I've read this over the break, for a class I'm taking. It was a slow read, because 1. I could not pronounce any of the character's names (and had difficulty telling them apart) 2. The parallel plot line that jumps from past to present, with some characters bearing the same names made it harder for me to stay focused and 3. Because the female characters were kind of disturbing and my mind kept drifting away, trying to imagine an alternative character that wouldn't have made me fretful. I was not really able to come up with one, but I tried, nonetheless. hmmm.
So, the female character. There's this one girl, who is close to nature. She is a "wild" girl who rides on horses naked (and without a saddle-- which also implicates that the girl is an unsaddled being, yeah?), runs about free as the wind, sings "split voice" (and this makes the male protagonist quite impressed, as well as sexually aroused), understands her natural surroundings more than anyone else in town, talks to birds (to be fair, her father does this too), and appears in the protagonist's dream as water that runs down the river-path, which is, in the dream, him. She is the noble savage, the savage mother earth, the girl whose naked passion and her intuitive understanding (and love) of nature is celebrated in the book. But, to make things complicated-- she's not your simple savage who rests peacefully in nature, smiling childishly up at the colonizers. She is also, the most deviant of characters, who will go around chopping foreign trees that she sees as harmful to the environment, and will blatantly blurt out at court that she will continue on doing this whether or not they charge her. She comprehends the consequences of modernization (the town is facing changes, which will bring casinos and hotels. The rivers will teem with tourists enjoying water skiing, etc)-- refuting the words of the people who root for modernization because they see jobs, money, and electric lights, she notes that the jobs will be scant, for the project will bring in workers from external sources, and that they will, including the environment and the people, be exploited. The water will not be theirs to harvest. They will have to pay. The indigenous trees and plants will suffer (or be uprooted, to be replaced by British, or other European trees-- possibly cash crops), and they will no longer be the people of this land. The land, along with everything else, will be forced away. And it is the noble savage girl, the girl who embodies mother earth, who says all this.
Her insight penetrates the facile logic of the colonizers (or should I say, those proponents of modernization). She sees through their logic, she sees their greed, and their devised plans to displace the inhabitants of the land.
First, you frame the narrative so that the natives, the rightful owners of the land-- who know that they are indebted to nature for survival, and that they must maintain sustainability (they have their own rules as to what trees can be cut and what can't be cut, to what extent, etc)-- will be defined as "red" (not in a "commie" kind of way, but the savages who paint themselves red), backward, and ignorant. Then, you tempt them with trinkets that sparkle. Electric lights. Trees that are not bushy, but shiny. Hotels and merry go rounds (on which your kids will never ride, because that will not be free). And what else? Many other things, that will "poof" and be gone as soon as the town gets reestablished as a tourist site for the gamblers and water sport fans. People will be reduced to human resource, if they are lucky-- how many will get jobs? Not many. (And this gal certainly knows this-- she says this in the book.) So, without much trouble, if the tempting works, you conquer not just the land, but its people too.
I say I'm confused, and don't know what the hell to do with this gal, because she knows all this, but she is also portrayed as the wild savage who cannot be tamed. And, she later gives birth to a boy, but it's said that she never had intercourse with anyone. A magic realism type of deal, I understand, but this is mystifying the female body, is it not? Or, am I being too critical of all this? I don't care-- that bit really bothered me. And at the end of the book, we see the gal (and I keep calling her the gal-- her name, I'll have to look up and add to this post later) crooning to her babe, trying to make him swim in the river with her. (She fails to do this, because the babe declares that he belongs to the "man's town" not in the water!) Ah, here we go-- mother nature, and the mother of the child, softly crooning in the water (womb?). Very metaphoric. Again, she is not really clothed in anything. We see her as nature. And as much as I love her, and appreciate the most important message of the book coming from her, I find myself oddly unsatisfied. Did she have to be the mother-nature-naked-savage character to be convincing? I'm no writer, so I don't know what my choice would have been. But as a reader, I have to confess. I didn't find myself content with this. So there!
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기