ATWOOD's Oryx & Crake: Discussion Questions

Our final book of the season is Atwood’s dsytopic Oryx & Crake: an excellent book, as it happens, to read immediately after Gulliver’s Travels.

No coincidence that Atwood’s opening epigram quotes Gulliver. O&C may not be a Juvenalian satire in Swift’s mode, but when Jimmy tours the self-damning ‘wonders’ of Watson-Crick (Wolvogs), it bears more than a passing resemblance to Gulliver touring Lagado Academy’s ludicrous Projectors.

All page numbers are from the Anchor books paperback

This story is ripping tale & a terrifying social critique that haunts me as all good novels should. When I was asked this month to help brainstorm an essay on The Future of the University, I thought first (direly) of Martha Graham & Watson-Crick. Corporate bidding wars & “Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills”! (Applied Rhetoric,188)

Ars Longa Vita Brevis.

The full quote of M-G's motto, by Hippocrates, translates:

"Life is short, [the] art long, opportunity fleeting, experience misleading, judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.”

Indeed.

Last year, when I read the Harpers essay preceding Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, I also thought of Oryx & Crake.

Klein, like Atwood, explores a certain apotheosis of capitalism: disaster-inspired privatization & the dismantling of the public sphere. Klein titles the chapter discussing this: Disaster Apartheid: a world of green zones and red zones—a description not unfamiliar to the Corps compounds & pleeblands of Jimmy’s world.

“With emergencies on the rise,” writes Klein, “government no longer able to foot the bill, and citizens stranded by their can’t-do state, the parallel corporate state will rent back its disaster infrastructure to whoever can afford it, at whatever price the market will bear.” (p. 419)

As a journalist, Klein (fore)sees society divided into those who can & cannot afford to replace public services with private services, the middle class fleeing to “green zones” of security within the poverty & violence-ridden exteriors. “[A] new, more resilient approach to national security, one built not around the state but around private citizens and companies...Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already.” (420)

CorpSeCorp as Blackwater, for instance. Upscale hospitals, Baghdad’s Green Zone, New Orleans’ Sandy Springs--a ‘contract city’ ‘with no governmental processes in place’---these suggest real life prototypes of HelthWyzer & Paradice.

And this is what categorizes Oryx & Crake as ‘speculative fiction’, rather than true science-fiction. As in PD James’ excellent Children of Men or McCarthy’s The Road, even Huxley’s sci-fi borderline Brave New World, no law of physics is broken, no invention unprecedented. What’s here only extrapolates upon scientific, cultural & economic trends already in motion.

Glowing rabbits, for example. Entirely without preaching she shows, unnamed: Global Warming. Web porn. GMOs. The freedoms we willingly sacrifice for security. Even the Methuselah Mouse (22). The fun is in its imaginative departures; the punch is in its plausibility.

This was great fun to read for the group. I hope you have a grand final discussion. Happy reading, everyone. Don’t be a stranger!

~ A. Campisi

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Discussion Questions & Suggestions

• Satire? Do you think O&C is a satire? (CorpSeCorp? And yet....) How & why or why not? Why flag Gulliver?

• What do you make of the epigram from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse?

• Education: Here we see bidding wars for students; an evolved value & purpose to an education; an economic class division between arts & sciences; generalized illiteracy; a selective amnesia of history; the comparative roles of “Student Services”.

Although it’s clear which skills & fields this society values, & the author herself is obviously a ‘word person’ (several of Atwood’s close relatives are scientists), the descriptions of each institution play out in scenes sparing neither side its particular degradations, disgrace, damning (a)morality, or ridicule.

→ What's the critique here?

→ Do you see academia heading in this direction?

• Class. Talk about economic class.

Here’s the rich /poor gap in extremis: the compounds vs. the pleeblands; the elimination of the middle class. I admire this book for deftly creating a (literal) bubble of privilege & class freedom that allows Jimmy & Crake—as many actual people of their class—to be completely unmoved by the rest of the world. After all, at most we glimpse that world at a cool remove: through highly mediated websites like Brainfrizz & HottTotts.

With them, we are so perfectly apart from it that it’s shocking on page 257, so late in the book, when we suddenly see “shots of boondocks war in some arid mountain range across the ocean, with close-ups of dead mercenaries, male and female; a bunch of aid workers getting mauled by the starving in one of those dusty famines far away.” Mountains? Famines? Aid workers? Even the reminder that there is a government is startling.

• Jimmy’s Mother. One nagging exception to their ability to ignore the outside world is Jimmy’s mother, who’s out there somewhere: involved. What’s the purpose of her character?

• Don’t Let Me Down. Jimmy is told “Don’t let me down” three times, once by his mother, then Oryx, then Crake. What do each of them mean? Why is it repeated?

• Games & porn. “The body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.” (85) Talk about their early influences of choice: the pornography; the games: Barbarian Stomp: see if you can change history! (they can); Blood & Roses; Three-Dimensional Waco; Extinctathon; Kwiktime Osama.

→ How do these instruct & influence each of them?

→ Of all their adolescent diversions, which was your favorite invention? Which one troubled you the most & why?

→ What do these sites say of the economy driving them? “It was amazing what people would do for a couple of lamb chops or a chunk of genuine brie.” (85) What lines have these crossed that are still intact (more or less) today? How close do you think we are to any of these in particular being so easily available or popular?

• Happicuppa. Which everyone continues to drink despite the genetic manipulation, economic devastation & social upheaval it causes “elsewhere.” Why? Does this remind you of any real world events?

• ChickieNobs. Would you eat them? Advocate for them? Why or why not?

• Do you think BlyssPluss would sell today? Why or why not?

• Oryx. What does she (& her particular history) bring to this story? Why does Crake love her, do you think? Why does Jimmy? What do you make of her fate?

• Crake asks: What’s real? We already genetically engineer our food plants & animals, our medicines, our bio-weapons, in growing possibilities our children. Visiting Watson-Crick, Jimmy looks at the ChickieNobs, the wolvogs, & it's asked: “Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?” (206)
Can you answer these questions? Where IS the line?

• Crake says: “Nature is to zoos as God is to churches....Those walls and bars are there for a reason...Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.”
“Them?”
“Nature & God.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy.
“I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.”

Do you believe in Nature with a capital N? What does that mean?

• After the fall, Jimmy imagines Crake’s retort: “The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment—the way it always was...and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.” (228) IS this the way it always was? Has Crake’s interference fundamentally changed the world’s natural order?

• Our Stranger, Snowman, asks: Why me? Why him?

• WHY? Why did Crake do it at all? Do you think it turned out as Crake imagined it?

• The Stranger: discuss our final book in terms of the theme.

• Defoe. Who knows the literary reference in the chapter 15 title: Footprint? Why invoke this here? What do you make of the allusion?

• Rewriting Creation: both literal & mythological. The new gods. Talk about Snowman’s relationship with the Crakers.

• What is Snowman’s responsibility to the Crakers?

• Symbolic thinking. Apparently Crake fails to eradicate ART, SPIRITUALITY, & DREAMS. What’s going on with this authorial choice? Why did he want to eliminate them in the first place?

• The last page. How would you face your own kind? What’s going to happen next?

SWIFT's Gullivers Travels: Discussion Questions

“He had been eight Years upon a Project for extracting Sunbeams out of Cucumbers

...he did not doubt in eight Years more, he should be able to supply the Governor’s Gardens with Sunshine at a reasonable Rate.” (167-68)

All page numbers are from the Penguin Classics version.

This might be my favorite line of Swift’s 1726 satire. It’s from a scene wherein literature’s most worldly sycophant, Lemuel Gulliver, a.k.a. Quinbus Flestrin, ‘Man Mountain’, the erstwhile nanunculus Grildig (90), tours among Lagado’s Academy of earnest Projectors, all laboring on behalf of the Public Good. I laughed aloud through that whole section.

With the love of his country foremost at heart (not to be exceeded by his extreme Love of Truth), our most unfortunate Stranger records four remarkable Voyages: .

[None to be mistaken for his presumptive namesake’s, Jon Swift]

• To the isle of the diminutive Lilliputians
• To the kingdom of the giant Brobdingnagians
• To the floating island, Laputa, & lands beneath its roaming shadow
• To the Country of enlightened horse-like Houyhnhnms
  

No coincidence: all four are set near lands & latitudes frequented by travel narratives of the time (e.g.: New Holland, Alaska, Tasmania), as Swift wrote Gulliver in parody of such (i.e. William Dampier’s Voyages, which you can read online HERE).

This and the larger satire are written in the Juvenalian mood.

When our Traveller’s name bears an intentional similarity to “Gullible”, the satirical concerns for total Veracity & Empirical Observation are poignant. Even moreso in an era when travel narratives could be the only public source of information on a foreign place or people.

They become morally synonymous with journalism.

So when you discuss the stakes of this satire, consider how sharp & personal Swift’s barbs remain if you substituted, say, our contemporary international news culture for ‘travel narrative’.

The first barb is meant for writers; the 'Gullible' is for readers.

While we're at it, let’s give a nod to the 18th c. coining of Yahoo, thought to be a variation on the word HUMAN. Beware: for now you know that if hurled as an epithet, Yahoo! could be grounds for a duel.

Yet I, being studious of brevity, shall not belabor the point.

Rather, infused as we are with a modest Tincture of Learning & wholly within the pretense of Reason, acknowledging our many Prejudices & a certain Narrowness of Thinking, let us begin!

~ A. Campisi

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Discussion Questions & Suggestions

• The Stranger. A perfect book for our theme. In what way is he actually Stranger in each land? What does he learn from each People about his own Native Countrymen? How is he affected each time he returns?

• The Bigness of a .... Size matters: HOW?

• Rational. In the context of these Voyages, what does it mean to be a ‘rational creature’?

• Do you agree with Gulliver that the Houyhnhnms (pronounced “Hwinn-ems”) are the pinnacle of an enlightened, rational society?

• Can you compare Houyhnhnm social philosophy to any other political systems—fictional or historical, theoretical or actual?

• The first ‘yahoo’ he meets leaving the Houyhnhnms is an Aboriginal ‘savage’ who shoots him with an arrow. The second is the elaborately kind Portuguese captain Pedro de Mendez (263). What is this transition about? What are we being shown in the captain’s character?

• Compare & discuss in broad strokes the politics & values of each society he visits, according to its Bigness.

• More specifically: Compare the values of Lilliput’s justice system (p. 56) with those of Brobdingnag (p. 126) or the Houyhnhnms' (256). What social commentary arises from the descriptions of each?

• Were there any observations of society or human nature which struck you as still holding particularly true today? For example: “The Disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a Man incapable of holding any Public Station” (57)

• Honesty: “Nothing but an extreme Love of Truth could have hindered me from concealing this part of my Story.” (123). Gulliver is constantly concerned with questions of Truth & Honesty: in his records, in the falsehood of others, in the hypocrisy of historical leaders, in not being believed by his hosts or countrymen, in the purpose of narratives, in the cultures which depend on lies & those (Houyhnhnms) which don’t even have a word for them. What is this theme of Truth about?

• Empiricism. Related to this is the question of objective observation, prized in any ethnographer or historian. Discuss the methods, stakes & effect of ‘empirical observation’ as it comes up in specific instances of the book.

• The Author’s Love of his Native Country. Such titles almost always seem to follow a host’s opinion like this one, from the Giant King: “I cannot but conclude the Bulk of the Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.” (123)
A beautifully timed line, no?
Talk about Gulliver’s Pride in his country and the comparative impression he has in each Voyage. Why do his panegyrics always seem to backfire?

• Scat. Among the pivotal images that fail to appear in all cinematic renditions & children’s versions—(such as “A frolicsome Girl of sixteen, who would sometimes set me astride one of her Nipples” (111))—is Swift’s hilarious devotion to scatological detail. Like it or not, it is a significant theme.

Talk scat.

Here are some examples:

• G. ‘Discharged the Necessities of Nature” inside the old temple where he’s chained (an allusion to Westminster Hall), which must be removed by wheelbarrow trains daily (30)
• Discreetly defecating in the sorrel garden
• Plagued by giant fly excrement
• The heroic / treasonous piss extinguishing the tower fire (54) which earns him a sentence of death commuted to a mere blinding.
  
• “The Operation to reduce human Excrement to its original Food” (168)
• And: perceiving that “Men are never so Serious, Thoughtful, and Intent, as when they are at Stool” the Professor would profoundly investigate the Ordure of great Statesmen suspected of Conspiracy against the Government, which was brought to him in barrels. (178)
• Shat upon by Yahoos (208)
• “The Cure prescribed is a Mixture of their own Dung & Urine forcibly put down the Yahoo’s throats” which Gulliver then “freely recommend[s] to my Countrymen for the public Good, as an admirable Specific against all Diseases produced by Repletion.” [ie: eating too much; gluttony] (241)

• Talk about the Isle of the Ancient Dead, magicians who can call up honest ‘ghosts’ of any named hero of the past. A lot of pages go to this angry screed. What does he learn?

• What did you think of the Struldbrugs (Immortals)—and Gulliver’s speculative ambitions for immortality as compared with the unhappier truth?

• What's the analogy of the floating island?

• My favorite images of the book are all in the 3rd Voyage, beginning with the Flappers & zeroing in on the Projectors.

The Laputian Flappers, their masters the cuckolded snobs of mathematics & music, all living in terror of the sun’s mortality, which “will by Degrees be encrusted with its own Effluvia” (153)

“Persons who are able to afford it always keep a Flapper...the Business of this Officer is, when two or three more Persons are in Company, gently to strike with his Bladder [affixed like a Flail to the end of a short stick] the Mouth of him who is to speak, and the Right Ear of him or them to whom the Speaker addresseth himself. This Flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his Master in his Walks, and upon occasion to give him a soft Flap on his Eyes, because he is always so wrapped up in Cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every Precipice...” (148)

→How it is that a race of such impractical intellectuals commands such control over those below? What are the larger connections & comments on social hierarchy here?

• The Anagrammatic Method (179) & plays on words. Talk about the made up words of the book, beginning with Gulliver’s names (for himself & for others). Then there are the alleged variations on London England (Mildendo; Lorbrulgrun; Lagado; Fladona Gagnole; Luggnagg) & Dublin (Lindalino; Glubbdubdrib) Tories & Whigs (Tramesksan & Slamecksan); and the more blatant: Laputa (in Spanish: the whore; or the English put = a stupid fellow (as perhaps in Lilliput)).

• Some claim Swift is simply a misanthrope, but I think the opposite is at least as likely. What do you think?

• Pride. The book ends on this note: Gulliver's exhortation against Pride. Discuss this move.

A comment:

As an occasional Traveller oft pretending to lofty Aims of Public Interest, even the faint hope to “make Men wiser and better, and to improve their Minds by the bad as well as good Example of what [I] deliver concerning foreign Places” (266), I might cynically suggest the greatest fiction in this book lies in the universally deep & inexhaustible CURIOSITY that Gulliver finds aimed at his travels and country of origin wherever he goes.

For in mild sympathy for Dampier & his justly mocked ilk, there is–as there always has been—a Carnal Appetite out there for any narrative in which “Authors [have] less consulted Truth than their own Vanity or Interest, or the Diversion of ignorant Readers.’ (137)
It's all Stories, after all, even the Truth.

Not an excuse; only marking an enduring dilemma for any writer.

SARAMAGO's Blindness: Discussion Questions

Apocalyptic stories are always in demand. We are energetic fantasts of our own doom, endlessly fascinated by seeing it writ large (although we in the west require endings with salvation & hope). Note the enduring popularity of such works in literature & pulp alike, from McCarthy’s The Road to Will Smith’s revision of I Am Legend.

In fact, Atwood will help us end civilization as we know it again in May.

The son of illiterate pig farmers, Portuguese Jose Saramago began writing novels in earnest in his late 50s & won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He’s a notorious crank, a communist & an old world atheist. Like Rushdie (& the old man with the eye patch?) he married a beautiful woman 30 years his junior. His drunkenly bastardized surname means ‘wild radish’. His daughter (a biologist) is named Violante.

Spoiler warning.
The following reveals plot & character details.

Here's a good NYT profile by Fernanda Eberstadt. It has a section on Saramago's narrator (page 6), who is the reporting spectator in most of his books.

A movie of Blindness is coming out soon. How could they not? The scene in which they’re fleeing the burning asylum alone is sparking with cinematic promise. I’m encouraged to see it stars Julianne Moore & is directed by Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener).

This is still one of my favorite books & it was a pleasure to re-read it for the group this month. Enjoy!

~A. Campisi

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS & SUGGESTIONS

All page numbers are from the paperback Harcourt Brace edition.

The WRITING

FORM. One of the great feats of this books is its stripped down form. It’s unpunctuated with chapter titles, white space or italics, few paragraph breaks or speaker tags (= “he said”), & for a book that is so heavily dialogue-based: no quotation or question marks, exclamation points, or line breaks for speaker shifts, separating adjacent speakers only by commas & capital letters. He does not even use character names. Amazing to me: he achieves this without stumble or confusion.

He makes similar choices in other works as well, notably the excellent & often-banned Gospel According to Jesus Christ, but there is no book better suited to this style than Blindness.

First, how did the formal choices affect your reading experience? Was there a learning curve? Any other observations of formal choices?

Second, how does the style specifically fit & add to the book’s themes?

TENSE. One of the techniques that impresses me the most is Saramago’s free flow of tense. Specifically, he’ll change without warning from past to present & then back again, often in the middle of a sentence, & he does it seamlessly. I’d be curious to know how many readers noticed this happening & what you thought of it when you did catch it. He does it on the first page, for example. Also p 202, 210, 274 (a nice close-up of the lamp flames), etc.

More elegantly he does it on p. 155, just for a moment, as a tool not only to shift & narrow our focus—functioning as a camera might do a close-up in a movie—but also for switching the point of view. This is masterful work.

Here’s that example (p 155):

The doctor’s wife has wandered out by the gate at night, a soldier outside it with a torch. We been for a long time in the doctor’s wife’s POV, she’s sitting, contemplating the scissors, then the next sentence begins:
“The soldier approached the gate, although he is standing against the light, it is clear that he is looking in this direction, he must have noticed the motionless shadow, although, for the moment there is not enough light to see that it is only a woman seated on the ground...the soldier points the beam of a torch at her, now there can be no doubt, it is a woman who is about to get up...in a flash he asks himself whether he should raise the alarm...as a precaution he points his weapon in her direction, but this means putting the torch aside and, with that movement, the luminous beam shone directly into his eyes...” from then on it's in past tense.

NARRATION. Who is the narrator do you think?
I ask because while totally reliable & omniscient, it often swoops in with an “I” or a “we”, & freely uses rhetorical markers (like: that is to say; in a word; so to speak; as we imagine it), which function as indicators of candor & authenticity, but also insert some distance in the reporting, making sure we see that it’s a mediated story, either written or told.

Sometimes it speaks inclusively, as if the narrator were there, too (even referring to “our blindness” (218)). Sometimes it appears to be looking on aloof, proposing thought experiments: “Let us put ourselves in the place of the soldiers....Let us remember the precedents...” (111) Is it the writer they meet later? Is it speaking as Humanity? Is it the author? What did you make of it?

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the STORY

STRANGERS. “Who spoke, It was me, Who is Me, Me” (99). Here’s the book of all books to talk about our theme. In a nameless city & country, they are strangers from beginning to end. Even “Names have no importance here.” (59) Why do they never give names & insist that the blind do not need them? When the women return from the orgy, they "are different women now". How instead do we know one another--or ourselves?

WHITE. Why do they see white, “a milky sea”, “like a light going on”, instead of darkness or nothing?

BLINDNESS. What’s being investigated here? This question comes up again & again throughout the book. It's answered differently by different characters. Why are they blind & what does it mean to be blind. What is “blindness”?

What do you make of this: “Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are, said the doctor.” (126)

Or this, “The blind are always at war, always have been at war” (193)?

DOCTOR’s WIFE. Surely one of the great heroines of contemporary literature. What did you think of her character? Why does she retain her sight? How do you interpret the last page of the book?

What did you think of her saying: “I shall become more and more blind because I shall have no one to see me.” (317)

The STUFF WE’RE MADE OF, “This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference, half malice.” In the context of the book, do you agree?

COMMUNISM. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” (141) What do you make of Saramago using this Marx quote here? What other political statements does this book make? Organization. Leadership. Duty. Morality. Tyranny. Law. Equality. The Government. The Military. The People.

TYRANNY. Saramago grew up under the fascist Salazar dictatorship. Whether or not there are specific allusions to that history, however, there’s a stunning political allegory to be had in the mass dissent & then uprising against the armed thugs holding their food (163-164). Why does it fail when the numbers are on their side? What’s the larger story being told here?

WOMEN. So much to discuss here. The doctor’s wife’s leadership. Sexuality. The sexism of individuals. “No great shakes” Focus on the shattering order to present the women in exchange for food (beginning on 166).

Talk about the debate & moral discussion, how exactly the women volunteer & then prepare themselves in their own ward. Talk about their compliance, especially in relationship to their men & after their dissent when it was only money the thugs wanted. Why do they comply?

Later, what changes that allows for a successful group & individual (terrorist?) rebellion?

AFFAIR. Talk about the doctor’s affair with the girl with dark glasses, the wife’s & girl’s reactions.

DOG OF TEARS. Talk about the dog of tears. What might he represent?

CHURCH of the BLIND GODs. There’s a very powerful image at the end, when the doctor & his wife are taking shelter inside the church where she alone can see that all the statues, paintings & even the crucifix have had their eyes either bandaged or whited out. When others learn this is true, they panic. After which: the doctor & his wife take their food.

First, what might this mean in general that this has been done?

Second, go through the specific list of images (316-317) & see if you can make any closer analyses. Beyond the simplest image x = character y connections, let’s consider for starters how the character of the doctor’s wife deepens with the image that: “there was only one woman who did not have her eyes covered, because she carried her gouged-out eyes on a silver tray.” (that is a painting of Saint Lucia, by the way)

FREE WILL. Does Saramago's purported atheism make sense to you given what you’ve read? Does it affect how you interpret parts of the book?
Maybe he’s an atheist, but there’s a lot of spirituality here. There are persuasive arguments out there, too, that this book can be read through a Christian lens, even a Catholic message of using free will in a dark age. What do you think?

ALLUSION. Who recognizes this allusion? p. 158: the doctor’s wife is spying on the sleeping thugs. “The blind man was sleeping, his head resting against the door jamb, his stick had slipped silently to the floor, there was a defenceless blind man and with no columns to bring crashing down around him.” What do you think it means in this context?

PROVERB. “As the old proverb never tires of teaching us, while trying to cross himself the blind man only succeeded in breaking his own nose.” (17) Was anyone else reminded of Aadam Aziz, of Midnight’s Children, breaking his nose while bowing to God?

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A NOTE for approaching Gulliver's Travels

This classic isn't really long, but the language is old & so you'll want to give yourself some time. Remember what I warned you about with Rushdie? And did you listen? Start reading now.

Also, many versions of Gulliver's Travels come with introductory essays & contextual analysis. I don't recommend any one in particular, but the book & discussion may be more fun if you've read a little about the context. (Only because it's the one on my shelf) I'm going to use the Penguin Classics paperback & will refer to page numbers there. Have fun with it!

RUSHDIE's Midnight's Children: Discussion Questions

Alas for poor pickle-nosed Saleem, disintegrating in a Bombay pickle factory, foretelling that—like Scheherazade—his life will end when (if not before!) he finishes his tale of 1001 ‘Midnight’s Children’.

If you ever have a chance to hear Salman Rushdie speak in person, I recommend it. He has more of the world in his head than most. He’s bitterly funny and furious, a man perennially condemned to death for his writing. He speaks with all the wit and eloquence of Old World erudition, yet remains as willing to cite the merits of Blade Runner as Persia’s 12^th c. Rubaiyyat.

Perhaps that’s the least we should expect from a best-selling author dubbed a Knight & an Apostate both.

I met Rushie once, if fleetingly. We were introduced one evening in Ithaca, NY (where you can meet a surprising number of accomplished artists without a huge crowd at your elbow). Our author-host encouraged him by generously naming me a ‘very promising young writer’, at which point his eyes glazed over as if to plead: Oh, God, not another one.

Fair enough. The “promising young” are a dubious lot.

He did share a magnificent anecdote, however, about the extremes of defending freedom of speech, which is roughly represented here, under International Guerillas.

The title, Midnight’s Children, is taken from a speech by then-prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, delivered at midnight of 14/15 August 1947 to mark India’s independence from England. In 1993 the book, Rushdie's second, was awarded the "Booker of Bookers," a honor accorded to the best novel published in the competition's first twenty-five years.

This story comes at you through a fire hose—and not always one that feels under control. From its stuttering start to its full-bore finish Midnight’s Children is a tour-de-force, thematically & literally a giant work. There’s a different lens for every fan.

Rushdie is not an author you ask for lean precision; he’s a writer one turns to for the Truth.

Suffice to say it’s far more than any set of twenty questions can cover, so let’s just jump in for fun.

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Discussion Questions & Suggestions

"There are so many stories to tell...so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well."

Personal Passages

• Last month, I suggested reading Midnight’s Children with an eye for short passages—a single image, exchange or event—on which to do a close reading & then bring as a personal contribution to your meeting.

• If you chose to do that, you might begin by sharing those.

• What were some of your favorite images?

The Storyteller’s Truth

When & with what image would YOU begin your own life story? Why would you start there?

• The ‘beginning’. Saleem begins the story of his life with his birth: the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, at the exact moment India gained its independence from British rule. Then he immediately backs up and begins again with his grandfather, emphasizing the importance of genetic heritage, legacies, identity. “I must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it really began.” Why does he begin his life’s story there?

• The Frame Story, ie: the narrator’s present-day story that frames the rest, a la Arabian Nights, where Scheherazade telling stories to save her life is the Frame for her 1001 tales.

(Most wonderfully, this device (a frame story) is also called: Rahmenerzahlung. Though take it from me, who's tipsily apt to pop off with words like Operculum & Rahmenerzahlung to pretty things at parties: it's really better not to use this word in public).

• Get yourselves on the same page with the frame story, in which the dying 31-year-old contrives to tell us his life story, literally & allegorically, before crumbling to dust.
What is this about? How does returning now & then to the Frame Story function as a valve for the histories this “swallower of lives” tells us?

• MC. Can you agree on a basic version of the story it contains?

• 1001. Saleem tells us Midnight’s Children parallel the history of the post-colonial nation. Do they? Is this allegory doing more than giving us a comprehensible scale of suffering?

• Methwold’s Estate. Of what significance is Saleem’s growing up on the Methwold estate & the manner in which it, and everything inside it, is bequeathed to them?

• The Center of Everything. Saleem is a highly self-conscious autobiographer, often self-centered, needy, even narcissistic. He’s convinced (rightly?) that he is at the center of Indian nationhood, “handcuffed to history”, intent that his life means something. What do you make of the narrator’s attitude?

• Padma. How does Padma’s character, the narrator’s irreverent, illiterate care-taker & lover, guardian of ayah Mary’s chutney factory, balance Saleem’s narration?

• An Unreliable Narrator. Saleem gets some facts wrong & even tells some outright lies. He withholds critical information. When he gives the wrong date for Mahatma Ghandi’s death, for example, he admits: "But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time."

So it’s the Truth vs. the Facts again: one of my favorite themes. Or as Rushdie puts it: the 'Remembered truth' vs. the ‘Literal truth’.

• How did you take to Saleem’s unreliable narration? Why do you think Rushdie made him that way?

• Are his ‘Remembered Truths’ more or less truthful or authentic than the Pakistani government’s Truths? What are the differences there?

• Rushdie has a very short essay here called: 'Errata': or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight's Children, which is worth glancing at if you’re going to talk about Saleem as an unreliable narrator.

• Not His Whole Story. He is ‘remaking’ his life, after all. For all his emphasis on biology & destiny, for all that Saleem appears to have ‘inherited’, this family history is not his biological own. Why does Saleem wait so long to tell us he was switched at birth? Or to say who his real parents were?

• How does his biological parentage change his relationship to his family history? To India / Pakistan’s story? How does it fit into the history his life is said to parallel?

• The Switcheroo. What is the effect & significance of switching these particular characters, Shiva & Saleem?

"Occult Tyrannies"

Several of our season’s books have made it clear that we are constantly surrounded by portent signs and omens merely waiting for our awareness & interpretation. Consider sharing (& interpreting) a distinctly Rushdian sign or omen from your own life.

• Talk about the role of Fate & Foreknowledge in the novel.

We know from the first pages that Destiny looms large here.

For example: Frozen ‘rubies’ of blood & ‘diamonds’ of tears fall from Aadam Aziz’s nose. A page later, after his father has suffered a stroke, his mother starts a gem business, selling rubies & diamonds. Later, Aziz sees his future wife’s face for the first time on the same day World War I ends, in 1918. There’s a self-conscious concern for fateful signs here, even if that only emerges in the telling.

• How do these signs work as forces in the story? In characters’ lives?

• Similarly: Pre-cognizance. That he would lose a finger. That the war would save Shiva. That Musa would bring destruction. On & on. Some of it is Saleem's exaggeration, an authorial license, but some of it is authentic. What is the reality, role & effect of such prescience?

( it is, of course, somewhat easier to seem 'omniscient' when you're narrating history.)

• Handcuffed to History. Saleem claims he’s responsible for a great many things, from his father’s alcoholism to various affairs of state. Why does he believe that so much of what goes wrong is his fault? What does he mean by claiming fault? Is he responsible?

• One thing about Rushdie, he likes to interpret his own symbols for us sometimes, perhaps before anyone else can get them wrong. Were there any explicit authorial interpretations that you particularly appreciated?

• Why does Rushdie destroy Saleem's entire family with disease, war, and natural disaster?

Fragmentation

“Please believe that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically”

What would be the most allegorically appropriate way for you to depart the world?

Aziz falls in love with his wife by seeing her piece by piece through a sheet.

Saleem is inexorably falling apart, literally being ground to hundreds of millions of pieces.

• Other examples of fragmentation? What is this theme about?

• What do you make of Saleem’s fate—crumbling to dust, the hundreds of millions of pieces? What does that represent?

Biology & Destiny: the Super-Natural

Assuming you were born at the stroke of midnight on the Independence of your home (or host) country, what supernatural power have you been granted? If you can do so safely, please demonstrate it now for the group.

• War-knees. A nose the size of the Indian subcontinent & birthmarks on either side. Talk about the Supernatural powers accorded to various MC, depending on how close they were born to midnight. What is the meaning and nature of each, to the extent that you can say?

• Shifting Powers. What do you make of it when Saleem loses his telepathy with the surgery, then gains a sense of smell that detects emotions?

• Amnesia. Why does he lose (& then regain) his memory?

• Why is (Muslim) Saleem known as "buddha" during his time as an amnesiac soldier in the Indian-Pakistani conflict?

• Inheritance. Saleem has ‘inherited’ the huge nose & blue eyes of his grandfather, yet later reveals he was switched at birth. What does this say about biology & destiny? How does this personal twist in telling a life story parallel the turmoil of post-colonial India itself and the struggles of nationhood?

Proboscissimus! The Nasal Motif

Please point out for the group one of your own specific physical traits (for example, your birthmark the shape of the highly gerrymandered 64^th district of St. Paul) & explain to the group it’s allegorical significance.

• The Noses! (& their vegetable counterparts: cucumbers (& their phallic associates)) play surprisingly significant roles in this book. List out some of the examples. What’s going on with this choice?

Strangers in Their Own Land:

• Consider our theme. At once heralded as the very embodiment of sovereignty & nationhood, Midnight’s Children are nevertheless hunted down for extermination. Why?

• What does this hunt reject? What does this choice mean?

• How does this relate to the Indo-Pakistani war, justified on religious grounds, cleansing a nation, purified for the good of the country?

• Why sterilize & release rather than, say, murder them all?

[Here it may be important to note two things:

1. “The Widow”, India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi), carried out the forced sterilization of Midnight’s Children. In real life, Indira Gandhi did implement a voluntary sterilization policy, followed by her son Sanjay’s highly unpopular campaign of forced sterilization of the poor in the late 1970s.

2. Related sections of the original version of Midnight’s Children resulted in a libel suit with Gandhi, forcing Rushdie to make revisions.]

Religion, Morality, Authority:

• The hole. When Aadam Aziz bows in prayer, he cracks his great nose on the ground, & in doing so loses his faith in God. “A hole” opens up inside him. Discuss the significance & consequence of this. Is this related to the hole in “the perforated sheet”?

• Discuss the shifting Bases of Authority. Throughout the book we find people finding & losing faith, shifting bases for religious conviction, exploring the use & abuse of religion by the state (ie: when Ahmed’s assests are frozen, presumably because he is a Muslim) & the role it plays in daily fear (our characters terrified that Mahatma Gandhi’s murderer might turn out to be a Muslim, relieved when he proves to have been Hindu).

• Snakes & Ladders: is presented early as a childish, hopeful binary of Good & Evil. Later Saleem is saved by snake poison, giving him “an early awareness of the ambiguity of snakes.” How does the book deal with morality, good & evil? IS there any Good or Evil?

• Scriptural Authority. What is Saleem’s relationship to Islam?

• Muhammad. "(on whose name be peace, let me add; I don't want to offend anyone)" Do you think he (Saleem / Rushdie) does? Where & why?

• Taking on a great mantle indeed, Saleem claims to have heard "a headful of gabbling tongues" after which he "struggled, alone, to understand what had happened," and later "saw the shawl of genius fluttering down, like an embroidered butterfly, the mantle of greatness settling upon [his] shoulders" What’s happening here?

Characters:

• Parvarti and Padma?

• FYI: Salman Rushdie’s birth name is “Ahmed Salman Rushdie”

(Sir Ahmed to us.)

• Shiva & Saleem. Talk about this pairing, their switch, their powers, their relationship, their rivalry. Think about them not only as personalities, but economically, temperamentally, religiously, in terms of powers, motives & relationship to government / Partition.

• This book has a very full cast of powerful female characters. Do you find any trends to discuss along those lines per se?

• Are the women Saleem loves & woos critical to his story? Compare with Shiva's 'loves'.

• “The Widow” (Indira Gandhi) vs. the Dung-Lotus Goddess (Padma). How do these two women act as different motivating forces in Saleem’s present life (frame story).

• Parvati-the-witch. His friend & wife, who later has an affair & child with Shiva. (In the Hindu religion, Parvati is the consort of Shiva, god of Destruction.) Why do you think Parvati is attracted to Saleem?

• Whatsitsname! Grandmother Naseem Aziz, the Reverend Mother.

• Aadam Aziz.

• Mian Abdullah, instigator of the "optimism epidemic". IS Aziz's optimism a plague?

• Tai, the ancient boatman.

• The Brass Monkey, Jamila Singer, Saleem’s sister, the Voice of Pakistan

Fatal Biographies

• A narrator aware that he will die when his story is complete may be tempted to go on longer than he should. Padma certainly agrees that he’s said more than enough. Do you? To the extent that you think the book is too long, what would you have cut & by how much?

TAN's The Arrival: Discussion Questions

With The Arrival we come to the list’s most literal interpretation of The Stranger, not only in the hero's story of immigration to a strange new land, but with the graphic form itself: devoid of known languages, inviting us as readers along on the experience.

I heard Shaun Tan speak this past June at the enormous & excellent Sydney Writer’s Festival.

He came across as funny, candid & totally unpolished, a very likable, humble fellow, who talked about the four-year process of producing the 120-page, unnumbered The Arrival. Shy of over-burdening his family & friends, he used himself as the model for the principal character.

(There was a funny moment during his talk when someone in the audience asked him who he’d used, while Shaun Tan—standing right there, not far away—looks just about exactly like his character).

To find the most fluid movements & natural expressions, Tan assembled some of his panels from stills taken from video. He’d go out in his backyard, say, wearing a hat & long coat, set the camera rolling & then pick up a suitcase, walk a few steps, put it down, look up. He’d draft his friends & family to perform similar sequences, over & over again. His neighbors, who held to varying degrees of understanding what he was doing, would sometimes watch him in his yard.

His Chinese father immigrated from Malaysia to Australia in 1960. Tan grew up in Perth, where he was in different ways both a born-&-bred native & a stranger there himself. In part the book is inspired by his father’s stories, but The Arrival is far more universal.

Some images are adapted from people he’s interviewed. Some are taken directly—& recognizably—from sepia photos of Ellis Island. Others are based on things like a Tom Roberts' painting of a migrant ship bound for Australia, ‘Going South'. One of the project’s many origins was in the double-page illustration near the start—titled “The Old Country”—of dragon tails looping through a city, the family walking below. He didn’t know what it was about, but he wanted to find its story.

Tan’s excerpted essay HERE--found at the bottom of the page under “Comments on The Arrival”--is worth reading & pertains to our theme.

Shaun Tan has won the Australia’s prestigious New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for 2007 (a true feat for a wordless book) & the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist. Since its US release in October 2007, it’s enjoyed such popularity that it was hard to find on shelves over the holidays.

Have fun discussing this one! I’ve included a short note about approaching Midnight’s Children at the end.

--A. Campisi

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Discussion Questions & Suggestions

• Favorites. Which is your favorite illustration or detail & why?

• Strangers. What does it mean to be a Stranger here? Discuss our hero’s challenges toward finding himself at home in a strange land.

• Alienation to Home. That's a basic arc here. What are the crucial events & elements that eventually allow him to transition from total alienation to finding himself more at home?

• Cross-overs. For all his adaptation & assimilation, what (if any) images follow him from his Old Country to the New?

• Readerly Empathy. Discuss the specific ways the form puts the reader in the hero’s shoes, as it were, making us better empathize with the protagonist / immigrant’s experience. Which did you feel were most affective?

• Universality. A single immigrant’s story can’t be entirely universal, though the book makes a good faith attempt. What are some of the assumptions & choices it makes with respect to the immigrants themselves, the Old Countries, the New Country, the decisions to leave, and being a Stranger?

• Transitions. One of the geniuses of this book is Tan’s ability to transition (wordlessly!) into & out of other people’s stories, fluidly changing narrators / point of view & even tense. The blond grocer tells our hero his story, for example, fleeing The Giants with big boots, vacuuming people up. The old man at the assembly line also tells his war story. Talk about that technique & those side stories.

• The Fantastic. Elements of the aliens lands are merely different shapes (hats, stamps, snowflakes). Others are alien but guessable (food, animals, the postal system). Still other fantastical & allegorical (dragons, giants). Tan tries to walk a fine line between giving us something at once familiar & simultaneously alien. He’s snowed the protagonist (& us!) with elements we don’t recognize & yet must navigate. Talk about the use of surreal or fantastic imagery.

• Other Choices. What other authorial choices did you find particularly interesting? Were there moves that didn’t work for you?

• What is it? What do you think of this form: a wordless graphic novel? Is this book for adults? Kids? Is it literature? Do you think it deserved to win a general literary award in a category including all traditional books of adult literary fiction?

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A Note for Approaching Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

This book won the Booker of Bookers, judged to be the best Booker Prize winner in the award’s first 25 years.

1. Start reading now.

This is a fantastic book, in all senses of the term. Rushdie writes some incandescent prose, imagery dense, intensely erudite, lyrical & passionate. It's not without flab, but what's good is well worth the extra pages. Suffice to say, this is not a book you can happily rush through in the last week without missing some crucial points & real gems.

2. With this book in particular you might find it fruitful to keep an eye out for short passages as you’re reading—say, between a sentence to 3 pages or so, settling on a single image, exchange or event—then do a very close reading of your selection & bring it with you as a personal contribution to the meeting.

CHABON's The Final Solution: Discussion Questions

“He sat up, his head cocked at an angle that among parrots would have signified mild sexual arousal but that among apes denoted vigilance.”

(Bruno the parrot, in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution)

In 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a story called “The Final Problem,” in which the author plunges Sherlock Holmes over a cliff to his death.

Strangely (if not surprisingly), this didn’t take.

Doyle was weary of Holmes as a fixture in his life & as the definition of his career. However, as Star Trek fans may understand better than most, Doyle was totally unsuccessful in killing off his fictional character, who by then had taken on a life & fame quite independent of his maker. Outraged fans rallied for Holmes' resurrection & Doyle spent much of the next two decades churning out Sherlock Holmes stories. As a writer, I find this failure intriguing. And very alarming.

So it’s one final game afoot for The Old Man, as Chabon calls him, disinterring the ancient sleuth from obscurity & dereliction as a Sussex beekeeper. It came out in 2004, along with a shelf-load of other Holmes books, when the great detective turned 150.

But this is Michael Chabon [also HERE], so it’s not purely an homage to Holmes / Doyle. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, he also addresses the sorrow & horrors of Hitler’s Final Solution. Holmesian mystery or not, Chabon's The Final Solution is at least a timely study of social red herrings—specifically issues of security (eg: defense codes) & profit (eg: bank account numbers)—that distract from basic human tragedies.

At heart this is a book that asks: What is worth remembering?

So it's not just an homage. Neither, as some complain, is this truly (or purely) a work of genre fiction. In this respect Chabon is no snob: he's a writer who uses anything that works. His writing here flirts with a Victorian voice. Sometimes his phrases can seem shaken in a Boggle box & laid out as they fall, a sentence gambling on for a paragraph. But that’s quintessentially Chabon: super-energetic images; quirky characters; red herrings; a romping plot; erudition; tongue-twisting vocabulary; great pathos; The Human Condition. A willingness to pass the point of view to a parrot.

Here are some suggestions for discussion. As you’re talking about “The Arrival” as well, I’ve given you fewer than usual. I’ll append a note on approaching Rushdie’s book in the next post. Enjoy!

--A. Campisi

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Discussion Questions & Suggestions

• During your meeting, just for fun, consider dropping at least 2 of the following Chabonian words in casual conversation.

Extra points for accuracy, topicality & straight faces.

.Ignis fatuus (pl. ignis fatui) .......Tatterdemalion

.Echolalia.......Bibulousness

.Dryasdusts.......Mundungus

.Aspergillum.......Gephryrophobia

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• If you didn’t know in advance, how long did it take you to recognize who the old man was? What were your clues?

For example: "Then he reached into the old conjuror's pocket ... and took out his glass. It was brass and tortoise shell, and bore around its bezel an affectionate inscription from the sole great friend of his life" (29)

• What did you think about never naming Holmes?

"Years and years ago his name -- itself redolent now of the fustian and rectitude of that vanished era -- had adorned the newspapers and police gazettes ... " (43).

• Separately, what did you think about calling him The Old Man, the only unnamed principal character? What effect did it have on your reading?

• The Title. Talk about the various meanings & references contained in the title.

• The Mysteries. So the old man solves his mystery with signature alacrity & style: He finds Bruno & reunites him with the boy. But that’s not the only game in town. Why is he so intrigued as to rise again to this particular mystery & not to the one that everyone else is trying to solve?

• The Train Song. “The sound of the train song, arising in the middle of the night, would jar the man from his slumber, send him scrabbling for his pencil & pad.” (117, Harper Perennial Edition) (This is my favorite page in the book.)

What is it that’s worth so much to remember? Answer the book’s other mystery: What is the parrot actually singing?

• Revealing Errors. What do people think Bruno is singing with his German strings of numbers? What’s the basis for their various theories? Why don’t any of them guess the real answer? What’s the social commentary contained in those specific errors?

• The Ending. What did you think of the ending, which does not spell out for you in so many words the answer to the mystery?

What do you make of it when the old man says at the end, "I doubt very much ... if we shall ever learn what significance, if any, those numbers may hold" (129).

• Illustrations. What meaning or clues, if any, did you find in the illustrations?

• Talk about the Panickers. Their name. Their racial mix. Their family dynamics. Their marriage. As foils. In context of the greater social themes of the book’s Zeitgeist.

• Mr. Panicker "... his shame was compounded by the intimate knowledge that Richard Shane's brutal murder in the road behind the vicarage had echoed, in outline and particulars, the secret trend of his own darkest imaginings" (94). What are Mr. Panicker's 'darkest imaginings'? Why is he so tortured?

• The Stranger. Talk about the old man in terms of our theme. How is he a stranger, how is he estranged?

• The Stranger. More importantly, talk about the boy in terms of our theme. How is he a stranger, how is he estranged?

• Selective Mutism. Why doesn’t the boy talk? Clearly his youth & his not speaking are at least a device to enable & preserve the mystery. What else does it add to the story?

• The Writing. How does Chabon’s distinctive style strike you? How would you describe it? Examples of what you liked / didn’t like & why?

• Bruno. What did you think of the chapter that slid into the parrot’s point of view? Why did or didn’t it work for you? What did it accomplish, do you think, that it could not have accomplished as well with a human perspective?