Bildungsroman BigFun!

October 10, 2008 by 2 Comments

Dear Millicent,

I just finished reading Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and the ending very much reminded me of an old Jezebel post from this summer about the quarter life crisis versus the return of Saturn.  You know, how everybody in their twenties tends to have a moment where their world breaks a bit, and it is often framed as, oh are you 27 or 28, must be your return of Saturn? Or, oh, are you isolated and living in Tokyo, you lucky full-lipped thing?  They did a great job or parsing the subject, pretty much boiling it down to the flummox before we get a sign that our life is going to make sense.  In the Jezebel writer’s case, she got a job, and calmed the fuck down.  This calming does seem to depend on that very important thing (job, plan, opportunity) actually arriving (which I liken to the comet Dimmesdale sees in the sky in The Scarlet Letter).

Lessing’s characters seem to go through a similar process, all self scrutiny and intense panicked thought, until, voila, jobs and marriages are agreed to. Then it is a fast, slap-of-the-hands, end.  Which, brings me to the bildungsroman ending where the young hero, after his or her adventures, has to decide whether to return and join the community through marriage or job taking, or keeps going into the wilderness, decidedly a lone wolf (much like the Amish rumspringa tradition).  Molly and Anna are not immature women, and their decisions arrive in middle age, after children and full histories.  They also need less of each other once their decisions have been made, much like Scarlett leaving Bill Murray and going off to her future, probably publishing her first book through her richie-pants connections and going on to write provocative things about how boring the culture class in America is.  I want to puke on my future version of her, and also be her, wear her clothes, and write her scathing richie-pants words.  But that is not the point.  I wonder if we leave behind the structures of support we find in the wilderness when we agree to go back to the fold, something like Tarzan waving good-bye to the apes as he puts on his tuxedo.  But, isn’t part of why Tarzan is awesome is that he never actually does that? He and the apes keep in touch?

Back to the bildungsoman, there is something in this…is all angst calmed by an acceptance of purpose, with the search being traded in for any answer at all?

TGIF,

CF

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Songs of Innocence and Experience

September 29, 2008 by 1 Comment

Dearest Millicent,

I hope you are not eating a Cadbury Egg at the moment.  It seems my faith in food (it was announced today that Cadbury eggs have been found to be full of melamine, the great sickener of babies, kittens, puppies, and all things adorable), is plummeting as fast as our stock markets.  If Cadbury is not sacred, what great fulcrum keeps our world atilt!

Onto other slight terrors.  So, you know I have been happily diving into Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.  All was well, and still is, but this damn paragraph gave me the shivers:

Paul gave birth to Ella, the naive Ella.  He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith.  And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

Now, when I am drawn to a man, I can assess the depth of a possible relationship with him by the degree to which the naive Anna [the narrator] is created in me….[there is more about all involved, and then it ends with this hit]

What Ella lost during those five years was the power to create through naivety.

I read this, and even though it is not in complete synchronicity with my experience, it nails something important and terrifying.  My creative powers as an  inexperienced youth were alchemical.  Now, they are closer to the workings of a drip coffee maker.  You and I have talked about this whammy before, and it was invigorating to see it exist in another woman’s work.  The fright, or the alarm, rather, that I felt when finding this line in the middle of my afternoon reading was that the condition was confirmed, and possibly permanent.

Another Cadbury egg: I was teaching Rear Window today and realized there was a good chance that my beloved and I are the most like the couple sleeping out on their balcony and cooing over their dog (in our case, cat).  I wouldn’t mind this fate that much at all, if only I could have Grace Kelly’s wardrobe (even just the green suit with the halter blouse would be enough).  I have always wanted to sleep on a balcony.

Are you well rested? Well spoken?  You must watch, to recuperate,  eight hours of Arrested Development and then Peep Show.  Doctor’s orders.

Yours,

CF

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Obviousities

September 25, 2008 by Leave a comment

Dearest Millicent,

I have some obvious revelations to share.  The first is Doris Lessings’ The Golden Notebook.  I’m in the middle of it, and with that, a big crush on the book itself.  I’ve read other of Lessing’s works, but this one is a new delight to me.  It feels to cliche’ to like it in the way that I do.  It does present women’s relationships in a way that I don’t think I have seen before. If I have, it has been rare.  Her characters are wonderfully cranky and judgmental, and constantly examining their crankiness and judgments.  Plus, the writing is exact and pretty.  Like Munroe, but with a different edge.  I read this paragraph, and thought of you:

“With strawberries, wine, obviously,” Anna said greedily; and moved the spoon about among the fruit, feeling its soft sliding resistance and the slipperiness of the cream under a gritty crust of sugar. Molly swiftly filled glasses with wine and set them on the white sill. The sunlight crystallised beside each glass on the white paint in quivering lozenges of crimson and yellow light, and the two women sat in the sunlight, sighing with pleasure and stretching their legs in the thin warmth, looking at the colours of the fruit in the bright bowls and at the red wine.

Second obvious revelation: That pang of “is there more?” that happens in relationships, it must be a luxury of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  Once a certain round of qualifications are met, a new sphere seems possible to ask for.  I think of this regarding the mutual friend who would like to have a boyfriend she actually likes.  I think of this regarding my own panics, outraged that I am yet to be actualized (and seeing that first I must conquer that great beast of esteem).  This actually calms me a little, writing it, because it suggests the issue is some of my own.  Is the great “work” of marriage that everybody is always talking about really the climb of this ladder–actually a case of chutes and ladders?

Third obvious revelation: When I am out in the world with my husband, I think I experience less of it, and it is my own fault.  I was grocery shopping solo yesterday, and I had a very strong sense of my public self.  Usually, when I am with him, I have no concern for the public self–if we are grocery shopping, I am unaware of how I look, or that I am a person part of the milieu.  I almost go on autopilot, and I think this is because I assume he will make most of the decisions (and because I like him making most of the decisions (these are the tiny myriad of decisions that take place every day: things like driving, which store to go to, which card to put it on, which cereal, which parking spot)).  When I am alone, suddenly I have to make these thousand choices myself, and I feel my own weight again.  I’m not sure which I prefer, or if I even feel guilty writing this.  However, it has been observed.

Hope you are well,

Yours,

CF

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