Otherness

I've managed to get a fair bit of reading done here in KL. Seamus Heaney's Human Chain slipped down nicely using my recently discovered cover to cover technique for reading poetry collections, though it didn't seem to me one of his best. But who am I to say? I find myself making so many revisions of opinions on all sorts of works that any first judgement on a novel, play, poem or poetry collection now seems very temporary indeed. And thus it is that I hesitate to say I wasn't terribly impressed with Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World either, though I did get some sense of how urgent its debates might have appeared in the Bengal of 1914. I also had the distinct feeling that Tagore's purple prose probably worked in the original language (Bengali? - pardon my ignorance) but didn't translate well into a language which can make the most lyrical flights come crashing lumpily down to earth oftentimes.

I set aside the last couple of days for a reread of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, on the grounds that my timetable is getting shuffled round when we get back to work and I might well end up teaching the novel. To be honest, I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about reading it again as, for some reason, I didn't exactly fancy teaching the text - possibly because I have never quite felt that I've really 'got' the novel somehow, and that's something of a prerequisite for teaching, as you can probably guess.

But the oddest thing happened to me on this reading. I seemed to connect to at least part of the deep power of the novel even though I still feel a degree of uncertainty with regard to some of its surface features. In fact, not 'getting' the novel I think is central to what we're meant to experience in a fully committed reading. Just as Rhys's Rochester doesn't 'get' the West Indies and its people(s), especially his unfortunate wife. Rhys recognises our deepest needs to know and, therefore, appropriate others, and just ferociously we can react when we are denied possession.

This is a novel that it's wise to keep a certain distance from. I didn't, I couldn't, not this time, and the result has been a mild but distinct sense of depression. That's unusual for me, by the way. I'm someone who can feel cheerful after the bleakest of Beckett. But Ms Rhys has got under my skin. She must have been a nightmare as a drinking partner.