Monday 24 August 2015

Elena Ferrante-"My Brilliant Friend"

     In the age of social media, which spurns on self-indulgence, Elena Ferrante's choice to be an outlier of social anonymity is refreshing.  She once said to her editor that "I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors."  This brings back some type of purity-false or not-to the eternal art of storytelling.
     "My Brilliant Friend" is the first in her four-part Neapolitan series.  It is a picture of a post WW-II, early modern Naples.  LIke her contemporary Karl-Ove Knausgaard, her writings tread the murkiness of fiction and non-fiction.  The major difference between the two is that unlike Knausgaard, Ferrante's own life is behind a thin veil of discretion.
     In a sensory manner, the novel elicits a tactile presence along with many propensities of high emotion.  There is a definite emphasis on how women are negatively shaped and limited by their social surroundings and expectations.  There seems to be an intensity of purpose with her writings. Ferrante finds little if any redemption in the traditional female experience.  It is a fatalism, a ring of fire, an unbroken circle.
     This book marks the beginnings of the main characters Elena Greco and the undefinable Lila Cerullo.  Lila, the daughter of a shoemaker, is the brilliant friend but also vindictive, confrontational, obsessively problem-solving and eventually, stunningly beautiful.  Elena is continually under the influential guise of her friend.  As Elena moves on to higher education, Lila resorts to quitting school and marrying young.  The two end up being almost exact inverses of each other.  For Elena, the question becomes a matter of whether she plagiarizes or honours Lila in her writings?
     Ferrante is intimate and candid in her bildungsroman or coming of age story.  Elena seems to go through the motions("I did many things in my life without conviction...I always felt slightly detached from my own actions"), while Lila has actions of both propensity and intensity.  The Naples childhood in the 1950's "was full of violence....life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us."  When they were young children, Lila threw Elena's favourite doll down the dark cellar and Elena in return does the same to her.  Later on, Lila describes Naples as a place without love, which in turn, makes the people sterile and promotes violence.  In many ways this book is also a sociological photo of a time and place, through the eyes of both class and gender.  Elena realizes by the end of "My Brilliant Friend" that by marrying young to a grocer, Lila kept "chained in a glaring way to that world, from which she imagined she had taken the best."  Elena, on the other hand, managed to escape that world.  In external appearance, she would no longer be a pleb.
     Elena's feelings of inferiority and awe of Lila persist.  All Elena can come up as a reason is some sort of shrouded theory.  "I had the impression, from the way she used me, from the way she handled Stefano, that she was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being, all her own, that was still obscure to her."  Elena herself feels separated from her own words and actions and is still in pursuit of discovering her own true identity, while Lila looks to have been certain from day one.
****1/2

Thursday 20 August 2015

Jorge Luis Borges-"Labyrinths"

     This selection of stories, essays and parables presents the myth of the blind man on an eternal and epic scale.   Borges has epitomized Latin American literature yet he only shows himself in his miniature writings, in which stories are often only several pages.  His skill, similar to Kafka, is the ability to present a vast propensity of depth in only a few words.
    In this collection the short stories are the main focus but I find his essays to be of a certain valour that I have not seen addressed by many other critiques before.  His stories are a bare cabinet of plot and focus on the alienated male, which in itself is a bit yawning of a theme.  Borges however is superb in getting all of us to question the sanity of how we perceive our own universe.  His writings have made him the king of magic realism.  He challenges the reality of nature.  He is absorbed in the various fascinations of mere existence.  Overall, "Labyrinths" is an embrace of solipsism.  The universe is in your mind.  What we perceive to be reality are our own ideas, largely coming from past inheritance.  Therefore, both our purpose and burden in life is to create meaning for ourselves.
     In "Tlon, Uqhar, Orbis, Tertius", Borges describes Tlon as "surely a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men."  This statement stands for Borges' praise of solipsism. When one builds perception based entirely on mind, this creates the labyrinth.  In a labyrinth, we can only be abstract perceivers.  Time is a plurality where divergence, convergence and parallelism are all involved as the different colours of paints used in creating our perceptions.
     In "The Library of Babel", Borges determines that our world is infinite.  "Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end-which is absurd.....The Library is unlimited and cyclical."  In other words, knowledge has an order to its disorder.  It is a world we have to not only face but add our own ideas to.  Discerning a beginning or ending is beyond our scope.  Pleasure cannot go much beyond the internal("There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought"-"The Immortal").  Many of our perceived thoughts are abstractions.  An example of this is money.  "It(money)can be an evening in the suburbs, or music by Brahms, it can be maps, or chess, or coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold"("The Zahir").  It also symbolizes free will.  There is some form of an inferno circling around us, containing both our griefs of oppression and our hopes of vastness.
     In Borges' essays a greater clarity comes forth.  It gives a transparency to his thoughts.  In analyzing Kafka in "Kafka and His Precursors", he compares him to the unicorn:  "a supernatural being of good omen....the unicorn constitutes a favourable presage.  But this animal does not figure among the domestic beasts, it is not always easy to find, it does not lend itself to classification."  On top of that, "we could be face to face with a unicorn and not know for certain what it was."  As reiterated in "The Mirror of Enigmas", the unicorn can be thought of as us in terms of the everlasting uncertainty surrounding us("It is doubtful that the world has a meaning:  it is even more doubtful that it has a double or triple meaning, the unbeliever will observe....No one knows who he is").
     While analyzing the arguments of Schopenhauer versus Hume in "A New Refutation of Time", he repeats his embrace of solipsism by saying that "time, if we can intuitively grasp such an identity, is a delusion.."   There is nothing beyond consciousness.  The consciousness of the mind is to Borges like a theatre:  "Where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations."  Borges ends up taking Schopenhauer's side in as far as agreeing that we can only live in the present.  In short, "Labyrinths" is an excellently choreographed collection of Borges' explanation of his solipsism perspective on life.
****