A Thousand Splendid Suns Blog 4

Trigger Warning: Rape

Throughout 1,000 Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini the rhetorical situation is difficult to nail down.

For instance, when Mariam is first raped by her husband Rasheed, Hosseini writes within the narrative voice of Mariam’s point of view, “Now and then, his ear rubbed against her cheek, and she knew from the scratchy feel that he had shaved it” (45). The inauthentic reader falling into the role of narratee will see the description of the stubbly lobe merely as significant detail included to enforce the mimesis of the situation. It is in fact masterful to include this detail at the moment of Mariam’s rape as it builds upon the aesthetic emotion of the scene before and after other passages describing onions on Rasheed’s breathe and the glowing hands on his watch after they have finished (45).

However, the passage about Rasheed’s earlobe also functions according to the needs of the authorial voice seeking to reveal to the authorial audience Rasheed’s true nature via the hermeneutic code. Just a few pages before that, still in Mariam’s point of view, Hosseini describes Mariam’s meeting Fariba and her son Noor on her first time out of Rasheed’s house since coming to Kabul after her mother’s death:

“You’re Rasheed jan’s new wife, aren’t you? […] You’re so young! […] My name is Fariba. I live on your street, five houses to your left, the one with the green door. This is my son Noor.”

The boy at her side had a smooth, happy face and wiry hair like his mother’s. There was a patch of black hairs on the lobe of his left ear. His eyes had a mischievous, reckless light in them.

(39)

The inauthentic narratee may only see the hairy lobe on Noor as a significant detail added for the sake of giving Noor an easy to remember character trait. However, the authorial audience will recognize instantly that a notably hairy earlobes are a trait that might be passed from father to son, creating an enigma within he hermeneutic code.

In many modern Western cultures, names are chosen for aural aesthetics, not meaning, and even when they are chosen for meaning they are still random in describing who we actually are. My own name Samuel means “asked by G-d” or “the name of G-d”  in Hebrew, but my parents didn’t consider that. However, Noor means “light” in Arabic and because Noor is a character in a book written by a man who speaks Arabic, his name was intentionally chosen for his authorial function in the novel. In this case, Noor is figuratively shedding light on Rasheed’s past affair with Fariba. Hosseini consciously chose “Fariba” because it means charming and enticing.

(See page 41)

Even within a cultural code in which he can legally abuse his wives, Rasheed is still guilty of adultery.

The hairy ear lobes implying adultery are a function of the authorial voice in A Thousand Splendid Suns because they are details which Hosseini includes only at times of great trauma for Mariam, the point of view character, is suffering from trauma. After Mariam first meets Noor on the street, she is overwhelmed by attention from all the other women to point of hyperventilating. For the inauthentic narratee, the stress of the situation is the focus, they empathize with poor Mariam. So what if one character has hair on his earlobe and another shaves his? A girl is being raped! Never once does the narrator explicitly connect the shaved ear lobe with the hairy one, but the synthetic nature of text implies that while the narrator is seeking to tell Mariam’s tragedy, the author also seeks to reveal Rasheed’s hypocrisy within the cultural code of pride and honor which he uses as justification for his abuse of his wives. The authentic authorial audience will be able to shed the mimetic shock of what is happening to the characters and pay attention to the word the author is putting on the page.

Blog 3 1,000 Splendid Suns

In A Thousand Splendid Suns – Blog 3, Christina Ellis describes Khaled Hosseini’s use of code in A Thousand Splendid Suns writing, “This juxtaposition of the feelings Miriam has toward her mother and father are how the proairetic code comes into play. You can instantly feel the negative connotation surrounding her mother and the positive around her father.,” in reference to mother Nana’s harsh criticism of the protagonist Mariam’s father Jalil. Hosseini programs Mariam’s proairetic code further using the semic code of Nana’s negativity when Nana berates Mariam’s tutor Mullah Faizullah for suggesting that Mariam start going to school:

And you, akhund sahib, with all due respect, you should know better than to encourage these foolish ideas of hers. If you really care about her, then you make her see that she belongs here at home with her mother. There is nothing out there for her. Nothing but rejection and heartache. I know, akhund sahib. I know. (12)

Nana arguing that Mariam “belongs at home with her mother” because she is unfit for the outside world connotes the image of a witch or step-mother out of a fairytale such as “Rapunzel” or “Sleeping Beauty” who endeavors to keep a princess secluded from the world. Hosseini uses this intertextual code of an overprotective authority figure to enforce Mariam’s proairetic struggle to gain freedom, freedom from who she is.

Blog 2 A Thousand Splendid Sun Sam Fine

In A Thousand Splendid Suns, a novel about Mariam a girl born out of wedlock in middle twentieth century Afghanistan, author Khaled Hosseini uses repetitive and syllogistic progressive form in building and breaking the generic expectations of a bildungsroman, or coming of age novel.

In the beginning of the novel, Hosseini writes that Miriam is the illegitimate child of Jalil a wealthy entrepreneur and his now-former serving girl Nana (4-5). Out of “penance,” Jalil built a shack in the woods outside the city of Herat for Nana and Mariam to live supported by him (6-7). Hosseini uses repetitive form to describe the shack’s location in terms of temporal relation to Mariam’s life, writing, “Although, she would live the first fifteen years of her life within walking distance of Herat, Mariam would never see this storied tree [in the city] (5),” and, “Jalil and two of his sons […] built the small kolba where Mariam would live the first fifteen years of her life (7).” Here Hosseini is employing repetitive form because he tells the reader that Mariam will stop living at the shack when she is fifteen, but does not yet say why. However, Hosseini provides foreshadowing in between those two mentions of Mariam turning fifteen, writing that Nana was once engaged to be wed at fifteen years old, but she developed epilepsy, a “jinn,”  before the wedding making her unfit for marriage then and forever (7). In the syllogistic level, a reader can infer that a significant plot point will occur when Mariam turns fifteen and it may have something to do with a frustrated engagement.

Hosseini’s repetitive mention of age in the first few pages places A Thousand Splendid Suns in the coming of age genre, which exists through the repeating real life incidents of people growing up and struggling with issues beyond their control as Mariam must overcome her illegitimate status.

Discworld Blog 3 (and blog two-ish)

In Discworld: The Colour of Magic, the first installment in a comic fantasy novel series, author Terry Pratchett uses myriad intertextual and cultural codes, drawing on nearly everything from ancient mythology to contemporary theoretical physics, to build his characters’ semic codes and set up the proairetics of his parody of the hero’s journey conventional form. The arch of Rincewind, Discworld’s unassuming protagonist, follows mythologist Joseph Campbell’s outline of the heroic story in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

The premise of Discworld, that the world is a disc balanced on the back of a cosmic turtle (Pratchett, 1), Pratchett borrows straight from an ancient Chinese myth. However, Pratchett writes that Discworld is, “a world that only exists because every improbability curve must have its far end,” and also a quantum shift into a parallel universe fits into the boon of Rincewind’s arch (Pratchett, 46 108). Together, these intertextual codes from Chinese Mythology and theoretical physics put Discworld in the science fiction/fantasy genre by posing the question: What if there is a parallel universe full cosmic turtles with oceans and continents on their backs?

Pratchett implicitly declares that Discworld is a parody of the hero convention when he introduces a literal “hero” in Hrun the Barbarian, “who was practically an academic by Hub standards in that he could think without moving his lips (Pratchett, 20).” Hrun, is a reference to the Old English epic Beowulf, about a Christian hero who kills the monster Grendel and his mother, but then is killed by a dragon. Pratchett links Hrun to Beowulf by starting his name with “hr.” In Beowulf, the “hr” sound starts many names such as Hrothgar the King and Hrunting the sword. This intertextual reference to Beowulf builds Hrun’s semic code by calling up the images of the barbarian heroes of Old English and Germanic Lore: brave but arrogant. The connection to Beowulf contributes to Discworld’s proairetics as well because it is known that Beowulf  died of wounds acquired while slaying a dragon. Therefore, when Hrun the Barbarian battles dragons in Discworld, one expects him to die, increasing the dramatic effect when Pratchett writes that Hrun is saved at the very last moment (Pratchett, 106).

Hrun’s talking magic sword Kring is also a vehicle for intertextual codes. Pratchett writes that Kring says to Rincewind, “I spent a couple of hundred years on the bottom of a lake once (Pratchett, 71),” which is an intertextual reference to King Arthur’s sword Excalibur which in every version of the legend is at least thrown into a lake when Arthur dies. This furthers Pratchett’s parody of the heroic journey, because Hrun is portrayed as a selfish warrior contrasting with his sword’s previous owner, a beloved ruler. Kring also says, “What I’d really like is to be a ploughshare. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds like an existence with some point to it,” which is a paraphrase of the Old Testament, Isaiah 2:4:

“And He will judge between the nations, And will render decisions for many peoples; And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they learn war.”

The Super Senior and the Text TOMATS blog 4

In The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway addresses two different readers. The first is the resistant reader who falls into the narrative audience of a fishing tale, perhaps another old fisherman listening over some beers on “the terrace,” accepting everything as true in . The resistant reader reads only for mimesis, empathizing with the old man’s decline and struggle to continue being a fisherman.

The second is the submissive reader who understands that the narrator is in fact the old man himself is is . The old man is the only witness to his adventures with the fish, therefore he is the only possible narrator. However, lying is part of the old man’s semic code as hyperbole is part of the fishing tale genre.

Play Ball! TOMATS Blog 3

I have already finished reading The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway. It is short. Owing to its abruptness however, I can still recall the inferential walks I took while reading the first half. Giving the contextual element of Cuba in the late 1940s/early 1950s, one can infer that the controlling ideas must be linked to communism and capitalism. Having begun his writing career as a journalist, many of Hemingway’s works contain cultural intertertextual references to contemporary journalism, placing his work firmly in the genre of Modernism (37). The Old Man and the Sea is no exception.

Hemingway uses intertextual references to Major League Baseball journalism to iterate the Old Man’s futility in resisting the inevitable. In the very first sentence, Hemingway writes, “He was an old man who…had gone eighty-four days now without catching a fish”(1), setting up the old man Santiago’s place in relation to baseball: if he were a baseball team with a record of 0-84, he would have no hope of a five hundred season. Later in the opening scene, Santiago says, “Yes, I have yesterday’s paper and I will read the baseball,” to which his boy companion reacts with suspicion, implying that the paper which Santiago produces from under his bed may be days or even years old (3).

Joe DiMaggio kisses his bat.

Throughout Santiago’s struggle to catch a fish, Hemingway references Joe DiMaggio, who, as the boy points out, has other men on his team (5). Joe DiMaggio did in fact suffer from bone spurs in his heel which prevented him from playing for the Yankees in the first months of the 1949 season, quite possibly being reported on in the old newspaper Santiago is reading in the year of the story 1951 (Gaffney). Santiago compares his dire fishing performance to that of Joe DiMaggio struggling to play with bone spurs. However, Santiago does not acknowledge DiMaggio’s teammates who prevented the Yankees’ record from plummeting to 0-84 while DiMaggio was out, inferring that Santiago should give up his greedy attempts at solitary fishing and embrace the community which cares for him in Havana, embrace Communism.

Work Cited

Gaffney, Dennis. “Essay: What Made DiMaggio a Great Player?” Web. Accessed September 29, 2015. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dimaggio/sfeature/essay.html

Group Reading 1 Samuel Fine

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway is about an old man Santiago who finds himself many months without having caught any fish. Sailing very far out, the old man hooks a big fish and engages in a multi-day struggle to land it.

In reading the first half of The Old Man and the Sea, I find myself challenged by my prior reading experiences with Hemingway to read for Modernist themes of nihilism conveyed through Hemingway’s abrupt prose. Even allowing for varying typography and formatting, one can see without even reading that not a single paragraph in The Old Man and the Sea occupies more than 1/4 of a page, a visual indication that opposing are constantly shifting throughout the novella.

Short paragraphs in The Old Man and the Sea

Reading4Awesome Reading List

1. The Old Man and The Sea, Earnest Hemingway 
2. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk 
3. Disc World: The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett 
4. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini

Samuel Fine’s Proposal

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov:

As I mentioned in my inventory, Lolita is one book which I was unwilling to submit to at all and I put it down. I would like to pick it up again, but avoid focusing upon the memetic register and instead focus through the intertextual cultural codes.

The Catcher in The Rye, J.D. Salinger:

Although I have read Catcher twice already, at thirteen and sixteen, I would like to reread it now. Being equipped with the tools to see beyond mere theme, character, and metaphor, I am able to approach the text in a new light as though I have never read it before.

Medea, Euripides:

Ancient Greek tragedy. I bought a copy for a world literature survey class, but then the professor never assigned the reading. The slim volume escaped my eye when I sold my books back at the end of the semester, so it sits unread on my shelf to this day.

Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk:

Apparently, There are some intertextual codes between this book and Demian. Perhaps Fight Club is a retelling of Demian’s story line and will provide insight into what we read for in the genre of psychological horror.

Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris:

In his debut memoir, Sedaris invites the reader to a novel rhetorical situation where they must discern whether or not the truth is told. Should the alleged truth of the stories be considered by a literary reading?

Demian Blog #3 Samuel Fine

Controlling Idea: Christian ideals are a path to salvation, namely the asking of forgiveness of sin, whether through confession prayer.

Counter idea: Christian ideals are lies structured to help the weak cope with their inadequacies compared to the strong, while realizing the falsity of salvation will lead to actual freedom (salvation).

Purpose: 

Symbolic Code

In Demian, Herman Hesse uses symbolic intertextual codes to highlight narrator Emil Sinclair’s path from religiously bonded emotions to intellectual freedom. Sinclair’s was born Catholic, a religion in which confession is a key sacrament hinged upon the belief that, when asked sincerely, Christ will forgive sin and grant salvation. Near the end of chapter two “Cain,” Before learning that he had been saved from his blackmailer by Demian, Sinclair confesses to his parents. The act has large emotional connotations for the reader (even though there is no quoted dialogue with Sinclair’s parents, implying the minor import of their characters to the whole tory), “the return of the prodigal son…Everything was wonderful, just like in the stories…I fled into that harmony” (35). Going from “dejection” to thinking of himself  a “prodigal son” returned, shows how much restorative power confession holds for Sinclair before Demian changes his views.

However, in retrospect, Sinclair confesses to the reader that he should have confessed to Demian, “I should have confessed to him! That confession would have been less ornamental and moving but more fruitful for me” (35). Sinclair did not confess to Demian because, “[Demian] was a link to the other world, wicked and bad…I could not and did not want to renounce Abel and glorify Cain, now that I had just turned back into an Abel myself” (35) Sinclair, still shaken by Demian’s alternate reading of Cain, prefers confessing to his parents in the world of good where confession has the power to  absolve guilt.

Still though, Demian disturbs Sinclair’s faith in confession in chapter 2 “The Thief on the Cross,” stating,”[The good thief crucified beside Christ] used to be a criminal…now he gets all mushy and performs these whiny rituals of self-improvement and repentance?! What’s the point point of remorse if you’re two steps from the grave…? It’s nothing but a sanctimonious fairy tale” (47). Here, Demian attacks not only the traditional reading of the Passion, which had previously instilled Sinclair with “overpowering, mystical shudders,” but also attacks the very practice of confession, which Sinclair takes so much comfort in (47).