Task 4: White Tigers

Quote from White Tigers:
"My mother washed my back as if I had left for only a day and were her baby yet. 'We are going to carve revenge on your back,' my father said. 'We'll write out oaths and names.'
'Wherever you go, whatever happens to you, people will know our sacrifice,' my mother said. 'And you'll never forget either.' She meant that even if I got killed, the people could use my dead body for a weapon, but we do not like to talk out loud about dying."

Context:
Mu-Lan arrives back to her village. Her parents wake her up the next morning, and begin cutting and carving words into her back.

Citation:
Kingston, Maxine Hong. "White Tigers." "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts." New York: Knopf, 1976. 34. Print.


Questions (my response is a mix of answers to all three):

2) Introduce your passage, and explain your original interest/thoughts about it.

3) Describe and observe what stands out about the content of this moment. What’s distinct about it? 

4) Step back and consider HOW the moment is written.  What stands out about Hong Kingston’s style and delivery?  What does it add to the experience of the content?

5) So what? What does this add?  Why do you think she would add this? What does she accomplish? 

I remember reading this and getting angry, initially: "our" sacrifice? What?! Their daughter bravely goes away from home, from her family, and lives with complete strangers for 14 years while training tirelessly to become a warrior, and all they can acknowledge is that they made a sacrifice? I found the parents very troubling and odd throughout the whole story. The parents definitely seem more connected, involved, and caring than the parents in the original Ballad, yet at the same time, they're strangely selfish and unusual. Also, the last line: "she meant that even if I got killed, the people could use my dead body for a weapon." Maybe this is clear to others, but I'm pretty confused on what this means. I was thinking as some sort of "sacrifice," as the story mentioned the sacrifice of animals earlier, but I'm not sure if this is right. Using it as a weapon? Hmm. This quote is chock-full of puzzling details, and I want to further explore in order to get a deeper inside on what it really means.

The content of this bit is, once again, strange. First of all, it comes so unexpectedly. Mu-Lan arrives home and we expect her to be greeting with welcoming and embrace. And she is, to a certain extent. But when her parents welcome her, their actions are completely contrary to what we might think. The parents are literally using knives and ink to cut into the skin of their daughters back, and carving out moths and names. Wait–"oaths?" An oath is a promise, a pledge, a guarantee. What is this oath for? Who is this oath towards? So not only is the content itself completely bizarre and out of place, but it raises many questions that lack definite answers.

This moment is juggling between how it defines the character of the parents: both affection, when Mu-Lan says, "My mother washed my back as if I had left for only a day and were her baby yet." And also this unusual, distant, almost cruel attitude: "we are going to carve revenge." Do they mean revenge on the people who trained her? Revenge for taking her? Or revenge on their daughter for leaving them? Hong Kingston writes this passage as if we are on a boat, and the text is the ocean, taking us one way with a big wave, and then shifting us another with another wave. We don't quite know what to think.

I think Hong Kingston adds this bit on purpose, in order to make us readers ask questions. She may have done it to prove our status quo assumptions about what a fan faction on this story would entail: since Hong Kingston has the supreme power, as the author, to create everything in this world, we'd think she'd make all the unfortunate parts of the ballad into positive, fairy-tale versions. But she doesn't. Within the first few pages of the fantasy part of the story, I liked her parents. They seemed more caring, more involved than in the ballad. But when Kingston puts in this particular passage, it makes me question my labeling of the parents as "good" (for lack of a better word) characters. Now, they're not "bad" characters. They're somewhere in between. Their motives are confusing. But maybe rereading the whole story while looking out for details on the parents might give us a clearer answer on not only who they truly are, but what their purpose is and why Kingston makes them so troubling.

Reading Notes: White Tigers

Skeleton/Rough Draft: The Smallest Woman in the World

SQ: Traditional stories affirm our beliefs and predispositions. They take us on a pleasurable journey in which we sympathize and often empathize with the characters; in which we connect with the situation; in which we are given a clear-cut lesson and message that comes hand in hand with the character’s big self-realization. Stories don’t question our cultural context. They aren’t even about us, but about the lives of the characters themselves.

(where does this go?) In Clarice Lispector’s “The Smallest Woman in the World,” she seems to write about a very traditionally explored situation–the encounter and relationship between the white society and the black society.

T: Yet, her version is confusing. It’s disturbing, and strange. Lispector doesn’t fulfill our predispositions about racial matters. Instead, she takes our status quo assumptions on what the average story about racial profile entails and toys with it, distorts it. The characters, plotline, setting, and conflicts of the story are unusual and exaggerated and turned upside down; there’s also no clear moral or message. However, despite the fact that Lispector defamiliarizes the(our?) familiar and makes our experience as readers quite bizarre, we aren’t turned off like we should be. We don’t walk away and give up, because the story still somehow manages to intrigue us. As readers, we can sense that there’s something deeper that the story manages to do, and although it’s not clear at first glance, we’re still curious and want to dig deeper. So we wonder how Lispector manages to keep us so fascinated despite her strange twist on traditional literature that would initially seem to irritate us. And furthermore, why would she bother to go out of her way as an author and write so strangely about such a common topic? What’s her goal; what’s the point?

C: Lispector has to make her story unusual and strange to make sure we don’t skim over it and dismiss it as a traditional story that deals with racial views and controversies. Because that’s not what it is at all. In fact, it’s less about a racial encounter than it is a story that explores ideas of how perspective and narrative control and influence our views on these matters. The point of the story is to show how distant we all are from the truth,  aand to question what the truth really is and whether or not it even exists.

C: This is a story by a female author who is highly aware that narrative constructs and defines a subject; that the story itself is completely influenced by the way (or how) it’s constructed, which in turn effects the reader’s experience.

(Don’t know if I need this, or where this even goes: Additionally, the strangeness of the story is to simply show and bring a light to the strangeness of the encounter between people of very different cultures, whether there black, white, Chinese, alien, etc; that’s not the point.)

Body paragraphs (no order):

1. In the beginning, us readers are only learning about Little Flower through the eyes of Marcel Pretre.

2. Lispector shows how material objects can be perspectives, too. She uses the newspaper to show how media greatly influences everybody, but yet it has so many flaws. All different kinds of media often provide information from a single perspective, and can even be classified as biased because it filters out certain facts and/or opinions.

3. Marcel Pretre is created to be an explorer to show the Westerner’s constant need to “classify” everything; to show how we always want an explanation and a definition and thus we label everything we come across. However, this often leads to being over generalizing and stereotyping, and by doing so we miss a huge part of the truth.

4. The truth is relative to the story teller. So when reading a story, it’s important to learn more about the author him/herself and see how their own personal beliefs and points of view influences the ideas of their story.

5. One of the great things about stories is that as readers, we often know things that the characters themselves do not. Lispector acknowledges that and uses it in her story–she takes this relationship that is usually depicted between the reader and a character, but makes it between the character and another character instead. But since we as readers have the benefit of knowing everything both characters think, ...?

Tree Map: The Smallest Woman in the World

Text Explorations: The Smallest Woman in the World

Passage 1:

Marcel Pretre has just discovered a little black pygmy woman in the forest.

“For a second, in the drone₁ of the jungle heat, it was as if the Frenchman had unexpectedly arrived at the end of the line₁. Certainly, it was only because he was sane that he managed to keep his head and not lose control₂. Sensing a sudden need to restore order₂, and to give a name to what exists₃, he called her Little Flower. And, in order to be able to classify her among the identifiable realities₃, he immediately began to gather data about her.”

            -(Lispector 89)

He proceeds to name her Little Flower; we then get more description on and information about Little Flower’s species.

I chose this passage because it’s kind of awfully beautiful, terrible, strange, yet fascinating. I think it shows something really important about Marcel Pretre, that might reflect on the entire Western society’s ideals and beliefs.

1.     Although this is written in 3^rd person, all the details of the event are still somehow pretty reflective on Marcel Pretre’s point of view of the situation in the beginning. So we get these descriptive phrases and words that all have pretty negative intonations: the first, drone, defined by the OED as “to proceed in a sluggish, lazy or indolent manner.” It’s as if Pretre is entering a foreign situation and announcing how difficult it is for him to be there; completely dissing the jungle and everything in it by proclaiming it to be drone-like. Furthermore, he says he’s “arrived at the end of the line:” What line? The line of difficulty? After all, he’s an explorer–what “line” has he reached the end of? Is the jungle just so terrible, is the tiny woman just too strange for him that he can’t handle its?

2.     And then, when he says it’s “only because he was sane that he managed to... not lose control,” it’s like he’s announcing the solution to a problem that he invented. There was no problem before he came to the jungle. The Likoualas were living peacefully by themselves and managing life on their own, and then this random guy comes in and says, oh no, this is so terrible, but because I am smart and I am an amazing explorer, I’m special because I can deal with it because that’s just how skilled I am. !!??!?!?! Furthermore: “sensing a need to restore order,” to restore order of what? THERE IS NO PROBLEM. HE’S THE ONLY ONE WHO’S INVENTING SOME PROBLEM THAT’S REALLY NOT EVEN THERE.

3.     “To give a name to what exists.” “To classify her among the identifiable realities.” Wow. This clearly shows how much we Westerners feel the need to label every single thing we come upon. We cannot let things be, alone in nature, undisturbed–we have to “classify” everything. Westerners are so ignorant and harsh towards anybody that’s not like themselves. This is evident all throughout history, with prejudices towards Jews, Blacks, immigrants, even women. Anyone who is not not like us immediately becomes an animal, an “other.” They are not people, people who have hearts, brains, feelings. They are “others;” they don’t count. So Lispector uses the character of Marcel Pretre as a representation of this culture that is so afraid of losing their own power that they have learned to dislike and be discriminatory towards anyone that is different then them.

4.     Lispector is also using this passage to make a point about how exploration and discovery is often done with our head versus our heart, with data versus emotional instincts. She is making an exaggerated statement about discovery and categorization by showing how Pretre managed and controlled the situation with intellect versus feeling–which I guess isn’t completely negative, as fact is the basis of science, but Lispector’s definitely trying to make this way of classifying clear.

Passage 2:

Mother just recalls a story her cook once told her about her time as an orphan. The mother then feels embarrassed about her child and what he said before.

“She obstinately₁ dressed up her toothless child in fancy clothes, and obstinately insisted upon keeping him clean and tidy, as if cleanliness might give emphasis to a tranquilizing superficiality, obstinately perfecting the polite aspect of beauty₂. Obstinately removing herself, and removing him from something which must be as “black as a monkey.”₃ Then, looking into the bathroom mirror, the mother smiled, intentionally refined and polished, placing between that face of hers of abstract lines and the raw face of Little Flower, the insuperable distance of a millennia."

            -(Lispector 92)

Lispector goes on to describe people in other houses and their reactions to the article/picture.

I chose this passage because what the mother is doing seems so superficial and stupid, even, and I want to explore more about her intentions and the reasoning behind all this.

1.     Lispector repeats obstinately 4 times in 2 sentences. According to the OED, obstinate is defined as “inflexible, resolute, and stubborn.”

2.     “Polite aspect of beauty.” Is this what beauty she really have to be? Polite? Isn’t beauty something that should be personal and boundless and lovely and mosty definitely not a “superficiality?” Yet, “polite” tones down all these loose aspects of beauty. It ties them down to make them serve the purpose of “pleasing.” “Polite” turns beauty around into something that is done for somebody else as oppose to your own self content. That is another fear of the Western culture: the fear of how others perceive you. Beauty has lost all it’s abtract, personal delicacy and has become completely about the self image. So all people want is control. Control of themselves, control of others, control of how other see them. This mother thinks that she can change her son into a better person by changing how he is on the outside, as if that will magically transform his sensitivity on the inside. Actually, she claims that what’s on the inside doesn’t matter because nobody can see it. And the only thing that matters is what others can see. So instead of outright making all these claims, Lispector uses the characters in her story to relay them and make them seem more agreeable and sensible.

3.     This lady is also reiterating this line/label that we’ve already seen in the story: the idea that the white, explorer, scientist man is good and correct and better than the little “black as a monkey” ignorant lady who is someone we want to “remove” ourselves from. Of course, this is very exaggerated–what person is ever so adamant about how much they don’t want to look like a black person? Who even thinks that? Who’s so open about that? So Lispector intentionally heightens the beliefs of her characters to make these feelings–that are often very subtle in the real world–to make them more clear.

4.     Also, just in general, the fact that Marcel Pretre has to make such a big deal about this little women by taking a picture of her, printing it in “full color,” and writing an article about her in the newspaper shows how habitual and conquering Westerner’s often are: they label all foreigners as savages, non-believing, filthy. They’re not able to leave nature amongst itself.

Passage 3:

            Little Flower loves Marcel Pretre, but because she also loves his boots, Pretre would be disappointed.

“In the humidity of the jungle, there do not exist these cruel refinements₁; love is not to be devoured, love is to find boots pretty₂, love is to...”
            -(Lispector 94-95)

            Discusses love, and what that means to Little Flower in particular.

I chose this passage because I want to see Lispector uses this idea of love to bring out the differences between Marcel Pretre and Little Flower.

1.     For the first time, Lispector acknowledges a lot of the ideas she previously explored as “cruel refinements:” this is the first concrete opinion we get from her.

2.     To Marcel Pretre, to love innocently and without an objective is a foreign idea. For Little flower, there’s no hieracrchy of love: loving something else doesn’t diminish the love of another something. But to Pretre, to Westerners, love is competitive. It must serve a purpose, have a concrete value. Just like the women who tries to superficially fix her son–she’s trying so hard instead of letting go and just feeling; she’s trying so fard to appear as something, to have a purpose, instead of just letting herself be and not labeling others as bad in order to make herself feel better.

Formula: The Smallest Woman in the World

“It is the function of the artist to evoke the experience of surprised recognition: to show the viewer what he knows but does not know that he knows.” – William Burroughs

Status Quo: Traditional stories affirm our beliefs and predispositions; they don’t question our cultural context.

Trouble: Lispector writes about very traditionally explored situations, yet she heightens, distorts, exaggerates, and defamiliarizes the familiar; makes the everyday strange.

Question: Why does she do this? How does she do this? What is the point; how does it benefit what the reader gets out of the story? (I’m not sure if these are too many questions, but it seems like they all kind of connect.)

Claim: This is a story by a female author who is highly aware that narrative constructs and defines a subject; that the story itself is completely influenced by the way (or how) it’s constructed, which in turn effects the reader’s experience. Lispector creates exaggerated characters, an unusual plotline, and a twisted, meta exploration of themes by using her story to play with these ideas of narrative and perspective. By defamiliarizing the familiar, heightening the strange*, and exaggerating/distorting the circumstances and situations within her story, she allows her readers to gain a riveting understanding of the distance between the scientist/explorer and the native. Her astute awareness of her narrative style is what remarkably brings to light the idea of the Western, white mode of dealing with indigenous people.

*-heightening something by making it strange? Not sure how to phrase this yet.

Exploratory Draft: The Smallest Woman in the World

Exploratory Writing: Extra Notes & Draft
(Sidenote– this is super messy and random writing, and may only really make sense to me. My ideas will clear up in the formula.)

Notes on the story:

-the smallest woman in the world is a story all about perspective, and how many perspectives we constantly have around us that are always influencing our own perspective, and what the truth is, what it means, and how that shifts from perspective to perspective.

-society’s constant labeling of everybody and everything

**Her characters are so strange!

-Marcel Pretre, explorer, initial main character.

-“to give a name to what exists.” “classify her among the identifiable realities.”

- smallest pygmies: “the need that Nature sometimes feel s to surpass herself.”

- Little Flower, the tiny black pregnant pigmy lady; one of the Likoualas spe;cies.

- the “savage Bantus-“ they hunt the Likoualas.

-“not even the teachings of the Indian Sages are so rare”- The Great Seven Sages of India:

“When Lord Brahma decided to create our universe, he created seven sages out of his thoughts they were called as Saptha Rishi or Manasa Putra (created out of mental thoughts).

They completely dedicated themselves to the pursuit of inner bless & divine light. They are known as "seers" as they are said to possess perfect knowledge about the past, present & future of humanity.”

http://www.jeevanadi.com/seven-sages-of-india.php

-“At that moment, Little Flower scratched herself where one never scratches oneself. The explorer–as if he were receiving the highest prize of chastity to which man, always so full of ideals, dare aspire–the explorer who has so much experience of life, turned away his eyes.”

Reactions to picture of Little Flower in the newspaper”

*Take note: none of these people are named -> goes to show it doesn’t matter who says it, it just matters that it was said.

#1 – Woman says, “it distresses me.”

#2 – Woman feels such a “perverse tenderness for the daintiness of the African woman,” that “Little Flower should never be left alone with the tenderness of that woman. Who knows to what darkness of love her affection might extend.”

#3 – A little girl had always been the tiniest person her family had ever known, but now she’s not, because of Little Flower: **Even in the most ridiculous circumstances, we are always looking for the benefit of ourselves!

#4 – Consecration: “association with the sacred.” Young girl feels empathy for the “sad look” on Little Flower’s face, but mother dismisses it’s significance by saying it’s the sadness of an animal, not a human.

#5 – A little boy thinks it would be fun to put Little Flower in his brother’s bed while he’s sleeping to make scared when he wakes up. His Mother has a strange reaction–she reminisces about a story of when her cook was an orphan, the orphan girls hid a dead girl in the cupboard and played with her without telling the nun what happened–because they had “maternal feelings” just as every girl does (!!) and needed means of expressing them, as they didn’t have dolls to care for, which was the normal way (!!) to express those feelings. Mother then has an inner thought process about love and happiness.

-       nun’s perspectives

#6 – A family tries to measure the size of Little Flower/ “Each member of the family there arose the gnawing desire to possess that minute and indomitable thing for himself.”

*** “...felt in its heart–perhaps also lack, because one can no longer have confidence in a Nature that had already blundered (“to make a stupid or careless mistake”) once...”

-“Like the secret of its own secret.”

- The “ineffable (to great to be expressed in words) sensation of not have been devoured yet.”

*** Little Flower, in a strange way, is an example of the purity and innocence that we so rarely see anymore, except maybe in children.

-And when smiles, the explorer cannot “classify it.”

****THAT”S WHY HE’S AN EXPLORER–to show how we always label, to show our need for constant classification; we can never just let anything be, we have to label it, define it.

-“But in the humidity of the jungle, there do not exist these cruel refinements.”

-“Love is not to be devoured, love is to find boots pretty, love is to like the strange color of a man who is not black, love is to smile out of love at a ring that shines.”

**Lispector does make a lot of assumptions– but maybe they’re on purpose; she’s probably hyper aware of every writing move she makes.

Exploratory Draft:

I’m interested in the idea of a story, what a story means, how we define a story, and what typically makes up a story. We’ve all been taught–by our reading and writing classes all throughout our schooling, and simply by the general assumptions of our society–that if a piece of writing is classified as a story, it means it has a plot line, a climax; an intricate conflict, a touching resolution; a single character that goes on a powerful journey of self realization; clear cut themes, messages, lessons, morals that benefit the greater good of society; a story must be a certain genre, whether it’s realistic fiction, nonfiction, or fantasy. These are all the elements that attract so many people to reading stories. They’re what keeps readers interested and on the edge of their seats, eager to read on.

However, the Smallest Woman in the World, a short story by Clarice Lispector, lacks many of these traditional requirements. The story has no clearly defined plot or climax. It takes place over a very short period of time, and constantly jumps around between so many different perspectives. It has no evident conflict, let alone a resolution. Yet, it keeps readers on their toes; it keeps readers fascinated, compelled, intrigued. It makes us question and wonder. So how is it that, while omitting so many of the conventional literary forms, structures, and elements of the standard short story, Lispector still manages to take readers on an enjoyable, excited journey, just like most stories try so hard to do? Furthermore, why would Lispector chose to divert her form from the norm and write with such a unique, different style? What does she accomplish by doing this? What is the purpose of her story?

I have two main chunks to my tentative claim, but I’m not yet sure how to connect them.

The first is about how the Lispector’s quirky writing style affects the reader’s experience with the story, and how that in turn influences their interpretations of its themes and main ideas:

Just like most stories, the Smallest Woman in the World definitely explores many themes, relays many messages, and is and makes many arguments.

We, as readers, read the story, observe these themes, and interpret them for ourselves.

That’s what we do with all stories. With all writing. For everything we consume, actually. We see, we observe, we interpret. That thought process stays the same for everything we will ever be approached with.

However, that thought process is greatly influenced by how information is presented to us. One can argue whatever they want–the content stays the same–but the form, how one argues, is the most important part. My parents always used to tell me, “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” It’s just form and function; form being the how and function being the what.

Clarise Lispector touches upon many traditional themes in her story, like ideas of racism, sexism. And she could have simply written a story that deals with these issues in a much simpler way.

I think of authors as game designers. They have the power to do absolutely whatever they want; they create the word, they bring the characters to life; they decide how they’ll present the stories. So Lispector, as the one in control, decided to take a cutting-edge approach and make her story really unusual, strange, weird, unfamiliar, and often illogical.

But maybe it’s not just because she felt like making it weird. Plus, she’s hyperaware of what she’s doing. Maybe her bizarre style effects what we get out of the story. Maybe she’s intentionally making her writing so quirky in order to accomplish something that could not be done in a normal, ordinary way.

How?

-       It initially seems super unrelatable. All the events of the story revolve around an unrealistically tiny woman, for starters. Secondly, all the reactions that the different people have to seeing Little Flower’s picture in the papers seem insanely uncanny and disturbingly perplexing. But by making these reactions seem like ones we readers would never have, it makes us remove ourselves from the situation, which is something we rarely do (**as human beings, we’re often doing things for solely our own benefit. When we are in any situation we always, even if it’s subconsciously, compare ourselves to the alternate, and try to make our own personal situation seem better than theirs to make ourselves feel better. However, this comparison only comes when there’s some sort of basis of similarity. So by making the character’s reactions seem so unlike ours, we remove ourselves from comparison and just read the story).

We then go on to read the story free of comparison, which actually allows us to be more open and questioning. Although we still judge, we’re more at peace with the strangeness that we’re judging because we think it has nothing to do with ourselves.

But the story is so confusing and weird that we read it a second time, in hopes of gaining a better understanding. And then, when we take a step back, we notice some familiar themes. We begin to see ourselves in some of these characters. And we’re horrified. We realize certain things about our society in a new light.

This “journey” only happens the way it does because of the unusual style of the story.

**The experience has something to do with how we react and interpret the messages and claims of the story itself.

The second part of my “claim” more answers the question of what the purpose of the story really is.

Maybe the style of the story isn’t actually important. I think the purpose of the story may have to do with a big theme. So maybe the story isn’t so different from most other stories: it has a theme, which is arguably the most important part of any piece of writing (sidenote–as a writer myself, I do find it really annoying when people–especially a lot of English teachers– are all like, “every story has a purpose. The author did everything intentionally!” because this really isn’t always true. However, I do believe that all writing does have a theme, even if that theme is simply the pleasure that the author takes in writing something.)

*she actually deals with a much more complicated issue that really covers all the other issues.

I think that the central theme has to do with the idea of perspective. From Marcel Pretre the explorer, to Little Flower, to the families in their apartments, the story is full of different perspectives (perspective is defined as “a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view”).

Our personal interpretations of and reactions to the story are suspended as we read about other people’s reactions–these people being characters in the story itself. Lispector pulls a really interesting literary move here–she has some sort of meta, inception-like reaction chain going on (I don’t know if that makes any sense?), which greatly effects how we interpret the story for ourselves.

So the story is all about how perspective is so subjective and influential: influential by others, by sterotypes, by pressures, by society. The whole beginning of the story, which is when we are introduced to Little Flower, is in the point of view of Marcel Pretre. All the descriptions we get of Little Flower in the beginning are coming from him.

Then, Marcel writes an article about Little Flower and takes a picture of her, and it’s published in the newspaper. So then everyone who reads the newspaper is only learning about Little Flower through the filter of Marcel (it’s interesting to note here that we readers are in the same boat as these families reading the newspaper: we aren’t provided the primary information–the “truth,” per se– about Little Flower, so our assumptions on the event aren’t really on the event itself, but on Marcel’s interpretation of the event).

We also see the themes of stereotyping and labeling. The idea of what it means to love is briefly explored at the end of the story, when Lispector announces Little Flower’s genuine love for Marcel Pretre, yet because her love extends not just towards him but to his boots, as well, Marcel Pretre will have a negative reaction to this. Because his culture–which is essentially our culture–has taught him all these superficial meanings about love, and how it has to be romantic and cannot just be a genuine, friendship, “brotherly” sort of love. So his actions are influenced by he his feelings which are influenced by his opinions which are influenced by the society he lives in, which often promote exaggerated, unfair, stereotypical ideas.

(also, this example is completely influenced by the norms and “rules” of society: -“At that moment, Little Flower scratched herself where one never scratches oneself. The explorer–as if he were receiving the highest prize of chastity to which man, always so full of ideals, dare aspire–the explorer who has so much experience of life, turned away his eyes.”)

So the Smallest Woman in the World is all about how distant we all are from the truth, and how truth may have to be redefinied because it may not even exist. When we live in a world with billions of other people, how can we not be influenced by them? So maybe truth is just subjective and personal and there isn’t one truth but many truths, as many as there are people in this world because every person has there own personal truth.

AH!

-Marcel Pretre and Little Flower foil each other; she’s so innocent, while he’s very uptight and lives by the social norms.

Proposal & Explorations for Essay: The Smallest Woman in the World

(Tentative status quo): I’m interested in writing about the ideas of what makes a story a story. We’ve all been taught–whether through school or just through the assumptions of our culture–that a story needs a plot, a climax, a single character that goes on an intense journey of self realization; it needs a conflict, a resolution. All of these characteristics are what make a story a story: what makes it so intriguing. (Beginning of trouble): However, The Smallest Women in the World lacks many of these seemingly vital elements–it has absolutely no set plot or climax; it jumps around between multiple perspectives; it has an unclear conflict that never fully gets resolved, per se; it’s a complete retell of events, something that we’re always told not to do in a writing class. Additionally, it isn’t a set genre; it is fairly realistic, yet it revolves around the idea of an unrealistically tiny women.

(Tentative trouble): And yet, it’s still captivating. When I read this story, I was so fascinated and interested, almost appreciating and enjoying the author’s unique style. This makes me want to understand how Lispector manages to maintain the intrigue that readers have with her story despite the fact that it omits so many of these traditional “requirements” of a story. Additionally, I want to explore why she chose to take this route; what she hopes to accomplish with her story by doing something so unique and different.

(Tentative claim- this needs a lot of work and much more thinking): One way to consider this is...

(No particular order yet):

Chunk 1: ...to think about how her characters serve as possibly the most important part of the story, particularly those in all the scenes of different people reacting to the discovery of Little Flower. By providing us with (“pre-made?”) meta reactions to the main “event” of story within the story itself, Lispector suspends our own personal reaction and opinion to the event. It serves as almost a series of mirrors with reflections of ourselves, the readers. However, we don’t recognize ourselves in these reactions because they seem so weird, unusual, strange, completely foreign but they actually reveal more about ourselves then we think.

Chunk 2: ...to see how Lispector is able to do things in her story that couldn’t quite be done in a traditional story.

Chunk 3: ...to notice that this is a story more for the reader than for the author: a story for our “benefit” rather than the author’s pure enjoyment and pleasure of writing a story and creating a fictional world. It gets us to think about certain issues in ways we often don’t. By defamiliarizing the context of certain issues such as sexism, slavery, and racism, it makes us readers more open to listening to what the text has to say because we aren’t instantly comparing ourselves to the characters in the story: because all of their reactions seem like reactions we readers would never have. However, after thinking about it and taking a step back, we realize that the rash reactions of the characters within the story aren’t all that different from our own (chunk 1 & 3 are similar).

Chunk 4: Maybe the format and style of a story doesn’t matter: maybe that’s not what’s really important. At heart, this story actually does serve the function of what most stories essentially do–relay themes, messages, lessons, provide arguments, and raise awareness to certain issues. The Smallest Women in the World does do this, and in a very interesting, idiosyncratic way.

Text Exploration: The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Red Anymore by Sherman Alexie

Early Claim: It’s easy to dismiss Sherman Alexie’s story as offensive and pointless. But it seems like his unique narrative style humanizes his characters in a way that would be impossible were they just flat stereotypes.

Ideas to further unpack (in bold from above):

1)   “unique narrative style.”

2)   “humanizes his characters.”

3)   “flat stereotypes.”

Light Text-Exploration:

Julius and his friends pass by. Victor and Adrian sit on Victor’s porch talking and reminiscing about Julius and their own basketball experiences.
“There’s a definite history₁ of reservation heroes₂ who never finish high school, who never finish basketball seasons. Hell, there’s been one or two guys who played just a few minutes of one game, just enough to show what they could have been₃. And there’s the famous case of Silas Sirius, who made one move and scored one basket in his entire basketball career. People still talk about it₄.”
-page 47
They continue to talk about Silas Sirius.

1.     Alexie does something interesting here–he has his main character almost embrace the stereotype, in a way that reveals that he’s hyper aware of it. When Victor describes how there’s a “definite history of reservation heroes who never finish high school,” he speaks as if he understands that this is a common track for reservation Indians to take. At the same time, however, he acknowledges that there are exceptions to this fate, so he’s both showing his understanding of the stereotype but also making sure to note that it’s not always true.

2.     The definition of a “hero” is a brave person that is recognized and idealized for courage and outstanding achievements. This shows how Alexie humanizes his characters by showing how on reservations–just like everywhere else in the world–there are heroes: there are brave people who have courage and determination. This knocks down stereotypes of reservation Indians being very underachieved and unaccomplished.

3.     “What they could have been:” could have has the intonation of being very passive, almost lazy. This is a recurring pattern we see with the characters in this story–two men who just sit around all day, waiting for something to happen; people using alcohol as an escape from reality. However, this seems to greatly encompass the stereotype of reservation Indians being very complacent and lethargic–but just because it stems from a stereotype, does that mean it’s untruthful? What is Alexie trying to do here? Is he admitting to a stereotype or trying to show that this one is truthful?

4.     This bit dives away from a stereotype by showing how reservation Indians do have a sense of community, do support each other, do get excited when one of their comrades succeeds. Although that isn’t quite what’s being shown in this particular part of the story, we do see this sense of pride and optimism when we see Victor hoping that Julius does make it. The natural feelings that communities of people have and share are often discounted and ignored when looking at the lives of reservation Indians, because we throw so many labels onto them that we forget the fact that they’re people too! And that they have human feelings just like we do!