blog#9 – the Object of Anxiety —
I’ll admit that I am not very good at remembering character’s names when reading, especially during the part I have to read in dialogue. But in this book, many characters have a kind of tic or catchphrase that they say which I thought was really interesting. Whatever their respective indicator might be, it always makes its way into the story. Don Bazil has his “you bet”, Ali has “black, kinky hair”, and Lady Di has her (ugly) thumb of course. “The Kid, the Guileless One, the Learned one” is a character I found very intriguing but I didn’t really understand them.
A question that kept popping into my mind while reading and thinking about Norman Manea’s ‘The Trenchcoat’, how immersive is context? Manea’s background and the environment in which he grew up in obviously makes its way through his psyche as he is writing, but how much of it is intentional? How much of his circumstances seeped its way into his writing, and is it inevitable?
I can understand that fragments of my question are definitely flawed, but I’m not sure how else to put it. As a writer myself, I sometimes get asked about what inspires my work, and a lot of the time it’s assumed that I exclusively write about being POC, queer, or a ‘woman’. And so, I wonder what it’s like for Manea, someone who grew up in more dire circumstances than I, someone who’s backdrop of life is consumed by world events and tragedies.
This idea also lends itself to the notion that there are parts of ourselves that are only revealed after certain pressures or triggers. What pushes (or in some cases, pulls) a person to their limit? It’s also interesting to note that a lot of the time, these pressures can be animated through an inanimate object. In this case, it was the Trenchcoat.
The Trenchcoat represents a kind of fear and anxiety in the characters, (especially Dina), but it’s fascinating that so much emotion and information can be derived from a seemingly simple object and its place. The Trenchcoat, this object that has been seemingly forgotten and overlooked by all except one, perhaps it acts as more of catalyst to unlocking a giant dam of unacknowledged uncertainty. The object of anxiety in this case was a terrible culmination of realized fears, possibilities that have only been pondered – but did this object, and all that encapsulates, free these characters?
One reply on “blog#9 – the Object of Anxiety —”
Your post, including (especially) the title, is interesting to me, Jasmine.
Indeed, I believe that the trench coat operates as an almost fetish object, which has a life of its own. It’s as if a set of social tensions were crystallized in its materiality.
On the other hand, you mention that Dina especially feels anxious about the trench coat. Regarding your question, what happens to her in the end?