Miscellanea: Evergreen "Ulysses" and Our Three Lives

 I sometimes clip out a newspaper or magazine article thinking I would like to write about a topic contained therein, but not immediately. More often that not, such clippings sit in a pile and eventually get thrown out.

One such article was "Tales of Female Trios" by Megan O'Grady in the Feb, 23, 2020 issue of T, the New York Times Style Magazine.

A couple things jumped out at me.

After discussing some of the books she read during her youth, such as "Little Women," Ms O'Grady said: "Meanwhile, the books my brother read were by and large structured as heroic journeys. Even his fantasy novels, with their large casts of characters, starred a lone adventurer overcoming great hardship to reach his goal."

In other words "Ulysses."  

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

At a later point in her article, Ms O'Grady, talked about the "rule of threes" she said occurs in much of Western literature. After noting Freud's division of the human persona into id, ego and superego, she said: "All of us have three characters within us: the one we display publicly, the one we actually are and the one we think we are."  That, she explained is a paraphrase of a notion put forward by 19th-century French critic Jean-Baptiste Alphones Karr.

Well, that brought to mind Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who said: “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”

That, I think, makes more sense than Ms O'Grady's reading of Karr.

I shall now consign my copy of Ms O'Grady's article to the recycle bin, somewhat relieved that the act of saving it did not go totally to waste.

Ong Comes Up Short In "The Monkey Who Speaks"

 To use the words of its author, Han Ong, the Sept. 6, 2021 New Yorker short story "The Monkey Who Speaks" is about a woman who has a job "where the professional can't help but bleed into the personal."

"I was interested in that slippery border" he said in one of the usual New Yorker author interviews. 

It is indeed an excellent subject for fiction, and Ong does a respectable job depicting the life of a young Filipina named Flavia who works as a home health aid for a predictably difficult, well-to-do, elderly white male named Roscoe, aided by Roscoe's fair-minded, accommodating daughter Veronica.

While the story is commendably free of transgressive behavior -- the stock-in-trade for far too much contemporary fiction -- Ong fails to do much with the slippery border in question.  One expects a situation to arise where Flavia has a difficult choice to make that involves a significant moral or ethical dilemma, the resolution of which is not just compelling reading, but also illuminative of the woman's cultural background.

But none does. There is a twist or two centering on the identify of the talking monkey, but they are of little consequence and based on her responses, Flavia could easily have come from somewhere other than the Philippines.

The New Yorker, like other similar publications, is evidently feeling a need to demonstrate a commitment to greater cultural diversify and in principle, this story would seem to fit the bill.  But in practice, it provides readers with little if any new insights into how demographic changes are impacting the U.S.

"Being from the Philippines, I've wanted for some time to write about an industry where Filipinos are well represent, even over represented," Ong said.

Well, that's about it. As such, it's not a bad story, but it's not a particularly interesting one, either.