Tag Archives: childhood

Georges Perec, “W, or the Memory of Childhood”

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Much like my post on Black Shack Alley, I will format my post according to the parts of the book. I’ll also be updating this as I move through each part before I do a brief concluding reflection at the end.

 

Reflection on Part I

Unfortunately, I do not have quite as much to say about this as I did with Black Shack Alley. Something that does stick out to me is that just like in Combray, nothing really happens for a long time. Georges meets with the mysterious Otto Apfelstahl, and simultaneously goes on a long reflection of his past and his family, especially his father, as well as several disjointed memories from his childhood and his adulthood (especially Chapter Eight, which is filled with passages that seem vaguely connected to one another but then bounce to something else). It does seem awfully interesting though. Georges is a refugee of the Holocaust in France, and lost his parents because of the war. However, because he was a child at the time of the war and fled to safety, the war only forms a distant backdrop in this part, while the main focus is on the patchy memories of his family and childhood – lots of use of “I think” when recalling memories, and lots of instances of him correcting himself based on his family’s accounts –  and the ongoing mystery of Gaspard Winckler. What I can find is that the memory of childhood is hazy indeed; we can only really remember little bits and reconstruct the rest using the memories of others – so how much is really the truth?

I also wonder why Georges agrees so readily to helping Otto in the search for Gaspard? I shall find out as I read on. (Note: I don’t.)

 

Reflection on Part II

Very confusingly, the parallel narrative shifts to one about the fictional island of W. I honestly do not understand what’s going on with W, and I find myself wishing to go back to the Gaspard story! I wonder how much is lost by translating into English from French?

I do find it interesting, having watched the lecture, how the island of W hides an authoritarian and horribly unjust system that not only perpetuate inequality and treats the losers brutally, but can also be extremely arbitrary (highlighted by the opening paragraph on p.117). Given the backdrop of WWII and the Holocaust, it reminds me of a course that I took on jurisprudence some time ago in my home university. In particular, my professor referred to a scene from the film Schindler’s List – while I haven’t seen the film and can’t recall the details of her explanation, the scene depicted people being arrested in Nazi Germany for crimes they did not even know about yet. This was meant to spark the question of whether unspoken law is law at all (“The Law must be known by all, but the Law cannot be known”). Fitting, then, that Perec chooses to illustrate the arbitrary injustice of the Nazis with this seemingly unrelated fiction.

In fact, as the barbarism of W is increasingly described, it is presented alongside a description of the fairly apathetic and ineffective Administration, which pays lip service to decrying various practices (such as trades) but makes no genuine effort to actually induce change. Indeed, they even seem to promote some of this barbarism at times, such as the peculiar scale of punishment for athletes who sneak into the women’s dormitories. A criticism of government?

The more I read about W, the more it makes me wonder if – or how – it is linked to the Holocaust. The brutality of it all; the apathy and cruelty of the Administration; the animalistic barbarism; the horror that the novices become privy to once they enter. In light of how Chapter Thirty ends, with some kind of optimism, I’m not terribly sure.

Chapter Thirty-Seven seems to give some confirmation, but it certainly gives me no answers!

 

Final Reflection

I didn’t really understand this novel. Unlike Proust, which had a clear trigger for his reminiscence, here I don’t see the connection between the various narratives taking place. What about Gaspard Winckler? What was the purpose of that short scene which spans the entire first part? What is the significance of W to Georges’s story, if there even is any? What is the point of Georges’s reflections to begin with? The various memories are strung along and alternate with the parallel narratives but doesn’t seem to tie together beyond being of Perec, the writer, and not the character. To me, this read more like a diary. I will admit though, that it was well written and often had me as hooked in as I was bored!

My question for this blog post is, therefore, why does Perec use the parallel narrative structure with multiple different narratives taking place at once?

One other thing I really want to discuss, but couldn’t understand, is the significance of Georges’s childhood memories. While I could gather some concepts and themes from W, and the part on Gaspard Winckler was too short to make much out of, the childhood memories take up such as large part of the book and yet I can’t really make anything of it.

I do have another thought about Gaspard Winckler. I still wonder why he is even in the book at all. Is he a victim of tragedy conveniently forgotten in place of something bigger, more “important”?

 

Some Quotes

p. 12: “However, childhood is neither longing nor terror, neither a paradise lost nor the Golden Fleece, but maybe it is a horizon, a point of
departure, a set of co-ordinates from which the axes of my life may draw their meaning.”

p. 42: ” I am not writing in order to say that I shall say nothing, I am not writing to say that I have nothing to say. I write: I
write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.”

p. 68-69: “What marks this period especially is the absence of landmarks: these memories are scraps of life snatched from the void. No mooring. Nothing to anchor them or hold them down. Almost no way of ratifying them. No sequence in time, except as I have reconstructed it arbitrarily over the years: time went by. There were seasons. There was skiing and haymaking. No beginning, no end. There was no past,
and for very many years there was no future either; things simply went on. You were there.”

p. 117: “As you begin to acquaint yourself with W life, as a novice, for instance, who has moved from the Youth Homes to one of the
four villages at the age of fourteen, you soon grasp that one, and perhaps the main, feature of the world that is your world from now on is that its institutions are harsh and inflexible to an extent matched only by the vast scope of the rule-bending that goes on in them. This realization, which is one of the things which determine a newcomer’s personal safety, is consistently borne out, at all levels, at every moment. The Law is implacable, but the Law is unpredictable. The Law must be known by all, but the Law cannot be known. Between those who live under its sway and those who pronounce it stands an insurmountable barrier.”

p. 139-140: “Thus ends the novice’s first day. The following days will be spent in the same way. To begin with he does not grasp. Novices a
little more senior than he sometimes try to explain, to tell him what goes on, how things work, what he must do and what he mustn’t do. But usually they can’t do it. How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of?”

p. 145: “Each time, Henri expressed surprise that this outburst of adolescent anger had made such an impression on me: it seems to me, however, that what I deduced from this unbelievable act was not that Henri was just a child, but rather, more darkly, that he was not, was no longer, the infallible being, the model, the repository of knowledge and the dispenser of certainty which he of all people simply had to remain for me.” (I like this quote; it doesn’t have any particular significance to me but I just like how it was written)

p. 159: “The life of an Athlete of W is but a single, endless, furious striving, a pointless, debilitating pursuit of that unreal instant when triumph can bring rest.”

p. 160: “There are two worlds, the world of the Masters and the world of slaves. The Masters are unreachable, and the slaves tear at each other. But an Athlete of W does not even know that. He would rather believe in his Star. He waits for luck to smile on him.”

 

 

Joseph Zobel, “Black Shack Alley”

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Reflection on Part I

Part I of the book follows Jose’s childhood in Black Shack Alley. Some of the important themes of this part are childhood and innocence. Jose and the other children of Shack Alley are constantly up to their own mischief when their parents go to work the fields, despite the punishments they inevitably receive. It is interesting how Zobel juxtaposes the harshness of the conditions with the carefree naivete of the children. The children see their “freedom” as the times when their parents are out and they have free reign to play, oblivious to the damage they cause to the little possessions their families are able to have. Yet, it strikingly brings out the harshness of it all even more. The children are so innocent, wishing to simply be children, but their families have to keep them in check. Blissfully unaware of the struggles of their parents, they nonetheless find small joys here and there. Such is the life of the slave community, who can only find small solace in their occasional traditions and festivities after receiving their meagre salaries.

When the children burn down Mr Saint-Louis’s garden, it feels like a moment of innocence lost. The children are separated, never getting to play with one another again. But it is not so much that their childhoods are lost, or at least, not Jose’s, because of M’man Tine. The adult figures of Jose’s life, M’man Tine and Mr Medouze, are interesting characters in their own right. M’man Tine is the fierce guardian of Jose and does everything within her power to free Jose from the fields and give him an education. Mr Medouze, on the other hand, has a touching relationship with Jose as his close friend. His stories of faraway lands like Guinea are like bridges to the outside world. A world beyond Black Shack Alley. A world that Jose can become part of if he breaks away from Black Shack Alley, which he does. It is thus fitting that Mr Medouze’s death is what punctuates the end of Part I.

 

Reflection on Part II:

Jose finally gets to go to school. I really admire Zobel’s ability to bring a childlike voice to Jose. He captures the naivete and short-sightedness of a child very well, with many things he does not quite understand and things he does not see, only aware of his own personal desires and experiences, such as when he runs away, or his relative indifference to Jojo being forbidden from playing with them and towards his godmother’s death. He also does not fully understand the significance of his education, but he does appreciate how it is important to M’man Tine, given the apparent changes in her behaviour. At the end of this chapter, Jose is happy to go to Fort-De-France because he can see his mother, and the goal of furthering his education is more of a “borrowed dream” (144).

However, we do start to feel a slow maturation of Jose. Jose has felt feelings of loss with Mr Medouze, and the sickness that M’man Tine comes down with. Critically, I think the moment of M’man Tine falling sick brings about realisation in Jose, because it causes him to realise the unforgiving nature of working the fields. Indeed, after he realises that M’man Tine’s illness and Mr Medouze’s death are both caused by exhaustion from working the fields, he resolves not to return to the petite-bandes even though he could earn some money for new shoes. Similarly, he feels remorse over Jojo’s running away, likening him to a “runaway slave” (139), representing a slow distancing from his former existence in Black Shack Alley.

Race and class are also becoming more prominent than before, but not quite apparent since Jose, still a child, does not fully understand it yet. The blackboard could be an interesting metaphor for colonisation: white on black. The subtle ways in which he is treated by Mme Leonce and Raphael’s mother. How Jojo was conceived and the status of mulattoes, and how Jojo becomes Jose’s “object of greatest pity” (104), dispelling his preconception that his family’s wealth meant he would be happy. And it’s funny, really, because I feel as though I don’t know the context enough to pick up on everything that Jose doesn’t fully understand himself, which Zobel is recounting to us. I think this speaks as much to Zobel’s writing ability as it does to my own ignorance or naivete.

 

Reflection on Part III:

It is interesting how food is used throughout the book. From always getting a bite to eat from M’man Tine, to having to hopelessly watch the other students buy cakes from the caretaker. It really symbolises a different environment that Jose ends up in. A different race/class dynamic altogether.

On a similar note, we also get a glimpse at the Black community of Route Didier, right in the middle of White territory. Jose notes how they are different from the people of Black Shack Alley. They are far more submissive, almost undignified, unlike the rural Blacks who “did not prostrate themselves [before the Whites]” (179). Jose learns and matures much more, finding more understanding about the place of Blacks in the world. With full exposure to all the racial injustice, he now realises the superior place of Whites in this society simply by merit of their skin. One striking passage is Carmen’s story of the Black woman who has an affair with a beke, bearing him five children, whom he bestows money and possessions. Yet, even as the woman begs him to claim their children so they can be entitled to his estate, he refuses because “[his] name only belonged to white people” (197).

There is no happy ending here, but there is promise embedded in Jose’s growth. M’man Tine dies without getting to see Jose become someone, but she is always portrayed as happy and proud of him being educated. Education is the only way out of their suffering, but that she dies before Jose can complete it shows that the hardship of the disenfranchised of society runs deep; they cannot be freed from their status so quickly, so easily. Her hands, worn out, are what Jose pictures of her after knowing of her death. Those hands symbolise the struggle of the Black population of Martinique; she is not pictured with her face because the Blacks are not given face, but it was with those hands that she gave Jose what he needed. Nevertheless, there is hope. Jose’s friends in his later years, Carmen and Jojo, both demonstrate that the Blacks still have dignity. Carmen, an urbanite, always finds a way to be happy in life, and even learns to read from Jose, taking steps into the path to true freedom. Similarly, Jojo, who began in the novel as pitiful, grabs ahold of his life by the reins and finds himself reunited with Jose. They all talk about the plight of their people, and through Jose’s love of reading, there is hope at the end of the novel with Jose’s resolve to speak and fight for their rights.

Question: How and why does education provide the means for freedom? Is it enough?

 

Quotes (incomplete, will edit later and pick notable ones)

Part I: 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 20, 36, 37, 41, 43, 48, 51, 52, 57, 59, 67, 68

Part II: 73, 76, 104, 105, 107, 108, 111, 139, 144, 146

Part III: 151, 152, 155, 159, 163,

Marcel Proust, “Combray”

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On Part I

Having read the introduction by Davis, I mentally prepared myself to be thoroughly confused and worked up my capacity for patience. To my surprise, for how long Proust’s sentences and descriptions are, they flow extremely well and are very lovely to read. That being said, I am impressed by how much can be said about so little actually happening within the story. Sometimes it feels like my own thought process bouncing between analogy and all kinds of ideas and tangents. Below I will list some of my impressions after reading through the passage.

A central theme of this part seems to be the narrator’s relationship with his memories at Combray. In our dreams, we sometimes explore the places and times we have been in, but without complete clarity. It is once the narrator is pulled into the waking world that he recalls his experiences. His relationship with his family is an interesting one. There is an almost Oedipal obsession with his mother, and a cold sternness from his father, and yet, this seems to flip by the end of the chapter, for it is his mother who shows the sternness and his father who grants him the comfort he seeks (sort of; it is clear that his father does not express his love (?) outwardly). He is portrayed with a nervous disposition and desires the fleeting comfort of his mother at night, which is often denied because of his nervousness. However, perhaps paradoxically, his anxiety seems to give him the courage to be “rebellious” and seek the comfort he is kept from. This seems to bring truer expressions of love between him and his parents. Love thus appears to be another recurring theme in the story. And of course, there is the scene with the tea and madeleine. This scene was wonderfully poetic and lyrical, but also very confusing. The madeleine evokes something within the narrator. I believe this is the peculiarity of memory. In dreams we see fragments, and in our awoken minds we recall, but sometimes it takes something as simple as the taste of a madeleine to make us relive. It’s like a gateway into lost time, or perhaps an anchor? Back in high school, I studied literature for a bit, and this reminds me of the poetry of an author, Boey Kim Cheng, who often wrote about the power of food to bind us to memory and love and family, allowing us to rediscover memories from the past.

Those are just some of my musings and I haven’t really thought too hard about their applicability. So, what about Swann? I do not fully understand the class politics in play with regard to Swann, or why some of the family members treat him with such disdain. I also do not really understand his place in the story yet. I understand him to be a man with friends in high places and he maintains his relationship with the narrator’s family through a connection to the grandfather, but not much more than that. Perhaps more will become clear once I proceed to Part II. Will update this post when/if I get there!

Oh yes, and a question to pose: What is the value of remembering the past? Is it better to remember, or to forget?

EDIT: Some other thoughts that occurred as I read other posts.

  1. It is beautiful the way the chapter ends as the memory of Combray is rebuilt “from (his) cup of tea”. It’s like it is immortalised.
  2. The narrator describes how there is something more enduring and more immaterial even as people die and things are destroyed by time. He says smell and taste remain for a long time, but perhaps it is not smell and taste per se. After all, the feeling evoked within him was not the tea or the madeleine, but something deeper within. Those memories deep inside will always withstand the test of time. (but maybe I’m misreading this!)

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