Middlesex Part Two

Throughout my reading of Middlesex, I became increasingly interested in the tone of Cal’s narration during the passages he’s writing in present-tense (in Germany, with Julie, thinking about the past). It is during these passages that he touches on some of the more political aspects of his story – the parts that I’m most interested in right now. The introductions to two chapters in particular, “The Obscure Object” and “Flesh and Blood”, were riddled with questions, both posed by the narrator and implied/asked by the reader, some of which I’d like to tackle in this post.

“The Obscure Object” begins with Cal’s own stance against what I initially thought this novel would be: groundbreaking, liberating, courageous, compelling in it’s story of self-discovery and empowerment – all of those good things. In the end, I still think it was most of those things, but in a very different (and maybe more quiet) way. “Writing my story isn’t the courageous act of liberation I had hoped it would be. Writing is solitary, furtive, and I know all about those things. …Is it really my apolitical temperament that makes me keep my distance from the intersexual rights movement? Couldn’t it also be fear? Of standing up. Of becoming one of them.” Here Cal takes on – or at least posits the question as to why he is not more tied up in the intersex rights movement, despite having met some individuals in his life that were deeply interested in and knowledgeable of intersexual history, despite having seen the twisted obsession that some individuals have with intersex people, despite having seen and experienced the damage that such an obsession can have on one person.  Despite all this, Cal is afraid (or “wonders” if what he’s feeling could possibly be fear) to be an other – an official, card-carrying, registered-in-the-membership-files ‘other’.

The innocence and timidity that I recognized in Calliope as a young girl is still present, albeit in other forms, in Cal as a grown man. Or it could be that I’m interpreting Cal’s reserved tone and attitude incorrectly as timid, the difference being that one is aware of all of the implications of their own being and experience yet remained reserved, while the other may not understand the grandiose-ness (for lack of a better word) of their experience in the big picture of modern American society and the strange views we hold on gender and sexuality and everything else. Immediately after that paragraph, Cal notes, “Still, you can only do what you’re able.” It’s his reconciling of what I mentioned before: he’s not wildly rich or famous, knowledgeable or popular, a television star or a policy-maker. However, he is a writer, and by writing a novel on his family’s history and tumultuous relationship with desire and gender, he is doing what he is able.

The introduction to “Flesh and Blood” also caught my attention, for it’s discussion of discovery of self, by self, by others, through others, all of which led to Cal’s ‘current’ position, writing in Berlin. Discovering something about ones self is often times about confirming a gut feeling that you’ve already had about yourself, something you’ve already felt and not been able to name, such as Cal’s discovery that he is ‘genetically male’ in Luce’s file when the Doctor is out of the room. This is opposed to discovering something about someone else, which is often times more shocking, or the result of learning entirely new information about another person – for example, Cal’s learning that Lefty and Desdemona were siblings. This news is new to him and puts in perspective many, if not all, of the events of his life thus far.

I particularly enjoyed the discussion of how Cal’s family adjusted to his returning home as a son, not a daughter, as he had left. As I reached the end of the novel, I couldn’t forgot the following line in the intro to Flesh and Blood: “…the discovery by my parents of what kind of child they’d given birth to (answer: the same child, only different)” (361). It turns out that the most drastic thing that Cal’s mother and brother need to adjust to is his gender presentation, haircut, facial hair, physique, etc. “Confronted with the impossible, there was no option but to treat it as normal.” (516) This is Cal’s interpretation of his very first encounter with Chapter Eleven after he returns home – that there was no use having a long discussion about exactly what had happened, that the changes he’d made to his life were so drastic that it turned out to be easier for all to treat everything as ‘normal’.

Gradually, though, his language changes in reflecting this experience: “…it’s amazing what you can get used to. After I returned from San Francisco and started living as a male, my family found that, contrary to popular opinion, gender was not all that important. My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood. …Even now, though I live as a man I remain in essential ways Tessie’s daughter.” (520) Maybe this is the courageous, revolutionary, ground breaking part of the book that will be the requisite eye-opener for readers that may have come into the novel not understanding, accepting or appreciating the variety of experiences held by intersex individuals (or any gender-nonconforming individual). This book can hold it’s own in the canon of intersex literature not because it’s a book about changing the world and becoming a vocal proponent of intersex rights (it’s not) but because it accurately describes the confusion and process of simply beginning to understand ones own place within the larger spectrum of gender variant people, and that’s just as important to have published on the Best Seller List.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2011 at 11:26 am and is filed under Savannah. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.