Posts

Ginger in The Song of Solomon

In The Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison tends to use the environments of her characters, especially subtle details, to communicate her broader themes in the novels. We see the peacock, for example, showing how vanity keeps the characters from flying. There is the wilderness forcing Milkman to work for something. That’s why I was curious about the spicy ginger smell that kept wafting into The Song of Solomon. Seemingly random places would just start smelling of ginger! And it kept happening! So now I’m hooked. I want to know what this ginger means.  Obviously this isn’t without a purpose, so I want to try to understand why so many things smell like ginger ! I’ll start with what I know for sure. Ginger is a spice. Spices are often associated with luxury, joy, and indulgence. There’s the whole history of the spice trade driving colonialism: people want spices. And they’re willing to do anything to get those spices and the money promised by them. This would fit into the themes of materi...
6 comments
Read more

Meursault's Balloon

Image
  When Albert Camus wrote the Stranger , he was actively working with the French resistance against the Nazis. I need to reconcile his completely apathetic protagonist with a deeply passionate, and active agenda of his own. So, what about Meursault, his worldview, and his experience in the book can be framed as a cautionary tale about passivity? A call to action? We don’t know what Meursault’s emotional state was before his mother died, but I assume that he was capable of expressing and recognizing emotions. I believe this because at the end of the book, he has that outburst at the priest trying to convert him. After violently shaking and screaming at this man, Meursault feels “as if that blind rage had washed me clean” (122). Suddenly, he knows exactly what he is feeling! He is taking actions that correlate with those emotions! I believe this capability didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Meursault had this capability at some other point in his life, for many years. Then, I theoriz...
6 comments
Read more

Just Some Scattered Thoughts about Brett

Is Brett a bad person? I just can’t wrap my head around her actions in this book, and how they are so woven into the emotional realities of all the other characters! Brett, on several occasions, laments feeling like a “bitch.” I take this to mean she recognizes the discomfort and pain she can create in the people around her, and scorns herself for continuing on the same path. What is best for Brett-- sort of fluttering freely from man to man-- is inherently harmful to any of these partners she might take. I think that is her main conflict: people expect her to do something, and become emotionally invested in that reality. But then she does something completely different. Ouch. So what should Brett do? Is she meant to just give up any shot at personal fulfillment because these men expect her to settle down? Or follow her fluttery heart and leave these poor dudes alone and confused?  A pattern is established in the book that Brett comes around and Jake drops his own life to cater to ...
5 comments
Read more

Virginia Woolf isn't a Writer

Image
Virigina Woolf isn’t a writer She’s an actress!  And also a sock puppeteer (read to the end to see why). I’ve been consuming an increasing amount of media about acting lately, because I think it’s cool. As a result, I’ve begun to realize the introspective aspect of acting. A good actor knows themself very well in order to pull bits of that self into a character (or so I’m told). And that is exactly what Virginia Woolf does in Mrs. Dalloway! She draws on her own experiences, views, and feelings, and wraps them into characters that exist both fundamentally tied to her and as their own separate entities! Then, in doing so her finished work is a spectacular insight into her own self as well as an interesting exploration of different facets of human experience in general. Acting. Boom. In Mrs. Dalloway, the characters have so many different life experiences, and yet many of them have suspiciously significant ties to Woolf. Septimus struggles with a misunderstood mental illness, as Woolf...
7 comments
Read more

Consciousness in The Mezannine

Image
  Consciousness in The Mezzanine  I’m going to start by likening human consciousness to a tangled mess of yarn. There are strands to grasp at, thousands of colors, and once you follow one line for any amount of time you can no longer be sure you have the same one. As in the image above, this tangle of fleeting impressions, long-forgotten experiences, and passing observations nonetheless informs your view of the world. It takes up the area you use to comprehend the space around you, resulting in muddled confusion. Baker does an excellent job in his novel of not only navigating but imitating these twists and turns in Howie’s brain through his unpredictable footnotes and topical shifts. The portrayal of Howie’s consciousness in The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker seems very similar to that of actual human beings, based on my experience with my own human consciousness. Baker provides a net, a sort of filter, that allows you to be enveloped in the folds of Howie’s brain and view the...
6 comments
Read more