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Uncategorized

Conclusion

It feels like this term has passed in the blink of an eye!! Even before I realize, it is almost the end of the semester… It feels like not long ago I was writing my introduction blog, and so soon it is already my final post!!

Alright…I cannot say I did a really good job in this semester, but I do enjoy reading those books!!! Although in my previous blogs I keep picking at those books, they are indeed very interesting to read!!

Which makes me the most impressive is the love in this course, we spent a lot of time on discussing the love, although they are mostly toxic, I enjoy reading them in such a different angle. To be honest, they didn’t seem to me that interesting at first, but soon when I share the thoughts with our classmates and rethink these books, I found them so interesting!!

Thanks to our classmates’ great ideas, I feel like I read those books several times in different angles, and also gives me a lot of new perspectives that can help me construct the whole idea of not only the single text but also all the readings in general. But even though I like to read other classmates’ idea through their posts, I was anxious when I post my blog at first, since I was so afraid that my idea would be wrong and what if other classmates won’t agree with me? Soon I find out that this does not have to do with right or wrong, and even if they disagree with me that means I would have another perspective of this book, and each way could help me to have a more comprehensive understanding towards the readings!!

I like The Lover the most, since it shocks me the most in a sense, which somewhat makes me think it is interesting and impressive. And I like other readings as well, they are also interesting too (especially the Agostino, I found reading the blogs from other students would be more interesting than reading the text itself, when I read Sophia’s blog, I feel like: Oh I never thought this way!!)

What is more, I like the attendant sheet every class. That is also interesting!! And also the music selected every class, they are so matching with the readings we are reading!!! (Thank you!!)

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Love Me Tender

Love Me Tender :/

I kind of like this book, since it looks interesting. And each chapter is relatively short so it is easier to read. But on the other hand, I feel like this book is a little bit confusing when I am reading it, since it seems to me a little bit fragmented and does not follow a traditional linear narrative,

I like how it said on chapter 14, “It’s the same with clothes, the same with gender, it depends on my mood or the situation.(pp.63)”, which gives me a sense that our gender is not definable, and “For me, homosexuality isn’t about who I’m fucking, it’s about who I become. (pp.29)” in this sentence, we can see that the self identity is not that confined. Also, she is suggesting this is a process rather than a simple identity.

In the text, “Women, love, sex […] It’s all still there […] but it’s not important, like the décor of a room […](pp.29-30)”, her life seems to be constantly surrounded with lovers, routines, and physical experiences, while these elements do not alleviate her inner isolation; instead, they seem to conceal a deeper sense of emptiness. And I think by this contrast, her loneliness seems deeper in this sense.

In this sense, the intimacy is stripped of its meaning, becoming superficial and easily replaceable, rather than a source of genuine emotional connection, but like a decor in a room, you can see it everyday but never can feel its realness to your life.

The loss of her son produces an irreplaceable emotional void, as no other relationship is able to replace the bond between mother and child. Hence makes her life feel so empty, as she meets different women every day, yet they leave the next day, suggesting that she is constantly experiencing other people’s leaving.

So I think she is not truly free (even though she seems wants to have some new senses of adventure and freedom), but rather, she is exhausting herself in order to sustain the appearance of freedom. in her life, she is hoping that she could get rid of the social expectation, but she ends up being more empty.  Also, her freedom seems more exhausted than she thought, the repetition of meeting new people doesn’t make her freedom true, but makes it lose its connection, and he movement does not equal to the progress. It makes me think, it does not look like a life but a repeated movements.

 

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Uncategorized

My Brilliant Friend: (

I do not really like this book. I mean, it is a very good book, but I am not particularly drawn to it. I like how the two girls struggle against the darkness with each other’s support, and also like how Ferrante portrays them in such a way, but at the same time, their complex relationship also confuses me, their jealousies are secretly placed on each other(or maybe it is just overinterpret), and also I really don’t like Lila’s father Fernando!!! Anyways, this book is one of the longest book I read recently lol.

(I like the opening of the disappearing of Lila, and this also links to the past whcih helps us to involve in her past smoothly)

On the surface, Lenu’s jealousy is more external, such as her constant comparison with Lila’s intelligence, charisma, and social influence, But actually Lila also envies Lenu in a more internal and less explicitly expressed way, for example, she envies Lenu’s access to education, and could escape the neighbourhood (which seems to me like this!!).

So I was very confused at the beginning, I thought it is just Lenu’s self internal-struggle or overthinking and keeps measuring herself to Lila, and wants to be like her so much. And these underlying competition seems that finally comes to an end when one of them left and the other got married.

“I answered that I had school, a privilege she had lost forever. That is my wealth, I tried to convince myself. And in fact that year all the teachers began to praise me again. (pp.259)” In this sentence, I think it can be interpreted in many ways, but I think it is just a self-comfort, and she attempts to define her own value by claiming that “school” is her “wealth,” which is something Lila has “lost forever.” However, “I tried to convince myself”also shows that it is not fully secured, but rather a form of compensation shaped by comparison with Lila.(it makes me think she just tries to find a realm that she won’t lose?????)

“Love and interest. Grocery plus shoes. Old houses plus new houses. Was I like them? Was I still? (pp.327)” I kind of like this sentence, she was worried about she may have become part of the very system she once sought to escape, and this makes me think that the past is always influencing her even though she seems to have escaped from darkness(?).

So personally I do not really like it because it feels so real to me, and I feel a little bit tired when I read it. Anyways, this is how our lives are like, and it makes me think: throughout our lives, we are constantly trying to escape the forces that seek to confine us: external pressures, others’ expectations, and the limitations we impose on ourselves, in order to become who we truly are.

(And btw, I really don’t like Lila’s father in any way!!!!!)

 

Categories
Money To Burn

Money to Burn: Romance??

In their secluded world as two partners, there is no space for other people to step in. Rather than saying it is enclosed, it’s more like exclusive.

In the text, Kid and Dorda constantly together and they do not have much close relationship with others (their relationship becomes a kind of shared isolation). Both of them are outsiders in society,  separated from the rest of people. Maybe because of this, they highly dependent to each other, and bonded them tightly.

Their intimacy always exists in a violent circumstance. They are criminals, and they robbered a bank. From their identity, we can already see that they are exclusive to the rest of society, their marginalize-ness has already eliminated the possiblity of their integration into society. They do not have a real place to stay in this outside world, so they became the only one who they can depend on to each other. In the text, it says: “the only man who had ever loved him, and who’d treated him as a person, better than a brother. (pp. 189)”, which suggests that in Dorda’s mind, Kid is the only one who treats him like a person, and how he distincts him to the other people, implying their isolated relationship.

However, their mental health is weaken and weaken day by day due to their immorality, and their relligious beliefs has also driven them to madness. In the text, there are many depictions and descriptions that portrays their religious obsession, and when it ties to other elements in the text, it gives us a sense of chaos.

For example, in the description, “he was sure it must be true, the Kid looked so like the figure of Christ silhouetted by the station lights. (pp.200)”, by comparing Kid to Christ, which often represents sacrifice, suffering and savior in a holy image, it does not only gives us a sense that Dorda’s mental health has reached a very unstable state, but also reveals that in his mind, Nene is no longer merely a person to rely on, but a more sacred existence.

The ending transforms their bond into a form of tragic intimacy, where their bond survives not through escape or redemption, but through shared destruction. Their shared fate (They flee together, are surrounded together, and ultimately walk toward destruction together) shows that their loyalty to each other becomes more important than money, survival, or any hope of escape. By burning the money, they reject the social order that defines value through wealth, they reject the social ultimate value and meaning, which also implies that their distinction to the society.

 

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The Lover

The Lover: memory

It is also a story that begins with a memory, as the narrator recalls her past from her old age.

It reminds me of the narrative in The Shrouded Woman, and both of them are like recollections of the past, where the story unfolds through memories rather than through a linear plot (Also, at the beginning, they both emphasize the change in their appearance!). But I think the narrator in The Lover is more like an aging woman stands in the present, repeatedly looking back at her past, interrupting it, revising it, and reconstructing it.

(I like the line: “…I think you’re more beautiful now than then.
Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your
face as it is now. Ravaged.”(pp.3)!!!)

In the text, it is not like a story that is well organized in chronological order; rather, she recalls different moments of her past through fragments of memory, constantly jumping back and forth in time. In the line, “The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line” (p. 20), it suggests that life is not like a novel that has a clear central line that everything follows. Instead, it is composed of scattered memories and experiences that do not necessarily form a continuous narrative. Through this fragmented structure, the narrator reconstructs her past not as a fixed story, but as a series of memories that emerge at different moments, so this story is not simply telling a story, but rather repeatedly retelling and revising things that have not been told before (It is not like saving and loading a fixed memory, but more like reconstructing the past each time it is narrated).

Later on, she talks about the photograph, which does not exist. I think just because of its absence, it precisely gives the image its significance. And this implies that the meaning of the moment was not visible at the time it happened, but was constructed afterward through reflection and memory. As a result, the image becomes more than a simple record of the past: it is a reconstructed memory that gains meaning over time.

Hence, I think it does not make us think this book is not simply retelling a past that has been stored somewhere like a fixed record, but is constantly returning to the past to rethink, reinterpret, and rename what happened(?). This implies that the memory is like the untaken photograph, because the moment was never fixed as a concrete record, it remains alive in memory that can be revisited and revised again and again.

(btw, I DONT LIKE THE LOVE IN THIS BOOK AT ALL!!! It is insane… I thought this was going to be a warm and romantic love story, but it turned out to be completely different from what I expected. )

Categories
The Hour of The Star

The Hour of The Star: Love

I feel this book is very unique: it is quite different from other books I have read.

From the very beginning, it is clearly written that the narrative itself is part of the subject. While the narrator, Rodrigo, introduces himself and even explains that the story will contain several characters, including himself as an important presence.

And according to the text, he portrays that in Macabéa’s life, there is almost no dramatic plot. She is poor in wealth, health, and education. She barely desires anything, yet she continues to believe that she is happy, or at least that her life is acceptable, until the end, when she briefly senses that something in her life is missing. However, this awareness is not a full awakening, but only a fragile and momentary realization triggered by what she is told.

Also, the love in the novel is very unusual — it seems as if it never truly exists, yet at the same time it is present everywhere.

  1. Macabéa appears to love Olímpico, but her love remains mostly on the surface. This kind of love is neither equal nor deeply understood by each other. Rather, it feels more like a desire for companionship and a longing to have her existence acknowledged. Her understanding of love is pure and naive; it is light, almost weightless .
  2. On the other hand, Olimpico’s love is not that healthy either. He is very ambitious, and throughout the novel, he is concerned with social mobility and self advancement. He constantly speaks about improving his status and seeks opportunities that might elevate his position.
    And when he eventually leaves her, he does not provide much emotional conflict or remorse. Instead, he rationally chooses a woman whom he believes will better contribute to his social aspirations:( as for him, he values that the relationships function as instruments rather than bonds of mutual understanding.
    “And you’re all dirt. You don’t have the face or the body to be a movie star.”(pp.45)
    (And I don’t like him at all!!! How could he say this to her???!!)
  3. Love in the novel is closely connected to power. In this unequal relationship, Macabéa is passive: she never asks for anything and does not require loyalty, which makes me think it represents that she is also marginalized in the society. What is most cruel is that she is told she might have happiness, which makes her feel she deserves love, but she is crushed to death immediately afterward. This seems to suggest that the possibility of being loved exists only in words and can never truly happen in reality.
  4. Lastly, what is more complex is the love from the narrator. Rodrigo claims that he cares about her and feels responsible for telling her story. His “love” for her seems to take the form of sympathy, duty, and even pity. However, this love is not free from power. While he insists that he is giving her a voice, he also controls how her story is told and how she is presented to the reader. In this sense, his affection contains authority, because he ultimately decides how she will be seen and understood.

 

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The Time Of The Doves

Another Erased-Agency Female Character :,((

??? Why are all those lovers (that we have read) so toxic??

Natalia’s identity and self is being gradually erased during the marriage and the war.

Firstly, I think she places too much value on Quimet. Because of a date with him, she begins thinking about him while at work and ends up making mistakes. When Quimet arrives a full hour late, instead of questioning or scolding him, she assumes that she must have misremembered the time. And when they talk, most of the conversations are around Quimet.

This makes me start to think whether she neglects her own self and agency too much, and she almost lost her own internal voices. She hardly expresses her anger nor resists directly, instead, she keeps endures and tolerates, everything she feels uncomfortable would be swallowed by herself. This is a form of internal oppression, and this is not imposed solely through external force, but through a gradual process in which she comes to believe this is the only way that she can live.

From Quimet changes her name to Colometa as a start, she is gradually away from her own identity. From my perspective, this is not a romantic nickname, but an act of power dominance. Since a name is a core of one self and one’s sense of identity, and the one who names you actually defines you. Quimet gives her a name, and she neither refuses nor resists, this makes me feel like he is dominant to Natalia, and their relationship is in a hierarchy.  From this, her subjectivity is already not self-determined, and moreover, the name “Colometa” itself diminishes her. It is infantilizing, sentimental, and strips away seriousness, making her from a complete person to something small or cute, almost an object of affection rather than an autonomous individual.

After marriage, her life becomes all around Quimet: her wishes becomes blurred, her language becomes shorter and more restrained, and her decision becomes hesitant, with the first person narratives, we can feel that she is not oppressed externally, but keeps stepping backwards again and again and finally lost the space to place her own self, this is a form of gradual disappearance.

Later on, Quimet starts to raise doves, and with the quantity of the doves increasing, it starts to occupy the room Natalia could stay, and she has to take care for the doves, while the only thing Quimet would do is to enjoy “possession”. I think this stands for the patriarchal will invades the private sphere. And the doves implies her own self, the doves are caged, renamed, deprived of freedom and make noice without meaning, while she is called Colometa, and also confined within marriage, renamed, deprived of autonomy, and her voice is weakened. — Doves symbolize peace, purity and gentleness, but in the text, peace is absent, purity is gradually consumed, and gentleness turns into passivity, with this transformation that turns a symbol of peace into a burden shaped by war, creating a strong sense of irony.

The marriage is terrible enough, but the war makes her life even worse. She is not a wide anymore, but a poor mother and hungry body, her own identity of a social character is reduced to a surviving creature — she has already lost her own voice during the marriage, and now she is not able to think anything other than food, how much “self” does she left?? And this is how it compresses women until they are reduced to nothing but bodies and responsibilities.

In the end, there is no dramatic process of she finding her “self” or “identity”, but just simply regains her footing slowly, and is no longer completely consumed. It is not an awakening, but rather a preservation of a small part of herself after nearly being erased.

Categories
Agostino

Agostino: a boy, a man

Even though I am shocked, I feel bad for Agostino too…

  1. From the beginning, I could tell the story started to go in a weird direction, especially when I read the depiction of how he feels proud of the attention his mother receives and the envy he imagines from others. And he feel disappointed when he saw his mother’s eager of being with other men when his mother accepted the invitation of a boat ride from a young man, thinking his mother does not belong to him in the way he imagined, this unsettled him and triggered him of the past he does not wish to recall.
      • This opening places strong emphasis on the description of the physical body, as well as on how Agostino pays attention to his mother, keeping Agostino’s world small and exclusive to her. This suggests that in Agostino’s boyhood, after his father’s death, his mother is all he has. He looks only at his mother and belongs only to her, and therefore believes that he occupies the same exclusive position in her life as well.
      • In this world he has ideally created, everything feels safe and secure. The emotional roles are clearly defined, and his identity is stable, while the relation is solely exclusive between his mother and him — everyone plays their own roles: his mother belongs to him, and other people are strangers outside their world who pose a threat to him (so he thinks everyone else is jealous of him!) However, he is in a state of conflict, on the one hand, he feels good to see people jealous him, on the other hand, he feels disappointed to be excluded.
      • Thus, he soon understands that he no longer holds a privileged position in his mother’s decision when he realizes his mother’s actively eager to be with other men, this mother-son world started to fall.
  2. He soon turns into adulthood. When he cannot stand this mess, he starts to keep himself away from his mother and tries to get along with a group of aggressive and crude boys, who speak openly and violently about sex. Agostino wishes to be involved with them and wants their sympathy, hoping to become a man by staying with them. But they do not provide any positive response; instead, they mock Agostino’s innocence, humiliate him, and bring him emotional degradation.
    • Among this group of boys, I feel like the sexuality is linked tightly to power, cruelty and dominance, and be used as a topic of conversation to brag about. And it reveals that how the masculinity is performed through humiliation and aggression, and these means become a way to show off a man’s power and masculinity. Agostino’s previous life could never give him such permission to get involved with those boy, so he is neither accepted by the group (as a sign of grown up), nor be able to return back to his childhood world (still be regarded as a boy).
    • I think that in the process of Agostino’s fast growth from a boy to a man, it is not a gain, but a loss. He grows without proper guidance, experiencing only brutal exposure. He loses the perfect image of his mother in his own world and loses the feeling of safety from his boyhood, yet never truly gains the power to become mature. It is not a man growing up from a boy, but a boy forced to accept a cold world without sympathy.

Just as the video lecture mentioned, this book focuses only on a short period of Agostino’s experience, so we are not able to see his day-to-day life. I think he is growing up in a very fast way and can never return to his previous life, but I do not think he has become a man (at least not ready to be a man!).

 

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Bombal Shrouded Woman Uncategorized

Don’t marry him!!!

  1. I really like the way the whole book is divided into many distinct parts! Each of them refers to a different story of the past. This kind of structure gently makes us as the reader feel we are involved into each remembered moment, creating the feeling of participating in her memories, while those stories do not seem cumulative to us.At the beginning, she is dead, which means she has lost everything. Later, the text turns back to her past, a time when she still had everything. This contrast makes us wonder whether the narrative is a dream, or whether she has truly died.And the overall tone is very beautiful. For example, at the beginning she describes the rainfall in a vivid way, by depicting the motion of the rainfall, we can imagine the scene while we read it. And when she describe how she remembers Richardo, she did not simply give us his appearance, instead, the narrative is infused with a strong sense of subjective memory and the descriptions of his expressions, giving us the sense that he is not merely a character in a fiction, but as someone vividly alive, and once lived in someone’s memory.

    But why does she mention his name so late? Is this simply a narrative technique, or it has some specific purpose behind it?

  2. Her first love is bitter, even though it was sweet at the beginning, I don’t like the way Ricardo treats her. And also from the way she portrays him as someone who is easily influenced by his mother’s opinions (at least it seems to me like that) and from the way they break up,  I don’t think he takes this relationship seriously. As when he claims that “love affairs are not eternal” to excuse the breakup and insists that he is not the one to be blamed, I think it somewhat makes me think he is emotional irresponsible.What is more, she describes her own blood as if it is shared with Richardo’s, implies to the physical and mental bond between them. But I think it is more likely expressing the cost of love?
  3. And I like how it says: “…for that insignificant boy, that good-for-nothing, you’re making yourself cheap! You who have your life before you, you who can choose the husband you want, you so proud, so intelligent…” (Yes, don’t marry him!!!) Also, she tries to use sex or a threat to keep a man, which gives me the sense that in such a relationship, the person who is more deeply in love often ends up in a lower position (Don’t marry him!!!!!)

 

 

 

Categories
The Combray

Proust, The Combray

At the beginning, I found it strange that the text starts with a detailed description of the state of sleep — especially focusing on his conscious experience between being awake and asleep. Why would the author spend so much time on what, on the face value, seems to be just a man waking up in confusion? Does this opening help us form a general sense of what will unfold in the rest of the text? But soon I found that the author does not simply depict a scene, he is explaining the process of a person’s consciousness. He explains that memory is not linear, that consciousness happens first and then the understanding follows, and since the self consists of the perceptual senses and  consciousness, thus the self is neither stable, nor unchangeable.

In the later on texts of the Combray, the way he views the Combray from a loving and curious perspectives and the way he interacts with his aunt all provide us with plenty of colourful images and vivid imagination when we are reading it. And he when he describes this town, he does not just focus on talking about the physical layout of it, but imbuing it with deeper spiritual connotations. This transformation from physical space to mental space (consciousness) gives us some philosophical insights into time, and also explains the concept of  involuntary memory, which means the physical sensations can activate our memory and allow for deeper interactions between body and mind. For example, in Proust’s account, he walks through the garden and smells the scent of the flower, and then these scents become the medium to awaken his memory.

I like how his narrative goes, which is non-linear, and flexible –When he tastes the madeleine cake, memories of his childhood come out, giving us an image of how the present and past overlap, and further on indicates his idea of the time: the time is not something that could be measured through the clock or other instrument but is intrinsically constituted by the interconnections of the conscious experiences.

I might be wrong, but from my perspective, I find it might be a reflection of the microcosm of society at that time, and he skillfully integrates the society of that era into his descriptions, including post-Revolutionary French society of that time and social class transformations. So he mentions a lot about the interaction between different classes and the interaction between industry and nature in the book.

Moreover, since this book is a translated work, it necessarily passes through several layers of interpretation, which may introduce certain biases for the readers. The translator is a more modern American writer, while the original text was written in 1913’s French, in a very different historical and cultural context. So I think that the translator would inevitably bring her own understanding and perspective to the text, and we come to understand the book through these multi-layered interpretations.

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