Constant Reader

[Gail]

I think I wasn't quite clear in my previous post; I should have said that I liked or had a fellow feeling with Iris in the hospital episode, which I didn't have in the Klause section. The business with Mr. Morning, though, was weirdly fascinating. I too had some creepy feelings about the cotton ball. Having just lost someone close to me, however, I could at least have a glimmer of understanding about Morning's desire to explore these little left-behind items.

[Yulia]

The first time I read the ending, I disliked the cliche she used in the last sentence, how she "ran like a bat out of hell." The second time, I felt the same way, puzzled why Hustvedt had use such a tired phrase. But after reading Mary Jo's comment about how Iris finally wanted a more normal, safe life and was escaping all the danger and madness she'd been drawn to throughout the book, perhaps a cliche was the best way for the book to end. It's nice to know it may not have been clumsiness on Hustvedt's part at all, but a very careful choice of words.

[[deleted user]]

Hello all,
Sorry not to be part of this fascinating discussion, but I'll take the chance and add something serendipitously from Hustvedt's A Plea for Eros p.32. It is not clear to me how it connects at all, but maybe something will resonate with someone here in the discussion. She went to Columbia University but 'now' lives in Brooklyn.

"But all the time I've lived in Brooklyn I've been writing about other places. I wrote a book called The Blindfold here, about a young graduate student who lives near Columbia and has a number of peculiar adventures. She and I aren't the same person but she's close to me. And I put her in my old apartment, the one I rented on West 109th Street. When I wrote her stories, I saw her in my apartment and on the streets I knew so well. What she did wasn't what I had done, but I don't think I could have written that book if I had not put her there, and I couldn't have written it had I still been living in that building."

End of thought. All yours.

[Mary Jo]

That last sentence struck me, also, Yulia, as a complete departure from the rest of the book. I felt that Hustvedt's language up to that point was spare and concise in that she didn't use an excessive number of words when a few would do, but at the same time I was often struck by the lyrical quality to her writing. Even though what she was describing might be ugly, her telling of it was often poetic and lovely, at times even romantic.

That last sentence, however, was completely ordinary in that it was a phrase any regular person, as opposed to a poet or writer, might use as a normal part of their everyday language; who hasn't heard that cliche in the course of day-to-day conversation? I think it placed Iris firmly back in reality, one of us again; "us", in this case being the regular, ordinary, sane folks.

Also, I just wanted to say, I'm pretty new here and this is the first book I've read with the group. What a joy this is! The story itself was disturbing to me on a few levels, but the insightful discussions here have changed how I feel overall about the book. I'm thoroughly enjoying the entire experience and am looking forward to the next book. Thanks to everyone participating here.

[Yulia]

Oh, I'm so happy you joined the discussion for this novel, Mary Jo! I couldn't predict how the discussion would go, as I knew some people would be turned off by the nature of the book, but it has turned out to be quite a success in regard to the questions it's inspired, with the mix of views and interpretations we've had here. Cohesive dissonance you could call it perhaps, though I'm sure the poets in the group could come up with a better phrase.

[Mary Jo]

Thanks, Yulia. This isn't a book I would have picked up to read on my own, but as is so often the case, I'm glad I read it. Without the discussion group, though, I probably would have read it quickly and moved on to something a little more upbeat to rid myself of that lingering sense of being disturbed by it all. There have been so many wonderful insights here, though, I think I'll always remember this book now with pleasure.

one last thought about the last sentence; I think Hustvedt is really being quite literal in that everything that Iris describes prior is her own personal hell on earth and that last sentence is that nice, neat, tidy conclusion I was looking for; she stared her hell in the face and ran as fast as she could in the other direction. I don't have the book in front of me right now, but didn't she also mention that she ran to the subway? If so, then she not only ran as fast as she could, but also ran to a form of transportation that could deliver her farther and faster to any number of other places. She escaped and it makes us happy for her. Well, maybe I'm just an optimist looking for that happy ending and I'm reading too much into it, but now I'm a little more comfortable with it all.

[Wilhelmina]

I agree; this has been a terrific discussion of a challenging book. Thank you, Yulia!

[Sherry]

Mary Jo, I'm so glad you had such a positive experience with your first book here. The quality of the discussions has kept me a Constant Reader since 1994. That and the people I have come to know and love. This book discussion has been exceptional, though. I want to thank you, too, Yulia.

[Gail]

Excellent discussion of a diffiult work. As Mary Jo said, I might have read it and then moved on as quickly as I could; the opportunity to react to others' takes on the book has been illuminating. Good job, all, and thanks for a new author, Yulia.

[Yulia]

My pleasure!

[Jane]

I agree that this has been a wonderful discussion. I read the book in plenty of time, but then I went out of town. When I came home, I had a very busy week and today was the first day that I had time to read all of your comments.

The voyeur theme is very interesting. You have all mentioned that the photographer is a voyeur and that Iris is at times a voyeur (voyeuse, to be exact) and Mr. Morning seems like a voyeur to me. He is trying to see the life of the murdered girl through the descriptions of the objects that she owned. And he wants the personality of the girls doing the describing to disappear when he asks them to whisper. He says, "The whisper is essential because the full human voice is too idiosyncratic, too marked with its own history. I'm looking for anonymity so the purity of the object won't be blocked from coming through, from displaying itself in its nakedness. A whisper has no character."

I wondered if anyone found this statement strange "That night the screaming began." Iris says this when she brings home the first object. The screaming somehow seemed related to the objects that Iris was bringing home, because it happened a second time. I expected to hear more about the screaming, but I guess it just added to the eerie atmosphere of the first section.

Jane

[Jane]

Russ2,

Thanks for posting that comment from Hustvedt. It was interesting that Hustvedt said that she couldn't imagine the story taking place anywhere else.

Jane

[[deleted user]]

Jane and others,
Anyone who has an interest in Hustvedt herself could do worse than to look at A Plea for Eros which I have now finished. She evidently has a vivid and good memory for events from her past and will use parts of them in her writing. Her description of the locale around Columbia is photographically perfect, for example. On the other hand she also has a very active imagination when she is in creative mode and lets her mind go where it will in constructing a story. In the last chapter of Eros she describes her life-long torments with 'terrible dreams, hallucinations or night terrors' and wonders whether her 'wounded self' is her 'writing self,' or whether her writing self is an answer to her wounded self. She ends the book by saying "I was very young when I first heard the story of the exorcism Jesus performs on a possessed man. When Jesus talks to the demon inside the man and asks for his name, the words he cries out both scared and thrilled me. The demon says: 'My name is Legion.' That is my name too."
She seems to be a very introspective woman.

[Yulia]

Jane, yes, Mr. Morning was definitely a voyeur in his own right. I found it interesting he asked the people (just women?) he hired to whisper instead of finding someone with a generic, featureless voice like the kind most voice-over professionals have or a pleasant, neutral voice like call center employees in Omaha.

Whispering, however, made me immediately think of random phone sex callers, and made me think Mr. Morning wanted not just to bring these discarded items to life but to sexualize them with the taped voices. I know it sounds sick, but I think this may have been his purpose. He did fetishize the items, after all.

As for the screaming, did they end after the first part? I vaguely remember (or misremember) screaming in at least one other section, which made me think that the neighborhood was haunted or at least dangerous for women. But if the items did emit or inspire the screams, in that case it was not the smell that Iris omitted from her taped descriptions, but the sounds.

[[deleted user]]

Filling in a bit more from the ending of A Plea for Eros, now that it sounds more relevant.

"Could my need to write be connected to my neurological sensitivity? Maybe, but not what I write. Content is what few neurologists discuss.
I an afraid of writing too, because when I write I am always moving toward the unarticulated, the dangerous, the places where the walls don't hold. [referring here to a persistent terrifying dream] I don't know what's there but I'm pulled toward it. . . .
The writing self is multiple and elastic, and it circles the wound [of her wounded self]. Over time I have become more aware that I must not try to cover that speechless, hurt core, that I must fight my dread of the mess and violence that are also there. I have to write the fear. The writing itself is restless and searching, and it listens for voices. Where do they come from, these chatterers who talk to me before I fall asleep? My characters. I am making them and not making them, like people in my dreams. They discuss, fight, laugh, yell, and weep"

And then follows the closing story of the exorcism already mentioned. "'My name is Legion.' That is my name too."

[Melissa]

That is very interesting, Russ, thank you.

And Yulia, I agree with your insightful comments about Mr. Morning's fetishistic behavior. I had a similar reaction to his insistence on the whispering and his tight focus on items of a personal nature (esp. having to do with beauty? mirror, cotton ball ...) without being able to articulate my thoughts so clearly. Thanks!

[Yulia]

It's interesting you should mention space and distance in The Blindfold, an aspect I hadn't considered before but which does come up in Hustvedt's essay, "Yonder", in her collection , which was recommended by Russ and is amazingly relevant to the issues in this novel. It's true, boundaries are constanty being broken, the respect for the dead by mr. Morning, Iris's self-imagey by the gossip over her photograph, her physical space by the woman in the hospital, and finally the boundaries between the genders, teacher and student, and good and evil in the Klaus portion.

As for Iris's conversation with Ruth over the sex of her baby, I'd thought that Ruth and Iris were answer the "boy or girl" question in response to the other person, in a way. Ruth, in guessing Iris's fascination with and escapades wearing her brother's suit, answered that she wanted the child to be one sex or the other, not both, an dual identity Iris sometimes flirts with. Meanwhile, Iris tells Ruth she hopes it's a girl because from Iris's perspective Ruth is so traditionally feminine: getting married, becoming pregnant, wearing dresses always. She hopes Ruth's child will be a little Ruth: isn't that what people hope for their friends' children? May your baby be as traditional and gender-appropriate as you are.

Regarding the final scene, it still remains unclear (tome, at least) how Hustvedt meant it to be read. Yes, Iris rejects Paris's lewd act, but is this a rejection of his repossessing traditional gender roles (the man as dominant and sexual predator) or is she rejecting his forwardness simply because it comes from someone as ambiguous as Paris (suggesting she could handle his vague identity only intellectually and platonically but not physically)? Put another way, is she rejecting his putting her in a vulnerable, feminine position or is she rejecting his constant role-shuffling? I can't decide which it is. Either way, she refuses to have her boundaries crossed by Paris, to have Paris "press upon" her space. And so, whatever inspires her rejection, it does represent Iris's taking control of her own space/identity and not allowing others to define her.

A Plea for Eros also have an interesting essay "Being a Man," in which Hustvedt considers how writing enables her to inhabit the identities of both sexes and ruminates on her own amorphous identity. I've yet to finish it, but it does intrigue me. Thanks for recommending it, Russ. And Sara, I'm so glad you're mailing the book to your friend. I love the idea of a book's commuting (and communicating) from one person to another.

[Yulia]

Some interesting insights into her views on gender from the essay "Being a Man": "I'm sure that my dreams of maleness are at least partly about escaping the cultural expectations that burden femininity, but I also tink they are something more complex, that the dreams recognize that there is a man in me as well as a woman and that this duality is in fact part of being human, but no one that is always easy to reconcile" (p. 96).

And this about Iris: "I knew Iris had to put on the suit, but I never knew why except that her cross-dressing was related to her translation of the German novella The Brutal Boy, a movement from one language into another, and that by pretending to be a man she loses some vulnerability and gains some power, which she desperately needs. It has never occurred to me until now that taking on a masculine position as a survival technique has roots in my own family, that in the suit Iris lives out the duality and uncertainty of my dreams, and that when she reinvents herself as a male character she is finally able to imagine her own rescue" (p. 101). How about that?

[Al]

Russ and Yulia:

Thanks for sharing from A Plea for Eros. I am definitely adding it to my list!

I think her comment about "taking on a masculine position as a survival technique has roots in my own family" is quite intriguing, likewise that by reinventing herself as a man, she can then imagine her rescue. I think this gives even greater insight into the ending of the book and the final lines.

[[deleted user]]

Too late for the discussion here, I have finally finished The Blindfold and I regret to say that it just doesn't do it for me in any major respect, whether plot, characterization, setting or writing style.

With respect to plot, the early three stories built dramatic tension but never reached even hints of conclusions. They disappeared in mid-plot just as I thought I might be going to hear a denouement, just like bursting bubbles that disappear and leave nothing behind to grasp. Mr Morning, George and Mrs. O. simply disappeared, and in the last story Iris herself simply walked out on the last of her relationships and straight out of the book. One might say finally into a new and better life, but with almost no evidence that I would feel certain about.

Ms Vegan herself was not a character I liked at all. She seemed to me to be far too aggressive, way too self-absorbed with herself with endless descriptions of the minutiae of her thoughts and perceptions, and continually seeing herself in a victim role trying to erect defensive boundaries against the other people impinging on her life. I would find her hard to take in real life and I didn't think she was very interesting either, with all she said about herself or her life

In terms of setting, there was virtually no description of surroundings or place or ambience in the narrator-Vegan's exceedingly austere facts-only expository style. "We went to his office in Dodge Hall." "We went to the Hungarian Pastry Shop, sat in the back and had coffee." "I went home to my apartment on 109th Street" Those are actual physical places -- and Columbia is located in a very colorful bustling neighborhood -- but that is all the description they get. Only a genuine alumnus of Columbia University can visualize those actual locales.

The written style was instead devoted entirely to Vegan's almost microscopic attention to what she was seeing, or what her inner self was feeling or thinking -- except when she was interviewing for the job at Mr, Morning's place, where she came across to me more like a hard-boiled detective, browbeating Mr. Morning and giving him an aggressive third-degree. Technically I suppose Hustvedt was trying to get information out into the story by forcing it out of Mr. Morning and showing him as a reluctant provider. It played as much too unnatural for me for someone like Iris looking for and desperately needing a job. Instead of just telling the story, she seemed to be in a continuing intense argument with me, the reader, to provide all the details that would convince me to see the story her way. I wouldn't have needed the arm-twisting.

I realize I don't need to like a character to like a book, but something about the telling of the story has to be appealing. I couldn't find it in this one. So it fell flat for me, even though I did get myself to finish it.