“Is it painful being ugly?”
I found this when I Googled the book. It’s a movie now?
I’ve completely neglected this whole blog thing lately, but here we go, I’ll try to get back into the swing of things.
Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star was like nothing I’ve ever read before. It was half philosophy, half fiction. Is it metafiction? Is this what metafiction is? The writer (though masked by the character of Rodrigo S.M.) is writing about writing a story? Normally the idea of writing about writing just seems intrusive, but in this it worked. When Rodrigo interrupted his story about Macabea, the reader felt that he really was frustrated and overwhelmed thinking about her–the way that one does often feel when thinking about someone they love, as he claims to love her.
But is Macabea real at all, or is she something that Rodrigo just made up? I couldn’t quite figure that out. The end, after she’s been hit by the car, makes it seem like he controls her fate, whether she lives or dies. At the end of the story, Macabea, or at least the stories Rodrigo tells us about her seem to all be fabrications from his own mind.
What makes this story so tragic is that Macabea was happy in her ignorance. She didn’t care that she was poor and ugly because that’s what she was and it was all she had. She wasn’t covetous or jealous of others. She was pure in her ignorance, like a child. She doesn’t think she can have things better than they are. It is only after she goes to see Madame Carlota and is told that she has a miserable life and that she could have fancy clothes and a rich husband that she feels misery. It is the imposition of society (Mme. Carlota) on its inhabitant that causes sorrow, in this case Macabea’s sorrow, and the final thing she feels.
It doesn’t really seem like this has to be set in Rio de Janeiro. In fact, the city didn’t seem to play that much of a role in the story to me. There is obviously a subculture of these “unfortunates,” but every city has its poor and its destitute. While it did provide a juxtaposition against what one usually associates with Rio–Carnivale, nude beaches, party time vs. poverty, loneliness, misery–it just seems to me that the story could’ve taken place anywhere and would have been just as good. The city didn’t seem like a character as much as it has in other novels (Mrs. Dalloway, The Passion.)
So do we only feel bad (lonely, ugly, inferior) because society tells us that we should have more? Does society tell us that we all have a bright future, when in actuality some of us could be dead tomorrow? Is this what causes unhappiness? Is ignorance really bliss?
Also, this is beautiful and true:
“I am alone in the world. I don’t believe in anyone for they all tell lies, sometimes even when they’re making love. I find that people don’t really communicate with each other. The truth comes to me only when I’m alone.”
Quicksand
I really did not enjoy this book.
For one, Larsen’s writing is very unclear and awkward. Sentences like, “She carried herself as queens are reputed to bear themselves, and probabbly do not,” show nothing about the characters. Larsen repeatedly tells and explains, rather than shows with well-crafted imagery. It just doesn’t work. I mean, what does, “These things irked her with great irksomeness,” really tell us about how Helga felt? Not a lot.
On another note, Helga is a completely unsympathetic character. She longs for human contact and bonds, but consistantly separates herself from blacks because she is of mixed race. At times, she even seems to think she is better than them because of this. The scene in the jazz club makes her a very unattractive main character, and the reader, or at least I, wanted nothing to do with her. She calls her friends and the other black people at the club “jungle creatures” and adamently tells herself that she is not one of them and watches in disgust.
Helga just comes off as greedy and wishy-washy and unpleasant. With the exception of her difficult upbringing, there is little to sympathize with her about.
The combination of Larsen’s writing style and Helga’s attitude towards herself and others just made this book painful to read, and I really don’t know why Larsen is so exalted as a writer.
Elizabeth Bishop: Country Bumpkin or City Girl?
So can Bishop aliterate or what?
In her poem, “From the Country to the City,” Bishop compares America(?) to a clown, at the head of this clown is the city. And while she did not specify which city she was referencing, I automatically associated it with New York.
For one, it is obviously on the edge of the country. She rises upwards from the, “league-boots of land,” I thought of it as a clown laying across the length of the United States, his boots being the West Coast. And his head, his head is the East Coast, or more specifically New York. The “satin-stripes on harlequin’s trousers tights” she uses to represent miles of winding asphalt across the country. This is the first line she introduces the concept of the city–for all intents and purposes, we’ll say New York–depicted as a harlequin.
“His tough trunk, dressed in tatters” is the Midwest, the hardened and worn Dust Bowl of America where farmers have struggled, especially in the early 20th century.
But then you arrive at his head, his brain, with its “tall dunce-cap” and “shows and sights.” The brain, the city, New York, is done-up and painted to look flashy “with lamé and lights” but really it is just the ridiculous head of a harlequin. It is, as she says, the “wickedest clown.” It, typically New York, draws in the sons and daughters of the rest of the country. They drive across those “satin-stripes” to arrive in a city where they’ll probably never make it, despite their hopes and dreams.
Her use of aliteration: “The long, long legs, league-boots of land…” “his tough trunk dressed in tatters,” implies repetition. The pilgrims who consistantly make the journey to New York to escape the monotony of their homes only to fall into the monotony of the city.
At the end, the rest of the country, “the long black length of body,” begs the city to, “Subside,” and send its children home.
On New York
White, Kazin, Abbey, Didion, and Schulman can be divided into two categories: those who are still intrigued by New York, and those who have become jaded with it. White and Kazin still believe in the good of New York. In “Here is New York,” White sees it as a place where all aspects of life have been compressed and pressurized into one super-intense experience. It does not have just one draw, it has all of them: “art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance.” White sections New York into three kinds. The first is the New York as seen by its natives. Its size, variety, and uniqueness seen by outsiders are taken for granted by the natives. This is what life is to them. The second is New York as seen by commuters. New York to them is just a place that ends with the blow of the whistle. The third and most important group is the New York as seen by the settlers, the people who have journeyed there to make a new life. The wide-eyed who venture from some small midwestern town, etc. with idealism and passion to start the life they’ve dreamed of. They, White says, are what give New York its life. They are the ones who love New York as if it is their first love. To them, no other place could ever feel more perfect than New York City.
To Kazin, New York is Manhattan. Everything outside of that may as well be just another small town to be escaped. Manhattan is the place of adventure, is what White’s settlers seek. Manhattan is the center of New York’s passion. This idealization of Manhattan causes all other towns, even those in New York, to pale in comparison. After being in the real New York, his world of Brownsville is no longer the same. Manhattan changes the way he sees what was once his home. When he returns, things seem rundown and small; it could never live up to the grandeur of Manhattan.
Abbey bridges the gap between the two groups in “Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night.” Like Kazin, Abbey sees New York as only Manhattan. It is the City. Living in Hoboken, across the river from Manhattan, the New Jerseyites see the city as something desirable, they long for the glamour of what he calls “Glitter Gulch, U.S.A.” But as Abbey travels across the ferry and nears the city, its glamour seems to fall away. Like a Monet, all the little imperfect pieces come to the surface. The anger, the dirt, and the crime all become visible when the he enters the city. It is no longer something better than Jersey; it is a doomed place that can’t possibly survive.
Didion is in the other category, the one that has grown tired of New York, sees all its faults and can no longer take them, as the title “Goodbye to All That” suggests. The bravado and charm and grandeur that first draw White’s settler types, which she once was, gradually fades and now drives them away. Didion calls New York “a city for the very young.” She goes there with the typical idealism, plans only to stay for a short while then is sucked in. However, she says, “It never occurred to me that I was living a real life there.” New York is a fantasy world, a playground for the idealistic. But with age and the loss of idealism and the rise of realism, the places that once were home become unbearable and the settler becomes hardened. Didion, too, refers to the love for New York as like that for a first love. However, as most do, she falls out of love with the city that was once her high school sweetheart, and she most move on, and away, back into the real world.
Schulman in “People and Their Streets, Places,” also has discovered that Manhattan is not a perfect place. After living there, she realizes that rats weren’t just, “Something that bit babies in an unreal and faraway ghetto.” She discovers the real problems of living in such a compressed city, infestation, unemployment, and selfishness. She finds that the problem with New York is that its residents only care about themselves, and that is what makes it dangerous.
Personally, I most identify with Didion’s views in “Goodbye to All That.” Right now, I feel like I’m in the throes of some teenage romance. But as she said, I do not feel like I’m living a real life. I am partitioned off from the poor, if I get in a bind I can still call my mom, but still be far enough away to feel like I’m independent. Going on adventures at two in the morning still seems feasible. One day though, I know I’ll grow tired of this. I’ll want a real life and a husband and maybe some babies. I hope though, that I can remain here. That’s the beauty of Brooklyn, you can get to the City, but you can also escape from it.
