To be honest, the amusement grounds should be closed at this hour, but, for my own purposes, tonight Electric Park is open all night, and the fog suddenly lifts, all so that my grandfather can look out the window and see a roller coaster streaking down the track. A moment of cheap symbolism only, and then I have to bow to the strict rules of realism, which is to say: they can't see a thing.Also, did you find yourself thinking of the narrator as a particular gender? For some reason, I thought of the narrator as female for most of the book, even though I knew that Calliope would wind up as Cal. Was that just me?
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Narrative voice
What did you think of the narrative style? For example, the way Cal tells the story of his family before he was born. He gives details, elaborates, and then occasionally interrupts the story to draw attention to himself and the artifice of his story, such as this section as Lefty and Desdemona are on their way to Detroit:
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6 comments:
I loved the narrative style: perceiving the whole sweep of his life from the very beginning. And I thought the narrative voice discussing things it couldn't really know was poignant. I think we all have a sense of how things were for certain family times that we didn't witness, like our parents' lives before we were born, and even if it doesn't strictly jibe with the actual truth, it's sort of a personal picture that we value and use to make sense of the present. It's sort of like our own biblical myths in microcosm, our own creation story.
I underlined that passage you referred to, too, Erin. I thought it was funny, and it was the narrator poking fun at himself, like he's saying all reconstruction of the past involves imagination and narrative "glue," so why not have some fun with it in a more or less self-conscious way.
In real life, when someone exaggerates or embellishes and doesn't admit that theyr'e doing it, it's annoying. It seems untruthful and arrogant. But when they're forthright about the fact that they're doing it and are clearly doing it to enhance a story, that's another matter. You understand their use of poetic truth.
Plus, you can tell the narrator really enjoys the act of writing. At one point he notes his personal belief that "real life doesn't live up to writing about it." (189)
And later: "I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I'm dipping into principal, spending it all..." (297)
Then there's this thing he says about his teacher Mr. da Silva: He "had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life." (321). I sometimes suspected Cal of doing this, of evading real life through an obsession with words. Telling his life instead of living it, but that lessened toward the end.
I thought of the narrator as female, too. I think the narrator saw himself that way, too, to some extent. He was outwardly a man because that was the truth of his biology, but inside he was the same person he had been. He was socialized as a girl, and he continued to connect more deeply with women than he did with men. In fact, he made scads of derogatory marks about men, saying, for example, "What did I know about boys, about men? I didn't even like them that much." (442)
And retelling the story of Jerome's advances, Cal writes: "Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love." (379) It's interesting to me that he's making this observation as a man himself.
And: "Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness,' 'joy,' or 'regeret.' Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling." (217)
So he seems to deeply value his more complicated "feminine side."
He talks about his ability to "communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both."
And he talks about how he and Tessie are still like mother and daughter, even though he's a man, how they chat on the phone and share in that intimate "female" way.
(Sorry if I'm being overbearing with these long answers to your fabulous questions. I loved this book so much; it's hard for me to desist from being anal about it).
Great examples! I bow to your extraordinary citing skills, my dear.
Even in reading the book a second time I found I had a hard time always remembering that Cal and Calliope were the same person. That might be because there is still so much of the story to tell to fill in the gap between when the retelling ends and our interaction with the narrator begins.
kc, I think you pointed out some of the best bridges Eugendies makes for us between the two worlds, how Cal feels continuity with his feminine side. And what about the passage where he describes the differnces b/w how men and women walk, that he had to retrain himself to sway from the shoulders not the hips. Some of that is anatomy, obviously but he is suggesting, I think, that many of our gendered mannerisms are also passed culturally.
I had an interesting discussion about this last night with the "womyn's book club" here. A woman in the group was talking about how she saw this play where men were playing female roles and she could tell right away they were men by their gestures: how they pulled up a seat and some other things — all very telling and cultural, things the director obviously didn't "correct for."
Most of these women also seem convinced that gay people are more observant about these things, and their theory was that being "outside the norm" they are more attuned to variations of the norm. Or they have fewer cultural expectations of what constitutes a man and what constitutes a woman. This came up because a book we read has a female to male cross-dresser and they were trying to explain why all the lesbian characters picked up on this immediately but the straight ones didn't. I found that kind of interesting.
That is interesting. Do you think that's true?
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