Elizabeth and Ono: Laughter is Freedom

      In my Survey of American Literature class, about a month ago, we were having a discussion about the “N” word, and whether it was appropriate to say it in the context provided by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My stance was, and still is, that while the word may have been used in the time when Twain was writing, given the connotations associated with the word in our country’s not-too-distant past, it is safer to leave it out of classroom discussion. A lot of people fought me on this, invoking “freedom of speech,” and the fact that it is part of our literary and cultural history. While I see their point, my refusal to utter this word, (in any context), stems from the knowledge that its meaning changes when spoken by a white person versus an African-American. I choose to be a responsible citizen of the floating world by allowing people to choose how they define themselves, and respecting these definitions, recognizing them as the individual’s freedom.

      This is a thread that both Bessie Head and Kazuo Ishiguro touch on, though from opposing roles. In A Question of Power, Bessie Head, through her protagonist Elizabeth, explores the process of framing and defining; Kazuo Ishiguro, through his main character, Ono, in An Artist of the Floating World, questions what it takes to make peace when how others define themselves counters our own beliefs. From pairing these two narratives, it can be seen that people are adaptable creatures, and we learn to cope when it is in our better interest.

      For Bessie Head’s heroine Elizabeth, floating does not occur on the world-level, but on the level of self. She is an observer of the goings-on in her own mind, lacking any anchors to keep her focused and steady. Her relationship with her son is much too uninvolved to give her any real sense of responsibility, she hides from her own sexuality, sparked by Dan’s claim that she hasn’t “got a vagina” (13), and her closest friend, what closest resembles a human connection, is a figment of her imagination. These are not exactly the makings of a strong, stable woman. For a while the reader believes what Dan does: that “he had a wilting puppet in his hands” (13); but Elizabeth knows that “the victim is really the most flexible, the most free person on earth” (84) because their power is in their reaction.

      Pieces of Elizabeth’s person come out on their own free will and ultimately save her. During a random conversation with Tom about homosexuality, “She laughed a bit. The world steadied itself” (161). A trigger reaction, like laughter, comes from somewhere deep inside us, a place we have no control over - it comes from our core. A person’s core never changes, but there’s a layer surrounding the core that is affected by the world; this is the part of us that has to change shape to survive the world we live in. Elizabeth discovered first-hand that “The human soul is alone in the battle of life” (86), but “when someone knows they are failing in every way, they still keep up the routine.” Somewhere in these “gaps and blanks” in the routine (162), there will arise the opportunity for a little piece of the core self to come out - there will arise the opportunity to laugh.

      As for Ono, Kazuo Ishiguro’s leading man, he, too, believes that the world has taken a far to serious turn. He accuses the younger generation of acquiring “bitterness…hardness, almost a maliciousness” (59), and concludes that he “couldn’t celebrate the floating world” because he “couldn’t bring [himself] to believe in its worth” (150). Well, I’ll admit I often feel like this about the world I find myself in. When I find myself discouraged by the bigger world, I, like Ono, narrow my focus. Ono does not falter in the face of values that contradict his own; instead, he holds tighter to those values and experiences “a profound sense of happiness deriving from the conviction that one’s efforts have been justified” (204). This determination to hold onto oneself in the face of uncontrollable circumstances is an attempt to maintain a sense of freedom - the freedom to think, the freedom to believe whatever your core tells you to.

      While Elizabeth ponders her freedom in the role of victim, at a certain point, she just draws the line: “The depths of the man were so awful that she simply disliked him and wanted to pull her mind out of the chaos” (Head, 147). She fights for the same freedom Ono does - the freedom to be yourself. Like Elizabeth, Ono draws his own line. When he does, though, it is far more subtle, and comes off more as acceptance than determination: “Our nation, it seems, whatever mistakes it may have made in the past, has now another chance to make a better go of things. One can only wish these young people well” (Ishiguro, 206). As I listened to my classmates defending their right to use the “N” word, Ono’s last lines and Elizabeth’s laughter popped into my head; while I felt powerless, I recognized that there is nothing I can do on a mass-level to end the ignorance that blankets my corner of the Earth. So I laugh (because it’s a more comfortable sensation than terror), and thank my core for being different from everyone else’s.