Response to Amos Oz' "A Tale of Love and Darkness"

Amoz Oz A Tale of Love and Darkness is an aptly named memoir providing details of Oz’ life that help us, as readers, understand his experiences in a way that enriches our understanding of his fiction and the ideas portrayed in works like My Michael.  This autobiographical account is full of both love and darkness, recounting Oz’ experiences in the tumultuous setting of mid-twentieth-century Jerusalem, including the death of his mother (a result of suicide) and the strained relationship between his parents.  Oz did not lead an easy life, and it is clear that the challenges he faced influenced and inspired his writing.

This memoir was particularly illuminating in terms of explaining the inspiration for My Michael, the other Amos Oz piece we read this semester.  Both the setting and the characters’ challenges in My Michael parallel Oz’ own experiences, and it seems likely that the relatively dysfunctional relationship between Oz’ parents was at least part of the inspiration for the dysfunctional relationship between Michael and Hannah in My Michael.  Oz’ mother, who he says “lived a solitary life,” (272) is portrayed as a troubled, lonely individual, much like Hannah, and Oz’ father and relatively suspicious and calculated man, bears some resemblance to Michael.  

A Tale of Love and Darkness is a lengthy, detailed book, and it can begin to feel a bit taxing for the reader, especially in autobiographies and memoirs are not a favorite genre.  It does, however, serve to make obvious the connections between Oz’ life and work, showing just how profoundly an author’s own life contributes to his writing and how even fiction is often autobiographical.  As such, Love and Darkness is probably best read in conjunction with Oz’ works of fiction.  Nevertheless, this is a well-written and interesting account of an author’s challenging and inspiring life.

Repsone to Naguib Mafouz' "Echoes of an Autobiography"

Naguib Mafouz Echoes of an Autobiography is easily my favorite book among the works we’ve covered this semester.  A series of extremely short narratives, conversations, and proverbs, some lasting on a few sentences, this book was in no way typical of autobiographical non-fiction.  There were no extended explanations of the author’s childhood, no reflections on his coming of age or accomplishments, and no detailed descriptions of his family, yet the lack of these elements was somewhat refreshing.  It seems Mafouz was less concerned here with the details of his life and more concerned with his view of life and with the things he learned and experiences about humanity as a whole.

One of most impressive aspects of the short vignette’s that make up Echoes is their incredible depth.  Much is said here with very few words, and these entries are both challenging and thought-provoking for the reader.  Major themes include the nature of human existence, the inevitability of death, and tendency of individuals to go largely unnoticed by society.  In one chilling account, Mafouz tells the story of a man hit by a bus and killed using a tone that is so unemotional and matter-of-fact that the entry starts of sounding remarkably like a world problem one might encounter while taking a mathematics course.  In another, Mafouz tells of a conversation between an old man and a woman in which the man asks why the woman “[expends] herself on the insignificant” (23) and she responds by stating that she “used to sell love at a handsome profit” but “came to buy it at a considerable loss.”  (23)  The woman then describes life as “wicked and fascinating,” a statement which seems to capture Mafouz own view of the world as expressed in Echoes.

Echoes of an Autobiography tackles deep and complex human issues, and Mafouz use of such short entries to convey such enormous ideas in surprisingly successful.  In some ways, this book feels much like a collection of poetry, through the entries are invariably prose.  They share with poetry, however, their ability to express much in few words, and like poetry, they require a bit digging and, at times, a great deal of thought to uncover the gem within.

Breadth, Depth, and the Effects of Form in "Omeros," "White Castle," "Istanbul," and "Echoes of an Autobiography"

While many of the works we’ve read this semester have dealt with similar themes, particularly questions of identity and characters’ struggle to find their place in the world, many of the books we’ve covered have done so using entirely different literary forms that portray these themes  through either vast and changing settings and plot events and extended narratives or smaller, more specific settings and a detailed discussions of specific characters and events.  Derek Walcott’s Omeros is an epic poem, Naguib Mafouz’ Echoes of an Autobiography is a collection of extremely short prose pieces, and Istanbul and White Castle, the two Orhan Pamuk books we’ve read,  tackle the issue of identity, for both individuals and societies, using a non-fiction, autobiographical form and fictional narrative, respectively.  Because these four pieces, in particular, contain similar themes throughout, it is particularly interesting to analyze the way in which form relates to function and changes the way in which the themes of identity come across to the reader.

Omeros was, debatably, the most unusual work covered this semester.  Modern epic poems certainly exist, but they are not particularly common, and even within the genre of epic poetry, Omeros is somewhat unusual.  Often shifting or ambiguous, the narration in Walcott’s epic is sometimes hard to follow as it changes between Seven Seas, an unnamed narrator, Omeros, and Walcott himself.  Changes in geographic location, though typical within the epic form, are also common, with the setting shifting from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia to Africa, the United States, and various parts of Europe.  The setting of Omeros, as well as the sheer number of plot events, is vast, and in many ways, Walcott uses the breadth and movement of the epic form to create a sense of aloneness and crisis, of a changing world in which characters and places are often left behind.   Walcott’s epic also takes place over a long period of time, adding to the vastness of not only the geographic setting but enlarging the setting in terms of the passage of time.

Orhan Pamuk’s White Castle, a novel that explores the idea of identity crisis and the individuality of human beings through two men, an unnamed narrator and a scholar known as Hoja, who are evidently so similar that one could replace the other without the general public taking any particular notice.  Like Omeros, Pamuk’s novel is an extended narrative and with a relatively large setting in terms of both time and place.  While the story takes place primarily in 17^th century Istanbul, the protagonists do travel throughout Europe, and the novel’s setting is extremely large in terms of time, with most of the unnamed narrator’s life contained in the narrative.  In some senses, White Castle is just as “vast” as Omeros, but in another sense, its lack of shifting narration and focus on one or two particular characters throughout make it a much more specific work, approaching the idea of identity crisis with more depth and less breadth.  If Omeros is a national or international survey with a vast test group, White Castle is something closer to a case study.

In Omeros and White Castle, the theme of a struggle to find one’s identity in the midst of a changing world is, clearly, convey through the medium of fiction.  The characters and events in these works, save the few instances where Walcott chooses to conspicuously insert himself into the narrative of Omeros, are imagined and created by the author, and though the settings are realistic, they are not intended to be entirely accurate and historically correct.  Pamuk’s Istanbul and Naguib Mafouz Echoes of an Autobiography, however, fall into the category of non-fiction, a genre which necessarily requires that the themes of a work be approached in a way that is generally more literal, straightforward, and specific.  

Istanbul  is, in many ways, about the same issues as Omeros and White Castle.  Pamuk potrays himself and his city lost, confused, and struggling to find identity in the face of change.  As an artist, Pamuk feels out of place and unaccepted by his family, and as a people group, Pamuk’s family and other members of the old aristocracy in Istanbul feel out of place in a city that is rapidly changing and leaving their way of life behind.  These struggles, along with the struggles of Walcott’s island characters and the protagonists in White Castle, are all the result of the same question, “where do I belong?”  In his memoir, however, Pamuk chooses to make these issues more specific and more personal, identifying the struggle for identity in his own life and narrowing down the affects of what seems like a universal struggle in order to discuss the ways in which this is not only the world’s struggle but the struggle of his city, his family, and himself.

Naguib Mafouz, also the author of the collection of short stories titled Arabian Nights and Days, apparently prefers to compile a number of shorter pieces in the effort to tell a larger story, and in he does this to the extreme in Echoes of an Autobiography.  This book, apparently non-fiction, is a collection of tiny narratives, some mere sentences, that share that generally address issues of life, death, the purpose of existence, and the ways in which we find our place in the world as human beings.  If those sound like enormous topics to cover using a serious of small vignettes, they are, yet somehow, the specificity of these tiny stories is what makes them so powerful.  Many of the “entries” in Echoes of an Autobiography are conversational in nature, though others are simply small narrative pieces, yet this series of small “case studies” come together  as a description of Mafouz’ own life experiences and the ideas that have shaped him.  Ideas like the inevitability of death and the importance or invisibility of the individual are common in Echoes, and the form manages to convey these ideas using both specificity and diversity that would never have been present to the same extent in a traditional autobiography or memoir.

Form, though sometimes overlooked, is an important aspect of any work of literature, and the diversity of form exhibited in these four books shows just how differently similar ideas and themes can be expressed.  In general, however, I appreciated the specificity and honesty of the two autobiographical works and found the vastness of Omeros’ plot and setting more of a hinderence to the successful conveyance of the poem’s major themes.  Still, the use of literary forms that contributed to either breadth and vastness or depth and specificity helped show the ways in which finding our place in the world, our identity, is a concern of both individuals and humankind as a whole, a constant question that is entwined with the human story.

Response to Derek Walcott's "Omeros"

Omeros is, apparently, an epic.  It is an extended poem with elements of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey written in, and it includes many elements that are typically of epic poetry.  The setting for Walcott's poem could be accurately identified as "planet Earth" in both the past and present, a setting which certainly qualifies as "vast,” and it tells, in some sense, the story of a society, perhaps an entire civilization.  In this sense, the epic form is successfully executed in Omeros, yet as a reader of this lengthy, poetic narrative, with its vague presentation of enormous ideas, frequent shifts in narration and geographic location, and ambiguity regarding even the known, physical characters  present, I can’t help but wonder why Walcott chose such a form.

Epic poems are, by nature, difficult for a modern audience.  They are incredibly structured, following conventions often unknown to the modern reader, and the sheer length and complexity of such a narrative is only magnified by its expression in verse rather than prose.  This is not to say that epics have no place in modern literature, but they are certainly a difficult form, perhaps the most difficult form, to write well.  In some sense, I can’t say I think that Walcott has written a good epic, though most would probably disagree given the general acceptance and praise of Omeros within academia.

The purpose of literature, in my opinion, is ultimately communication, and while beauty and literary techniques are certainly important, their main purpose, it seems to me, should be to communicate an idea, an feeling, or a concept to the reader.  Walcott not only chooses to write Omeros in a form somewhat alien to contemporary readers, he crafts a narrative that is incredibly complex and difficult to follow within this form, and he does so in stanzas of only three lines with constant and seemingly pointless enjambment.  Omeros does not flow particularly well, and when it does, the “flow” is essentially monotony.  The poem seems a series of ideas crammed together, a sort of disconnected stream-of-consciousness with shifting narration and location and the occasional comment from the author himself, sometimes related to the writing of the poem.  While Walcott’s ability to sustain such a form for hundreds of pages is impressive, the result in terms of Omeros’ ability to connect with readers is less impressive.  While many may disagree, Walcott’s use of the epic form here seems not only unnecessary, but detrimental, though he has at least managed to join the meager ranks of those who write postmodern epics.

Response to Orhan Pamuk's "The White Castle"

Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle, like many of the works we’ve read this semester, is about a crisis of identity.  The novel’s narrator, a young Italian, is captured by an Ottoman ship while sailing from Naples to Venice.  After impersonating a doctor in an attempt to save his own life, the narrator eventually end up a slave, working for a scholar named “Hoja” (meaning master) who is nearly identical to him in physical appearance.  Much of The White Castle focuses on the complexity of the slave-master relationship between the unnamed narrator and Hoja, a relationship that is made more complex by the remarkable similarities between the two men.  Both Hoja and the unnamed narrator are intellectual figures, though each has a markedly different worldview, and as they work on building a weapon to destroy the white castle for which the novel is named, they seem to learn from each other in the process.  As the story progresses, the slave-master relationship becomes less and less pronounced, and though the narrator initially thinks that he has nothing to offer Hoja, he slowly becomes aware that the similarity between himself and his master is so profound that the two could easily trade identities.  This realization becomes bothersome to the narrator, and it calls into question, in a more general sense, the nature of human beings as individuals. 

Near the end of chapter 9, the narrator speaks of a recurring dream in which he and Hoja are “at a masked ball in Venice reminiscent in its confusion of the feasts of Istanbul.” (125)  Recognizing his mother and fiancée in the crowd, the narrator removes his mask in hopes that they will recognize him but realizes to his horror that his family is pointing to a man standing behind him.  “When I turned to look,” says the narrator, “I saw that this person who would know I was me was Hoja.  Then when I approached him, the man who was Hoja took off his mask without a word and from behind it, terrifying me with a pang of guilt that woke me from my dream, emerged the image of my youth.”  (125)  The narrator’s identity is so caught up in Hoja’s that the lines are blurred, and even for the narrator, separating the identities of the two men becomes difficult.  This ambiguity related to the identities of Hoja and the narrator is most extreme in the novel’s final chapter, in which the narrator, whose identity is not disclosed, claims to have heard the story from a traveler and written it down.  There is some doubt at this point about whether or not the previously recounted events ever took place, and neither Hoja nor the unnamed narrator are mentioned in the final chapter, only an ambiguous and always capitalized “He.”  It is this section, perhaps, that most powerfully presents the issue of identity and human individuality (or lack thereof), as it causes even the reader to blur the line between Hoja and the narrator.