Surfacing 3

1
Surfacing 3

• Quest or Alienation?
• Discovery or Madness?
• Focus chaps 16-18

2
Outline

• Quest (Searching/Diving/Surfacing) and
  Alienation
• Power Struggle among David, Anna and Joe
• The Narrators Alienation
• Her Diving Experience chap 17 the process, the
  past and her vision
• The Narrators view of Language and Signs
• For next time Part III

3
Quest and Search for her Parents

• Searchfor her father (and also her mother), for
  the Indian rock painting, and for her selves.
• Chap 15 the searching with the fathers map for
  the Indian rock fails
• Chap 17 she goes to the cliff
• "It would be right," she says, "for my mother to
  have left something for me also, a legacy. His
  was complicated, tangled, but hers would be
  simple as a hand, it would be final. I was not
  completed yet there had to be a gift from each
  of them" (chap 18 150).

4
Quest and Search for her Parents

• Quest for the mothers simple truth ? for nature
  p. 151
• Imagines humans as filament plants
• Wants to take her mother out of her glass case
• End of Part II '. . . nothing has died,
  everything is alive, everything is waiting to
  become alive.'

5
Diving/Surfacing

• Surfacing --both on the physical and spiritual
  levels
• Swimming, diving and then surfacing
• e.g. End of Part I Swimming ? chaps 17
• 2) Diving into the subconscious and bringing the
  repressed guilt to the surface
• e.g. There is "death . . . inside me, she layers
  it "over, a cyst, a tumor, black pearl." (146)
• 3) Chap 20 "HeJoe trembles and then I can feel
  my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me"
  (161-62).

6
Against and Complicit with the Americans/Humans

• Chap 15 the 'Americans' turn out to be from
  Toronto p. 129
• They "killed the heron anyway. It doesn't matter
  what country they're from . . . they're still
  Americans, they're what's in store for us, what
  we are turning into."

7
Against and Complicit with the Americans/Humans

• Chap 15 (2)
• The protagonist feels "a sickening complicity"
  in the transgressions of others "The trouble
  some people have being German," she says in
  reference to the Nazi atrocities, "I have being
  human" (129-30).
• e.g. Her allowing the animals to be trapped and
  killed by her brother. Because of my fear they
  were killed (132)

8
Against and Complicit with the Americans/Humans

• Chap 18
• -- not the men she hates, but the Americans, the
  human beings ? the aggressive, possessive and
  destructive tendencies in humans.
• wants there to be a mchine that could make them
  vanish . . .
• Is she too cruel to her fellow human beings? Is
  she going mad?

9
Alienation

• Ending of Part II (chap 19) -- The voices
  murmur, they cant discuss me, they know Im
  listening. Theyre avoiding me, they find me
  inappropriate they think I should be filled with
  death, I should be in mourning. But nothing has
  died, everything is alive, everything is waiting
  to become alive.'

10
David, Anna Joe and the Narrators Alienation
from them

• Chap 16 the 6th day.
• What happen to Anna and David on this day? How
  does David look at it? Joe? And the narrator?
• Chap 18 the geometrical sex
• What does this episode tell us more about Anna,
  David and Joe? How about the narrator and her
  question of love?

11
Exploitation of Anna in David and Joes Random
Samples

• Put naked Anna together with the dead bird
  your chance for stardom.
• Davids and Joes 136-137 one brutal and
  domineering, and the other uncertain.
• The narrators response (136) So we battled in
  secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer
  fought back because I never won. The only
  defense was flight, invisibility. p. 138 asks
  David for herself, but not for Anna.

12
Exploitation of Anna in David and Joes Random
Samples

• Davids explanation (pp. 138-39)
  self-justification

13
Geometrical Sex

• Joe and Anna as losers comforting each other
  with sex?
• David p. 153
• -- never take no for no.
• -- sex separated from love, sexual organs
  detached from human bodies.
• -- goes to the narrator to get even with Anna.
  (154)
• -- Second hand American was spreading over him
  

14
Further Alienation from the Three

• The dinner scene
• The narrator observes the continuation of the
  war between David and Anna, both of which know
  what happened.
• The two join forces and turn around to attack the
  narrator.
• Continued fragmentation of identities in the
  narrators eyes P. 155

15
Further Alienation from the Three

• Chap 19 For him truth might still be possible,
  what will preserve him is the absence of words
  but the others are already turning to metal,
  skins galvanizing, heads congealing to brass
  knobs, components and intricate wires ripening
  inside. (160)
• What would you do if you were the narrator? Do
  you think that the narrator is too detached and
  radical?

16
Her Diving Experience chap 17

• The difficult process of diving the lake is
  shown to be layered p. 142 ? What does it mean?
• 1) pain 2) disorientation, 3) saw it.
• What does the narrator find out when she dives?

17
Her Diving Experience the past

• How is her real past remembered?
• The brutal scene of abortion p. 144 lack of
  care, forced to do it 145
• More flashbacks in chap 18 his being her first,
  her idol, her teacher his wanting to separate
  their relationship from everything else. (150)
• Acknowledges her making a faked album.
• Regret I should have said no but I didnt
  that made me one of them too, a killer.

18
Her Diving Experience vision

• Mythic vision of nature as a place of truth --
• Beginning of this chapter dead animals as
  Christ
• P. 146 She appreciates natural beings as gods
  who give her what she needs
• Rock paintings the place to learn truth

19
The Narrators view of Language and Signs

• Her mistrust of the words, and alienation from it
  -- love e.g. 30 107.
• I couldnt use it love because it wasnt
  mine.
• The voice wasnt mine, it came from someone
  dressed as me, imitating me
• p. 139 she loves you, I repeated. . .it was
  the magic word but it couldnt work because I had
  no faith.

20
The Narrators view of Language and Signs

• Davids wristwatch p. 153 his dial or switch

21
Part III

• The narrator stays behind, and becomes a natural
  woman.
• a creature neither animal nor human, furless,
  only a dirty blanket, shoulders huddled over into
  a crouch, . . . The lips move by themselves.

22
Different Views on Part III

• The narrator goes crazy deliberately in order
  to empower herself. (Annis Pratt)
• Before the narrator can establish a strong sense
  of identity, she hits "rock bottom. . . . Fed up
  with the superficiality of her companions, she
  banishes them and submits to paranoia(Patricia
  F. Goldblatt)