The family dynamic is one that has been a great source of confusion over the centuries. The fascinating thing about families is that they are truly a universal unit, as well as a concept. The generally accepted concept of the family, at least that which exists in the United States, is a beautiful one. Families don't even necessarily have to be related by blood or law; it is simply a close-knit and deeply bonded community, welded together through love and a sense of unconditionality that is not otherwise present in most of our relationships. However, the family units that are portrayed in novels from different areas throughout the world are highly different in comparison to the often unconventional and certainly unique ones that are fondly regarded in Western society. No, the family dynamics that must be explored today are those that exist in novels ranging in place from Korea to Egypt to Israel. The novels in question are Kyung-Sook Shin's Please Look After Mom, Naguib Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days and Amos Oz's My Michael. It is interesting to note that with the exception of Mahfouz's novel, each book has a strong filial reference proclaimed quite obviously in the title. The novels are all complex in their own way, but their undeniable similarity lies in the family dynamics of each, more specifically in the struggle and the failure of those relationships.
In each novel, the primary relationships are based namely on a sense of obligation. In an idealized world, family relationships would be built off of intense feelings of love and devotion. Although loving one's family is a struggle at times for most people, it seems improbable that the family unit would still exist were family relationships truly always devoid of any true affection. The relationships portrayed in these novels, however, reflect something very- and tragically- different.
Notably, there is Please Look After Mom, a novel set in Korea and scrutinizing not only the marital relationship between a traditional Korean couple, but also the relationship between the mother and her adult children who are living in a vastly different world than the one their mother grew up in. There is a great deal of distance between the mother and the other members of her family, and not the literal distance which occurs when the elderly mother suddenly goes missing one day in a Seoul subway station. Ironically enough, it is the physical loss of the mother that brings the family to the realization that mentally and emotionally, they have lost touch with the mother as well. It is the disappearance of the mother that leads the children to discover that they never really knew their mother; that is to say, they knew "Mom" but they did not know the woman they called mom as a human being, as a person outside of the role of giver that she played to them. The youngest daughter, the one most distant from her mother, has a passage that explains the relationship it seems that all of the children had with their mother: "To you Mom was always Mom. It never occurred to you that she had once taken her first step, or had once been three or twelve or twenty years old. Mom was Mom. She was born as Mom...it hadn't dawned on you that she was a human being who harbored the exact same feeling you had for you own brothers, and this realization led to the awareness that she, too, had had a childhood," [Shin 27].
Likewise, the relationship that exists between "Mom" and her husband, the children's father, is a stunted one. Instead of the love and devotion one would hope to find between a couple married so long, Shin has painted a vision of a restless husband, at times even an unloving husband, a cruel husband, feeling trapped in his home, taking his wife's care and tenderness for granted. With regards to the father, Shin writes, "Before she went missing, you spent your days without thinking about her. When you did think about her, it was to ask her to do something, or to blame her or ignore her," [Shin 129].
The central focus here is on Shin's novel, Please Look After Mom, and how it portrays the dysfunction of family relationships. Naguib's Arabian Nights and Days and Oz's My Michael serve as highlights of the issues have been and continue to be herein discussed.
Arabian Nights and Days does not give the reader such a close look into the inner workings of the family dynamic as does Shin's work. but the lens which it uses is an important one nonetheless. It seems a common theme throughout the book that husbands do not truly love or respect their wives. They certainly do not have devotion toward them; nare a chapter passes that the main character does not speak of his desire to take another woman as an additional wife, or of his lusts after women much younger than him, in one case even the daughter of a friend. Wives are not treated with a great deal of respect either; they are in life what their husbands make them and in turn they earn no right to respect or the privilege of honesty from the man they have married.
Women in Naguib's novel are of a lesser position in general, which is not entirely surprising, and notedly not the purpose of this essay. However, it does seem worth noting that the sultan of the story has an obsession with putting mass amounts of virgins to death until his beautiful young wife enchants him with stories, convincing him to give up the pastime permanently. But does his repentance stem from his love for Dunyazad? No, it would seem, he appreciates her for her obvious assets, such as her body, and also because, "Her stories are white magic...They open up worlds that invite reflection," [Naguib 2]. But most importantly at all, he cares for his wife because, "She bore me a son and my troubled spirits were put at peace," [Naguib 2]. It appears very explicitly that the sultan's interest in his wife lies in her ability to give to him. She gives him stories, a son, sex, an escape mechanism...all of these are things that enchant him, things he desires greatly. His love for her is not the pure or selfless love of a marriage, especially since when we examine Dunyazad's feelings for her husband, there is nothing but fear and repressed loathing there. The family unit, in this case, is a very twisted one, prompted more by unbalance, greed, and obligation than any other observed in these three novels.
The one family unit in Nights that might be deemed positive also has a major flaw that strips its possibility of being any real example of a loving, genuine family relationship. The character originally known as Gamasa al-Buti is executed for murder but reincarnated by a genie in the form of a lowly Ethiopian man with little prestige and no family. As such, all he can do is wander sadly around the displaced remnants of his family, who have been shamed and forced to move due to his actions. They do not know who he is and so he can only mope and look in on their lives, comforted by the fact that they are safe and tortured by the fact that he can never truly be with them again. Yet even after he pines over his old wife and wishes to be reunited with her and his daughter, he still lusts after the young daughter of his late friend and wishes to be bound to her as well. Something about that arrangement seems sick to this modern day westernized eye, and it certainly does not speak for the health of the family relationship.
Finally, we come to examine Amos Oz's My Michael. And in all honestly, a field day could be had with how Oz portrays the marital relationship in this book. Before the main characters, Hannah and Michael, are even married, she is constantly belittling him, calling his remarks "trite", making him feel ill at ease or embarrassed almost constantly [Oz 21]. At one point after sharing a fact he learned at school he admits shamefacedly, "I was afraid you'd make fun of me talking like this," [Oz 23]. Does that sound like the loving repartee of two lovers? Is not your wife or your husband the person you ought to be able to trust most in the world, to talk about anything to? Indeed, at one point after the birth of their son Yair, Hannah writes "You are a stranger Michael. You lie next to me at night, and you are a stranger," [Oz 66]. And so it begs the question, why did they marry in the first place. During their engagement Michael is filled with glee when Hannah laughs while imagining his head shaven, saying, "At last I've managed to make you laugh. Time and time again I've tried to make you laugh , and I've never seen you laughing. Now, without trying, I've succeeded. It makes me happy," [Oz 39]. One can't help but feel sorry for the pathetic fellow after that statement. It is also revealed that Hannah enjoys her husband's failures, that she "enjoy[s] his discomfiture" upon failing at a task, makes him "feel guilty" and acts "stiff and...hysterical" toward him at varying times, [Oz 48, 60].
Now we must examine why these family relationships all similarly fail in every novel. These people are certainly not inherently unloving or cruel. The daughter in Shin's novel has a boyfriend she remains devoted to, while her father has mistresses he maintains passionate affairs with, to the point of not even coming home at times. In Naguib's novel, the men feel strong affection and lust for women who are not their wives, and in My Michael, Hannah is shown most definitely capable of carrying on a relevant, passionate relationship with an individual- just for some reason, not the individual she married. Now why is it that as soon as love becomes unconditional, as soon as humans are locked in irrevocably and bound to each other, relationships take on an edge. A "for grantedness" seems to settle over the relationships and the treatment of family members worsens exponentially with time. We become used to people being in our lives, we no longer recognize their value, we even become annoyed with their constant presence and their habits. We fail to comprehend the state our lives would be in were that person no longer a part of them. That age old tidbit of wisdom quickly comes to mind, the one that explains how one never quite realizes the value of what one has until it's gone. This answer seems most precisely reflected in the reactions the members of Mom's family have in Shin's novel after she has been discovered missing.
"Why did it never occur to you that mom didn't knowhow to read or write, even when she relied on you as a child, even after you read her the letters and wrote replies for her?" [Shin 17.] The youngest daughter wonders forst the first time. She them comes to a revelatory conclusion: "'After Mom went missing, I realized there's an answer to everything. I could have done everything she wanted me to do. It wasn't important. I don't know why I got under her skin over things like that,'" [Shin 114]. The father, similarly, feels regret, and finally comes to understand truths about his wife that he never seen in the half-century they had been married to each other: "Only now do you realize, painfully, that you turned a blind eye to your wife's confusion," [Shin 132]. "Your wife, whom you'd forgotten about for fifty years, was preset in your heart. Only after she disappeared did she come to you tangibly, as if you could reach out and touch her." [Shin 131].
No comments:
Post a Comment