Sipped Ink vol 3 issue 5

A Little Life — Week 5

I left off last week with the observation that A Little Life’s central tragedy is Jude St. Francis’s having been persuaded that he deserves all of the terrible things visited upon him. I was gratified, in this week’s reading, to find Harold making the same point:

I knew that he had decided that Caleb was right, that he was disgusting, that he had, somehow, deserved what had happened to him. And that was the worst thing, the most reprehensible thing. — 368

As it did a couple of weeks ago, the penny dropped for me a few days ago (perhaps a little late) regarding a somewhat obvious aspect of Jude’s relationship with Harold. That being the revelation that, just as he is for Willem an echo of Hemming, so Jude is also an echo, for Harold, of his deceased son Jacob. Somehow, in terms of the narrative, this feels both potentially trite and completely natural. Willem and Harold would, of course, have been deeply affected by the loss of their blood relations, and these absences would colour their lives permanently. That, consciously or unconsciously, they should be drawn to Jude as a kind of surrogate or a second chance feels well judged on Yanagihara’s part, but at the same time she’s careful not to draw the parallels too broadly or explicitly.

It bears mentioning that Brother Luke also says that Jude reminds him of a deceased son. This story seems to change in the telling each time, and we have no knowledge yet as to whether it’s true. However, that Jude should act as substitute for another loss would, at this point, seem natural.

It’s been a couple of letters since I wrote on the topic, but the qualities of friendship were re-introduced in an interesting way this week. There’s the matter of the obligation that Jude does feel:

the necessity of proving himself normal to Willem really did make him more normal — 387

and the one that Willem says he should feel:

you never seem to understand that you at least owe your friends the opportunity to try to help you — ibid.

All of which leaves Jude ‘disgusted at himself, by how dependent he was, how weak’ (ibid.). Indeed, I began to read the friendship question this week in respect of a slightly different issue which has risen to prominence in the novel: that of self-determination.

As we learn more of the history of abuse that Jude has suffered, we begin to see the roots of his personality. More and more we see that what drives Jude is a will (perhaps even a need) to be his own, independent person. Whether it’s his unwillingness to seem like a burden to his friends, his obsession with locked doors and enclosed spaces, or his general secrecy, so much of Jude’s way of life is predicated upon his desire that he alone should be in control of it. This is rooted, of course, in the physical and sexual abuse he suffers as a child:

People had always decided how his body would be used, and although he knew that Harold and Andy were trying to help him, the childish, obdurate part of him resisted: he would decide. — 382–3

And permeates also into his coping methods for the trauma he is left with:

His mind was his, he told himself. He would control this; he wouldn’t be controlled. — 384

It is also the root logic of his self-harming. (That it is now his choice and his choice alone what happens to his body.) And, ultimately, the same logic is applied to his attempted suicide:

Knowing that he didn’t have to keep going was a solace to him, somehow; it reminded him that he had options, it reminded him that even though his subconscious wouldn’t obey his conscious, it didn’t mean he wasn’t still in control. — 390

We’ve witnessed Jude go through a lot in the last 80 pages in particular, and I’m wondering what you think about the way in which Yanagihara has depicted the abuse that Jude suffers. In an article for The New Yorker titled ‘The Subversive Brilliance of “A Little Life”’, Jon Michaud argues that it is relatively rare to encounter sustained, explicit renderings of this kind of abuse in literary fiction:

The abuse in “Lolita,” for instance, is largely off camera, so to speak, or wrapped complexly in Nabokov’s lyrical prose. In Emma Donoghue’s “Room,” the child narrator is banished to the closet while his mother is raped by their captor. You are more likely to find sustained and explicit depictions of depravity in genre fiction, where authors seem freer to be less decorous. Stephen King’s “Lisey’s Story,” Steig Larsson’s “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and the torture of Theon Greyjoy in “A Game of Thrones” all came to mind.

Michaud, however, does defend Yanagihara against charges that have elsewhere been levelled against her on this score:

[The abuse] is not included for shock value or titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime fiction. Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character.

In Bridgid Delaney’s piece for The Guardian — ‘A Little Life: why everyone should read this modern-day classic’ — Yanagihara is quoted as saying, “One of the things my editor and I did fight about is the idea of how much a reader can take”. At just over half way through the novel I’m sure we’ve not yet reached the extent of Jude’s suffering. To date, to my mind, it feels as though the author has sensitively constructed a portrait of a deeply unfortunate, and thereby damaged individual, and in doing so has started to show that a victim can be a kind of hero. If anything is to change my opinion it seems most likely to come down not to how Yanagihara depicts the categories of violence we know of to date, but how much more we are expected to believe Jude has suffered and is still to suffer. Despite Melanie’s wish, a couple of weeks ago, for a ‘hopeful ending’, the novel’s trajectory of late — particularly the conversations between Harold and Willem, shrouded in a kind of finality and regret — doesn’t seem to offer much promise of one. Is the best that we can hope for at this stage that Jude should continue in the same vain as Brother Luke’s cattleya: ‘to live and leaf, though not bud’ (p.402)?

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