Autobiography of a Face part 2

 

In Autobiography of a Face, we learn the life of Lucy Grealy and her struggles growing up with cancer and then disfigurement. From this single sentence, I knew it was going to be tough to break from the Mimetic Register for this book, in particular with the way I read. In fact, I nearly had to put down the book when I began thinking of the pain that she went through when going to Chemotherapy for her childhood cancer in chapter four.

 

 

Representation of me while reading

 

Throughout the chapter, we learn of the cycle of which Lucy takes her treatments.  How her mother picks her up, the treatments being quick and less complicated, the other patients and how their diagnoses, etc. The mimetic register drew me into the reading because the words on the page painted a depressing picture. However, that was when I began to notice Narrator’s attention to detail. I believe that Lucy Grealy wanted us to feel what her time in the Radiology Department was like to draw us into the mimetic register. She was using these details in the situation in a conventional form to draw us in. “My body, wanting to turn itself inside out, made wave after wave of attempts to rid itself of this unseeable intruder, this overwhelming and noxious poison. I shook with heaves so strong they felt more like convulsions.(Grealy, 75)” There are quotes like that littered throughout the entire chapter. We expect a cancer patient to go through chemotherapy often, so to emphasize how often she goes, Lucy explains what she had observed and felt in her time there.

As I approached the end of the chapter four, I began to notice something else. Something that was happening to Lucy’s character that really wouldn’t occur to a kid, cancer patient or not. On page 81, she noted that due to her having so many brothers and sisters, she wouldn’t get time alone. While this would be a regular thing for any kid, it was the second line that made me think. She says, “I liked to lie on my sister’s bed, look out her window, think to myself, So this is what she sees when she wakes up in the morning.(81)” While laying in bed is fine, why would she think like that? Why would she be comparing herself like this to her sister? Why is she asking what it’s like to be someone else? 

This is what broke me from the mimetic register. It made me realize that Lucy was doing more than tell the story of her struggles. Up until this point, I thought the Lucy of the story was trying to be ignorant to her situation… But just like all kids, she grows up and begins to search for her Identity. Her actions such as laying in her sibling’s bed and diagnosing some of the other patients in the radiology department make her seem just like a kid, but it’s her thoughts and questions that tell the story.

The final shred of proof of the search of identity being the theme is the time Lucy’s father took her to her chemotherapy treatment instead of her mother. She remembers the event, “Once my name was called he’d accompany me into the office and exchange greetings with Dr. Woolf, but as soon as I was asked to take off my clothes he’d turn to me and say, “Right then, I’ll go get the car.” Perhaps in part, he was embarrassed to see his daughter half naked, but I knew that he did not want to see me suffer(84).” Most kids would have been nervous to be alone, but Lucy felt freer. Free to say what she wanted without the parents causing her to change her answers to suit what they wanted to hear. This small action had given the young Lucy clarity to not just herself but her position in the world.

I expect as the story to continues into her teenage and adult years, the book’s themes of identity will push themselves more and more to the front. The kind of thinking she had so far is much more expected in a teenager’s mind than a child’s. I hope whatever she does find makes her happy for a girl in her position.

Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Print.

 

Autobiography of a Face Blog 1

Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy chronicles her childhood battle with cancer and her lifelong battle with disfigurement. While she was cancer free not long after her diagnosis, she underwent reconstructive surgeries until she died at age 39 from a heroin overdose. While this book doesn’t contain her last few years of life, it tells the story of her childhood and adolescence with the wit, self-awareness, and intelligence of an adult.

 

Autobiography of a Face cover

 

Personally, my way of reading has always been stuck in the mimetic register. I am fully aware of the thematic register. I know how to close read. But maybe I’m guilty of this: when I’m reading something I know I don’t have to write a paper on, I shift into a passive mode. So I chose this book not only because I like memoirs, but because it would probably be easier to force myself OUT of the mimetic register. I already know that these things happened, so I won’t be as tempted to remain in the mimetic register and will have more opportunities for close reading. I think choosing this book also presents its challenges: how do we make a value graph and determine purposes, context, and controlling/counter ideas out of a true story? This belongs to somebody.

I think Lucy’s first surgery was the most telling, and I would argue that her controlling idea: she craved attention, and so she embraced being a sickly kid. That would make the counter idea what being sick entails: pain, discomfort, ugliness, awkwardness, and, most importantly, needles. Collectively, I will call this counter idea, sickliness.

 

An attempt at a value graph

 

When your jaw is wired shut, you get an ice cream diet. Silver lining????

The memoir begins with 9-year-old Lucy getting headbutted right in the jaw. Not ideal. This leads to a toothache and lockjaw and, eventually, a bony growth (but we’ll get there later). After the initial shoulder meeting jaw, Lucy got to miss school and had dreams of a diet of milkshakes, all making up for her having a jaw that may need wiring shut. After her initial doctor visit and the wrong diagnosis of a fractured jaw, Lucy was happy to be carted off in an ambulance. But, wait! When she got there, she actually had to have surgery. Before surgery, Lucy was ecstatic to be fussed over by doctors, nurses, and parents, being complimented on her bravery and behavior. Surgery time comes, and Lucy has to get injections and taste this horrible gas to make her go to sleep. Lucy was nervous, of course, but she was enamored by the sight of an operating room and the doctors and nurses all paying attention to her.

“Couldn’t she understand that sleeping was the single most desirable act in the world, the only thing I could ever want to do with the rest of my life?” – Lucy on page 24, but also me every day

She resisted as much as she could to go to sleep so she could watch everything, but the medicine overpowered her. Lucy wakes up vomiting and exhausted and bothered by her nurse. Lucy’s first operation of many was finally over.

 

 

If read only mimetically, the reader has an awkward time figuring out whether they are sympathetic with Lucy (of course they are! She’s a kid with cancer!) or horrified by her nonchalant attitude and what resembles joy about her injury, surgery, and then cancer (Doesn’t she understand how wrong that is?!). Lucy writes, “I was vain and proud when it came to wanting to be different from everyone else. I wanted nothing more than to be special, and so far the role of patient had delivered” (Grealy 25). I think that’s a really important line to begin reading the text thematically. It shows Lucy’s dissociation from herself. She was no longer Lucy Grealy, the 9-year-old Irish immigrant who was really good at book reports. She was now Lucinda (all the doctors use your full name) the patient. Lucinda the disfigured kid. Lucinda, the subject of medical journals and survivor of Ewing’s Sarcoma.

 

Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Print.

Demian Blog #3

Demian has a lot going on in the text; we know this. But I want to draw particular attention to the intertextual codes that aren’t accessible when an addressee is stuck only in the mimetic register. We need to take a closer look at the strange relationship between the apparently superior Demian and the infatuated Sinclair.

Using the hermeneutic code specifically, I’m attempting to trace a thread through the story that sets up and answers a question. What I want to know is why Sinclair and Demian never really discuss what went down with Kromer.

Thematization: I think it is understood that Demian is the mysterious one of the story in general, but also about the Kromer situation. He suggests for Sinclair that, “if there’s nothing else you can do, then kill him!” (32). Sinclair is horrified and says no.  

Proposal of the enigma: Even though Sinclair does nothing to resolve the situation, Kromer suddenly stops bothering Sinclair.

Request for an answer: Demian approaches Sinclair to check if Kromer is done bothering him. Sinclair confirms, and asks how he made it happen. All Demian says is he “talked to him” (33).

Snare: Demian continuously avoids Sinclair’s question.

Equivocation: Probably when Demian says, “I just talked to him, the same way I talked to you. I was able to make him see that leaving you alone was to his own advantage” (33). This may be part of Demian’s truth, but I don’t think it’s the whole truth. That makes it a bit of a lie, then.

Jamming: Demian doesn’t give Sinclair an answer, eliciting in Sinclair “the same awkward feeling toward [Demian], a strange mix of gratitude and shyness, admiration and fear, affection and inner resistance” which in turn begins Sinclair’s lifelong infatuation with Demian (33).

Suspended answer: Demian doesn’t share with Sinclair how he stopped Kromer, and the subject of Kromer isn’t brought up again for a very long time.

Disclosure: I feel that there is no resolution to the situation between Kromer, Sinclair, and Demian. The subject is never brought up again until the very end of the story. Demian asks, “Do you remember Franz Kromer?” (135). We get no hint about what happens to Kromer or what Demian did to make him go away.

(Actual footage of Kromer and Sinclair.)

So, why do Demian and Sinclair never speak of Kromer again until the very end? I would argue that the Kromer situation at 10 years old is where Sinclair originally lost his former self. Between then and the very end of the novel, when Demian confirms that Sinclair has found who he is, Demian was a guiding light. They never speak of it until the very end because he has finally come of age and is able to understand things on his own.

But we could also read this code as a different kind of enigma. The mystery isn’t what Demian did to Kromer, but Demian himself. This character bends the rules as he goes without consequence or even acknowledgement. Demian is ascribed all of these power words in semic code:

“[Demian] dodged the question no matter how hard [Sinclair] tried to find out what happened. [Sinclair] was left with the same awkward feeling toward [Demian], a strange mix of gratitude and shyness, admiration and fear, affection and inner resistance” (33).

We see this again when the two boys are in communion school. Demian moves his seat back to where Sinclair sits, and says that he makes it happen by will alone, such that not even the teacher can acknowledge the transgression. Demian “dodges.” This could be partially ascribed to Demian’s discussion of the “Mark of Cain,” but that had a bit more to do with mind-reading and seizing one’s destiny than avoiding interrogation by will alone.

These could all be considered partial answers to the question of why Demian and Sinclair avoid talking about Kromer, and why Demian is more than a regular person, as they tie into the disclosure without fully answering the question for sure.

Maybe there really isn’t just one answer.

 

Demian Blog #2

In Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of Demian, a few things happen in quick succession. Sinclair begins puberty and completes his confirmation class while Demian gave him a parallel education on critical thinking. He goes to boarding school, drinks too much, and paints a picture of a woman that resembles Max Demian. Then he meets Demian in a bar. Sinclair receives a note he’s sure is from Demian while in one of his classes, and later acquaints himself with Pistorius the organist.

Through these chapters we can follow a few distinct threads. First of all, it is made evident that Sinclair is very fond of Demian, almost romantically so. Most of chapter 3 is spent describing confirmation class and Demian’s revolutionary ideas that keep enrapturing and enlightening Sinclair. In chapter 4, however, Demian is left behind for boarding school. Sinclair, alone and rebellious, takes to dreaming and painting and conjures an image of a woman he feels many things about. He describes it as both masculine and feminine, as Demian, and as himself (66-67). The painting was supposed to be of the girl from the park, the one he named Beatrice, but as it went through several iterations it looked less like her and more like the face that Sinclair kept dreaming about: Demian’s. Sinclair had originally chosen the image of Beatrice to worship because it made him believe he could become a part of the world of light again, since drinking and sinning left him in the dark.

(Bless you, Soft Cell.)

This surprised me, breaking me temporarily out of the mimetic register, interrupting my flow as the addressee. Demian has challenged the world of light not as dishonest but as a world incomplete; he has brought Sinclair into new schools of thought and shown him new lenses through which to view religion, God, life, and people. Sinclair loves him for this, even though a part of him continues to yearn for the illusory completeness of the lost world of light (much like Cypher in The Matrix misses the bliss of unknowing). Though confused and alone in boarding school, Sinclair goes as far as to try to imitate Demian by retelling his version of Cain and Abel to Beck during his first encounter with alcohol (56).

This is when I realized something somewhere in the thematic register: this world of light that Sinclair yearns for, but knows he may never completely belong to again, is his childhood innocence. It was the veil over his eyes that separated his good world from the bad one that he knew only by reputation. Demian, however, moves freely between the good world and the dark one, and teaches Sinclair how to do the same because he sees the same power in his naive friend. Sinclair does have the power to move freely between the two, but is less cognizant of this. He is a rebel in high school, “a notorious, reckless barfly (59).” In the next line on the same page, he spells it out: “Once again I belonged entirely to the dark world – to the devil – and in that world I was considered a splendid fellow.”

“Once again,” he says. He is aware that he is shifting back and forth from light to dark, just not that he can control this. Sinclair is also capable of being fully immersed in whichever world he belongs to at a given time. He is what Gallop would call an ethical reader. He is behaving the way each world needs him to behave to be considered successful in that world, much like a submissive addressee. This lets him see both sides of the value chart as well, so to speak. In the light world, or Controlling Idea: the Purpose is that following the rules of law and church protects you. The Context is that breaking the rules leads to suffering and self-doubt. The Counter Idea (aka dark world), however,  the Purpose is that shirking institutional rules and making your own way provides strength of character and spiritual toughness. The Context is that blindly obeying laws signifies weakness and stupidity. In this chart we see that Sinclair has been moving dynamically through the “infinity” loop throughout the story so far.

He was light as a child, dark under Kromer’s thumb, light in confirmation class, dark in boarding school, light when worshipping Beatrice and painting. Like one of McKee’s value graphs, we see the emotional charge of our theme going up and down. Demian is at the heart of Sinclair’s ups and downs, catalysing them all directly or indirectly.

First blog post

This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.