Author: Lapras

I’m not sure what kinds of feelings are felt after a parents’ death and I can’t ever try and pretend to channel what those feelings might entail. When thinking about Bechdel and her recollection of her father’s life, and the life that they shared, I am still left with the idea that Bechdel has, like me, many questions that are still unanswered. Questions pertaining to her father’s sexual orientation, whether or not the allegations of sexual abuse to a minor were true, and if he was, even to say, happy. However I am making the claim that it is within those unanswered questions that Bechdel was able to navigate her own identity, while still struggling with that fact that she never honestly knew his identity. It is his death that brings about this complexity, this speculative persona that she didn’t think to expect from herself. Bechdel does not know how to interpret her father’s death, “What’s lost in translation is the complexity of loss itself” (Bechdel, 120). In this scene that Bechdel says this, she is looking through a box filled with old pictures and in that box she sees a picture that stands out: a photo of her father in a woman’s bathing suit. Bechdel had the question of why, but ends with her statement that “he’s lissome, elegant” (Bechdel, 120). It is as though Bechdel is letting her father exist as himself without feeling the need to identify him. The idea of being “lost in translation” is Bechdel’s outcry to deconstruct her feelings of grief toward her father’s death. The “complexity of loss itself” is the grief. How is Bechdel supposed to interpret her father’s death, when she knew almost nothing about him, as he was barely nurturing and only took interest in Bechdel once she was in college. What does it mean to lose someone who barely revealed a persona of themselves that had encapsulated most of his adult life? “Lost,” meaning “no longer to be found,” (Dictionary.com) is Betchdel’s inadequacy to find her place on the spectrum of grief, as she is no longer able to see herself as being a griever but sees herself “lost in translation.” “Lost in the translation” over her father’s identity, “lost in the translation” over her father’s absence of emotion, and “lost in the translation” over her inability to fully accept that her father was gone. To see someone as tangible, is the idea that their physical presence exists among you. In the scenes that we see leading up to her father’s death, there is a connection starting to form, although slow, and the tangibility of them being together gave the father a sort of contentment. The tangibility is then lost with his death, and it is in that loss that Bechdel begins to find herself.

 

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.

Lost [Def. 2]. (n.d) in Dictionary.com, Retrived: April 26, 2016,

from http://www.dictionary.com/browse/lost?s=t

 

 

 

 

 

“Mala will take care of you, Pohpoh. No one will ever touch you again like that. I will never let anyone put their terrible hands on you again. I, Mala Ramchandin, will set you, Pohpoh Ramchandin, free, free, free, like a bird!” (Pg. 173)

Under the Mudra tree, camouflaged under the untamed brush, sat Mala in a chair with her eyes closed with her mental state churning. Otoh is with his father, and both are trying to enter Mala’s yard, however Mala has yet to be seen by anyone. It is in this passage that Mala coincides her past with the present. Pohpoh, her younger self, exists by her (Mala’s) side. This scene is the unveiling of what Mala has felt about her younger self. Mala was not “fond” of Pohpoh when she and her were one, however as the years went on Mala became more accepting of Pohpoh. It is as though the guilt for not always being able to protect her sister [Asha], the shame of the sexual abuse from her father, and the pain from her mother and Lavina leaving, all exist within Pohpoh. This childhood trauma has seeped out of Pohpoh’s brain into Mala’s, and the chaos in the yard represents the acknowledgment of her past; Mala is brought back into reality and has to confront her torment. I want to make the claim that this acknowledgment of Pohpoh being present with Mala is the eruption of loneliness, anxiety, and misery of her childhood that could never be acknowledged because of the constant physical and mental degradation inflicted by her father. “Mala will take care of you, Pohpoh” is the replacement and loss of their mother and the affirmation that Pohpoh was the mother figure and has grown into being that battered mother figure. It is phrases such as, “no one will ever touch you again like that” that a mother would say to a child. Mala is wishing to travel through time to save the innocence of her younger self, and render her perplexing future so the deterioration of her home, the leaving of her sister, and the incestuous relationship with her father could be abolished. It is to stop the future of Pohpoh’s life as a disoriented being, and to stop her mental deterioration as Mala. “Free, like a bird!” is the final release, the final realization that to move forward, Mala’s needs to reconcile with her past. Thus far in this novel we see that Mala’s home has become devoured and encapsulated with plants, trees and brush, and this build up of nature around is the representation of her past and the “bird” is Mala, waiting to be set free through her own self.

In class we have been discussing the idea that Autobiography of Red is re-writing history, that the myth of Hercules killing Geryon is bending, rendering, and transforming a point in mythology into a Queer narrative. We have also discussed that Anne Carson challenges the regular forms of language by writing the novel in prose, however the book reads more like a novel, but there are no paragraphs with no distinguished chapters. All of this is true and an aspect of the inventiveness of this novel is the deviation from reality and fantasy. This bending of both topics is not just the idea that Geryon is a red-winged monster; it’s the idea that Anne Carson puts the fantasy aspect of the novel in the reality. What I mean is the setting of novel is reality, the characters are reality, and the experiences that are happening to the characters are reality. For example, Geryon’s incestuous abuse from his brother, his mother’s constant smoking and disconnection from her son’s and Geryon’s love for Hercules, one could argue are reality–real experiences of the modern world. However Geryon is the focal point of the fantasy, a red-winged monster. It’s Anne Carson’s use of language that disillusions our grasp of having a distinguished conception of reality or fantasy, as they both coexist together. The reality is the volcanoes, the weather, the people, and the experiences of love, anger, and confusion—exist as reality through a fantastical creature that embodies not only a myth but also an otherwise ostracized being of queerness.

 

 

The Wizard of Oz, a movie classic and a personal favorite, especially when I was younger I watched this movie all the time, along with listening to the audio on a cassette tape. Although I loved this movie, I would always become frightened and confused when Dorothy crossed over to Oz. As I became older, the movie became creepier, as I’m still trying to decipher why this is. However, looking through the lens of Halberstam, The Wizard of Oz is a queer classic movie. Halberstam defines “queer time and queer space” as being “of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” (Halberstam, 1).

If we take a moment to deconstruct Dorothy’s predicaments before the tornado, we lay the base understanding of queer time and space. Dorothy’s companion is a dog-named Toto, and she lives within the bindings of a heternormative lifestyle in rural Kansas. Unable to conform to a possibly foreseeable barren life around her she runs away only to return right when a storm is tearing through the desolate Kansas land. Queer time and space becomes apparent as soon as the screen turns into color. Dorothy has left the “temporal frames of…family” (Halberstam, 6) and now has entered a world of Witches, dwarfs, talking words of endearment and flying monkeys. Although Dorothy is physically present within the modern world, she has also managed to be physically here in queer time (Oz). Oz creates a world in which queerness has become the framework of their existence. To define further what I mean by queerness in terms of Oz is that in the film, the rainbow is seen as symbolic of the LGBTQ+ flag, Dorothy has escaped a heternormative lifestyle and now is exploring a state that is not non-normative, a place in which Dorothy’s desires, whether that be through the understanding of her sexuality or friendships (with the scarecrow, lion and tinman). This represents the unwinding of time, and the embodiment of postmodernity, it is as though the place of Oz is queer centrality, and Dorothy exists within the subcultures, navigating an unimagined future.

“You don’t get over it because “it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it.” (Winterson, 155).

 

At this point in the novel the narrator has constantly reflected on death, and of those who die, and if they will ever find peace in a world that is so big. After the narrator left Louise, because they thought it would be the best choice for their relationship, we see the narrator deteriorating line after line. It is not until the end of the novel, when the narrator, after a journey of searching for Louise, sees her appear in the doorway their flat, in what seems to be emaciated state. At that point, a “new” beginning becomes the ending.

The narrator has inflicted herself with pain. The narrator has become accustomed to being in control, but death has taken hold of the hierarchal power structure of the narrator, turning it inside out, and has forced the narrator to introspect. Introspective insofar as to mean that the person the narrator loves, has left,. This void that “no-one else can fit,” is being filled with remorse and penance. The narrator mentioning of “new people” is the affirmation of the past relationships, the past feasible “lovers,” but “the gap” that never closed. The acceptance that although Louise is the one the narrator loves, it is the pain from the past clustering in the present, which now coexists. The narrator’s language is of anguish and calamity, that echo’s the precariousness of this novel. Pain, gap, death, grieve, hole, stops, never closes­­––words that are dispersed through this novel that are dreary and are always in and out of the narrator’s thoughts and feelings. It is as though once things are settled, the narrator shifts the gears of her emotions and deviates from the scene, causing everything that we the reader thought we knew, into more pandemonium.

This continual berating of the narrator, and these somewhat sympathizing lines, makes me fall back into the trap of liking the complex narrator. The narrator’s love for Louise is real; I truly believe that no one else can fill the narrator’s emptiness except for Louise. It is not that the narrator wants sympathy for them, it’s that she wants us to conceptualize the complexities of love, the complexities of people, and the unsteadiness of life. Love is fickle, it is pain.

“You were driving but I was lost in my own navigation” (Winterson, 17).

We see a continuous crumbling structure of love woven within this novel. This idea of being within ones “own navigation” comes from the narrator’s overt fixation of love and lust but not knowing how to hold on to that, maybe even choosing the wrong lovers. The language used is clear and concise in its metaphorical usage, the idea of being in a relationship and progressing together within a relationship. The idea of the narrator’s “own navigation” cements the idea of the narrator’s lost infatuation with their love.

Understanding this passage, means understanding a lot of this novel thus far. The narrator falls in and out of love with married women and single women. It’s as though the narrator gets the same unfulfilling result, being on someone else’s navigation. The narrator is on this high, and it is not until they hit reality that they realize this relationship is only a façade. The lover’s however, aren’t always “driving” the relationship, and in many ways the narrator is driving, and they’re trying to navigate their journey with the narrator only to realize that love is not being reciprocated.

I think, though, that the narrator wants readers to feel compassion and empathy for themselves. We, as readers, see the unsteadiness of the relationships, however our sympathy should not be towards the narrator, it should be more towards the lovers. The narrator is manipulating us. The narrator’s captivation and undeniable love for a companion is not valid because the narrator is deteriorating. Deteriorating because one relationship ends as the other begins, never cementing in an ending.