j.m. coetzee's disgrace

while the book's still fresh in my head i shall blog about it. for once i'll be on top of things! =)
what an interesting read the novel was, really enjoyed the freshness of male perspective. it's funny how often you hear about female empowerment and War Against Rape but you never hear the rapist's side of things.

firstly, the unique character, david lurie, 52, yet immensely old in thought, behaviour and from what he sees of himself in others' eyes. his age gap from his main 'victim' in the book is glaringly obvious, a 30+ year difference from melanie isaacs. it is interesting how david lurie, being a literature professor, thinks and speaks in ways that i can identify with, how our literature professors themselves are so well-versed in poetry and prose and can come up with bits and pieces of words to suit each occasion. it is the way he speaks that differentiates him from melanie, antagonises her even, the fact that he is her professor. his experience, vast knowledge, all at once intrigue her, draw her further into his net, yet it also burns her, a moth attracted by a bright flame.

the way events play themselves out, limited by lurie the sole narrator, you are left in a limbo of sorts, unable to decide if the punishment meted out to him was satisfactory, deserved or no. it wasn't as if isaacs forcibly repelled him, fought against his advances. there was even mutual assent and participation, once. but in rape the victim will always be the victim, yes? i thought the way he handled the inquiry was simultaneously admirable yet irritating, the way he refused to comply to the board's wishes for a confession and apology, the way they refused to accept his frank declaration of guilt. things are never easy in reality, the situation is thusly believable here.

next, the relationship between david and his daughter lucy, a professed lesbian and woman 'of the earth', who grips the soil with the toes of her bare feet. the karmic cycle comes around when lucy is raped and the house plundered by three south africans. what david didn't understand about mr. isaacs before, he does now, with painful clarity. lucy puts rape in a new light, like murder it is: "when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her - isn't it a bit like killing? pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood - doesn't it feel like murder, like getting away with murder?" the phallus as knife. no wonder we immediately assume rapists to be male if you hear of a rape case. in a sense, i can then understand david lurie's agony and desire for castration - to be rid of the organ which he cannot control and is subject to Eros' whim and fancy. his vision of the surgeon, poking around his body, dissecting it with a scalpel.

disgrace: a socially constructed concept. coetzee's characters are placed in such neutral light, each speech made causes an epiphanic moment in favour of the one who spoke. when we realise that right and wrong are merely labels, and that people are NOT divided into the major nor minor, perhaps we need to seek refuge in the extraordinary imaginary. like david lurie and his beautiful opera that exists only in his mind.

kafka. so bizarre, so bizarre

i realise that i'm late for posting on the blog. it's just that lately it's finally hit me that i'm in school and it's already the 8th week (or end of it). tempus fugit, and it ain't funny. it's not that we haven't done our readings, i believe, it's just that we're too tired to get online to blog. okay. enough dillydallying and on to my thoughts on the metamorphosis and the penal colony by kafka.

first, i'd like to do a little show and tell. what gregor samsa looks like inside my mind. the wonders of paint, and how cute he looks to me!

okay. back to the serious stuff. what shot through my mind as i read metamorphosis was firstly, despite how energetic and mobile gregor suddenly found himself (thus the numerous legs), he was psychologically restricted simply because of his family's perceptions/receptions of him, and because he couldn't articulate his thoughts. would it have been different if he could speak? then perhaps the sheet on the sofa could stay atop him and his mother and sister would come in and sit at a corner to talk to him, find out what his feelings were. but because he lost the power of speech, he lost his rights, his recognition as a 'human being', or a being with a human soul. he lost all vestiges of 'human-ness' in his family's eyes.

it just goes to show how limited our perceptions are, by our senses and by popular thought, by the mass media and so on and so forth. have you ever wondered how you've managed to acquire that irrational fear of bugs? (if you don't have any fear of that sort, then pardon me, it was a gross assumption on my part.) was it because you had a terrible, traumatic experience when you were young? like a bug bit you on the leg or something. or was it because you saw your mother/grandma/auntie/sister (erm not to be politically incorrect but i admit it's usually the female that does) scream every time at the sight of a hairy-multilegged thingy, and automatically your brain stores this information away, and you react the same way afterward when encountering another one of the miniscule, harmless - but oh, eek! creatures.

this fear is therefore irrational, of bugs of all sorts. i can sort of understand his family's initial reactions though, a BIG BIG bug is definitely something to get squeamish about. but surely after awhile, his appearance should be familiar to them, and therefore they ought not to react so violently every time? there was once i volunteered at the singapore zoological gardens, and they asked me if i was afraid of snakes. funnily enough, i didn't see any reason to be afraid of them, and so had to handle pythons for photography with visitors. see, despite shows on animal planet telling you about poisonous snakes, i personally hadn't encountered any vicious ones, so yeah, why hold a groundless prejudice against all snakes? likewise, i shake my head at the samsa family. they ought to know better, to be more objective. their reticence from gregor, their withdrawal of sympathy and social interaction was what inevitably caused his mental and emotional degeneration into eventual death.

and now for another commercial break from text: my pathetic attempt at reconstructing the 'apparatus' in the penal colony

it's a terrible attempt, i know. but heck, i never did do well at drawing.
nevertheless, you gotta admit, this form of torture, meaningless and mindless it may seem, is certainly an intriguing, well-thought out creative piece of machinery.

the officer was insistently annoying. pathetic, his lengthy diatribes of his departed commandant and his obvious clawings at a system that was unacceptable by modern standards. it was, as if, he was brainwashed, and his mind ('narrow, incapable of understanding') was the only weak one left that had no barrier of common sense to keep quiet and be one of the passive (yet hopeful of future uprising) adherents who ate above the commandant's grave. i felt that his death by impaling on the spike of the machine was not right, not fair. he should've been made to suffer like all the rest of his tortured victims, he should've been made to feel the 'message' on his body, the words 'be just' inscribed over and over again on flesh. (incidentally, this reminds me of some punishment in harry potter, anyone remember this?)

be just. these two words. i realised that there might be the possibility kafka didn't allow this last statement to be etched onto the officer simply because it wasn't a worthy message. was he ever just in administering this torturous death to others? the flippant way in which death was the penalty for a person who dozed at his post seems not just to me. the officer's death, quick and relatively less painful than his previous victims', was not just. the officer did not manage to achieve the realization (or did he?) that at the 6th hour, it isn't enlightenment that dawns in the victim's eyes, it is the active mind shutting down its defenses and giving way to a passive acceptance of death, it is the blanking out due to the ever-shrinking, obliterated world of the tortured due to the immense pain. the way in which the explorer could simply hop in and out of others' lives unscathed yet scarring them forever, was unjust. justice was never really manifest anywhere within the text. therefore the final message did not get written.

murky mercy

first gatherings of thought on Michel Faber's Under the Skin

um. i kinda like meat.
More so than other food. In fact, if I weren't worried about the direct relationship between cellulite and beef (which is something relayed to me by my mother, not that I've read this in any medical journal or whatnot), I'd probably eat steak everyday. I'd be a meatatarian, haha. :P The gruesome processing of the monthling vodsel didn't affect me in the least. Does this make me uncaring? I hope not. Perhaps Hollywood gore has turned me (along with many others I'd bet) rather insensitive to bloody scenes. The passage about Hilis tempting Isserley with the premium steaks initially prepared for Amlis Vess got me salivating and daydreaming about the Australian beefcuts nestled within the family freezer. Seriously. People may be rather disgusted by my cannibalistic reaction to the whole issue regarding Isserley taking a vodsel morsel (ooh la this rhymes doesn't it), but perhaps at that point in time of reading I was in complete sympathy with the hungry Isserley. Not just because of the fact I'd skipped lunch, but because of Faber's descriptive portrayals of Isserley's mannerisms and emotional thoughts. You come to think of her as one of US.

And indeed, why not?

After years of interacting with vodsels, I'm sure we must've affected her, penetrated to her subconscious, altered her ways of living. Blurred the lines of being. (She tried to see herself as a vodsel might, didn't she?) The book doesn't fully explain why in the beginning Isserley didn't bring back female vodsels, we are left to figure out why. But it is pretty obvious - had Isserley brought back females, it would've been too close for comfort, too jarring against her current physical reality. The book would've been severely different if the protagonist were male. Females (pardon me if I'm wrong here but all stereotypes have a grain of truth in them) are generally more sensitive, they find it easier to communicate with others, they are more willing to sacrifice comforts for the sake of others and they trust more easily. Feelings and emotions have more impact here because of Isserley's unique predicament, despite herself trying to be a cold callous professional ("yanked this contemptible little shoot of sentimentality out by its root"), she reacts upon her emotions, more and more so as the story progresses toward its explosive (literally) finish.

Isserley IS the only character within the book that's trapped within the nowheresville space betwixt species, a horrific limbo with no light at the end of the tunnel (which ironically she sees as she submerges herself in the bathtub). No other character in the book can completely identify with her physical sacrifice to surgical mutilation, her sufferings of social ostracism, her inability to express herself sexually and to give in to sexual pleasures, her confusion of dealing/empathising with sentient animals (us homosapiens), her huntress' guilt, her desire for brutal revenge after her rape and her complete and total enjoyment of Nature. There are probably so many more issues plaguing her character, but this a rough summary of the whole. Isn't it a bit much for an individual to deal with? I can understand why, in the end, she wanted to disintegrate, to release her spirit through a transcendental evanescent evaporation. Tears wouldn't do justification to her pain ('the jagged traps of her grief', how beautifully expressed!), she would have to become the moisture that falls from the clouds that we take so much for granted.

Nature.
We discussed a poem in my first 19th Century lit tutorial the other day that reminded me of Isserley's appreciation of the miraculous world around us, as opposed to how much we don't notice it.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

- William Wordsworth, 1806. (emphasis mine)

Isserley's world - noxious/toxic/smog. As opposed to ours. Golden/beauty/purity. Well, the less industrialised parts, anyway. I've never thought of the clouds as being another sea floating above us for one thing.

You know how everyone who read the book first tried to envision Isserley? When things began to confuse us and we realised she was of a different sort? Well, my first thought was that she was a mermaid. I don't know why, perhaps it was her eyes. And the side profile on the cover. Kind of reminds you of that National Geographic Afghan girl.

And then you have to cope with the fact that she keeps thinking herself deformed, while to us she possesses one of the feminine bodily parts that get much (too much, in my opinion) attention from the media, big breasts. It's true, isn't it, the hype really DOES exist. In any case. What Isserley and her kind think the epitome of beauty is, is opposite for us. She cannot eat what we eat. Her sleep cycles are different from ours, the alien language (Faber's neologisms like vodsel, mussanta and aviir - how fun!), the concept of mercy not existing for her race. Everything is jarring within the book, my perceptions keep altering as more and more clues are revealed along the way. Instead of feeling disturbed and having my notions of the world usurped though, I feel intrigued by these new ways of thinking. I definitely have to reread this over again and then talk more about it later. Forgive me for my tangled thoughts, it's the best I can do for now.

We can NEVER read this book for the first time ever again, have you thought about that? Damn.

encased, not entrapped

The Fat Black Woman.

Words that fill up your mouth. Seriously speaking, I like to play around with words. Sometimes I use them wrongly (like in weird sequences or funned-up neologisms) on purpose. The point of this is that I can feel the roundness of her, the protagonist, the person declaring her emancipation, her total acceptance of whom she is, to the world. I envy her confidence in her voluptuousness and her pride in overcoming her tormented history. Having watched two seasons of Dim Sum Dollies, I would say that Selena Tan is the Singaporean equivalent of this poetry persona we're currently studying, she projects herself to be utterly happy with her God-given shape, even to the point of flaunting it in her audience' faces. Why can't we all be like this? Happy to be what we are, and blind to what the world and the society around us perceives as "hot", as the "perfect body shape". If only we could see through all that. I don't think the Fat Black Woman hates the beauties in "Looking at Miss World" (although she wonders when they will ever really burn), I think she hates the socially-constructed notion that slimness equals beauty, that the outer skin is all that matters though it covers up a shrivelled soul beneath.

There was a time ... when Yang Gui Fei was considered the epitome of beauty.

I would say that in Singapore, I'm considered a middle-to-big sized girl. Sometimes it gets to me, most times it doesn't. In the States, however, I gained a big boost in confidence, seeing as how all the people around me came in different sizes and shape and shade. Because there were so many, people didn't bother to scrutinize. OR perhaps I didn't notice them scrutinizing because the crowd just enveloped you into its welcoming anonymity. Here, though, I get the sense that Asian women just LOVE to look, and comment, and criticize, despite the way they themselves look, which may be perfectly acceptable in most peoples' eyes. (I think I am just unhappy about my mother and aunties' nagging but yeah, indulge me for a second here.) No way can we Asian girls "drift in happy oblivion", instead, the slimming industry's "profitsome spoke" is happy welcome in its intrusive presence. I am unhappy about this fact, but I do not deny that occasionally, just occasionally, I entertain a small thought or two about what would happen had I the financial resources to actually sample their services.

another thought: the protagonist's identification with her kind and its past

There is something in Grace Nichols' poetry that I cannot identify with. How the Fat Black Woman is so connected, seamlessly intertwined with the women of the past, of her like kind. How one woman can speak for the whole, can speak confidently as an immense presence encompassing her ancestors past and present, looking forward toward the future as a beacon of hope. How an individual, revelling in her uniqueness, can still be part of the genealogy. I envy the Fat Black Woman for her past, her collective experiences, her tumultuous history. This is something lacking for the Skinny Chinese Woman. Perhaps the clamour to be "thin and gorgeously-slim", this fanaticism that has been driven into our minds from the West has so easily pervaded our sense of what the body should be, BECAUSE we have no idea of whom we really are. We have none, or not much, identification with the women of our past. Maybe because we do not want to (it being very unglamorous to associate oneself with samsui women for example), or maybe because we are largely apathetic and too susceptible to the influences of the West.

I DO wish we invented some dance, like the foxtrot or the tango. =)

And like Ann said, I too have a headache.

rumbled ramblings

test.

je suis faim.