and stifling status quo. I dreamt of the magic of motion that Kerouac so aptly describes: “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move” (111). I thought that I could, like Dean, be a con-man and invent characters for every scene. Like Sal, I thought that I might find myself truly and finally alive on the road. I fancied myself a seeker and so, I thought on the road I, too, might find God. In the aftermath, I feel disillusioned. I had been running from myself and chasing the “point of ecstasy I had always wanted to reach”. I always caught up and that moment never was quite close enough to touch. I wasn’t free. The experience often reminds me of Foucault’s discussion of the omnipresence of sex in pop culture – our movement away from overtly puritanical restrictions of sexual behavior is merely a ruse, sexuality remains deviant – and likewise, drug use remains criminal. As society embraces counterculture, commercializes it, and finds in it a space where individualism is seamlessly recast for capitalism, its message is watered down, if not downright nullified.

Perhaps, I am at ease now with something a bit more tempered – less reactive, more responsive. I find myself put off by the realization that On the Road now occupies a new space in our national, cultural narrative from when it first appeared. It seems like false advertising. I am embarrassed that I bought it. Apparently, Kerouac is now as American as apple pie or, at the very least, the Gap.

I was intrigued by the substitution of Fes for Ouehrane in the opening sequence. My own memories of Fes are constituted by details – a man leading his wife on a donkey weighed down by blue jugs, shouting ‘Balak! Balak!’ to clear the path; the emptiness and cleanliness of the streets in the Jewish quarter; the blue-green mosaic interiors, hidden behind shabby walls and doors; and the graffitied, sundrenched schoolyard below my hotel window on the outskirts of the medina. It is in the details that I am able to rediscover my sense of Fes and it is in the details that I can separate it from Essaouira, Rabat, Marrakech, Ouarzazate and any of the desert towns between Morocco and Algeria.

Despite its status as a work of fiction, I struggled to accept this substitution as merely a device to simplify the travel itinerary or an inability on Bowles’ part to imagine (or recall) a more authentically Algerian opening setting. Perhaps, it is completely insignificant, but it is potentially indicative of Bowles’ assumptions about his readers. An even more compelling possibility was implied in Tennessee Williams’ 1949 New York Times review of the novel. While ‘The Sheltering Sky’ can certainly be read as a “first-rate adventure story,” it operates on another, more complex frequency. It could be, as Williams suggests, an allegory for a spiritual journey, a journey to the heart of the psyche. Alternatively, the novel can be read as an ideological journey – with Port’s life and death and Kit’s demise an adventure in moral nihilism and an exploration of the space after the death of existentialism (or an existential(ist) as the case may be).

In some ways, as a reader, I hope that the substitution of Fes for Ouehrane makes the space for a novel that is only superficially a travel fiction. In some sense, the novel is like the hotel bar. “Here in this sad colonial room […] each invocation of Europe was merely one more squalid touch, one more visible proof of isolation; the mother country seemed farthest in such a room” (50). Only the artifice of ‘The Sheltering Sky’ is that of a travel novel and in this inconsistency of detail is where its distance from its cloak of being a travel novel is most glaring.

"No-man's land or at any rate literary no-man's land might be the title of this talk, since one of the greatest challenges faced by contemporary novelists is an unprecedented loss of geographical and, to some extent, national and even social sense of belonging. I don't mean that this is exclusive to novelists, I mean this is what's happened to their material, what's happened to the world. The sense of territory is like a great rug that's been pulled out--very recently and very quickly--from under the feet of all of us." – Shirley Hazzard (1979)

Although it was published some years before Shirley Hazzard gave this ABC radio talk, The Evening of the Holiday reads like a fictionalization of this point. This lack of belonging is exemplified by Sophie, the young traveler. Half Italian and half English, she falls between the cracks of a geographical or national identity. “She did not really know where she most belonged. Even those places to which she felt most drawn were mere approximations of home” (43). In contrast, Tancredi, the Italian with whom she becomes romantically entangled, is firmly rooted in his place based identity. It is as if Hazzard’s detailed descriptions of the Tuscan countryside are as much elaborations on Tancredi’s character as images of the landscape (42). While Tancredi is placed, Sophie represents the challenge of the displaced.

However, “the sense of territory is like a great rug that’s been pulled out…from under the feet of all of us,” and Tancredi is no exception. The dramatic storm that ravages Luisa’s garden is perhaps the symbolic moment of this upheaval. Just as the plants and trees are uprooted by the elements, so is Tancredi by his relationship with Sophie. He seems no longer connected to the land. He “wanted to get away” (78). He appears in sharp contrast to Luisa and the other Italians skillfully recovering the garden from the storm.

His belonging to the land becomes a memory. “How can you bear it, this memory, this recollecting of things utterly and unthinkably past? He himself was already finding it intolerable to remember – …the fragments of mood, light, sensation, which he couldn’t recapture” (97). There is no turning back for Tancredi and, as Sophie loses her connection to Italy with Luisa’s death and then denies the connection when she is presented with Tancredi’s car, it is clear that there is no turning back for her either.

Alternatives to discussing alcoholism after reading The Sun Also Rises:

• Like the sun, wind, and rivers in Ecclesiastes 1:5, the characters in The Sun Also Rises are paradoxically both always changing and always the same, “returning again according to [their] circuits.”

• What was originally meant by Gertrude Stein’s term “the lost generation”? What shift in meaning might have led Hemingway to reject the term later in life?

• While much of Hemingway’s work is known for its hyper-masculinity, The Sun Also Rises stands out as a divergence from this pattern. Beginning with Jake Barnes’ impotence, male characters throughout the text are repeatedly humiliated and emasculated. Lady Brett Ashley, in contrast, wields tremendous power.
• Although Lady Brett uses her mythic beauty for gain, her body functions as a ‘gilded cage’, entrapping and isolating her rather than offering real liberation.
• While Hemingway seemingly strips his characters bare for the reader, exposing their weaknesses and inadequacies, the novel is dominated by a recurring theme of ‘appearances.’ In fact, “nothing is as it seems.”
• The lack of social grace of Jack’s crew notwithstanding, can The Sun Also Rises be read as a guide to American expatriate and traveling etiquette?
• Mentions of Catholicism and Barnes’ aspirations towards religious sentiment recur throughout the novel. What does this mean in light of traditional interpretations of Ecclesiastes 1:5? How does this search for God figure into Barnes’ inclusion in the “lost generation”?
• Besides Hemingway’s personal aficion for bullfighting, what is its significance in the novel?
• Etc.

(Note: Alcoholic writers - Hunter S. Thompson, Raymond Chandler, John Cheever, Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Bukowski, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway, to name a few - write about alcohol. It is part of the fabric of their autobiographical experience. However, it is not the drinking that makes their prose relevant.)

A crude analysis of “Daisy Miller” reveals that it is a story that relies primarily on oppositions: innocence/sophistication, young/old, savage/civilized, etc. Feminist critics have explored the oppositional relationship between the characters of Daisy Miller and Mr. Winterbourne at length, often casting them as symbols of the oppressed female and the male oppressor. Attention is frequently drawn to the reactions to their respective indiscretions. Throughout the text, Daisy Miller becomes increasingly ostracized as she continues to wittingly (or unwittingly) defy the expectations of propriety for a young woman of her status. Her relationship with Mr. Giovanelli is considered particularly immodest and, in this cautionary tale, is the catalyst for both her social and literal demise. Meanwhile, it is intimated that Mr. Winterbourne is involved in an intimate relationship with a “mysterious foreign lady” that is adulterous, or at the very least sufficiently improper to be kept secret. His indiscretion is met with few consequences other than idle speculation about his occupation in Geneva. This difference lends credibility to a larger critique of patriarchal elements in the text.

Another theme that is equally significant, in my estimation, emerges with this juxtaposition: the social humiliation of public versus private indiscretions.

‘They are very dreadful people.’

Winterbourne meditated a moment. ‘They are very ignorant- very innocent only. Depend upon it they are not bad.’

‘They are hopelessly vulgar,’ said Mrs. Costello. ‘Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being “bad” is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to blush for, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough.’ (30 -31)

Their genders aside, one of the key differences between the two characters is that Daisy Miller plays out her faux-pas in the public sphere, while Mr. Winterbourne restricts his impropriety to the private sphere of the bedroom. Whether arriving late to an exclusive party or consorting with a local in the Pincian Garden, Daisy Miller fails to respect the customs enforced by the expatriate community with whom she is expected to socialize. The damage to her personal reputation is only part of the humiliation—she garners attention because she poses a threat to the reputation of Americans abroad as a whole.

In this way, the binary extends to distinguish being at home (private) from being abroad (public). Through the voice of Randolph Miller, it is repeatedly suggested that they should just return to the comfort, freedom, and privacy of Schenectady, i.e. home. Ella W. Thompson’s words in Beaten Paths (1874) clarify the point: “O my country, may you not be judged by your traveling children.”