This is something I wanted to post earlier, but my blog access went wonky.
Joyce Carol Oates reviewed In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman in The New York Review of Books (10/23/14, 59-60). This book, by the way, fits in with much of what we have discussed in this class in a post-colonial, South Asian kind of way.
Ms. Oats refers to "the author's decision not to use quotation marks further renders the novel dreamlike and remote" (60). In How Late it Was, How Late there are no quotation marks. How Late is dreamlike if not downright nightmarish in many aspects. As for "remote," Sammy's blindness removes him from interacting fully--seeing--the world. Nor do we see Sammy's world, either by his relaying of events or the narrator's. This removes the reader from the observable world as well. We have discussed in class that we don't know what Sammy looks like, what his flat looks like, what the offices he visits or the people with whom he interacts look like--we don't "see" anything. Is this a way of telling us that we can not comprehend what Sammy's life is like, much as the workers at the DSS?
Just a wee bit to mull over.
Wayne
I thought of it as though he is blind, and so we, the readers are blind. I know we do not get any details before he goes blind either. I think this has to do with his interior blindness. It is as though he stumbles through the many social constructs around him. The disciplinary construct of the police, for example, seems to completely baffle him as to what they want. During his times at the social assistance construct, he is again blind not only to what anyone is thinking about him but also as to what he needs to say and do to achieve his goals. I think the lack of details as to what things and people look like in the novel was done deliberately to focus us on Sammy and on sight and to replicate what it is like to be blind, to be trapped in the world inside your head and your imagination.
ReplyDelete... or, on the other hand, there is no inside or outside, no private delimitation of the self from the rest of the world. So, the lack of quotations can be dreamlike and imaginative, or it can be about exposure and surveillance. Both make sense in the case of How Late.
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