I’m writing this with a headache, so bear with me.

Borges is a very good writer. He knows how to do short stories, and I enjoyed almost every assigned reading within this book as well as some that weren’t assigned. The downfall to his very cohesive and structured style, however, is that it gets predictable quick; after reading two stories with aggressive rising actions and ironic climaxes, I wasn’t surprised to find about ten more stories with the same structure (Hakim, Circular Ruins, Forking Paths, Traitor and Hero, Two Kings, and Book of Sand are strong examples of this). Of course, not all of them are like that. Stories such as Babel and Utopia are more sublime in their execution and, in my opinion, more powerful as a result. In fact, those two are probably my favorite stories from this collection, although my opinion is probably biased since Babel reflects a philosophy I strongly adhere to and Utopia reminds me of a short story I wrote. Really, though, every story in this book seems to offer something interesting, and once I get the chance, I will read the whole thing.

I’ve just realized that the title of Cooked Cat is “Cooked Cat” and not “Crooked Cat,” which is what I’ve been reading until now. Ha.

Daisy Dolls is my favorite story this year. The writing quality is excellent and I was, for the first time in a long time, actually drawn to read more for pleasure than academic interest. Grammar, flow, and of course, plot—everything just clicked. I wasn’t crazily confused or driven mad at any point reading this, however, which is a shame as I rather enjoy healthy doses of insanity. The story reminds me of a mixture of several other stories and concepts I’ve experienced, and to be honest, it falls far short of what I’d classify as insane (ranks somewhere around The Yellow Wallpaper, I suppose). That aside, intensity isn’t what makes this story so great; it’s the undertone. Every part of the plot, from the protagonist’s collection of “scenes” to the shy man, create a unified atmosphere that just permeates through the digital pages. No character is meaningless, no setting empty of symbolism, no action without a grand thematic purpose. Maybe I’m lavishing more praise than this story actually deserves (must be the headache), but, all in all, it’s a damn good piece of literature.

While I disliked the Borges readings (it’s true, Jon), I did like reading “The Daisy Dolls.” My initial impression of the story was that it was another feminist story, where women are depicted as daisy dolls to be used for pleasure and thrown aside once they ceased to interest their masters. Then I realized this may be one element to the story, but the story seemed to center more on Horace than the actual daisy dolls (despite the title of the book). So what is this story trying to say about Horace?

The way I see it, Horace is, in some ways, a form of Jekyll. A man who has an “outside” self and an “inside” self. He has his hidden desires that won’t go away, so he turns to a solution to indulge in them. He doesn’t exactly have a Hyde, but he does try to hide his sexual relationship with a doll. At least he does make an attempt to do so. Whether he is actually successful or not is another story. I found it hard to understand how any person could possibly be sexually attracted to a doll- and act on those impulses too! Maybe I’m being narrow-minded. After reading the short story, I’m still not quite sure what kind of a person Horace is. Has he been abused in his childhood, so now he’s messed up and wants to have many relationships with many dolls? He cares about his wife, but he still can’t help himself from cheating on her. We don’t know what happened in his childhood. We’re only given a hint. Apparently, they died in an epidemic when he was a child- and he resented them for it. What happened after that? We don’t know.

And what is it about those daisy dolls? Are they really a host body for spirits, as Horace believed? Or are they manufactured as sexual objects? In some ways, they really are both. They’re not just dolls. There’s something odd about them. They’re not the dolls you’d give a child to play with. They’re like… inanimate prostitutes? As for the spirit theory, the dolls really do have a personality. Horace swears they even move on their own. So what are they, really? Even after pondering this question many times, I still haven’t a clue. If I had to go with one answer, I’d say these dolls are inanimate prostitutes. But even that answer isn’t a sufficient answer. They’re more than prostitutes.

Metamorphosis, The Yellow Wallpaper and now Daisy Dolls. What do all these have in common? They are messed up stories that confuse and alienate their readers. As someone very close to me would say, “dafuq?”

Pardon me if my reading of the story may seem blurred, but I finished it a couple weeks back in a hurry and felt bewildered, and confused throughout the entire tale. Just like Daisy Dolls, this story begins with a gradual decline in reason and rationalism, to a quick exponential spiral into disarray. The story doesn’t really make much sense, and it doesn’t feel provocative to me, it seems just flat out absurd.

If my memory serves me correctly our protagonist works for a doll shop where he adjusts and forms doll’s postures that convey sexuality in order advertise clothes for a particular clothing brand. For some reason, the main character feels anxieties that his wife is slipping away from him. He feels as if she may be on the brink of leaving him forever. So to cull his paranoia he seeks consultation by bringing home “Daisy”, a large mannequin that he dresses to carry the physical embodiment of his wife. Yet his wife still remains and it becomes and extremely awkward scenario. But the role of the protagonist, his wife and Daisy evolves. First it is a simple form of comfort for the husband, but eventually his wife comes to embrace Daisy almost as a daughter and the doll becomes a link that brings them closer and rekindles their relationship. But later on, Daisy becomes something more, something much more perverse. Even with each others company Daisy is needed by each alone for their own deeds. The acts they each commit upon the water-warmed doll are never really revealed but it doesn’t take much to realize what they are doing to her. They are using her as an object to fulfill their bizarre sexual fixations. And this is where the novella becomes most puzzling, we have almost no idea what is running through these two peoples minds.

The novella takes a turn and Daisy’s magnetizing powers are reversed into an enlarged gap between the couple. The couple throw a house party and invite guests to entertain, and oddly choose to introduced Daisy as well. This is the one brief moment where our embargo on other spectators perspectives is broken, the guests are obviously baffled by Daisy and their opinion of their hosts is quickly altered. Ironically both husband and wife desire Daisy exclusively to themselves, and both wish to destroy her by attempting to murder her (even though she isn’t alive). Both experience separate lapses of rationality and absurdity at alternating times, witnessing each others madness only to relapse into it. This is a story that really makes the readers scratch their heads in confusion. What is wrong with these people? What does their actions tell me about mine? How am I supposed to relate?

These stories carry over the absurdity of last week’s readings as well as Freud’s unconscious sexuality and repressions, but I need a lot of counsel on this. What the hell happened?

I remember when I signed up for Arts One and I saw Kafka on the reading list. I’d never read anything by him, but when I saw it I immediately thought to myself “That one’s gonna be worth reading”. It’s not that “The Metamorphosis” wasn’t worth reading, it’s just that I found “The Yellow Wallpaper” so interesting that Kafka’s work was a mere afterthought. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely enjoyed “The Metamorphosis”, it’s just that I hated Gregor so much. Everything about him. His weak and clouded mind, being taken advantage of by his family as he continuously frets and works for them.

However in comparison, the lady from “The Yellow Wallpaper” was extremely interesting. While she too is undermined by other characters (especially her husband Jon), as she loses her mind, she also seems to gain her own freedom from his oppression. He constantly told her what to do, not to write, where to sit, how to rest, and while she did end up going crazy, the final scene is so rebellious and uprising that it almost makes me respect her. “Her” being a strange way to refer to the character, especially if it’s still “her” as in the woman who wrote the journal the entire time. We don’t really know, as the scene where she tears out the wallpaper begins to meld the woman from the wallpaper with the one outside of it.

That’s why I liked “The Yellow Wallpaper” so much, it’s open to interpretation and makes you think. Reading and re-reading you find little interesting details which perhaps make the case that she’s been trapped in the wallpaper, and others which lead to other conclusions. Whereas reading “The Metamorphosis” I had no doubts that Gregor was turned into a bug, and there was no mysticism about it all. He became a bug. Nobody cared. He eventually died. That sort of a plotline really fails to excite me, whereas the “The Yellow Wallpaper” has extremely interesting storytelling elements which leave the reader unsure about what happened, and especially what they can trust of the text.

So I guess this all shows me something. Don’t have big expectations? I’m not sure, but then again, every short story or short piece of literature we do in Arts One seems to be awesome, therefore I’ve got big expectations of short works (Borges better not let me down).

The Wednesday quotation, part XIX: I’ve been reading Felisberto Hernández, a very striking Uruguayan writer from the first half of the twentieth century who is practically unknown, especially in English. Some of his short stories have been translated, in a collection entitled Piano Stories (introduced by Italo Calvino, which should give a sense of why they might be of interest), but so far as I can tell this book never sold well and is now long out of print.

“The Stray Horse” is a story that begins by giving life to very concrete things: a marble bust, for instance, or furniture, or a pencil that “was anxious to be allowed to write” (17). Before long the narrator, a child depicted with his grandmother and with his piano teacher, Celina, with whom he is obsessed, can say that “the objects were more alive than we were” (18). As the story progresses, however, it takes on the perspective of the man that the child has become many years later and turns into a long disquisition on memory and on aging in which abstract ideas are presented with surprising vividness, as though they were tangible objects. It is as though the two halves of the story were mirror images of each other: the life of things, and the things of life that unite in (or divide) the narrator’s consciousness.

For in time, with the effort to recollect the past, the narrator finds himself multiplied, fragmented, transformed. He imagines a shadowy partner, who follows him wherever he goes and whom he dimly discerns to represent or incarnate the world of others around him. Though the two are often depicted as at odds, they also make common cause in the narrator’s adventures in consciousness and memory. This leads to an extraordinary passage that ultimately proves to be about something like creativity:

I have to thank him for the times he followed me at night to the edge of a river where I went to see the water of memory flow. When I drew some water in a jug and was saddened at how little and how still it was, he would help me invent other containers for it and comfort me by showing me its different shapes in the different vessels. Afterward we invented a boat in which to cross the river to the island where Celina’s house was. We would take along thoughts that fought hand to hand with our memories, knocking over or displacing many objects in the house. Some of the objects may have rolled under the furniture, and others we must have lost on our way back, because when we opened the bag with our hoard it was always down to just a few bones, and the small lantern we had been holding over the soil of memory dropped from our hands.

Yet the next morning we always turned what little we had gathered during the night into writing. (43-4)

Meanwhile, here is something I wrote a few years ago specifically on “The Daisy Dolls” (“Las hortensias”).

Metamorphosis displayed a very clear theme to me, one which I found to recur throughout the text. This was the importance of money. As Gregor awakens to find himself turned into an insect he does not appear to be overly concerned. His largest concern is how he will handle his work situation, lacking a valid excuse for not arriving on time. The fact that this job as a salesman is of greater importance, seemingly, than being transformed into a gigantic bug demonstrates the importance of money in this story.

The same is seen of his family members. Gregor was counted upon by his family to put food on the table and provide for the family members’ monetary needs. Once he falls into his bug state, he can no longer work and forces his father and mother into finding lines of work in order to maintain this seemingly pitiful lifestyle. By finding work, the structure of things appears to improve. The father appears to stand straighter and have a higher sense of order in his life. This is attributed to the work, and pay which he receives. A statement could be made that money is the basis by which the family finds new life, all of which is at the expense of Gregor.

The theme of money can also be seen with Gregor and his sister Grete. He continually mentions the need and his desire to send Grete to art school. However he needs money in order to do so. This shows that progress is halted without an adequate amount of money. Gregor would love nothing more than to send Grete to art school but he has no option because of his state. Once he can no longer work and earn an income, he becomes disrespected and humiliated  Gregor is no longer treated as a family member and is left to his room, listening to the rest of his family. If money were available, Grete would be able to make advancements towards a more prosperous life. She would be able to fulfill her dream of going into art school, propelling her into her own, independent, and prosperous life.

At the very end of this story, upon the death of Gregor, the family finds a disturbing level of solace upon discovering their financial stance is better than they had once predicted. This further shows the effect of money as the structural norm and guiding force in the lives of every member of the story. I believe an argument could be made that each and every character in this story is directly affected and driven primarily by money.

Could this be the most confusing work we have read in arts one to date? I would have to agree with that statement. From the beginning of the poem onward, I found myself scratching my head and heading back a few lines to see if I had missed anything. It seems as though the purpose of this poem is that there is no purpose. The ideas appear to bounce from one vague and confusing concept to the next. This could be almost to show that what has happened so far in the world is, for the most part, disorganized.

It’s as if Eliot is attempting to show just how disorganized the world can be. That is his wasteland, and he attempts to recreate it with various bits of stories and poems. By doing so, the ideas are no longer transmitted through the actual words and text. Instead, the concept is driven home by sheer structure of the poem.

I have noticed a few names reoccurring in this poem. For example, Tiresias has found a way back into my life. Of course I remember Tiresias from Oedipus as the prophet who warned of the destruction which awaited Oedipus as he threatened and mocked the blind prophet. In the Waste Land, Tiresias is found, with breasts for a reasoning I am not quite certain. But regardless, Tiresias views the interaction between a typist and her lover. The typist appears to be taken advantage of by the man. She seems content with the situation and simply feels relief upon his departure. This sort of seemingly random event occurs continuously from different characters which are not properly introduced.

I simply hold from my deciphering of this poem that Eliot is not impressed by what has been accomplished. He sees this world as a wasteland, using bits of text as examples to his thesis.

In my opinion, I found Kafka’s short story to intrigue me in more ways than some other pieces we have read so far. I thought that The Metamorphosis was an immensely compelling and tragic story. As I reader, I would say that it left me really pondering things, and wanting more out of the story. The fact that a normal man undergoes such a gruesome transformation so quickly, and in a flash.. his entire life gets robbed from him, is a depressing concept to grasp.  This isn’t a story that left me feeling satisfied or happy, to say the least. It is a tale that makes one feel absolutely miserable and confused. It made me wonder how something so awful could happen to one man, and how in the end, he must sacrifice himself for the sake of others. Essentially, his life is doomed from the get go of this transformation, and its really only a matter of time until he realizes what must happen in order to rid his family of misfortune, or being at severe risk. The anger and resentment that derives from this tragedy is definitely a detail I took note of. How quickly one’s life can alter and for no given reason to support such a drastic and life-altering change! So as I previously stated, The Metamorphosis was a story that deeply affected me. It triggered something in me that Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde etc, did not. Perhaps it is because this unalterable change occurred simply out of the blue, and to a man who was not looking for it at all… but I found the story to be very compelling and thought provoking. Leaving me miserable and consumed with the tragedy of it all, I found Kafka’s thoughts and story-telling ability to be sensational, and the tale as a whole remarkable.

As for the Yellow Wallpaper, I also found this poem to be pretty interesting too. I recall reading it in Grade 11 and deeply analyzing it then, granted prior to reading it again now, I was a bit hazy on some details, but nonetheless, I thought that this poem was also written well, and the story also gripping. One of the most notable scenarios is when the narrator describes her being confined within the four yellow walls. I found her description of everything that she was seeing, or thought she was seeing to be nail biting. Her utter hysteria and arguable insanity becomes quite noticeable and vivid at this point in the narration, especially when she states, “I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled.” This poem is brilliant. I absolutely loved reading it, and it definitely makes one feel like their going psycho even reading it. Generally speaking, everything about it was astonishing.

The Wasteland is a text of mysteries. While there might be some that tear their hair out over these mysteries, analyzing with scrupulous eyes, I embrace the mystery. I try to read the text for what it is, pretty sounding words put together nicely, and if there’s a deeper meaning to find, hopefully I’ll see it. In the past I really tried to delve deep into the true meanings of books and stories, often looking to hard to even appreciate the work for what it is.

But I had a revelation with “The Wasteland”. At first I was completely puzzled by it all. Truly lost, trying to find meaning within sentences which eluded me and confused me to no end. Yet my revelation came when I remembered a conversation with an old friend from highschool. He was midway through reading James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” for a school project, and when I asked him how he managed to make sense of it all, he told me this. “I don’t make sense of anything anymore, there’s no use. Instead I just read the words for what they are, if Joyce says ‘Bisons is Bisons’, well then ‘Bisons is Bisons’.” He ended up doing pretty well on his project, so I guess he’s got this wild complicated literature stuff figured out.

It’s not that I’m saying we should avoid discussion or not ponder what “The Wasteland” means, but perhaps we should just try to read it and simply enjoy it. But of course, part of the fun of “The Wasteland” is its intricate allusions and references to older more ancient texts. It’s almost as if T.S. Eliot was re-tweeting all of the great writers of the past, throwing in his own little phrases amongst the references.

Perhaps a large part of why I enjoyed “The Wasteland” so much is that it was nice and short. Perhaps I should thank Ezra Pound, who trimmed out the unnecessary fat from T.S. Eliot’s original work. While the Wasteland is dense and colorful writing to analyze, it’s a different type of density compared to let’s say Hobbes’s “Leviathan” (probably also because it’s not sitting at around >400 pages). I really can’t say I made too much sense out of “The Wasteland”, but it’s easily one of the most memorable texts so far. I saw it almost the same way I see interpretive dance (something which I don’t know anything about), something that is there to be appreciated, and if you find deeper meanings, well that’s awesome!