14th October: It’s not the wallpaper

I’m pleased to see that environment-induced insanity (or, in some cases, quasi-insanity) is concerned in many of this semester’s stories; apart from me being interested in the concept of sanity, it’s also an essential motif in my thesis. The most curious thing about ‘The Voice from the Wall’ is the wife’s impossible situation – she’s under extreme pressure of several serious problems. Had anyone payed attention to her situation, it would have been obvious that she’ll inevitably go insane. Her situation is hopeless: her new life in the United States is making an obsession out of her past from the very beginning. At the immigration office, she loses her identity, which could help her beginning a new life, but, in fact, it rather causes a shock than relief. Then, this confused woman with a reasonably blank page inside is living with a husband whom she cannot talk to, in a city where she can’t speak to others, either, including fellow Chinese. What is being written on those blank pages is alienation and fragments of her memories – and none of them contributes to good emotional balance .The husband is another amazing element. I’d never realised his similarity to Cathedral’s narrator until I began to write this post, though he may be even worse – he doesn’t even realise his wife’s grave need to find some company (and learn some English). By the time her daughter grows up a little, she picks up some definite insanity (provided she hasn’t arrived like that already), and when he gets frightened by a chinese man – probably seemed to recognize her old seducer – her fragile balance gets slowly overthrown. It’s not really implied, but her condition probably contributed to (or caused) her second miscarriage, finally throwing her into madness. Ironically, her husband can’t easily recognise even that. It’s interesting to note the contradicting title: it implies that insanity will be concerned, but in the story, it’s the real voice of healthy people coming from the wall.

7th October: A most subjective narrative

If ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ was a story hard to interpret, then ‘The Cathedral’ was one I remained quite clueless – is there something I haven’t noticed or it is ‘only’ about the narrator gaining insight? After doing some research, it turned out that I hadn’t actually missed much – it was only the epiphany of the narrator itself that I couldn’t deal with. It was obvious that there’s not much intimacy between wife and husband, because that latter – mildly speaking – lacks some empathy which is made up by Robert, whom the wife tells everything via the tapes. A motif of alcohol is unavoidable as well; I myself pay some professional attention to spirits, so if it seems even to me that too much booze is coming around, then there’s something definitely wrong about it. Perhaps those two have found out that they get along better if both of them have a little every once in a while – keeping a little of everything at home is quite the hallmark of ‘drinking every once in a while’ kind of people. The narrator also turns out to know exactly nothing about the blind; so if he wasn’t interested in his wife’s friend, that makes the prospects of the visit even worse. I haven’t noticed how well Carver’s famous method works: from the narrator’s subjective point of view, despite some obvious clues, his problems don’t seem as bad as they are – except his amazing cluelessness about the blind . Not only he’s someone lacking insight (which further deprives the narration of objectiveness), but he also talks from a present perspective, rather than as a reminiscence. Now, about his epiphany... it comforted me for some extent to know that this ending is regarded a ‘zero-ending’, and the narrator’s success of gaining insight is important rather than what he’d exactly find out – a surprising idea. Usually, it's not easy to realise the importance of problems we are not affected by. Douglas Adams' Somebody Else's Problem field may be working better than it seems to.

30th September: It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ is not an easy story to interpret, and the murders that inspired it aren’t much of a clue either. I had a look on the other source of inspiration – i.e. the Bob Dylan song – which turned out to be just as ambiguous, but bringing the two together implies some radical change in somebody’s life and a goodbye to their present self – one way or another.

Now, we’ve got a serial killer’s case in the background and a story full of curiously unreal elements which may be explained with a dozen of theories (the story could be completely symbolic, Arnold could be an alien, etc.), but the simplest background would be that the whole setting is a nightmare induced by the murders and driven by the desires and fears of an adolescent girl. If that’s the case, the short story doesn’t indicate a shift between reality and dream – just like we don’t realize such a shift as we fall asleep and begin dreaming. Basically everything becomes improbable about Arnold upon is arrival to the house: he has an impossible name, a curious car with his name on it and ornamented with several other lines, and an appearance like that of imperfectly pictured characters in a vague dream. His friend in the car – being more or less out of Connie’s attention – is seen almost merely as an animated doll. The above are completed with something perfectly improbable: Arnold is as omniscient as far as the story goes.

Not only real and symbolic/dreamt elements are mixed up in the story, but there’s also no hint whether distinguishing the two is important or not – the story focuses on Connies’ experience about her desires (those she regards completely mature), her fright upon getting close to their fulfillment, and her decision (or involuntary drifting) to actually fulfill them.

23rd September: Social Responsibility

Europeans often don’t see any sense in the way Afro-Americans’ equality is emphasized in the U.S. media. In many cases, it seems unnecessarily highlighted, almost in an infantile way (some even thought that it’s illegal to feature a pair of cops in an American movie without one of them being black), while American movies often present an overall peaceful (and even trustful) relationship between Caucasians and Afro-Americans. The latter can be easily seen trough, of course, and it is more or less widely known that even today, there’s a lot of tension between those people. It is far less known, though, that this official altitude is relatively new, and it’s contrasting the former one that used to be quite the opposite. Battle Royal is a surprising reading for an average Hungarian: different forms of public humiliation posed as a cultural event, and considered a good-intended initiation ceremony for black men. The conditions of the narrator delivering his speech are, however, even more humiliating. The speech is scheduled just after the fight; the boy performs it soaked in sweat and blood, in the same gear he was fighting in. The hosts leave no doubt in their comments that they consider him some kind of speaking ape (as well as black people in general), whom they most benevolently allow to express his thoughts in public – almost implying that they could, by all rights, keep them all in cages. All that in the twentieth century. If you ask someone in Hungary about the past of Afro-Americans, you’ll typically hear that they were slaves until the late 19th century and they had a hard time getting all the rights a citizen is supposed to have, which doesn’t sound as bad as it was. It is not really known that their social equality had been a taboo for a long time after the end of slavery, an idea that was officially considered a kind of rebellion.

16th September: Slightly Scandalous

While The Magic Barrel doesn't make it that obvious, it unfolds problems of Jewish-American communities, just like Defender of the Faith. If I’d have to name a tenacious group of people, that would be – considering their internationality – the Jews, so it’s most surprising to see some of them making their troubles public. (It was an interesting part of Frank Herbert’s Dune series that – in a distant future when the civilisations of ancient Earth are already merged and long forgotten – suddenly a hidden Jew community appeared. Their communities and traditions survived ten thousands of years in the story.)
The Magic Barrel reveals the emotional (and thus partly religious) shallowness of a would-be rabbi. The need of a matchmaker wouldn’t be much of a flaw – he’s not supposed to be a womaniser by any means –, but he’s personally disinterested and also never loved anyone. The matchmaker’s moral flaws are referred to as well: he wasn’t only unable to provide his daughter an appropriate moral education, but he also failed to love her thereafter.

Defender of the Faith is a much more obvious story about religious and moral flaws: sergeant Marx finds that being a soldier, a Jew and a human are three things constantly interfering with each other. A sergeant is not really supposed to approve every religious requirement, or do personal favours, while a Jew is supposed to obey religious rules, but not supposed to help in case someone abuses their religion to make life more comfortable. Being human, however, may confront with both, and that is what he sacrifices for the former two. It is still not his decision that is seen the most scandalous but Grossbart’s altitude towards his religion: he’s not actually interested in following his religion, and he’s not really interested in hiding it either. He also grossly abuses Marx's kindness, against which Marx's revenge can be seen as a proper response – Grossbart was to send someone else to the front instead of himself, after all.

18th March: Dark Depths of Yellow

Serious stories are always connected to current affairs or issues experienced by or known to the author. Exceptions can be the ones dealing with topics never out of season, thus they're not really exceptions. After reading 'The Yellow Wallpaper', I supposed it doesn't belong to the latter, so I had to look up its background before evaluating it. The story seemed to be only about a woman driven nuts by a lack of stimuli, so there had to be just more to it. It was reassuring, though, to find out that's exactly the case, only with a reference to the era's medicinal methods partly based on contemporary stereotypes of women.

Her developing madness may be evident from the beginning for those who are keen to suppose it, but assuming other possibilities makes the story more exciting for open-minded readers (provided they don't know the background). Since the narrator is the woman itself, everything is described in a perfectly subjective way. That keeps some questions open, at least unless the creeping woman appears everywhere, that being very typical of madness. Supposing the woman to be more or less sane at the beginning, the wallpaper is already damaged when they arrive, which would allow some space for a fantastic hypnotizing or magical pattern on the wall, though it seems to be ridiculously far from the author's concern.

The criticism of this aspect of the era's medicine is really clear and straightforward: a depressed woman is destroyed being a sister and a wife of two well-recognised doctors, who are never going to assume that their 'modern science' may be flawed at some points. (That should be considered highly unscientific, shouldn't it? It have been typical all along human history, though.)

It's also interesting to see how far we've come from that conception of women (a little bit too far, maybe) that almost totally distinguished their emotional needs – and how this change changed women themselves in the meanwhile.

11th March: L'amour est éternel

I’ve found myself in the embarrassing situation of not having two stories to compare; however, a slight analogy with ‘An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge’ should be observed: dozens of clues are given to the end result, but they’re also misleading at the same time.

Although the readers may sense the irony throughout, they likely perceive it being only against the preconceptions of ‘civilised and tender white people’ and ‘barbaric and rough black people’ when it ‘turns out’ that Desiree is partly of black origin. The facts otherwise seem to be in order. Seeing an austere white man who is softened by love is just natural, just like a ‘black woman’ who seems to be simple in her emotions and was a foundling anyway.

Overrating of genetic differences’ relevance is affected in two aspects in the story. The more apparent one was discussed above, and the other one is overvaluing the state of being a descendant of great families; it's half cultural even for Armand, though, since he rather talks about ‘names’ than ‘blood’. In addition to the above preconceptions – which lead Armand to a ridiculously immature, yet also disastrous decision – another related problem emerges. When Armand turns out to be the ‘black’ one, one may comprehend that Desiree wasn’t that plausible to be the culprit, after all; we’ve just found that logical because we wanted to. If a situation is supposed to be logical, then it will usually seem to be, and that is what makes preconceptions really dangerous.

It should be mentioned that the vocabulary of the story was almost simple enough to read without a dictionary, and those words I had to look up were mostly French loan-words, which wasn’t really the case in the previous ones.