Chekhov's Mistress
Heartbreaking
I’m grateful for the “Rising Up Rising Down” blog because I don’t think I would have the heart to read this book on my own. Fortunately, we have this on-line world where we can do a meta-reading (?) through someone else’s eyes. It’s easier to turn away when you have to:
…a Chinese woman during the war (I didn’t look into the footnotes to see which war), who tells a poet that she cannot keep both herself and her baby alive so she leaves her baby to die where a large number of bodies already lifeless lie. Both the woman and the poet leave the baby to die and Vollmann concludes that neither is wrong. Two lived and one died. If the woman split what little food she had, the child and the mother probably both would have died. If all three split the food they all would have starved equally. The mother has the more moral dilemma here than the poet, though the poet was obviously morally concerned with it that he later wrote of this. I wonder how the woman dealt with it?
I can hardly stand to think about this, but one is reminded of Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved. Still, Vollman’s utilitarian moral calculations are arguable, aren’t they? I think the question here is, as in Beloved, is understanding the place of the mother, if such a thing is possible. If I remember (editorial confession: saw the movie, should read the book), the mother’s purpose in Beloved was not to save herself, but to save her children from a horrible outcome. Still, war, even though slavery was a long-slow war, changes the rules of human behavior, and, as pointed out in the excerpt, it is indeed difficult to understand the Chinese mother’s own moral calculus. Impossible. It’s amazing what we’re capable of when forced to make such decisions…
Sadly.
Read widely, think well, and write often
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: April 08, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
