Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Does the language matter?
would chapter 2 have affected you differently if it were about fucking and being fucked, explicit about prostitution ...if the character had the words to describe what she was doing, and those words were graphic explicitly rather than graphic about the dark and the thrusting and the concrete and the cement? Would you have been more or less bothered by it? A number of taboos are crossed in this discussion, right? Andrea crosses taboos about the rape/not rape dichotomy, about explicitness about sex, about age boundaries and sex ... what role does Andrea's choice of literary language play in it?
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the author could have been more explicit in her description and it would have made me cringe more but i think her effect is that she describes rape in a way i havent see in it described before. certainly she gets a kind of shock and awe reaction from me and makes my body shiver when she uses statements like "skin torn off" and "jagged bone". these graphic words make me uneasy and although rape isnt explicitly laid out for the reader we can certainly get a good picture of what shes going through. also, i thought it was interesting how she talked of telling the rapist her name because as a woman i have been taught that if i am ever caught in a bad situation to humanize myself and tell the attacker my name and about my family to let them see that i am a person with feelings and family, just as andrea does in chapter two. not to take the "horribleness" out of rape but through shows like law and order svu i have heard the same description of rape time and again and i think andreas way of describing it caught my attention more so than if she had explicitly stated what happened.
ReplyDeleteIf she would have used her jagged terminology it would have taken away from the emotions she was trying to evoke from the beginning of the chapters. She was not clear of what event had sucked the joy of her childhood. There was a sensitivity to her innocence but as those cringing words are used more often towards the end of the book, you feel the wrath of a women abused physically and emotionally. The animalistic instincts of a man can even be seen through her attitude towards women or men in the ending chapters.
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