In the midst of a book that seems to obfuscate all meaning
behind a veil of confusion and distance, it’s almost comical to come across the
line as you do, like it’s too obvious.
“You tear off the pretty parts to make it grow stronger,”
says Orren to Aloma, and I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the blatant
thesis statement the book was offering me (67). Morgan clearly wanted the message
to come across as strongly as possible: if Aloma wants to be strong enough to
survive life on the farm, she has to let beauty die. I expected, following
this, a series of scenes in which she begins to put aside piano to help Orren
with the farm, allowing her values of beauty to slowly die as she becomes a
slave to the ideal of hard work. I even thought the book would end with a
romantic comedy-esque expression of how Orren’s words aren’t true, and
how you have to balance beauty and strength to truly succeed.
Somehow, none of that happened. It felt as though the
concept was forgotten as I continued to read a book in which Aloma values beauty
and Orren values work and neither of them ever compromises or gives up some
part of themselves to help the other. Despite the novel setting up this obvious
trajectory for Aloma, it never followed through. And despite how obvious it may
have been, it might have been a better book if it had.
Morgan does well to write selfish characters who take
selfish actions, and it becomes almost like reality television to watch Orren
and Aloma duke it out in a battle of who can be the most self centered. But the
problem with this is that you can’t connect with or truly hate either
character, and so when the book ends with the both of them being some degree of
unhappy, you can’t feel satisfied in their discomfort. By the end of the book,
Orren hasn’t come to value beauty more—he still focuses deeply into work and
becomes possessive and angry with Aloma for acting out of his wishes. He shows
no growth or change from the way he was at the beginning of the book. Aloma, in
juxtaposition, hasn’t come to value beauty less—she still, despite knowing that
she is stuck on the barn, wistfully imagines a life where she isn’t “fastened
to this place” (197). Despite the whole of the book, neither character has
truly changed; in fact, they’ve remained almost completely static.
C. E. Morgan sets up the book to spark a question—must beauty
be sacrificed for strength? This question could have been a desperately needed
thread which tied the book together. However, the nonexistent character arcs
and static, stubborn characters that she creates seem to dissolve this meaning
right before the eyes of the reader, fading into a wash of vague wondering and
obscurity.
I agree with this line of thinking completely; I think you can go further and apply this to the spirit of the book itself and not just the failure of a clear moral. I understand that Morgan was attempting to showcase reality through this book (I…think?), but there are ways one can do that without sacrificing substance as well, like Americanah did. I am possibly biased because I inherently am sick of reading farm books, but even disregarding that I find the book to be vague--a wash of themes and morals slewing together in a soup of vague incomprehensibility that is difficult to draw any abject meaning from. And it truly is incomprehensible; it is my opinion that the book starts and ends as a tale about farm life… That’s it. There is not much more to find and glean from the narrative, as you hinted at through the dropped thematic statement. Whether this meaningless is intentional or not doesn’t matter; it makes the book a bit of a slog to get through—at least for me. I feel that it is very easy to try and glean a deep meaning from this book, but I’m not sure that that is because the book has one more so than that it is so ambiguous that it can be wholly malleable to the reader’s opinion. Of course, maybe I’ve fallen into that trap as well; maybe I’m doing it right now!
ReplyDeleteThroughout All the Living I attempted to make sense of the conflict between Aloma and Orren, and often it boiled down to their lack of communication and differing values. And like Mackenzie mentions, neither Aloma nor Orren change their values. Their unchanging dynamic irks me because I expected there to be a shift in their relationship as the novel progressed; I expected something dramatic, like a profound reconciliation or a breaking-off-all-ties end, and I received neither of these endings. At one point, Orren and Aloma have another fight, and Aloma considers leaving: “she heard the word—leaving—and she began to touch the thing, to turn it over and over in her mind” (162). This is the point at which I expected something to change. I expected to see either Aloma or Orren sacrifice something in order to be happy together. Instead, they continue living as they had been for months. Even though Aloma considers leaving at this point, the idea doesn’t develop any further and she remains stuck on the farm with Orren. Because both characters remain the same, neither Orren nor Aloma learn any lessons about life. Neither bends toward the other, and I find it hard to apply any moral lessons from the book to real life.
ReplyDeleteI also thought that throughout the book eventually Orren and Aloma would reach some form of compromise or understanding of each other. However, I believe Morgan avoids the happy ending for a reason. Not only does Morgan use this book to portray the reality of rural American life, I believe she also wants to depict the reality of a relationship between two people that have irreconcilable differences. Ultimately, Orren and Aloma are starkly different people. Orren has no clear desire other than an overwhelming sense of duty to take over and run his family's farm. While Aloma sees the farm as the “one place in the world she wants to leave behind her” (58). The polar difference in what the two characters make them incompatible. I believe Morgan wants to show how their circumstances in rural America left Aloma and Orren with no choice but to cling onto the other person. Morgan makes this claim evident when describing how Aloma after graduating from settlement school had virtually no option but to stay there and teach. Then Morgan uses the farm to explore how two people who truly can’t understand each other function in an isolated environment. Morgan writes that Aloma “didn't know this face, this stranger, not at all” (109). Thus despite Aloma trying to understand Orren, “the door did not open” (109). Regardless of her or Orren’s effors, while they may be able to cohabitate, they can never truly connect with and understand each other.
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