Renouncing relations and the amputated identity
Of everything we’ve read this semester, I have to admit that Middlesex has been the least gripping for me. Maybe it’s the pace, Cal’s voice, switching from “Angles in America,” predominantly dialogue, to lengthy prose, or maybe it’s something in me–my disintegrated family, my hurting heart–that makes it the wrong book to read at the wrong time. Throughout Parts 1 & 2, I was put off by how little Cal gives us of himself. I like the whole recessive mutation on the fifth chromosome motif and I appreciate how it fuels Cal’s genealogical study, but I wanted more of our main character, faster. More than one paragraph per chapter, at least. And all that is to say, I’ve finally been struck, at long, long last, or, at page 319, by something I can relate to and that I may have been missing the whole time.
As it turns out, my expectations had so gotten the best of me that I completely failed to contextualize the narrator’s experience into his retelling of it, which seems absurd to acknowledge, as I now consider that to be a very obvious and fundamental point to the narrative. But anyway, back to what I may have been missing: a resistance to self-identify, something I can identify with, most certainly! My final project for this class, my Cabinet of Curiosities, is currently confronting me with this very challenge. What can I possibly put in a box, and how to arrange it, to reproduce my/self? Which arrows to indicate what? What brief histories reflect my current state? Cal, I now realize, needed to configure his roots in order to discover what is presently blooming. Cal sees that his body defines him, but he also sees that his grandmother’s body defines him. And while my own bloodline is comparatively blotted out, I still recognize how even the lack of it has immense influence over the person I am. What we share: a resistance to dock ourselves, to embrace something we doubt was of our own choosing.
Cal grew up within an intricately layered kinship system, and yet it is marked by furtively guarded secrets. In his experience, proximity to extended family is a farse; they stick together in physical presence, but emotionally their dishonesty divides them. For this reason, it makes sense that Cal takes the roundabout route in his story: “slowly, leisurely, that’s the way” (232). Lefty, his grandfather, secretly gambles all his money away, and his father Milton buys a new house without conferring with anyone first. When Calliope asks her mother why she has to see a new doctor, Tessie avoids an honest answer. I grew up in a similarly “Because I Said So” household, a perfect example of how certain power relations seek to instill a cautionary subservience in its subjects. What else can this kind of communication, telling what but not why, teach us? In Cal’s case, it shows him that others are responsible for who he is, but that he alone must uncover the system of influence. When Cal says, “Writing is solitary, furtive, and I know all about those things,” he’s right, even though he grew up in a house constantly flowing with family and friends (319). All he’s ever known is blind faith, in God, in Family, which makes understanding himself as an individual all the more difficult, because it’s hard to apply the same faith to ourselves, to deny our own unanswered skepticisms as they clog up our thoughts day in and day out. After Callie begins her nighttime “love affair” with the Object, she admits, “Through all this I made no lasting conclusions about myself . . . It’s a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outsides, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison” (385, 387). For all the experiences, observations, and values we accumulate, comprehending ones’ Self only proves more and more of a challenge because the perspective we have of ourselves is a window, a mirror, a false mirror, a code, and a veil, all at the same time.
As someone who has actively rejected my status as a daughter, I wonder about the origin of this inclination. My biggest concern after graduation high school was not going to college, but moving out of my parents’ house. Over the past two years, I’ve removed all traces of myself from their homes. I don’t know my mother’s parents’ names, but growing up I was never told why. Both my parents left home at a young age, but I was never told why. Now I question if their failure to communicate openly has caused me to question the status of family in my own life. How could it not? Even if I don’t have the details, I perceive their defenses, and consciously or not, I’ve inherited them fully. So, when I face the challenge of self-identification, I come to it disjointed. People say, everyone is someone’s son or daughter, but is that really true? In searching for ourselves, can we amputate the influence from those who made us, from “what love bequeaths to us before we’re born” (388)?
Tags: alliance, Family, Identity, Jeffrey Eugenides, kinship, Middlesex, self
