For the Wife and her Speculation on Life

Dept. of Speculation – Blog One

Of the books we have read so far, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill is the most vague, yet painfully specific narrative. The story follows a woman, that calls herself the Wife (95), and the beginning and possible end of her family unit. In the first few chapters we read as she falls in love, gets married, and has her first child.

“What did you do today, you’d say…and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing” (25).

The Wife tells her story in bursts and jumps sprinkling in seemingly disconnected facts or quotes. The epitaph says “Speculators on the universe…are no better than madmen” which is a quote from Socrates. To open a book called Dept. of Speculation, this quote immediately makes me think that the narrator finds herself to be some kind of madman. Or at least her speculation is driving her somewhat mad.

I found this book extremely easy to read. The short paragraphs and seeming random nature of outside information only kept me reading. I sat down to read just a few pages to get a feel for the story and I found myself halfway through without even trying. I thought then, I was already halfway there. The narrator resonated with me. She has a dual nature, two perfectly opposite desires, one never possible if the other is true. This contradictory nature is something I believe I fight with.

She struggles with what she once wanted from life, and what her life has become. On page eight she says “I was going to be an art monster instead.” In the past she never wanted to get married and have children but by chapter 12 she’s done both of these things. But also, she no longer knows what she wants, or why she isn’t satisfied with what she has.

What do you want?                                                                            I don’t know.

What do you want?                                                                            I don’t know.

What seems to be the problem?                                                      Just leave me alone” (39).

The narrator can not rectify that she is a wife and mother, working a job that the husband would probably call “only vaguely soul-crushing” (34) if the roles were reversed. The narrator also says that someone asks her about her second book (38) which isn’t written yet. Another thing she’s had to give up so far.

“A few days later the baby sees the garden hose come on and we hear her laughing” (32).

I think mostly, the narrator is struggling with herself in these first few chapters. If she was an art monster who didn’t care for mundane things (8), then she would have never known the laughter of her daughter (32), but by giving up that part of her she loses a light that shines within (30). Then again, by giving up being that monster she can be apart of a society that thinks she is doing all the right things, but by being a part of this society she fades, becoming one of the mothers who do not show up early (42).

This progression is the start of the novels network of controlling values. These values can be found throughout the novel, but specifically in the in first 12 chapters. A controlling value for any given person is a cultural narrative their life follows. People will see any event or action through the lense of their own controlling values. This is how people with opposing views will always think their way is right even when given evidence that may prove the opposite. Controlling values are at the base of all judgments and projections. In Dept. of Speculation this is one of the dominant networks of controlling values that I found: 

Controlling Values

Context: Being selfish and concerned only with oneself and the creation of art, one loses out on the biologically and societally driven happiness that having a family and children provide.

Purpose: By forgoing some personal desires and giving oneself fully to the life of family, one will be wholly rewarded in the delights of children and die knowing that they have left something behind to continue to grow and prosper.

Opposite Controlling Values

Context: By giving up agency to focus on having a family and following social norms, one loses the spark of originality and light that made them an artistic creator.

Purpose: Accepting that the creation of art takes sacrifice, one can be a greater asset to society by allowing themselves to break free of social norms and do what they were meant to do, create.

“The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three” (11).

But even this seems to not encapsulate the whole story for the narrator. I wonder if she really gives anything up to continue creating. She has her family, and she has her second book, so to speak. She has gone through hardships and made sacrifices, but in the end it looks as if the only thing she truly loses is the city.

Yet still, she is never truly happy. Even she quotes “The third is an understanding of the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary experience,” while talking about the Buddhist’s three marks one must reach to attain wisdom (47). I think she may have discovered a kind of wisdom, but she feels “There is such a crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it” (44). This is the conflicting nature the Wife lives in, not fully apart of either ideal, for both are perfect opposites to her.

Genre and Form: Annihilation​ Blog 2

 

“When you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside of you” (6).

Annihilation is part science fiction, horror fiction, and fantasy fiction; three genres that create something more for readers to experience. Science fiction, many times, is a futuristic tale, or story that is technologically advanced, or even a story dealing with some kind of extraterrestrial. While horror fiction has elements that leave a reader scared, or uneasy. Then fantasy fiction deals with magic or the supernatural and many times isn’t set in the “real world.”

So far Annihilation is mostly a science/horror fiction novel. From the beginning, an air of uneasy mystery is brought to life. The Biologist says of Area X that “All of this part of the country has been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate” (3), which makes me wonder. Why is it not easy to relate? I feel that if something happens in an entire part of the country, as she says, that people would know what happened, or at least something easy to relate. On the same page the Biologist then says, “I do not believe that any of us could yet see the threat” (3).

The book continues in this way, making everything about Area X uneasy. This type of tension fits into the category of horror fiction, while the findings in the Tower lend itself to science fiction. The writing on the walls comprises of organisms that the Biologist can not fully identify. She says about the organisms in the letters, “most of these creatures were translucent and shaped like tiny hands embedded by the base of the palm” (24-25).

 

“Desolation tries to colonize you” (6).

These elements create a mysterious, ominous feeling. This mystery and slight fear of what’s to come keeps people engaged and ready. In the first fifty pages only about a day and a half pass in the book but it reads quickly. Many things are being set up (what’s so important about the lighthouse?), and many things are happening (goodbye Linguist) but the pace doesn’t feel rushed. It’s almost like the untouched wilderness is growing around the reader without them realizing they’re being trapped.

This situation, a world that was never what it seemed, requires there to be something more. I think that to most people the world is just as it seems with the simplest explanation being the right explanation. People want to step into a world like the one Annihilation is creating, a world where the calm is not calm, and a tunnel is not a tunnel, but a tower.

The form of the text also adds to the expectations created by the genre, it also circumvents those expectations. The qualitative progressive form evokes a mood from inferred qualities and allows the reader to move into a certain headspace, and progress with the text’s mood (Kopp).

 

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner” (23).

So far we have read that the Biologist in not just like her colleagues, she prefers solitude to people, and she not only fully accepts the dangers of the exhibition, she wants to be there. She wants to be there so much, even after three of her colleagues “leave” the exhibition she is still prepared to press on. Everyone else’s mood fits perfectly with the unease that surrounds Area X. The ominous nature of the uninhabited wilderness seeps into the others but not the Biologist.

 

I would argue that a qualitative progressive form surrounds the Biologist and her contamination. She says that her senses become heightened and that she is elated in the midst of the terrible things happening. On page 92 and 93 she worries herself out of this elevated mood with all of the questions about the Tower and the thing she names the Crawler, but finds that she slips back into it. She says that;

“The brightness in my chest, continued to sculpt me as I walked, and by the time I reached the deserted village that told me that I was halfway to the lighthouse, I believed I could have run a marathon” (93).

This statement comes after she has found a body, seen mysterious lights in a place no one should be and discovered some kind of creature. This circumvents the normal genre expectations. Under normal circumstances, I would expect the Biologist to be losing it, or making some crazy plan, or escaping. It’s unexpected to be that she’s feeling so good. But while I’m in this mood, or headspace, I am immediately thrust back into the ominous unease of the area. She continues to say that “I did not trust that feeling. I felt, in so many ways, that I was being lied to” (93).

Am I being lied to?

 

Me entering Area X.

 

This change in mood makes me wonder where the story is going next. The genre would have me predict that either the Biologist is destroyed by Area X, or she somehow destroys Area X’s mystery or an entity inside of it. I’ll have to wait and see.

Religion: Truth and Lies

I took Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut to be an exaggerated tale about religion and the culture that surrounds it. Told through the lense of a born again Bokononist, the story follows a convoluted spiral to the end of days, so to speak. The book left me scratching my head thinking why.

“[T]he son of a bitch had a piece of ice-nine with him – in a thermos jug” (83).

Barthes argues that there are five codes that describe the intertextuality of a writerly text. The codes help the reader to understand the interruptions they may have missed upon a mimetic, linear reading. By stopping and revisiting Cat’s Cradle in segments, the writerly text, and the use of the codes, allows readers to find connections to the cultural frame the text exists in.

“No damn cat, and no damn cradle” (166).

The island of San Lorenzo acts as a contained Symbolic Code that reinforces the dominant cultural codes of the time. One of the main ones being the fight between science and religion, or some form of truth and lies. There are poor islanders, cruel and rich rulers, and an oppositional religion that everyone believes in (but openly denounces). These many cultural dynamics are as old as people, and are as important today as they were when the book was written. The beauty of Cat’s Cradle is that it is self-conscious and draws attention to its Symbolic Codes. Even the cruel leader “Papa” is a devout Bokononist, demanding on his deathbed to be given last rites; “I am a member of the Bokononist faith,” “Papa” wheezed. “Get out, you stinking Christian” (218).

This comes right after “Papa” demands that Jonah kill Bokonon saying, “He teaches the people lies and lies and lies” (218). Having read Philip Castle’s book on San Lorenzo, Jonah knows that the Bokonon religion is built on lies and opposition between the city and the jungle. Yet still Jonah says, “I was not eager to kill anyone” (218). This symbolic code between the oppressive government and something to believe in is what kept the San Lorenzo people going. Their secret belief in Bokononism made life on the terrible island tolerable. Bokonon continually preached; “‘Live by the foma that makes you brave and kind and healthy and happy.’ The Books of Bokonon. I: 5” (epigraph).

Yet in the end these foma (harmless untruths) lead the survivors on San Lorenzo to commit suicide. How can the foma then be harmless? How can commiting sucide make “you brave and kind and healthy and happy”? I feel that the lies of Bokononism had become dangerous by this point. They no longer served their purpose in creating a utopia as I thought Johnson and McCabe had desired.

“Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything” (198).

The use of religion to create happiness in this text bothers me. Instead of actually increasing the standard of living on San Lorenzo, Bokonon created a religion to relieve the people of their suffering. Yet they still suffered, and in a negative turn of events some even died on the hook for their beliefs. Vonnegut laid bare centuries of turmoil due to poor living conditions and mixed religious teachings in such a way that it was comical, and outrageous. He wrote the symbolic code as if he was explaining it to the reader, rather than only existing within it. He called attention to the frame his narrative lived in, creating an interruption to the mimetic experience of the readerly text, yet somehow still creating a mimetic experience. By creating a false religion that was aware of its lies, the reader is forced to look at their own religion (which is taught as truth) and question how truthful it really is.

“I took my hands from the wheel for an instant to show him how empty of symbols they were” (285).

I think, like Campbell’s argument in Impacts of Science on Myth, the literal interpretation of Bokononism gets in the way of the spiritual impact it can have on people. In the end the dominant cultural code prevails. People have died for both science and religion and will continue to do so until ice-nine destroys the world, and in most cases even after that too. In the end religion killed the people and science killed the world. What is left for us to believe in?

Don’t Put That Fish in My Ear

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Blog 4

An agreement is struck every time I pick up a book. I am saying that I will try to read the text as it was meant to be read, and if I fail in this agreement I won’t enjoy the text as much as I could. This is me accepting my readerly role. I made this agreement when I picked up The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (THGTTG), I said I would try to be this narrator’s addressee.

Following what I just said, there are two roles present in every book, right? The narrator and the addressee. But, during our discussions in class we looked deeper and said there are actually three roles present in every text, the narrator, the addressee, and the reader reading the narrator address the addressee.

 

“I like the cover,” he said. “‘Don’t Panic.’ It’s the first helpful or intelligent thing anybody’s said to me all day” (47).

To peel apart each of these roles in THGTTG, we first have to look back to our previous discussion on the book’s dominant Network of Controlling Values. As unique human beings we bring to the text our own dominant network of controlling values that may run counter to the ones my group and I found in THGTTG, as James Seitz argues “Readers who are unable, for whatever reasons, to assume the values of the implied author will find the text less satisfactory than they would otherwise” (142). (In this example the implied author is our narrator). In other words, readers who can not step into the role of the addressee and experience the text with this assumed set of controlling values, the reader will not have an enjoyable experience with the text. To enjoy a text, such as THGTTG, a reader must submit to the dominant controlling values and try to read the text for what it is, not what we want it to be. In Blog 1 we decided as a group that the values were as follows:

 

Controlling Values

Context:  If you are reluctant to adapt to the changing world, you will not survive.

Purpose: If you adapt to the changing world around you, you will survive.

Opposing Controlling Values

Purpose: If you stick to your comfort zone, you stay true to yourself.

Context: If you step out of your comfort zone, you may go against your values.

Moving forward using these values we must ask ourselves some key questions. What kind of narrator would believe these values, what kind of addressee would believe these values, and what kind of reader would I have to become to believe these values?

In Blog 3 Jordan Coughlin wrote, “maybe there is some greater force at play that wants/needs Arthur and his comrades to update the THGTTG and accomplish all that they do along the way.” Meaning, could the narrator be some higher, more advanced being, telling the ridiculous story of Arthur Dent and company to “a roving researcher for that wholly remarkable book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (12) in hopes that the guide be updated to better serve its hitchhikers trying “to see the Marvels of the Universe for less than thirty Altairian dollars a day” (12)? Or could the narrator be an old, humorous hitchhiker that succumbed to the many pitfalls of an outdated guide and the addressee a captive guide researcher?

The reader would then need to fill the role of the addressee, who would most likely be eating up the ridiculous, improbable story of Arthur, with every aside being a possible new entry in the guide.

But what sort of values would this reading imply the reader adopt? Would it be the values my group and I found, or a different set? As Seitz pointed out, “rather, we ‘try on’ readings, envision the text through the eyes of various masks, all the while attempting to forecast what it proposes, ‘what it all adds up to’” (152). In other words, with this mask of old hitchhiker and guide researcher, the reader would want to know what it all means by reading with this frame, and would it end with a fulfilling culmination of events or the number 42? To this addressee, it wouldn’t matter. All they would want would be more information for the guide, the more outrageous and colorful the better.

I think that the narrator is actually something more, advanced. It plays its role of third-person omniscient with a kind of finesse that imbues it with a sense of character and personality. It also addresses certain events as if it has a large readership. At one point it says “Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now” (121). Many people have speculated it said, implying that somehow many people have knowledge of this event in the same way the reader has knowledge of it. Also, curiously enough, who thinks it’s curious? Here the narrator acts as its own character with opinions on the events of the story.

I suspect that the narrator is a newer, inuitiver, version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Also, I like to believe that, like the Earth, it was designed by the one that came before it. I can almost feel the words, “A [guide] whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate – and yet I will design it for you,” (163) in a voice similar to our narrator on the last page of the old guide. Why else would the narrator feel it important to fill the story with so many asides that feel like guide updates?

On pages 19 and 20 in our updated guide there is a comparative entry discussing alcohol which ends with, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sells rather better than the Encyclopedia Galactia” (20). Note the italics in the quote. The whole section is in italics while talking about the two books, except for the book’s titles. To me this is the new Guide talking about how it’s better than the other book. This self-awareness is like Marvin’s prototype mind. To me, it’s almost like Marvin is a system that comes before this new kind of Guide.

To further this idea, I think this new type of Guide is improbable, like the Improbability Drive. Why would the guide have such a detailed story of a homeless Earthling? Well, it’s a huge improbability, that is also somehow helpful. Arthur’s story surrounds:

[T]he Answer!”

“The Answer?” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to what?”

“Life!” urged Fook.

“The Universe!” said Lunkwill.

“Everything!” they said in chorus, (152).

And also:

“The Ultimate Question?” (162).

The Ultimate Answer turning out to be less helpful than the Ultimate Question would have been but, I think that the stories ultimate usefulness may not yet be apparent to the reader. But it will be, when most improbable.

So, if the narrator is the new guide, who could be the addressee. Is the addressee a hitchhiker, new to jaunting through the galaxy, or, could they be an experienced vet reacquainting themselves with the Guide? Whoever they are specifically, I believe them to be someone who wants more knowledge about the vast universe, someone who stuck out their thumb while lying in the mud, and this new Guide appeared to them, towel included, ready to show them the galaxy.

So what does this mean for us, the fabled reader of the narrator addressing the addressee? The improbability of the whole story is what seems to win out in the end, and Arthur is left, homeless and adrift, but never alone. I think that we are like Arthur, swept up on this wacky, nonsensical journey. We can give ourselves over to the zany events because it is so far removed from daily life. No government official would lie in the mud in the place of someone else just because he’s already committed to waiting around all day, no one would seriously take poetry as a form of punishment (it would be a discomfort at most), and no one would really believe that mice are the most intelligent interdimensional beings on the planet. We can either take a fish in the ear and hear what’s being said, or be deaf. The story drags the reader along because it is so out there, hitchhiking among the stars.

 

Not yet!