This book was fantastic. I could not get enough of it and have so far recommended it to 5 people. It was one of the most enjoyable reads that I've had in a while and one of the reasons for that is the section involving the "noncorpum" entity. It's search for his origins and the story of the three who think about the fate of the world brings it to inhabit Jargal, while talking to a few men seeking stories, but not the stories it wants. The drunken wizened man says, "There's no future in stories ... Stories are things of the past ... No place for stories in these market democracy days" (172). Stories are something outside of the market then, stories like these animals who think on the fate of the world and the camel who gives away his features. They are worthless in the marketplace because the future is not something available to them, they cannot carry a signified value within the marketplace structure. They cannot fluctuate and change like the value of money, they cannot be used to acquire wealth or status; stories can sit in museums about lost culture and accrue dust.
If this is the case, what does this story mean to tell us about literature in a capitalist society? Are stories perhaps just something that has been commodified in order to retain the cultural history of the subject or perhaps real stories have gone away? Our noncorpum friend finds a story to be the means to enlightenment, it finds past, present, and future in it's story. So perhaps this suggests that stories function as a means for self discovery to cast off the capitalist venture of commodification. Stories can help those who have been torn from their nations and cities to find a place again.
I like what you said about "stories function as a means for self discovery to cast off the capitalist venture of commodification." I almost quoted just up until "self discovery," but I thought that might be unfair if that's not what you really meant. But in a lot of ways, I think that stories are a means for self discovery.
ReplyDeleteI'll draw on another class I'm taking--Young Adult literature. We started out reading "Little Women." Not my favorite read, but interesting in a lot of ways. What I found particularly interesting was the various roles that the March sisters played in relation to their "gender script." That is to say: Compared with how they were "supposed" to act, how did they really act, and did this establish a new paradigm for young female readers to follow. I know many of our classmates are in, or have taken, YA Lit (or have read "Little Women"), so let's take Jo as an example: Jo is a "tomboy" who deviates significantly from the accepted mid-late-19th century female gender roles (especially if one considers only the first "part" of the book, which was the original publication). By sheer popularity, the women reading about Jo, many of whom were in their formative years, began to identify with her--and socially it was just a little more acceptable to be like Jo in certain ways. For many readers, especially when we consider the times before television, radio and the internet, stories were very much about self discovery.