Duality: Readings and Responses
Natalia Ginzburg’s He and I moves with metronomic contrast through a series of relational comparisons between a husband and wife. Ginzburg establishes a tick-tock of hierarchy whereby the husband is a man of confidence and culture, contrasted with the wife who, even as the narrator, is rendered as lesser and far from harmonious. The husband is a man of action, the wife one of lethargy. The husband a man of literature, fine dining and obscure cinema against the wife’s inability to navigate neither the map to the theater nor the map of life. But these appearances are only facade. Ginzburg moves back and forth in rapid, staccato sentences between the two, deepening our sympathies with the wife but also establishing an environment where she is trapped inside a long-term relationship with the sunk-cost fallacy of emotional abuse a daily operation.
However, there are brief moments where Ginzburg empowers her narrator to deviate from the back and forth of the discordant narrative metronome, and affords the wife the opportunity to disagree with the husband, first as inner voice, but later as ominous action. When the couple attempt to find an obscure arthouse movie theater inside of which there is a rare screening by an actress of passing interest to the husband, she describes:
“He tells me I have no curiosity, but this is not true. I am curious about a few, a very few, things. And when I have got to know them I retain scattered impressions of them, or the cadence of phrase, or a word. But my world, in which these completely unrelated (unless in some secret fashion unbeknown to me) impressions and cadences rise to the surface is a sad, barren place. His world, on the other hand, is green and populous and richly cultivated; It’s a fertile, well-watered countryside in which woods, meadows, orchards and villages flourish.”
Here Ginzburg is allowing her female to begin to disagree, even if such thoughts rise to the surface of a barren plain in contrast with the lush greenery of her husband. It arrests the pace of the piece, and affords the narrator space to pause and disagree, even if for the briefest of moments before returning to the previous metronomic pace of what he is and she isn’t, which begins to accelerate into couplets such as “I don't know how to dance and he does. I don't know how to type and he does.” It uses the previous approach of intellectual hierarchy and contrast, but further simplifies it and propels our reading forward with even greater velocity. As a similar moment of pause to her earlier disagreement, there is a curious biblical diversion into the learnings of the Book of Job, itself a parable of unmerited suffering and the belief that throughout intense periods of suffering, one must still believe in God. It is an echo of the ache within her own story, which she follows with the resignation of relational acceptance when she describes “I feel I do everything inadequately or mistakenly. But if I once find out that he has made a mistake I tell him so over and over again until he is exasperated. I can be very annoying at times.”
But all is not lost for Ginzburg’s female narrator. As the back and forth comparisons continue with increasing emotional violence, there is a moment not of disagreement, but of revenge. Ginzburg stops the music, takes our hand, and gives her wife the agency we have been looking for.
”Now and again he is ill with some mysterious ailment of his own; he can't explain what he feels and stays in bed for a day completely wrapped up in the sheets; nothing is visible except his beard and the tip of his red nose. Then he takes bicarbonate of soda and aspirins in doses suitable for a horse, and says that I cannot understand because I am always well, I am like those great fat strong friars who go out in the wind and in all weathers and come to no harm; he on the other hand is sensitive and delicate and suffers from mysterious ailments.”
Ginzburg doesn’t dwell on the husband’s mysterious ailments, but in this moment of silence where the husband falls ill, she fills the void with revenge. Gone are the contrasts of culture and taste, and now the wife has the benefit of the upper hand. She is healthy and he is not. Might it be that she is responsible, and we as readers are quietly cheering her on? Is the real message one of confession where she is slowly poisoning her emotionally abusive husband, hastening his extinction? Ginzburg’s piece isn’t one of confession, as the narrative swiftly moves on to adoration of the husband’s physical features and concludes with the reminiscence of their first meeting over twenty years ago. But it is already too late. Our suspicions already alerted. Despite being shut down for so many years by her husband, she has revealed something she perhaps would have preferred not to. There’s a sinister ambiguity to the paragraph which validates the motives described throughout the piece, but also provides a path towards their resolution. If the accelerating metronomic abuse of the piece before such a revelation provides the cause, what follows it gives the abuse its scale. The list of hierarchical comparisons give the tactical answers to the question of how long on which the piece concludes. The husband may have thought of her as less curious, less creative, and less virtuous, but that doesn’t mean that she lacks the agency to do something about it. Or him.
If Ginzburg’s He and I moves up and down within a hierarchy of relationship, Cynthia Ozick’s The Break moves from side to side in its relational uncoupling of conjoined twins with a narrative irony more pronounced than that of Ginzburg. Ozick’s surgical detachment allows her the irony to dream of nights without sleep or refuse to trade places with her separated twin for all the china in Teaneck, wonderful narrative inversions which twist around the reader as they propel Ozick’s thoughts forward. But if Ginzburg’s relationship is one of frustrated separation and the ominous resignation which comes from years of attachment, Ozick’s is that same separation rendered physical but fraught with emotional consequence. Ozick’s narrator has achieved the physical separation sought by Ginzburg’s protagonist, but still remains tightly coupled to their now separated twin, even ten years after the event. A surgical separation, but not an emotional one. Ozick remains frustrated by the actions of that which she’s been separated from, as she wrestles with the consequences of the operation. Ginzburg too is wrestling with a separation, but is cautious never to take things too far.
Ozick’s binary comparisons closely echo those of Ginzburg, as she describes “To begin with, I am honest; she is not. Or, to spare her a moral lecture (but why should I? what has she ever spared me?), let me put it that she is a fantasist and I am not. Never mind that her own term for her condition is, not surprisingly, realism. It’s precisely her "realism”, that I hate. It is precisely her "facts" that I despise. Here Ozick is writing from the perspective of Ginzburg’s husband. Looking down upon the partner with a disapproving intent. The other is always the lesser. If Ginzburg looks up with sinister intent, Ozick looks down with separated resentment. Between the two pieces, I had a preference for Ginzburg, although I enjoyed them both. The moment where Ginzburg arrests the reader with the potentially sinister intent of her protagonist was a moment in reading which Ozick’s has already moved on from. There is a tension in Ginberg’s writing which has already happened in Ozick’s. The Break is about what happens next. It’s framed as a story of consequence and afterwards as opposed to Ginzburg’s what ifs and maybes, and within it I found myself rooting harder for Ginzburg’s wife to finish off the boorish husband than for Ozick’s unconjoined twin who found themselves unable to move on.
If Ginzburg’s protagonist seeks the expiration of her husband, and Ozick’s twin the extraction of their sibling, then T. Coraghessan Boyle’s Chicxulub offers an extinction-level event which blends together the near-miss of the Tunguska meteor with the catastrophic civilization-ending impact of the Chicxulub fireball, to draw metaphors of grief and loss for two sets of parents. For Ted and Maureen, parents of Madeline, they are called to the hospital to identify what at first appears to be their daughter, the victim of a fatal car accident. Coraghessan Boyle walks the reader through the sweeping range of emotions both parents go through in ultimately finding that it is a case of mistaken identity. A Tunguska which kills others but not their own.
As Coraghessan Boyle describes, “My point? You'd better get down on your knees and pray to your gods, because each year this big spinning globe we ride intersects the orbits of some twenty million asteroids, at least a thousand of which are more than half a mile in diameter.” The circling danger which pervades existence and can snuff it out at any moment, but often just burns up in the atmosphere. Coraghessan Boyle places Ted and Maureen inside the metaphor of Tunguska to tell a story about the near miss of a teenage death, but contrasts it with the Chicxulub, which “Astrophysicists call such objects "civilization enders," and calculate the chances that a disaster of this magnitude will occur during any individual's lifetime at roughly one in ten thousand, the same odds as dying in an auto accident in the next six months-or, more tellingly, living to be a hundred in the company of your spouse.” In drawing the same probability between the civilization-ending meteor and the life-ending accident of not Madeline, but instead her best friend Kristi Cherwin, Coraghessan Boyle uses both meteors to compare two different outcomes of the same event.
For Kristi’s parents, Ed and Lucinda, it is an emotionally world-ending event. A Chicxulub. But for Madeline’s parents, Ted and Maureen, it is a near-miss. A Tunguska. One ends the life of a teenage girl, but the other only takes its parents to the brink of the same outcome before pulling them back as they pull back the sheet in the hospital with relief at the mistaken identity. For one family it is catastrophic forever. For the other only devastating until the moment of relief. Both experience the same emotions, but one is offered reprieve. The Tunguska still kills, but affords the survivors the opportunity to rebuild. The Chicxulub is a distinct finality from which there is little coming back.
Both Ginzburg and Coraghessan Boyle use a narrative strategy which builds towards a moment which ultimately goes unrealized. For Ginzburg it is a wife toying with the the health of her husband but never really going through with its potentially fatal conclusion. For Coraghessan Boyle the fatal conclusion is revealed, but it’s not the person we think it is. Ginzburg toys with the reader by revealing just enough to arouse suspicion, whereas Coraghessan Boyle doesn’t toy with the reader, but simply describes a truth of mistaken identity and doesn’t arouse suspicion, even though the clues about the swapped ID are there early on. Conversely, Ozick uses a strategy where two individuals, now separated, are asked to move on with their lives but cannot. It echoes the parents in Coraghessan Boyle and the narrative frustration of leaving Kristi’s parents to deal with their daughter’s death in the way that Madeline’s parents no longer have to.
All three pieces surface a frustration and suppression of identity. For Ginzburg is it a bubbling, sinister suppression held by the wife under the climate of decades of emotional abuse, and a frustration which is about to boil over. For Ozick it is the frustration of separation and the inability to extract oneself from one’s past, even after surgical uncoupling. And for Coraghessan Boyle it is the suppression of identity through mistaken documentation and the avoidance of catastrophic extinction. Madeline’s identity is suppressed and ultimately revealed to be Kristi’s. A through line of increasing scale might be drawn from the intimate, unspoken suppression in Ginzburg through the surgical but still highly personal separation in Ozick, and finally to the civilization-ending suppression in Coraghessan Boyle. From intimate to societal, all three authors handle the dual suppression of their protagonists by drawing upon the intensity and irony triggered by resentment, disappointment and confusion, in order to propel their narratives forward through wonderfully crafted misdirection and subterfuge.
