A Wrinkle in Time

This is my second time through A Wrinkle in Time. Although it is considered one of the "most memorable books from our childhood" by Anna Quindlen in the Appreciation, I didn't really have any memories the first time through it in grade 3(ish), nor was it a childhood fantasy novel that made a big impression on me. I think I enjoyed our class discussion of the theoretical considerations moreso than I did the actual book. That aside, I have a few thoughts to offer.

Narration:
To be honest, I was constantly annoyed at the narration and implausability of events. On one the one hand, I enjoyed the inclusion of time travel and the tesseract and what these concepts had to offer in relation to subverting the greatest sources of conformity. On the other hand, I thought the novel was actually written by a teenage girl. The perspective made the relations seem very self-centered and like the implausible fantasies of a teenage girl who needs to be the hero of her own life, find the perfect guy who likes her, and set herself apart from the rest of humanity because no one 'understands' her. For example, the family never questions Mrs Whatsit's visit (other than about the tesseract - but really, she takes off her boots and then leaves almost immediately, and that she knows whose house and what food they have in it - creepy). The way Calvin meets Meg and immediately tells details about himself that he's never shared before and becomes Meg's protector fits directly into a self fantasy of Meg. All of Meg's interactions with adults, boys, and her family are overly personal and way too dramatic. Anyways... my opinion aside, perhaps this perspective has purposeful intentions of drawing attention to the striving of humanity for social conformity (as the teenage years can be considered fundamental in establishing identity and personal understanding of oneself in the world).

Senses:
Throughout the novel, there seemed to be a heavy emphasis on the senses: sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell, as well as kinesthetic and "sixth" senses. Meg's description of the loss of senses demonstrates how important they really are: "She was alone in a fragment of nothingness. No light, no sound, no feeling" (65)

• Sight - While there is a constant tension between seeing and what cannot be seen, most of the characters depend on sight to see the "darkness" (the good and bad), to navigate, and to have the ability to get in/escape the prison. It is through sight that IT is able to penetrate and take over the mind of Charles Wallace (134).
  
• Touch - The tactile sense seems particularly important from the perspective of narrator Meg. She comments, "Then she felt her limbs again. Her legs and arms were tingling faintly...Is was not as simple as darkness, or absence of light. Darkness has a tangible quality; it can be moved through and felt; in darkness you can bark your shins; the world of things still exists around you. She was lost in a horrifying void" (65).
• Hearing - As important as hearing is when present, the absence of hearing draws fear and panic from Meg: "It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel" (65).
  
• Taste - Hunger and eating is abundant in the novel. There seems to be an emphasis on the physical needs of humanity. Calvin provides a good example when he eats "five bowls of stew, three saucers of Jello, and a dozen cookies" (52). The lack of taste presents a problem later on as well (141).
• Smell - Smell is mentioned repeatedly and may be a form of orienting Meg or reassuring her other senses. For example, she describes the sunlit field, saying, "...the air about them was moving with the delicious fragrance that comes only on the rarest of spring days when the sun's touch is gentle and the apple blossoms are just beginning to unfold" (67).
• Kinesthetic/Vestibulation - Meg's sense of bodily movement/awareness of the various parts of her body demonstrates a reliance on this sense, as well as her sense of gravity and position of her body relative to space and gravity. For example, she describes, "This movement, she felt, must be the turning of the earth, rotating on its axis, traveling its elliptic course about the sun. And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon" (65).
• Sixth senses - Calvin, Charles Wallace, and IT all make use of sixth senses. It could also be argued that Meg's sense of intuition could fall into this category.

I think the use of this constant reliance on senses could be considered a trope for our reliance on reason and rationality. On the other hand, when Meg is "alone in a fragment of nothingness" we find she still exists in the mind apart from her senses. Thus, an argument could be made for the existence of the mind and the being of consciousness. There is more than what can be felt, heard, tasted, seen, and that being is the essence of humanity through conscious experience...beyond reason and rationality.

Never Let Me Go 2

Souls:
I enjoyed the cloning for/against discussion that we had in class. I think it brought up two important questions: do clones have souls, and what is human? There are several dictionary definitions of what 'soul' means: a) the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life, b) the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all rational and spiritual beings, or the universe; c) the moral and emotional nature of human beings (1). In the strict sense of the word, the characters in the novel obviously demonstrate emotionality and human-ness in the way they act and think. I also found an interesting review on the topic, which made a valuable comment saying, "Certainly in the Western tradition religion has pretty much accepted, even required, the existence of a 'soul,' though its precise nature or function remains often marvelously, even elegantly, ambiguous" (2). It seems to me that Ishiguro does not try to make an outwardly convincing argument that clones have souls; instead, he slowly weaves the reader into the very essence of the characters in the novel. He subtly and subconsciously demonstrates that they do have souls by showing and involving the reader. The fact that the novel does not contain violence or any challenge to this world that has created a "socially organized and approved system of murder" (2) is all the more alarming to the reader.

Sources:
1)Merriam Webster Online Dictionary - http://www.merriam-webster.com/netdict/soul
2)Marvin Mirsky Review - http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/journals/perspectives_in_biology_and_medicine/v049/49.4mirsky.html

Dystopian Literature:
I have encountered Dystopian novels before without being introduced to the concept itself, so when the topic of Dystopian literature was brought up in class, the first novel that came to mind was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Never Let Me Go and The Road are similar in that the narration makes the book very "real" and involves the reader. Whereas Never Let Me Go seems to be contained in proper English and a typical or accepted form of grammatical structure, perhaps as a reflection of the containment of the clones and theme of socially accepted norms, The Road has a loss of punctuation that reflects that all that exists is the mind as there is nothing else left.

"Special":
The way that none of the characters challenged or questioned the way things were bothered me (as seen in my other post). What interests me is the way the students are told "they are special" over and over. Is this the downfall of humanity? In order to brainwash them all they need to do is to give them a sense of belonging, of reason, of purpose for their lives. This tie is strong enough to suppress individuality, imprison them in their predestined life, and prevent them from questioning. Is this really a fundamental quality of humans? - of the humans that created these clones and are given meaning in their superiority/importance of existence, of humans in real life (think of gangs and cults, or even social groupings in schools or society's hierarchies). Anyways, I digress...

Quote

--“Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space, restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression in the varied forms of self-realization.” Tagore--

Never Let Me Go

--"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day." Albert Einstein--

Reading Never Let Me Go brought me back to the first day of class when we discussed social norms and somehow started listing things that would break social norms, such as showing up to class naked, singing on the desks, or reversing the roles of teacher and students. It was very strange to read from the perspective of growing up with knowledge of the outside world, but never questioning the boundary that contains the Hailsham students. These children are raised to be intelligent and somewhat normal children, but are raised in such a way that even after they leave Hailsham, they never try to escape or make a life different from what they've been 'programmed' to be. In fact, they seem to be stuck in an immature perspective of the functioning of the world (even as grown adults, they think as immature children). This begs the question of whether they ever really have freedom of choice. I obviously stand as an outsider (outside the novel) on the side that thinks raising people for their organs is an unjustifiable practice. And I was very frustrated as I read the novel, as I continuously hoped for just one of the characters to question, or just one of the characters to break out of the assumptions of their world. They even have a method of escape - access to vehicles - and how would anyone be able to tell between a 'normal' human and a 'clone'?

More importantly, the novel brought me back to the question of whether a freak is born or made. On the surface, the clones can be considered as the freaks. True, they are born different, because they are clones destined to be used as organ donors. Yet they are entirely made. They are designed as clones, they are raised as clones, and they are made to be clones. However, it is clear that if one of these clones were to be raised as a normal human, there would be no distinction between him/her and the next human over. Thus, there is nothing less 'freakish' about the humans that contrived this world of clones than the supposed freaks themselves. Perhaps this novel has more to say about the value of the human soul than anything else as the distinction of freak is shattered through the subtle and quiet nature of the text.

The novel places the reader in the view of the Hailsham children, but as soon as the reader steps away from the novel, he or she is placed in a position of the 'other.' While writing the first part of the blog, it dawned on me how frustrated I was over the Hailsham characters never questioning or trying to escape, yet I was much more removed and less frustrated at the idea that humanity could create this mess in the first place. I think it is as this 'other' that I am unable to fully grasp the position of the Hailsham characters; as an other I want freedom for the characters, yet when placed in their shoes through the narration, I still view the world as an other, causing my frustration for their inability to question the world.

Nights at the Circus

Simply put, I loved Nights at the Circus. I don't understand how it's a short read, as it took me a very long time to read and cover the vocabulary, and I still think it will take me another couple times through to be able to actually grasp the enormity of the things Angela Carter reveals in this novel. I love to read for the 'details', and this novel was written intentionally down to every word (and even punctuation at times). I'd find myself looking up a word such as crepe, only to realize that one of the connotations is as a token of mourning, yet repeating the theme of death, significant throughout the novel.

For the sake of the blog, I will limit my discussion to a few of my thoughts - I am strongly considering writing my paper in relation to Nights at the Circus and do not want to 'steal' my own ideas (creativity) ahead of time without proper consideration and sufficient reflection.

We discussed the idea of magic realism, the Carnivalesque, and the grotesque last week. I was captivated by the use of these throughout the text, as the novel subverted truth with doubt, the real with the unreal, the fact with fiction, belief with disbelief, and how we question what we do not understand. As Carter puts it, "They knew the space they saw. They believed in a space they apprehended. Between knowledge and belief, there was no room for surmise or doubt.... Outside, under a sky the colour and texture of an army blanket, wild beasts, hunters, midwives, merchants, fur-traders and birds of prey went about their business in ignorance...Had they heard it, they would not have understood it; had they understood it, they would have mocked" (301,324). The entire novel is about being trapped and being liberated, about being caged for infinite and just as much about freedom.

I respectfully disagree that the novel is about reading for the political or philosophical 'big picture' purpose; I think the novel is as much about believing and living each of the stories within the novel, whether it be the tale of Maestro, the day Walser was used as an anatomy lesson for the Chimps, or finding the remains (or lack thereof) of Madame Schreck. I chose to partake in the magic realism as much as look at its purpose. To me, the novel was like the realization that a child has the day he/she realizes that the imaginative is not real, yet the child chooses to believe anyways. As a child I had an incredible imagination that did not just portray a reality, but created and believed that world. However, there is a point in time when one continues to create, but fully realizes it is but an illusion. Taken as a whole, Nights at the Circus represents the awareness of reality while yet questioning what is and is not. Alternatively, the novel had a very dreamlike state, where everything seems to make sense despite the fact that in reality it doesn't make sense at all. It can even be considered to have a likeness to Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, with its plot, characters and dream state. There is a complete freedom (from time, reality, suspension/subversion of the norm), yet everything is trapped in the dream (including the narrator's voice). Anyways, I digress...

In relation to the Grotesque, I found the novel to be like standing in awe while at the same time expressing that feeling of shock or realization of the strange unpleasantness of a situation. The closest thing that comes to mind is like standing over the eternally enclosed remains of the town of Frank, Alberta where a rockslide buried the town within seconds as a mountain literally fell down. Why do people travel to visit such a place? It is the feeling of standing over the lives that were trapped eternally there, the mystery of the few survivors, the feeling of timelessness as one stands over the town's grave. And at the same time, the feeling of wonderment and awe of the power of nature and mystery of death.

Other ideas of interest:
-Disguise -- the clowns (particularly Buffo and how without his face there is just an absence or abyss), Fevver's makeup and colouring, disguising the smell of rotting animal (303); this leads to questioning what is actually real (the "inner self" or the one that "is", the one the you make yourself to be, or the one that you actually are)
-Comparison of Fevvers at the start of her story and Walser at the end -- hatching from an egg, being taken in as a helpless being to be raised a (spiritual) character of the same gender, him being given feathers to 'fly' between lower and upper worlds, he's twice the size of the wild people (as Fevvers grows to become a huge woman)
-The "perpetually recurring cycle of return" -- the theme of being trapped in death and life that is repeated over and over throughout the text, and also the repetition of 'past, present, future' (from the machine built by the fellow that keeps Mignon as a fake apparition of the dead to the idea presented relating to the Shaman and their view of time, as well as the idea that time is going faster for them as they are "running out of time"
-How everything connects together -- eg Little Ivan as the grandson of the baboushka who becomes a clown, but later we find his mother in the prison, or Jenny from the whorehouse and later the connection with Albert/Albertina (Jenny's "treasure")

Geek Love - Books III and IV

***Miss Lick - page 155
I find it interesting that Miss Lick eats pretty much only one thing - the frozen dinners. This can be paralleled with the way she sees the world - in only one way. The frozen dinners are her own company's, just as her view of empowerment/good life for women is her own creation. She mentions that the only thing she eats are the frozen dinners at 900 calories a piece, but questions why she is so big. She eats only the one thing but fails to see the problem in her diet. Similarly, her view of the world is quite skewed in believing that painfully burning women's hair or faces, or removing pieces of who they are is liberation. She fails to see that her method of stopping men from expoiting them causes her to exploit them.

***The Horse (Frosty)
While rereading the novel, the symbolism of Frosty stood out to me. Whether Arty has already started to have an idea in his head for the future, or if Frosty is an inspiration that gives Arty the idea for the later Admitted, Frosty represents the start of Arty's control over Chick and the beginning for his later cult. He makes an agreement with Doc P that she can study Chick if she doctors Frosty. This is the same day as the sandstorm. It was unclear to me whether the sandstorm was a normal local occurence, or if it was somehow related to Chick's fear that first day that Arty trapped him in with Doc P. As is common in literature, the storm can be taken as an omen of the future. Further, after Frosty has his legs lopped off, the twins at first thank Arty for the present. However, Elly very shortly realizes the cost that has come, saying, "So this is what it's going to be like" (142). While Chick knows and says the horse has no hurt at all, Elly realizes that Arty is using Chick to remove all the pain. As Chick controls the horse's feelings, so Arty gains control over Chick, making him a slave. Indeed, Oly comments, "whether Chick kept the brute's heart pumping against his will I don't know" (142). Even in the absence of pain, the horse is scared and has lost the will to live; the horse can be considered as a "natural" being untouched by any human will to please Arty as the rest of the characters portray. We, as readers, can see what Arty does to this animal. Does the escape of pain come at the cost of losing one's life in a sense? This is an interesting thought when considering whether lopping off body parts liberates the Admitted later in Arty's Cult. They come wanting fearlessness, courage, compassion, love, and all-encompassing mercy (190) and Arty is just "telling them what they wanted to hear" (144). Norval Sanderson details the feeling from an outside perspective, saying, "I become convinced, for an hour, that Arty is not injuring them but is allowing them to acknowledge the pain in their lives in order to escape from it" (190). I think Frosty offers proof that in reality, this is not so. These people are not liberated as they may think, but lose pieces of their humanity in their cult following of Arty, who knowingly uses them for his own twisted power and sense of self, as well as for their money.

Geek Love - Books I and II

Details to Consider:

***Titles
Many of the titles Dunn uses are interesting and sometimes obscure. There are a couple that really drew my attention.

"Midnight Gardener" - While this title can be thought of in relation to the rose garden story about Al and Lil creating/breeding their own children as told in Al's fanciful story, the actual reference to the title in the text is given by Oly in the present scenario, saying, "Lily chose to forget me and I choose not to remind her, but I am terrified of seeing shame or disgust in my daughter's face. It would kill me. So I stalk and tend them both secretly, like a midnight gardener" (13). I did not even note this the first time I read the text, but I find it interesting that the actual written reference is tied to Oly instead of Al. It is possible that Dunn is drawing a comparison between Oly and Al, but I will have to think more on that topic.

"Meltdown, Diving into Teacups from the Thirteenth Floor, and Other Stimulating Experiences" - Meltdown describes much of Chapter 3, as well as a fairly large number of Oly's reactions to experiences. What I find interesting is the reference to the teacups when Oly poses for Miranda's artwork. Miranda does not actually live on the thirteenth floor, so this detail is of interest considering the connotation that the number 13 can have for cycles of fortune/misfortune and association with bad luck (Wikipedia). Aside from the misfortune in Oly's life, luck may have something to say on the issue of being born or made; luck infers some form of determinism.

"Geek Love" - The title of the novel is the same as the portrait drawn by Miranda that Oly sees while changing (29). Miranda drew the picture without knowing about her family roots at all. Oly makes several comparisons stating the likeness of Miranda with her father, Arty. However, as the reader, there is a clear contrast between Miranda and Arty; they have very few similarities in reality, physically, emotionally, and personally. The other thing that interests me is how a portrait of a person savagely biting the head off a live animal would be named "Geek Love." Why is the word love used?

"Your Dragon - Care, Feeding, and Identifying Fewmets" - As Dunn chose this to be the title of the second book (a fairly important title), this is an interesting choice of words. Fewmets are "the feces of a hunted animal by which the hunter identifies it" (Wikipedia). They are the only indication or hint of the animal's presence. I had a fascinating comparison/idea of how this related to the characters in the novel, particularly in relation to their humanity, but I forgot/lost it (something to come back to later).

***Crystal Lil
I think Crystal Lil is a very important secondary character. I think it is of interest to consider the following questions:
-What does Lil represent as a woman? (on the topic of gender as we started to discuss in class)
-What does the way she runs/walks/grabs onto things symbolize or represent?
-What could the act of killing the Bag Man mean in the larger context of the novel?
-How can her character be considered as a mother and as a "norm"? (The Binewski's are constantly referred to as being the opposite or apart from the norms, but in reality Lil is a norm. What does this have to say about the similarities between the norms and geeks? Does this not suggest that deep down, there is no difference between a norm and a geek, that we are in some ways what we believe ourselves to be, and that there is a commonality of humanity?)
-Is Lil really out of it, or how much does Lil really understand in the present day context? (While Oly describes her as being deaf and out of it, there are several moments of clarity, and Oly also says that Lil "chooses to forget.")

***Incest
Why does Dunn indicate/foreshadow the fact that Arty is Miranda's dad without indicating incest is not involved? In this family, it is believable that incest could have happened, thus the reader is caught up in lies to believe something that is repulsive and untrue. I think there is more purpose than indicating Oly's twisted relationship with Arty. I think it borders on the issue of truth as well questioning the status of "normal."

***Other Ideas that Stand Out
-Horst the Cat Man as a character
-Anger as a theme in the story
-The description of Chick that he tries to "help everybody so much that they would love him" and what that has to say for all of humanity
-The idea of protecting parents from reality (105)
-The contrast between the idea of "having a voice" in one's life, and Oly's main skill in life being her voice (Oly as oppressed by herself and others)