Tag: fragmentation

Family Life in Postmodern Literature

I think it’s interesting how the chapters in Tropic of Orange correspond with the characters. I’m not really sure what to make of it. It’s clearly another expression of fragmentation, but it’s odd that she outlines it for us in the beginning. It almost seems like a key, in the way that some of the information in House of Leaves seemed like a key. Yamashita is, in a way, telling us how to read the book. She organizes the information, it seems, to help us make sense of the novel. Doesn’t this sentiment seem slightly anti-postmodern? However, I’ve never seen it done in another text, so it is an innovative technique. I wonder if anyone read the chapters out of order. I’d like to go back and reread this in a year, but instead of reading straight through, I’d read the chapters the way they appear in the outline. I wonder how that would change the meaning of the text.

I liked this book, in particular, because it gave me some ways to continue thinking about my research topic. Most of the books we’ve read don’t deal closely with family life. In fact, their seems to be a lack of families, or a tearing apart of families, in most of the books we’ve read. Pynchon doesn’t depict a family and gives very little weight to the one marriage in the text. In House of Leaves, the Navidson family is figuratively (and literally in the case of Tom) torn apart.  There is one marriage in the Lathe of Heaven, but it is also made to be a background issue. 

We do see marriage and family life in The Female Man, but it is completely different from the traditional idea of the nuclear family. In Belovedthere are families, but they are often separated by death and slavery. In this text, family members never seem to work as a cohesive unit, but instead stay isolated from one another. In Mao II, Bill, Scott, and Karen make up a sort of untraditional family unit.  However, this family is also torn apart by the end of the novel. In The Tropic of Orange, Rafaela, Sol, and Bobby are at the center of the story. Although family members, such as Rafaela and Sol, seem to operate in normal ways, their are various abnormalities surrounding them. In this case, the family life is altered, not internally, but externally as the geography around them twists and turns from its natural state.

 Sometimes the aspects that interest me most in a book are not what it says, but what it doesn’t say. There is an obvious absence of family life in the books we’ve read.  This lead me to wonder – where do families (especially nuclear families), marriage, and love fit into postmodernism?

Unity in Fragmentation and Brokenness

In many ways Toni Morrison’s Beloved reminds me of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!  Both speak to issues of slavery and race; both narratives are told from multiple points of view and in non-chronological order, steadily fleshing out the many facets of the story.  I may be putting more faith in my reading of Beloved than Absalom, Absalom! when I say that I think Faulkner’s work is more post-modern in that in the end the reader is not sure what is true and what to believe; I think Morrison gives us a much more solid reality and a “center” that we can stand on.

I feel that the fragmented structure of the novel parallels the fragmented and broken nature of the characters in the work.  The setting of the narrative jumps around so the idea of home is difficult to pin down.  Sethe separates herself from the memory of Beloved, but Beloved cannot be repressed (sound familiar?  House of Leaves is back!).  At the same time, even though the characters lives and bodies are in pieces, the past of fragmentation brings them together and unifies them in the end.  I think that Paul D goes to Sethe with the hope that she might satisfy his needs and make him feel whole, unbroken.  He would not return were it not for some shared connection.  Granted, he does not understand the whole picture and when Beloved enters on the scene he gets uncomfortable and leaves.  Still, at the end, he returns and tries and offers to help heal and piece Sethe back together.  I also think that it is interesting that Sethe’s scars, her bodily brokenness, appears to form a tree.  The tree seems reminiscent of a family tree, showing that all of the characters, Sethe, Denver, Beloved, Paul D, are connected by the physical and not so physical wounds they bear.

The appearance of ghosts in this novel and postmodernism in general is an interesting one.  Going along with the theme I’ve already got rolling here, I think ghosts are great symbols for fragmentation: a ghost is a spirit separated from its body.  In the instance of Beloved, the ghost serves as a symbol of the mental wounds, the repressed, too.  With regards to Alyssa’s comments about ghosts, Morrison may not attempt to separate ghosts from religion, but I don’t think she tries to marry the two ideas together.  I feel the religion within the work comes out more in the form of a general spirituality than rigid establishments and dogmas.  If the work had been more about religion, then I think Morrison would have had the ladies at the end sing a hymn instead of one of Sixo’s(?) old tunes.  Ghost does not immediately connote religion; just think about how many horror movies have ghosts and then think about how many have priests in them.