Posted by Steven
on 20/6/2009, 9:36:15
76.187.110.226
I've read two more of the books in the Yale course on the American Novel: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. (I didn't re-read the books I've read in the last 1-3 years: Crying of Lot 49, Bluest Eye, and Blood Meridian)
The Woman Warrior is classed by some as autobiography, by some as fiction. I would call it "mythobiography." It is a series of sketches about a Chinese-American woman (the author) and her immigrant mother. Some are in first person, some in third. They vary in style from the seemingly factual accounts of immigrant life in America to an heroic myth of a woman warrior in China--a sort of cross between Joan of Arc and the movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," complete with sword-wielding women flying over the treetops. The common theme of these chapters is the power of myth among Chinese women, both as an enabler in a traditional society where women were treated worse than slaves, and as a retardant to those women trying to adjust to American culture.
I would particularly like to recommend the lecture on this novel in the Yale course, even to those who haven't read this book or listened to any of the other classes. The lecture doesn't specifically address The Woman Warrior, but talks in general about Professor Hungerford's theory of "The Identity Plot" as the chief device in the novel from 1945 to about 1985. She compares this to the Marriage Plot, which dominated fiction in the 19th century. The lecture is number 14: http://oyc.yale.edu/english/american-novel-since-1945/content/sessions/lecture14
The next book in the series was Housekeeping, which I think was the best novel I've read so far this year. It is the story, set in a small town in Idaho in the 1950s, of two teenage girls put under the charge of their young aunt after their mother's suicide. The aunt, however, is a transient who only reluctantly gives up freight-hopping to set up "housekeeping." Her influence pulls the girls, who are already somewhat alienated from their peers, into dangerously independent ways of thinking. This is a beautifully written novel full of striking images and ideas of death, beauty, sanity, and memory. I wish we had read this one together and could be discussing it. My description can't do it justice, so here is just a sample:
"Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water--peaches and grapes are little more than than, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do your senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing--the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild stawberries."
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