Sophie's Choice part.1

Sophie's Choice. 1

Author

William Styron

Publisher

Minumsa | Published 2008-12-26

Category

Novel

Book description

A work that looks upon the sins and pains of mankind with an affectionate gaze! The Pulitzer Prize ...

Actually, since Yoon-a said she'd read No Longer Human and Sophie's World, hmm.. No Longer Human seemed too hard to read (in this respect I clearly experience something like a kind of lookism. I judged the content by the title alone. Thoughts like, somehow it'll be hard, it'll be a bit annoying, and so on.) and Sophie's World was just sort of so-so, so since there happened to be a book from Minumsa's collection called Sophie's Choice, I picked that up. Of course, one regret existed too. Volume 3 of Anna Karenina, which I so badly wanted to read, hadn't been returned, and because of that I had no choice but to pick up another book I didn't really want. That was William Styron's book Sophie's Choice.

The narrator of this book is Stingo, and the people who rub up against his life as Stingo tells his own story are precisely 'Sophie' and 'Nathan.' The first feature of this novel is that these three people have the common point of having lived with their own wounds and history. In the past I would have passed over reading something like this without feeling anything, so has it gotten quite a bit better now... hmm.... though I have no knowledge of narrative or plot, it's clear that simply from reading novels continuously for several months, I can now see things I couldn't see before. The story strayed a bit, but Stingo has a wound about the region 'the American South' where he lived (there's pride too, but it feels like a wound flares up when a bad spot is poked), Sophie is Polish and has the memory of being dragged to Auschwitz and tortured during World War II while trying to get meat for her mother (but the important point is that she is not Jewish), and Nathan is 'Jewish' and so has bad memories about the genocide that occurred during World War II. The second feature is precisely the narrator's position and viewpoint. The narrator 'Stingo' does at times speak from a 'present' viewpoint while narrating this book, but that's when his recollection of the past is perfectly accomplished and appears as dialogue in the text; for the most part he narrated in a way that records events that happened before. You could call it purely Stingo's own diary. Only, in this diary there is also the hard-to-tell story of a woman who suffered, there is Leslie, with whom Stingo nearly had a relationship for a moment, there is the 'Pink Palace,' and there are 'Nathan' and 'Father.'

Then why did she leave out the facts and the detailed explanations that anyone would naturally have expected? It was surely because of the fatigue and depression she felt that night. And there may have been various other reasons besides, but I think guilt was the important cause. She used that word often, and when she had no choice but to talk about her past, terrible guilt surely weighed down her heart. Not only that, she felt self-loathing about what happened then, and this was not a rare phenomenon among people who had gone through the same ordeal as she. Simone Weil (the French woman philosopher) said the following about this kind of suffering: "Physical and mental suffering deeply imprints contempt, loathing of others and even of oneself, and guilt upon the human soul. Logically it ought to be crime that does so, but in reality it is suffering." Therefore, this destructive guilt and a reticence induced by simple but strong motives may have combined and led Sophie to keep silent about some facts. Sophie generally tried, almost to the point of obsession, to keep secret the time she spent at the center of hell, and if she truly wanted that, it had to be respected.

Because it was very similar to the behavior my girlfriend shows about her bad memories, for a moment I wondered whether my girlfriend might be like this too. That memory she doesn't want to recall again. Watching the genocide carried out at Auschwitz by a civilian named 'Hoess,' she too must have felt enormous guilt in her heart. The story comes in the latter half of volume 1 that, because she was good at speaking and writing both Polish and German and knew 'shorthand,' she caught 'Hoess's' eye, lived in his house, and eked out a living by ghostwriting the letters he would send to Hitler; and here Sophie says she always felt guilty and that at some point her faith in her 'God' also disappeared. As I read more than halfway through volume 1, the thought that came to me was, why, if it's 'Sophie's Choice,' is Sophie's story this scarce; and the reason was that the narrator was 'Stingo,' and that in the early part 'Stingo' poured out only his own story far too much. But as I read on to some extent, I saw that he was really telling only Sophie's story. After Stingo, while waiting for his father, met Sophie and Nathan at a bar, and Stingo and Nathan got into a big fight, and Sophie and Nathan packed up at the 'Pink Palace' and each went in a different direction, he talks about the contents of the letter he'll write to his father and then narrates over dozens of pages the stories Sophie had once confided to him. Sophie didn't always feel guilt, but there were many parts where I could fully understand how she came to have guilt. Because of her hatred toward her own father and her relationship with Rudolf Hoess, she, though a non-Jew, went through Auschwitz, and she conveys to 'Stingo' the source of the mental suffering she experiences as a survivor. This is possible because Stingo is not her 'lover' but a good friend.

The cause of the peculiar suffering Nathan shows was visible, even if indirectly, in volume 1. Judging from how his symptoms improve after he takes some aspirin, and from how his veins stand out and his pupils dilate, should I say something like slight 'epilepsy' symptoms are visible? The broad knowledge, fluent way of speaking, and witty sense he shows are indeed presented as things for Stingo to model himself on, but both the narrator and I, whenever we just see Nathan returning to a state of madness, felt so dreadfully bewildered that it was awkward to keep reading. Seeing him being excessively aggressive and pouring out barbed words at anyone, there's something wrong with him too. It's just that I don't know it yet.

I haven't yet mentioned the third impressive feature, which is precisely 'sex.' In my opinion too, words like XXX in English feel as if they stick to the mouth better and express the appropriate 'nuance.' Whenever the fantasies and bad memories Stingo has came up, this topic always came out of him. But then Leslie appeared to such a Stingo; however, she was a woman who had a mental 'defect' such that, though she 'talked' that way, she couldn't actually do so, and so his and her wish didn't come true, and Stingo, still looking at Sophie, often spins 'fantasies' about having a relationship with her, imagining her chest line, waist, and hips. Only, because the two have reached a 'friend' relationship, it's recorded only that a relationship beyond 'friend' was still impossible to establish, but somehow I can't quite imagine how it will turn out by volume 2. Since he's come to know Sophie's trauma, in a sense a fate seems to await in which there's no choice but to remain only as 'friends,' so won't it end up laying out only very pitiful stories for 'Stingo'.......

I read volume 1 in a single day, and it's sad that stories about 'wounds' keep coming up frequently in this book. Only, it's that, because it feels like I'm seeing the attitude Yoon-a usually takes toward things that could be called bad memories, a few things came up that I want to ask her directly. Not directly asking about past stories, but about whether the reason she doesn't talk about the past is for such-and-such reasons.

Related post: Sophie's Choice part.2