Books and the Human Condition

Crime and Punishment. Take a way the basic needs from a person and they resort to violence, and when a poor man does the extremes to provide themselves sustenance and they are punished. After all, steal bread and you're a thief. Steal from the masses and you're a politician.

A great but extremely uncomfortable read, rightfully so. To demonstrate an oppressive society is to expose its violent hegemonic structures. In this case, The Piano Teacher has turned sex as an apparatus of both control and expression for freedom. "But the mother looms before her, confront her. She puts Erika against the wall under interrogation--inquisitor and executioner in one, unanimously recognized as mother by the state and by the family." In traditional families, fathers assume the primary despotic position--an authoritarian regime at the micro level and the basic unit of society. Yet, Erika's mother is her greatest tyrant. Mother Kohut, who is Erika's only companion, had integrated herself into Erika, positing herself as both the laborer--on which she has given her life in the name of cultivating her daughter--and the owner of her daughter's labor, like that of a capitalist. Recognizing women's displacement in a patriarchal society, Mother Kohut has then twisted her victimhood to reclaim a sense of control through her daughter. And because the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, we see Erika doing the same. There has been a long and ongoing debate--whether or not some women's choices are justifiable when the system is built to force them to hold onto the most sharpest object within a never ending turbulent ecosystem. Both mother and daughter are products of such environment. And both, in turn, exacerbate it. Perhaps it is true, that when children are forced to operate in such controlling environment, they find ways to seek the forbidden one way or another. Erika has created her own system to cater to her own proclivities without mother knowing. How she seeks out to appease her own appetite are degrading, both to her and to other people. And yet, it gives her a sense of autonomy. The novel showed how people operate in society by analogizing the act of sex--becoming the means of control and freedom.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun. Reading it for the first time, you'd ponder why the main character is nameless. All you'll know is that he is a male writer who is constantly in the state of famine. Throughout the book, you as a read, will also feel like you're going mad from the same hunger that he is experiencing. That sense of relief when he earns is also your own relief, all frustrations becoming an on and off cycle. However, it also makes you question how art is commodified. In an economy where it's heavily founded by a neoliberal capitalist paradigm, the personal becomes impersonal. This is evident, when the character starts writing less for himself, and more for survival. And while there is a self in survival, he removes the importance of what he wants to write for the sake of selling his art for food. I then realized that he is unnamed, to truly expose his position in society--irrelevant. Of course as a reader he is the main character, but to truly understand the book, you'll realize that even if he dies, no one will even bat an eyelash to his existence.

Animal farm. People on the internet can argue for socialism all they want, but it cannot sustain itself if not all countries adapt the same type of system. Also, look at Russia and Chine they're imperialists now.

I find the themes of the Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy and Stoner by Williams similar--where despite obtaining what you supposedly want, you still end up unsatisfied. In one of Merton's theory--Strain Theory--he argued that success is defined according to the legal metrics of society through conformity. He posited that, the disconnect between such expected goals from an external source causes strain in an individual. We see this in both Ivan and Stoner, both are in respected professions and and as they act accordingly, they are extremely unsatisfied. In Stoner, we see our main character find emotions outside the feeling of melancholy through his few deviant acts (wanting to fail a favored student and committing adultery). Both books questions society's rigid expectations, demanding perfection with no questions. In reality, we see professions in art and philosophy looked down upon when both govern the existence of the human race. It makes you critical about the meritocracy that pushes people into unhealthy competitions while yearning to live for something else.