While
reading this first stretch of
"Voyage in the Dark" I became fixated upon a short passage on
page fifty-seven.
"That was when it was sad, when you lay awake at night and remembered things, That was when it was sad, when you stood by the bed and undressed, thinking, 'when he kisses me, shivers run up my back. I am hopeless, resigned, utterly happy. Is that me? I am bad, no good any longer, bad. That has no meaning, absolutely none. Just words. Bust something about the darkness of the streets has a meaning.'"
Though
we have seen plenty of Anna's character previously, this was the moment I
became invested in her story. This passage seems to express some deep confusion
she has about herself and her current situation, and even though she says she is
"utterly happy" the passage conveys the exact opposite emotion.
Does
she shiver with pleasure or cold when he kisses her? The close association
between her sexual relationship with Walter and death in the previous two pages
as well an indication that judgment comes next places a very ominous feeling
over Anna's position. Indeed, her
sadness seems to stem fro her confusion about her identity and a lack of
meaning when she uses the above example as "when it was sad."
Interestingly
her mood seems to improve when she is outside, as we can see in the top five
lines of page thirty-nine. When considered along side with the line "But
something about the darkness of the streets has a meaning" we can surmise
that she desires meaning and finds something meaningless about words and/or
being inside. This is an odd though and I am left scratching my head. Perhaps
this meaningful but somewhat perplexing passage is supposed to make us ravenous
for the explanation of Anna's back-story that follows in the following chapter.
Still,
I do not think I am done with this passage.
I think this idea of "confusion" and identity is very interesting: another way of reading the word "confuse" reads it like "con + fuse", or to fuse together. It carries with it both a sense of "mixed-up" and "ideas associated so closely they become fused together, inseparable." I think identity is more like this second than the first, a heterogeneous mixture that we have strong biases to conceive of as unitary and well integrated, but which is certainly more fragmentary and unitegrable than this.
ReplyDeleteI think your diagnosis of Anna finding absence of meaning in "words and/or being inside" sounds like "being inside the head." This relates, I think, to Anna's preoccupation with whiteness/blackness, which Richard Dyer in the article "White" claims is often constructed in terms of white->order,rationality; black->disorder, irrationality. This is roughly synonymous with whiteness as being perceived as too cerebral, too inside-the-head, detached from the body, while blackness is inside-the-body, lacking cephalized over-orderliness.