| ten good things (longest blog post EVER) |
[Oct. 13th, 2007|08:41 pm] |
i've been meaning to write this for about a month. which hopefully explains its ungodly length. truth be told, i've been pretty busy for an unemployed dude. i do want to write on here more often though, for realzzz...
10. 
richard hughes' novel a high wind in jamaica engenders the exact breed of surrealism i like best... its setting (initially a jamaican plantation destroyed by a hurricane, later a pirate ship!) is bizarre but also plausible, and its uncanniness owes more to thought out, atmospheric descriptions than to sudden disruptions in logic. in fact it's the logic itself that supplies its weirdness-- the way it naturalizes unlikely situations. its spookiness sets in as one page leads casually to the next. were it not for its occasional-- and totally inexcusable-- bursts of racism, i'd even say it rivals my other favorite classic-of-understated-surrealism: bruno schulz' the street of crocodiles.
like the henry darger painting that graces its cover, jamaica is largely a book about child sexuality. but unlike darger's constipated blend of innocence and repression (brilliant as it may be), hughes' handling of the subject is lucid and respectful. contrary to what i may have looked like in 1993, i've never been a pre-pubescent girl, personally. and i'd wager that hughes hasn't either. but as far as i can tell, he paints a convincing, comprehensive portrait of how that might feel, hormonally-- minus much of the lechery such question-raising might imply.
hughes isolates the tension between playfulness and learned morality with astounding accuracy. the book's precocious central character (emily) emerges at the tail-end of childhood's most limitless pleasures. she is solipsistic and confident-- almost to the point of megalomania. one of the great surprises of the book is the way that hughes reveres her confidence-- there's something convincingly utopian about her ignorance of gender norms, her willingness to follow her obsessive inclinations, and her ability to make a game out of everything. her "sexual awakening" occurs alongside her instinctual bravery in a variety of ways, most notably in her often dangerous interactions with adult men. hughes foreshadows the barriers, frustrations, and new pleasures that might soon arise for her as a growing person. these real-life dangers are rendered with a deep respect for the curiosity they provoke within her (and even, ickily enough, within the "pirates" aboard the ship). the taboos that arise are handled with an unforgiving investigative integrity, but there's a distant gentleness to hughes' writing as well. i found myself able to find parallels between emily's adventures and my own childhood-- particularly those weird, pre-"gendered" moments that society at large would rather not discuss. and it reminded me of the strange balance of confidence, insecurity, sexuality and socialization that determined my own creative abilities, for better or worse.
( nine more... ) |
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