Demian by Herman Hesse is a story about a youth Emil Sinclair who becomes obsessed with the duality of good and evil to such an extant he becomes hopelessy emotionally dependent upon Max Demian and his Mother Eve.
Premise: What would happen if you just “put your desire out into the universe” and waited to see what happens?
Stevens Dejesus
Reflection
How writers Read
Prof.Kopp
Where I stand now as a writer, after the course has come to an end, is far from who I was at the beginning. Analyzing the text was a vital part of this course but what really impacted me the most was the process of become a better writer. In this process I gained experience in how to read for many elements in the text that produce for example a book like A Thousand Splendid Suns. A book where I was able to analyze the authors intended message or messages that he/she would like to relay. The author in A Thousand Splendid Suns addresses a number or themes and topics that the reader had to uncover. I use uncover because the process for me was one where I began peeling back layers and addressing myself and my reaction to the text. In reality I was finding myself tending to two “onions”, one onion being myself and the other the text. Of course it caused me to grow frustrated with myself and my resistance to many parts of different texts but I learned much through the exercise. To clear this up I will use for example my first blog of our third book that I read with my group The Color of Magic. My first blog of this book was the first one of the course where I truly expressed my strong resistance to a text. I encountered the text and was not able to exercise what we were learning to do with the text in class. In the course we were challenged to become the submissive reader in order to later arrive at also becoming an authorative reader. Both of the terms such as the submissive and authoritive reader are to describe a reader who is non resistant to a book or a reader who has understood the text and has discovered other dynamics of the book/text.
The writing core values of the writing department presents the first core value which is to demonstrate understanding of a variety of genre conventions and exhibit rhetorical adaptability in applying those conventions. This is a core value that was inevitable to learn and apply in the classroom. We were constantly learning to look at a text that we were not accustomed to reading. We read articles from authorities in the field to authors of books such as The color of magic. I learned to understand these genres and dissect dense content like for example the essay written by Jane Gallop. The author of this text discussed difficult ideas that challenged me to move toward a place of discomfort. I say discomfort because I was hesitant to move away from how I had learned to read all of my life. I’ve been used to reading text and interpreting while being resistant to anything other than what I thought a text was. Jane Gallops essay ask the reader to jump through hoop and make an effort to become a reader that read without preconceptions. A reader that would drop all of the languages and practices that had been previously learned. My biggest issue with this process was learning the new language for example with our third book which feature many different terms that belonged to the world in which the text was written in. I learned in this text to actually learn the language and then look for different themes that the language and situations presented.
Another core value that I learned was the value of understanding theories of writing and reading and be able to apply them to their own writing. One of the important goals of the course was to learn a different way of reading to improve is writing. My writing now has a different process with which it is developed. Stories, blogs or ideas now are written with a different mindset like for example with an essay that I wrote for my social deviance course. I wrote an essay on a book called Dreamland where I applied the theory of understanding the language of the text and than using it to present an interpretation of that language. I became a submissive reader to a text that contained a language and situation I had no knowledge of. I first read the text and then wrote an essay analyzing the text which I was able to do using the theories learned by authors such as Jane Gallop.
Demonstrating the ability to critically read complex and sophisticated texts in a variety of subjects is the third value I learned in the course. The different subjects I encountered I not only encountered in the course but other classes as well. Before, I explained that was presented with the task of writing an essay the book Dreamland. With what I learned in How Writers Read such as experiencing the text and then looking to become an authority of the text I wrote this essay. I did well on the essay because I found what the author did not reveal to the reader who was resistant and standoffish to the text.
The course prepared me to become a dynamic writer and reader when doing any curse work in any text. Jumping through hoops that the text present to me are still a struggle but have begun to master small task that the course taught me.
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.
Remember when you were in kindergarten, if you can, and you met your first best friend. You were probably inseparable and never looked forward to the end of the school day. The relationship with the author and the addressee is like so. The reader meets the narrator and immediately places all of their trust in him/or her. Without even having the knowledge of the narrator’s character the reader is drawn to the subject at hand. While reading A Thousand Splendid Suns I had to believe everything and become the submissive reader because of how foreign the content was. The book takes place in a culture that is not well known and often times misunderstood. I would go as far as to say that even gets misrepresented. The narrator introduces you to the reality of the culture and allows the addressee to take what he wants from the text.
In the first few chapters the narrator does something that I believe tells the reader the kind of relationship that he want to develop. When Mariam is returned home by Jalil’s driver from Herat to her mother’s home the driver begins walking her to the hut. All of a sudden Mariam is stopped by the driver and redirected back to the car. Mariam still manages to see ahead and see her mother hanging from a tree. This tells me that the narrator will not be stopped or covered from experiencing everything in the text. Nothing will be to graphic or horrific for the reader to experience. It is not about the drama but about the content and reality.
as a reader I am expected to find myself face to face with this reality and gain a perspective on Mariam’s life.
Yet the author still is not reliable because other underlying themes resonate in the text. Oppression may be one of the fine themes but the cultural codes still need to be graped far into the text.
“If she could articulate it, she might have said to Nana that she was tired of being an instrument, of being lied to, used. That she was sick of Nana twisting the truths of their life and making her, Mariam, another of her grievances against the world” (26).
Since Mariam was a little girl growing up in the kolba, she needed the love and approval of a man. She goes to her father’s house hoping to live with him, his three wives and all of their children. Being the illegitimate child that she is, she is not wanted there so they marry her off to Rasheed after her mother kills herself. She begs her father to let her stay with them – begs for his love and acceptance – but her request falls on deaf ears and she is married off the next day. She tells her father that she never wants to speak to him again and when he tries to contact her almost ten years later, she refuses to speak to him. She stares out of the window at him, waiting and hoping for her to speak to him (just like he did to her the first night she came to ask to live there) and closes the curtain. He leaves a letter which she tears up without reading. The act of pride comes back to hurt her later when she gains hope in thinking she can get money from her father to help her family’s dire situation. Her hopes are crushed when she finds out that her father passed away many years ago. Had she read the letter he left her then she would have known that an inheritance awaited her.
After her initial apprehension to her marriage with Rasheed, she comes to seek his approval just as she did from her father. She goes from being disgusted by him to looking forward to making his meals. She accepts and even shows gratitude for her new life in this arranged marriage but it quickly goes sour after they both realize she is unable to have children. Mariam still seeks the approval she lost even after the physical and mental abuse from Rasheed. Then Laila shows up and Rasheed realizes that she can be the chance for having another son and they quickly marry to Mariam’s dismay. Laila ends up having a girl and Rasheed loses his admiration for her and she starts to get the same mistreatment as Mariam. The two women’s dislike toward each other turns to a close bond from this common unfortunate situation of abuse and unhappiness that they share. The other thing they have in common is their love for Laila’s little girl, Aziza. Laila does and up having a son who is doted upon by Rasheed unlike Aziza who he knew by the looks of her that she wasn’t his daughter. Aziza is the daughter of Tariq who was thought to be dead until he showed up at the door. The son tells Rasheed that he was there and Rasheed almost kills Laila by strangling her. Mariam grabs a shovel and kills him. She tells Laila to run away with the children and Tariq. She takes the blame and is sentenced to murder.
In Living to Tell About It, James Phelan said,
“Our judgments and emotions focus not on characters’ choices and what they mean for what does and does not happen to them but rather on the progressive revelation of characters and their static situations” (8).
The static situation throughout Miriam’s life is her need for the love and approval of a man. In her early life that man is her father. She loves him and adores everything about him. He is her light. When he refuses her and marries her off she is crushed and refuses to speak to him ever again. She gains strength by making that bold decision and that gives her the strength to decide to accept her situation and look for happiness and gratitude in her marriage to Rasheed. This continues Mariam’s progressive revelation. She makes a bold decision to swing that shovel to save Laila and it gives her strength. Immediately after killing him, when wondering what they are going to do without a man, Miriam says, “There is a way and I just have to find it” (315). She makes the tough decision to tell Laila to leave with the children and says, “For me, it ends here. There’s nothing more I want. Everything I’d ever wished for as a little girl you’ve already given me. You and your children have made me so very happy” (319). It’s ironic that she killed Rasheed for the love of a woman and that it wasn’t a man who gave her what she needed in the end. She took a man’s life and gave her own so that Laila and her children could have the freedom from men that she would never have. Her progression ends with her being told to kneel down for her beheading and the narrator says, “One last time, Mariam did as she was told.”
This story as I described it above is the character narrator addressing the narratee. I was pulled in emotionally and connected with these two women, Laila and Mariam. I watched the dramatic events unfold in their lives and I wanted so badly for them to overcome all of the strife and adversity. I was hoping they could do it together, but, as in all wars, some must die. The author also reaches out to the authorial audience in this cultural narrative. The issues of the war in Afghanistan and the everyday life of these people is something I was never able to relate to on such a deep emotional level. I lived the experience through the lives in this narrative. Although this is a fiction story, there is fact to it. Warlords, terrorists and communists did reign over this area and many people fled for their lives or lived in war torn areas with bombs falling all day and night. The ones that fled were stuck in refugee camps where dysentery, filth and death were the norm. The author brought the authorial audience and the narrative audience together by showing what can happen to normal families stuck in war zones and weaving in facts from the actual war. This weaving opened my tear filled eyes to how it might feel to actually live in a situation such as these characters did, as these real people do.
A Thousand Splendid Suns delivers cultural codes in many areas of the text one of those areas being the separation between the rich and the poor. This Cultural code is spoken off in Christine’s 3rd Blog where she looks at the relationship between Meriam and her father and Meriam and her mother. Christina shows us through places she points out in the text that there is evidence of the cultural code which points at poverty and injustice. She points to us the beliefs and norms of the culture and what are the results when anyone deviates from the norms. There is a great gap between those who are not wanted and those who believe themselves to be superior.
I see the cultural code develop in the relationship between Merriam and her teacher Mullah Faizullah.Her teacher and friend is vital to understanding the divide between those who are educated and those who are ignorant. Although Mariam is not in school she receives an education through Mullah and escapes the path of ignorance although it isn’t a complete liberation. Mullah is the medium of education that lingers between those who can and cannot afford it. Mariam’s hope is not only in her father but also in an education that may allow her to also free her mother. Her search becomes a search for enlightenment and revelation, one that she cannot receive while out of Herat.
It brings up a topic of poverty being a hindrance for those who want an education in the culture which Mariam is living in. The problem stems not only from poverty but also from gender inequality that may stem from the culture and not the religion. This cultural code reveals the clash between the culture and the undertone of religion being only used for the progress of the rich/ men of Herat.
Meriam finds herself in this complex ensemble of cultures that are for the majority detrimental to her dreams.
In Samuel’s 2nd Blog for A Thousand Splendid Suns he employs The syllogistic form to describe what he see that is to come in the future. Syllogistic progressive form is the unfolding of the steps of an argument through which the genre is introduced and the reader acquires an idea of what is to come. He sees this form manifested in the repeated inference to Mariam staying exiled with her mother until she is fifteen. This is a good analysis of the text and understanding of instances in which the text reveal the outcome of the next chapters in the book. Yet I think that this form also reveals moments in which Mariam is prompted to escape her fate.
I the first few pages of the book the stream near the hut is mention quite numerously. The narrator mentions the stream on pg.14 ” After tea with Nana, Mariam and Jalil always went fishing in the stream. He showed her how to cast her line, how to reel in the trout” and then on pg.18 “At the stream, Mariam waited by the spot they had agreed on the day before”. The stream is repeated and stands as a symbols of a running hope but is this is torn down by empty promise. When the stream is first mentioned on page fourteen it stands as symbols for what is occurring between Jalil and Mariam. Mariam is the fisherman throwing the line and Jalil is the fish that she never catches always coming up empty and disillusioned with hope.
The stream also serves as a symbol of where Mariam think she will find true happiness. She goes down to the stream to wait for Jalil because she believes that she will finally receive the attention she desires when Jalil comes for her. The stream is also a sign of her desire to go and visit Herat where she will find happiness and family.
I see this repetition as the anchor for what the story will repeatedly bring into play in the text. A theme of disillusion and false hope that will lead to a very dark ending in this story.
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.
The semic code is very apparent throughout the beginning of the book A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. As the protagonist, Miriam, speaks of her father and mother (who she calls Nana) there are many semes which connote strong feelings that she has toward each. There is a positive connotation surrounding her father and the words she uses to describe him and their time together. He sat her on his lap and told her lovely stories of the places he has been; she was his “little flower” (4). Immediately following every meeting with her father, her mother chimes in and spews her hateful words into her daughter’s brain. She would tell Miriam not to believe his stories and that he cast them out.
“Mariam would listen dutifully to this. She never dared say to Nana how much she disliked her talking this way about [her father] Jalil” (5).
Miriam feels she has a duty to be respectful of her mother’s feelings but she doesn’t agree with what her mother says. She doesn’t want to believe her father is a liar because he is the only person who makes her feel worthy of any of the wonderful things life has to offer. 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. The reader can make a prediction using these opposing values that there will be an internal struggle for Miriam to figure out her place in this world that she was born into.
This juxtaposition of feelings toward her parents can also be used to figure out the symbolic codes within the text. There is a constant struggle between Miriam wanting to be dutiful to the woman who is raising her and Miriam needing her father to make her feel loved, special and part of something bigger than the little kolba in the middle of a remote clearing of weeping willows deep in the woods in which her and her mother reside. There is a battle between right and wrong. It is wrong that she and her Nana were cast aside but her father does do right by making the effort to spend time with her. The difference between the rich and the poor is also apparent. The father doesn’t think of the consequences that might become for Nana when he sleeps with her. He just wants what he wants and will take it, just as the rich and powerful have the right to do BUT Nana is left with the burden of an illegitimate child in a culture that doesn’t permit such business. Her own father disowns her and she is shunned to a remote location. She is surviving without the lavish adventures and lifestyle like Jalil has AND she is left alone, allowing her bitterness to swell more and more with each visit from Jalil, and each story he tells. Miriam is caught in a world of mixed feelings as well. She wants to feel special and loved but doesn’t want to disrespect her mother.
The cultural code is also present in her mother’s fate. She became an disgraced outcast by making a decision to sleep with a married man. Miriami is also getting the repercussions of her mother’s choices – her own mother thinks of her as a harami. The fact that there is a word to describe a child born into such a situation is indicative of the culture that these people are living in.
The author sets evokes the resistant reader when he uses the hermeneutic code to give a foreshadowing of Miriam’s fate, at least for the first fifteen years of her life. He says on page 5, “though she would live the first fifteen years of her life within walking distance of Herat, Mariam would never see this storied tree. She would never see the famous minarets up close, and she would never pick fruit from Herat’s orchards or stroll in its fields of wheat.” The reader can infer that Miriam’s fate will not be much different from her mother’s unfortunate engagement at the age of fifteen. Sam Fine took a deeper inferential walk in his blog when he talked about how Miriam might have the same misfortune in marriage such as her mother had at the age of fifteen. Another enigma set up by the narrator revolves around the father’s intentions. It is significant that he chooses to send his sons to drop off supplies to Nana and Miriam when he could just as easily sent a servant.
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.
Khaled Housseini wrote this book to educate others about the dire situation in his country. There is a qualitative progression to the story. The reader is always aware that things are not going to work out well for the women in the story. There is the repetitive form of the war that is always surrounding the characters. Their town or country is always being taken over by wither communists or some sort of terrorist group. This gives the foreshadowing effect of instability and unrest for these characters.
That feeling lasts until the end of the book because even though Laila has found her childhood love and they are a family, I found myself waiting for something bad to happen to them. The book even ends with talk of how bad the neighborhood she grew up in has become.
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