Tuesday, April 2, 2013

What You Don't Know Can't Hurt You

The twelfth book to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is Oliver La Farge's 1930 novel about a traditional Navajo man, Laughing Boy, who falls in love with an American-educated Navajo woman, Slim Girl. Named for its main character, Laughing Boy was the first novel about Native American life to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. I enjoy stories about pioneers, Native Americans, and life in the West. Larry McMurtry's epic Lonesome Dove (which received the Pulitzer in 1986) remains my favorite book by an American writer and I first read it more than ten years ago. So I had high hopes for this novel. It did not meet them.

At just under 200 pages the story is not long, yet it failed to captivate me until about the last fifty pages. The cover of my copy includes a quote from the New York Times that says, "[A novel of] lucid beauty, vital artistic imagination, and a clear, almost hypnotic style."

Hypnotic, yes. Clear? Absolutely not.

La Farge's background is in anthropology and he is credited with discovering two previously unknown languages while working in Central America and the American Southwest. Throughout his life he was an advocate for the rights of Native Americans. As a highly educated anthropologist (he held two degrees from Harvard), he had an intimate, inside knowledge of Native American culture. It is clear from the narrative of Laughing Boy that he understands explicitly many things about Navajo culture that outsiders do not understand. Yet instead of finding a way to express normal activities of Navajo culture clearly to non-Native American readers, he too frequently writes assuming that his audience knows what he does. Which we usually don't. And so are often confused. Or at least, I was often confused, especially at the beginning. Take this passage from the opening page:

"He wished he could work while riding; everything was so perfect then, like the prayers, hozoji nashad, travelling [sic] in beauty. His hands, his feet, his head, his insides all were hozoji, all were very much alive. He whooped and struck up the Magpie Song till the empty desert resounded -
'A-a-a-iné, a-a-a-iné,
Ya-a-iné-ainé, ko-ya-ainé...'
He was lean, slender, tall, and handsome, Laughing Boy, with a new cheap headband and a borrowed silver belt to make ragged clothes look fine."

Now, this passage is beautiful, but I want to know what the native words really mean. You are able to get some idea of the meaning of 'hozoji' - but what is the difference between 'hozoji' and 'hozoji nashad'? And what does Laughing Boy's song mean? While we understand the emotion from which it is born, there is no indication of what his song means. Isn't it important to know what those things mean?
It reminded me of the experience of reading another Pulitzer prizewinner that we will come to much later in this challenge, Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Significant and sometimes lengthy portions of that novel are written in Spanish without translation. I happen to speak Spanish well enough to have understood them, and let me tell you there is important stuff in those sections! I often tell people that if they do not speak Spanish they will not enjoy it or understand it to its fullest potential. It also reminded me of reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for the first time, as a junior in high school. I took the small section written in German to my Spanish teacher to see if she had any German-speaking friends who could translate it for me because I had to know what it said! So, reading Laughing Boy I kept worrying about what information I was missing by not understanding native words. What insight into these characters was I losing? It distracted me from enjoying the story as much as I could have.

Several days after finishing the novel I was still wondering about what I missed from this story, when it occurred to me that perhaps that is exactly what La Farge wanted. Why would an author choose to use a second language in a story, knowing many readers would not understand it? Perhaps La Farge wanted his readers to feel a distance between themselves and his characters, to butt right up against those barriers to understanding another culture and wrestle with that feeling. I have a bad habit of making assumptions and I started this novel assuming that of course all writers must want their readers to understand their characters intimately. But maybe they don't? Maybe that's part of the point of Laughing Boy, to have some unanswered questions at the end.

Perhaps I'll read it again later in life (long after I've finished the other three million books on my To Read list), and by then I'll be able to accept seeing things I cannot understand, and letting them lie. For now I'm moving on to the next book on my neverending list.

And it's Years of Grace, by Margaret Ayer Barnes, which has so far been the most difficult text to acquire. Used copies on Amazon start at $40, the famous John K. King Used & Rare bookstore in Detroit has a copy for sale for $50, and only one Michigan library owns a lendable copy and it is 83 years old. I'm afraid this is a sign that it's not a very good book. And it's almost 600 pages long. So we shall see.

There I go, making assumptions again.

1 comment:

Ellen said...

I am also irritated by being unable to pronounce text that is in what I'm trying to read. I'm afraid I just skip over it. I didn't remember you read Kurt Vonnegut in high school. There I go, forgetting again.