Into the Chaos: Elizabeth's Brutal Honesty

     Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, and Frodo Baggins: what do they have in common (besides being widely popular here in the U.S. of Earth)? Their sanity is questionable. Luke takes notes on how to be a “Jedi” from Yoda, a two-foot-tall, green, wrinkled alien, holding a four-foot-long glowstick. Harry Potter, an eleven-year-old wizarding prodigy, plays a version of American football - one hundred feet in the air, atop a broomstick. Frodo Baggins makes a three-movie journey in order to throw a ring into a volcano to save the world. Sane? Hardly. But safe. These characters’ quests for their identity have taken them, and so have taken their audience, out into the physical world to discover their place in it, as a part of a whole community. Because it is not entirely self-oriented, there is less room here for turning one’s focus inward and looking into the scary depths of the soul.

     Elizabeth, the heroine of Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, leads the reader inward instead of outward. In the first thirty-four pages, she hardly leaves her bedroom; the majority of the action taking place is in her head and/or in a small physical space. This is not what people may deem “safe.” Bessie Head is controversial in our class because she is creating a woman, with a nearly identical background to hers, who is going absolutely mad. The question of how she could possibly write this novel without being absolutely mad herself has arisen on more than one occasion. We measure her sanity by the ruler of our own sanity. We try to solve her with riddles: the Chaos Riddle, which asks how to write about inner chaos without the entire work becoming chaotic, and the Honesty Question, which attempts to assess how honest she is being with herself, and how honest she is being with her readers (Burton Nts 3/6/08). I won’t pretend to know the answers, but I have questions and assessments of my own.

     In response to the Chaos Riddle, I ask why can’t the work become chaotic? Would the piece even be effective without chaos? We are looking into the soul of a woman who is going insane, who knows she is going insane. When she goes to serve a cup of tea to the form of Sello, she catches herself with a “jolt back to reality, shaking her head: ‘Agh, I must be mad! That’s just an intangible form’” (23). She determines herself to be mad, not because the form exists, but because she is serving an “intangible form” a tangible beverage. It is this calling back to reality, this acknowledgment that what she sees is only what she sees, that keeps this work from becoming incoherent. It is also what makes this work so effective. The same woman who manifests the face of Buddha manifests the Medusa-woman (32-33). This juxtapose is interesting, just stated plainly like that, but does it have the same effect coming from a distanced third person as it does coming from a third person voice that is so focused that it is nearly first person? Coming from a distanced third person, the speaker might say “Elizabeth sat on her bed and stared at nothing when the Medusa-woman came to her.” But the story is not told like that. Why should it be, when Elizabeth can actually show her readers that, “Suddenly, out of the monstrous woman, stepped a slenderly-built woman. She stood alone, her head bent. She threw her eyes into her own heart with such intent concentration that only the whites of her eyes were discernible” (33)? Through this narrative structure, Elizabeth is able to show us readers exactly what she is seeing.

     This lack of filtration brings me to the Honesty Question. One student in our class used the word “dishonest” to describe Bessie Head’s relationship with her main character, because the novel has autobiographical elements, but is not presented as an autobiography; it is presented as fiction (Burton Nts. 3/4/08). The debate that ensued created the Honesty Question: to what extent is Bessie Head being honest with herself, and to what extent is she being honest with the reader? My problem with this is that it is not our place to bring Bessie Head to the witness stand. We have a problem with her work, as a class, because she does not make an effort to get into the heads of her audience, but rather requires them to get inside hers. Can you imagine, as a writer, trying to get into the heads of thousands of people while trying to write a work about inner chaos and instability? It is not possible. She instead calls for what is referred to in theater as “a willing suspension of disbelief.” She needs us to believe that everything she is saying is real, because what she is seeing is really there, to her. She may know that Sello is an “intangible form” (23), but that doesn’t stop her from interacting with him and reserving the chair in her room only for him by telling visitors that the chair “has a slope which hurts the back” (24). This willingness to understand that these forms are not real shows that Elizabeth, as a character, is being honest with herself. Whether or not Bessie Head is being honest about Elizabeth being a version of herself is really irrelevant; it doesn’t concern us, as readers. What concerns us is that we are being taken deeper into someone’s waging in battle with reality, and we are being asked to relate to it in some way.

     Bessie Head turns a mirror on her readers through Elizabeth’s inward journey. By making us witnesses to this breaking down of barriers between the tangible and the intangible, Head’s Elizabeth is making us question our own reality. Through barely coherent chaos and excessive honesty, we are asked to examine our own relationship with self-identity, and also to examine the influences of our innermost thoughts and spirits. For Elizabeth, it is her empathy, her compassion for her fellow living people, that drives her into this madness. What is it that drives you?