TY - JOUR
AU - Hogue,, Beverly
AB - Abstract Ruth Ozeki's 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being suggests that garbage provides the raw material for meaning-making, an emphasis evident in both the content and the structure of the novel. Constructed as an assemblage of curated texts discarded and washed up on shore, the novel follows characters who wonder whether their own identities and communities are collages of flotsam whose worth is dependent on arbitrary judgments and accidental encounters. This essay examines how Ozeki excavates literary landfills to recuperate trashed narratives and devalued people, proposing that the very stuff cultures reject as worthless provides compost for the growth of new meaning. The essay further explores how Ozeki deploys the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment to critique the process of assigning worth and posit the concept of entanglement as a foundation for construction of community. In The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (2005), Gay Hawkins asserts that “what we want to get rid of also makes us who we are” (2). “Waste doesn’t just threaten the self in the horror of abjection,” she explains; “it also constitutes the self in the habits and embodied practices through which we decide what is connected to us and what isn’t” (4). This process of differentiation—between self and other, trash and treasure, worth and worthlessness—serves as the engine for construction of culture; however, differentiation requires individuals and communities to create and maintain artificial—and, ideally, inviolable—boundaries. What happens if these boundaries prove instead to be permeable membranes? What if the substances divided by these boundaries are so hopelessly entangled that they defy differentiation? In her 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki examines the implications of these questions by positioning garbage as the raw material for meaning-making. The novel is constructed as an assemblage of discarded narratives: a young girl’s diary washed up on a beach, the hidden journal of a Japanese kamikaze pilot, a college professor’s corrupted computer file, and more. The main character, Ruth, gathers these narratives but also wonders whether her very existence depends on flotsam, suggesting that both human culture and personal identity are built on middens not of our making. Ozeki excavates literary landfills to recuperate trashed narratives and devalued people, proposing that the very stuff cultures reject as worthless provides compost for the growth of new meaning. Furthermore, by explicitly employing the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, Ozeki characterizes the distinction between trash and treasure as tenuous and arbitrary, critiques the process of differentiation as a marker of worth, and posits the concept of entanglement as a compelling and creative foundation for construction of community within fluid currents of space and time. Surfing a Wave of Rubbish A. R. Ammons calls garbage “the poem of our time,” describing landfills as “ziggurats” where “the garbage trucks crawl as if in obeisance” (18). In a 2008 editor’s column for PMLA, Patricia Yaeger notes that “an artistic preoccupation with detritus” is hardly new, but that “postmodern detritus has unexpectedly taken on the sublimity that was once associated with nature” (327), and while “[d]isplacing nature, waste and debris provide these dividends in postmodern art[,] rubbish becomes a strange vale of soul making and creativity” (325). Any substance capable of evoking the sublime, building souls, and inspiring creativity ought to be considered a pearl of great price, but trash as a category comes into existence only when things, places, or people are deemed worthless. Indeed, so irresistible is this process of differentiation that Mary Douglas’s influential work in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) posits differentiation as the starting point for the development of human cultures. Defining dirt as “matter out of place,” Douglas points out that the very existence of “dirt” as a category positions rubbish as “the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (36). In other words, communities construct and communicate values by separating clean from unclean, whole from broken, and valuable from worthless, keeping the clean, whole, and valuable items close to home while relegating the unclean, broken, and worthless items to landfills, compost heaps, incinerators, cemeteries, or other places where we need not come face-to-face with our waste. However, since, as Hawkins asserts, “Value is a product of social processes, not the intrinsic properties of things,” even trashed items may be “rediscovered, given new value, and transferred into the category of durability” (78). Like Schrödinger’s cat, garbage hovers in a liminal space of possibility until an observer establishes the item’s position on the trash/treasure continuum. Garbage’s resistance to being sequestered, its status as the wave on which culture surfs, supports Karen Barad’s claim that “matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency” (139). In Barad’s account, material phenomena such as garbage are neither external to nor reducible to discursive practices; rather, Barad claims, “The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment” (140). Michelle N. Huang concurs, positing “ecologies of entanglement” as a phrase to “describe how material existence is constituted across geographical, temporal, and conceptual distances.” Huang argues that examining ecologies of entanglement can be especially productive in analysis of Asian American literature, eschewing “static, a priori truth” in favor of “the discursive and material relationships that constitute ontological becoming” (98). Huang notes that Ozeki’s “focusing on waste draws attention to jettisoned histories of disregard and violent erasure” (99), and that the novel characterizes the Pacific Ocean not as “a homogenous gap between Asia and America” but as a continuously intra-active cycle of currents binding the continents together (101). Garbage carried on these currents, such as the discarded diary of the Japanese schoolgirl named Nao, acts on people and places in a way that defies differentiation, encourages entanglement, and, in A Tale for the Time Being, “redistributes Asian/American history across space and time” (104). Far from worthless matter banished to the landfill, garbage engages in entanglements across boundaries of time and space to disrupt stereotypes about who—or what—matters. Recovered Drafts, Revalued Narratives This process is immediately apparent in the very structure of A Tale for the Time Being. The novel presents itself as an assemblage, with first-person passages from Nao’s secret diary alternating with the third-person narrative about the life of a writer, Ruth, who finds Nao’s diary encased in freezer bags encrusted with barnacles and washed up on the beach in British Columbia. Ruth’s curiosity about Nao leads her on an intense and difficult search for related documents, including e-mails from Nao’s father to a college professor; letters written by Nao’s great-uncle, a Japanese kamikaze pilot in World War II; and a translation of that great-uncle’s secret French diary. From the beginning, though, Ozeki disrupts readers’ expectations about authorship and authority, questioning the very process by which narratives are deemed worth reading and preserving. The novel opens with the first four numbered entries in Nao’s diary. Secret diaries generally follow a rhetorical template calling for spontaneous revelation of self that appears authentic and unmediated; Nao’s diary, on the other hand, features footnotes that explain Japanese words, Buddhist concepts, and historical references, with some footnotes asking questions and others referring readers to the appendices. This apparatus positions Nao’s personal diary as a historical artifact mediated and framed within a scholarly archive. Rocío G. Davis analyzes how “Ruth’s engagement with the diary … foregrounds the relationship between and among writers and their readers” (88), while the footnotes and other “[m]etatextual gestures … call attention to Ruth’s act of producing the text the reader holds, even as she is reading a received text” (94). By positioning the text as constructed via a process of dialogue among multiple readers and texts, Ozeki undermines the concept of the kind of authoritative, hegemonic voice suggested by the scholarly apparatus.1 From the beginning, Ozeki emphasizes the production of narrative as an incomplete but perpetual process; indeed, the first four fragments from Nao’s diary function much like rough drafts that a careful writer would discard. The first section begins with a cheery “Hi!” and ends with a promise that “together we’ll make magic!” (Ozeki, Tale 3–4), but the next section opens with “Ugh. That was dumb. I'll have to do better” (4), and the third section admits that the second “was not a nice way to start” (5); finally, the fourth section discards much of what has preceded to establish a goal for the rest of the diary. If these first diary entries are failed drafts, why not throw them in the rubbish bin and start afresh? By retaining these rejected bits of text and building the rest of the novel on ideas introduced there, Ozeki suggests that even discarded, rejected, or hidden stories provide a foundation for the making of meaning. There may be no more effective way to trash a narrative than to toss it into the Pacific Ocean where it will never be read, thus effectively cutting the story off from human culture; however, Ozeki brings this trashed narrative back into cultural circulation by providing a reader. The second section of the novel, labeled “Ruth,” reveals the character of the collector and interpreter of Nao’s diary. Eleanor Ty explores how the character Ruth reflects the life of the author, who, like the character in the novel, lives on an island in British Columbia with an artist husband named Oliver (Ozeki, “‘Universe’” 160–61). In an interview with Ty, Ozeki says, “[T]he Ruth character is clearly related to me, but she is not me” (162), adding that she hoped that writing a “fictionalized autobiography” would serve as an “invitation to the reader to research and find out” more about the author, making the book a sort of “treasure hunt—or better yet, a scavenger hunt” (165). Ozeki invites readers to emulate her main character, Ruth, in her search for coherent narrative among the flotsam. The odd thing, though, is that this “fictionalized autobiography” is written not in first person but in third person. Thus, Ozeki offers up a first-person diary framed within an “autobiography” written as third-person narrative, making readers wonder whose authorship, or what authority, brings together the various voices and texts. Moreover, while the annotations in the Nao sections are clearly, as Ozeki explains, “Ruth's interventions into Nao’s text,” it is not immediately clear who is responsible for the footnotes to the Ruth sections. Ozeki herself asks: “[I]f character Ruth isn’t the ultimate authority, who is the ultimate authority?” (167). This mystery arises more pressingly at the end of the novel, where questions about authorship and authority come more explicitly into the open; first, though, it is important to examine how Ozeki critiques the process of differentiation between the worth and worthlessness of narratives. Finding Value in the Flotsam This critique begins, of course, with Ruth’s discovery of Nao’s diary hiding “beneath a massive tangle of drying bull kelp, which the sea had heaved up onto the sand at full tide.” Ruth initially catches a glimpse of shiny translucent color and interprets it as “the sheen of a dying jellyfish,” but then she digs deeper and finds “a scarred plastic freezer bag, encrusted with barnacles that spread across its surface like a rash… . [S]omeone’s garbage, no doubt” (Ozeki, Tale 8). She takes the bag home, determined to throw it out without opening it, but her husband, Oliver, repeatedly challenges her decision to designate the bag “garbage” and relegate it to the dump. Ruth establishes firm boundaries between “clean” and “unclean” areas by demanding that Oliver leave the bag out on the porch for disposal, but Oliver transgresses those barriers by bringing the flotsam bag inside the house to examine its contents. “‘It’s bags within bags,’” says Oliver, adding, “‘I don’t think it’s garbage. It’s too neatly wrapped’” (9). John Scanlan calls garbage “the formlessness from which form takes flight” (14), a distinction clearly visible in this passage. Ruth sees the bag as formless, random flotsam and banishes it to the trash heap, but Oliver interprets the neat wrapping as a sign of form and design conferring value. Oliver’s insight wins out as he discovers within the layers of bags a Hello Kitty lunchbox containing Nao’s diary, a wristwatch, and a pile of letters, the cultural artifacts that will form the basis of the novel and provide a new sense of purpose to Ruth’s restless life. What allows the bag to cross the threshold from outdoors to indoors, dirty to clean, garbage to valued cultural artifact? Douglas explains that dirt is not inherent in items but is instead “a relative idea” arising when items appear where they do not belong, such as “out-door things in-doors; upstairs things downstairs; under-clothing appearing where over-clothing should be, and so on” (37). The diary’s packaging exemplifies this violation of place: barnacle-encrusted bags do not belong in the kitchen any more than neatly arranged artifacts belong among the flotsam. The item itself does not change when it moves from the porch to the kitchen, so the change in status is imposed by a change in understanding within the characters, a shift in their continual process of differentiation. Huang suggests that Ruth’s relegating the bag to the trash heap is “an act of psychological containment, meant to maintain the separation between humans and the abject messiness of our waste” (102); while Ruth prefers not to look too closely at the flotsam, Oliver insists on examining the bag, discovering that it resists the “garbage” label—and perhaps even the “flotsam” label. “‘Flotsam is accidental, stuff found floating at sea,’” explains Oliver; “‘Jetsam’s been jettisoned. It’s a matter of intent’” (Ozeki, Tale 13). Again, the label depends not on the contents of the bag or where it eventually washes up but on the reaction of the observers entangled with the intent of the person who discarded it. Here, Ozeki affirms that worth (or worthlessness) is not a quality inherent in material things but instead a label imposed by individuals and reflecting their cultural values. Later passages reaffirm this concept. After a storm, Ruth and Oliver go beachcombing to seek washed-up seaweed, a valuable fertilizer for their garden (151); however, they find other beachcombers, treasure-seekers looking for the first wave of debris washed to sea by the March 2011 tsunami that devastated coastal Japan.2 Ruth and Oliver’s friend Muriel sneers at the beachcombers: “‘Scavengers,’ Muriel said. ‘Looking for stuff from Japan. On my turf’” (152). The irony here is thick: Muriel, a retired anthropologist, specializes in excavating middens, reading heaps of ancient garbage for clues to the values and beliefs of defunct cultures, but she objects when beachcombers search for value in detritus produced by a disaster. This revaluing of garbage recurs later when Ruth visits the island’s dump, where islanders “haul their sodden boxes of cans and plastic bottles to the recycling table, sort their paper from their cardboard, and hurl glass into the crusher,” but they also “browse through the racks and shelves at the [dump’s] Free Store,” where items rejected as trash by one household can be adopted as treasure by another (219–20). “A trip to the dump was like a trip to the mall,” explains Ozeki (220), and Ruth is especially drawn to the shelves of discarded books she finds there, a collection “better than what she could find at the library” (221). When items relegated to the trash heap are deemed more valuable than those available in the marketplace or stored in official archives, the membrane separating garbage from cultural artifact again proves permeable and the “garbage” designation ephemeral. Trash becomes treasure, and trashed narrative becomes treasured cultural artifact by which people at a distance become entangled with one another. Revaluing Human Rubbish This recuperation of garbage into cultural circulation applies to human beings as well. In the “Nao” sections of the novel, Ozeki examines the ways cultures cut off certain people, designating them as worthless, unclean detritus. Given the long history of devaluing the ethnic or racial Other, the question of relative worth is especially salient here; however, Ozeki complicates the matter by fragmenting and entangling identities and ethnicities: Nao, an Asian American girl living in California, relocates to Japan and faces bullying and devaluing because she is viewed as too ungainly and American; furthermore, her body is available to readers only in the form of fragments mediated by Ruth, an Asian American woman living in Canada. As if responding to Rachel Lee’s plea for “a more discursive or artifactual location of Asian American/ist technique or encounter” (10), Ozeki creates a character in the form of mediated discourse contained within discarded artifacts, the types of fragments Lee calls “cuttable and extractable bags of parts” (29). The process of determining the value of these bags of parts begins with the reclamation of flotsam but continues with the reclamation of people. Similarly, Mel Y. Chen examines how “shaming language, slurs, and injurious speech” can objectify the Other and diminish their perceived humanity, but these insults “also, in crucial ways, paradoxically rely on animacy as they objectify, thereby providing possibilities for reanimation” (30). Three of Ozeki’s characters are driven toward suicide because others question their agency and worth, but Ozeki demonstrates once again that such attempts to designate people as trash can produce instead a new awareness of self-worth. Both Nao and her father, whom she calls Haruki Number Two, seriously consider suicide when the people around them label them worthless. Unable to support his family and unwilling to admit his failure to his wife, Haruki writes that he “sit[s] on the park bench everyday like gomi,” which he defines as “garbage, the kind to throw away and not even to recycle” (Ozeki, Tale 88). Nao concurs with her father’s self-assessment, blaming him for her adjustment problems after they move to Japan and expressing contempt for his inability to commit suicide effectively (286). However, Nao’s assessment of her father’s worth reverses suddenly when she discovers the motivation behind his firing from his California job: tasked with designing an online interface that would make it “easy and fun” for fighter pilots to “carry out a massively destructive bombing mission,” Haruki had wanted to “build a conscience into the interface design” (307). “‘I know it is a stupid idea to design a weapon that will refuse to kill,’” he admits, “‘But maybe I could make the killing not so much fun’” (309). When Nao finally hears this story, she reconsiders her father’s worth, labeling him “a total superhero” (388). Haruki Number Two is still the same ineffective, unemployed father Nao had previously relegated to the trash heap, but a shift in Nao’s perception transforms him instantly into her superhero. Nao’s reclamation is more complicated. At her new school in Tokyo, Nao becomes the class scapegoat, undergoing severe bullying by classmates. In a harrowing scene set in a school bathroom, Nao discovers that she has started her period but is not equipped with feminine hygiene products (276). Coming face-to-face with her bodily waste produces self-disgust, which is magnified when her classmates enter the bathroom, tie her up, and torture her—stealing her underwear and taking a video of her humiliation that they later post online. Encountering the video, Nao perceives herself as less than human: “I looked like a giant prehistoric squid, squirming and oozing ink from my ink sac in a futile attempt to confuse my predators” (278). Immobilized and silenced, Nao is reduced to nonhuman status, her bodily waste transfigured into squid ink that can neither confuse predators nor create meaning. Moreover, her classmates auction off Nao’s bloody panties online, where the signs of bodily fluids generally discarded as waste increase the panties’ value as a fetish object. In the online auction market, Nao’s worth is based entirely on her public debasement and her association with bodily waste, an association that recalls Hawkins’s comment about how waste “threaten[s] the self in the horror of abjection” (4). Stacy Alaimo asserts that “Forgetting that bodily waste must go somewhere allows us to imagine ourselves as rarefied rational beings distinct from nature’s muck and muddle” (8), but Nao’s experience in the bathroom forces her to remember and relive her connection to bodily waste, for while she effectively separates herself from her bullying classmates, she cannot remove the evidence of her abjection from the Internet. As Marlo Starr explains, “Though the bruises and marks inflicted on Nao’s body will eventually fade, the video becomes a part of her digital footprint that is much harder to erase” (106). While Nao had once viewed the Internet as a place of possibility, a neutral space where she could leave behind her past and reinvent herself, she now finds that fluidity threatened by her inability to disentangle herself from reminders of her bodily waste and public humiliation. Soon, Nao drops out of school and enters yet another kind of market: sex work, where her worth depends on her ability to perform the fetishized role of a simulated androgynous schoolgirl. In a situation awash with echoes of Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha (1997), an older and more experienced woman, Babette, provides a safe haven for Nao at the French maid café.3 At first, Babette simply provides Nao with a safe place away from bullying classmates, but Babette constantly assesses the market value of Nao’s appearance and eventually insists that Nao cannot remain in her safe writing space at the French maid café unless she earns her keep by going on “dates” with paying customers (Ozeki, Tale 299). Just as her panties and her shame had been auctioned online, Nao’s virginity is sold to a bidder Babette selects because he is unlikely to harm the merchandise and thus decrease Nao’s resale value (300). However, after Nao’s shaved hair grows out and she begins to look more conventionally feminine, her first customer loses interest and Babette insists that Nao sell herself to anyone willing to pay the price. When Nao objects to selling herself to a particularly creepy customer, Babette reveals to Nao her declining value: “‘People like you don’t deserve to have self-respect. So you better get over it’” (334). Thus, Nao’s perceived worth goes through several permutations: devalued and marginalized because of her difference from her classmates, valued in an online auction because of her abject association with bodily waste, valued as a sex worker because of her ability to perform a fetishized role, and relegated to worthlessness because of her engagement in sex work. It is hardly surprising that she seriously considers suicide—indeed, Davis describes Nao’s diary as reading like “a long suicide letter, a way for its writer to engage with the reality of time before dropping out of it altogether” (92). When nearly everyone around her relegates Nao to the trash heap, the young girl seems doomed to accept society’s valuation permanently. Revaluing “Remains” However, as the recovery of Nao’s trashed narrative illustrates, differentiation need not be permanent, and people, like stories, can be revalued. After enduring a painful sexual encounter with the creepy customer, Nao is jolted away from her incipient career as a sex worker when a ringing telephone reminds her of her great-grandmother, Jiko: “[T]hinking of Jiko made me realize that I didn’t want to end up being one of those girls who the police have to find on the floor days later, because that would break her heart” (Ozeki, Tale 336). Jiko, an elderly Buddhist nun living in retirement from the wider culture, may seem an odd mentor for a bullied schoolgirl, but throughout the novel, Nao’s relationship with Jiko challenges her to reassess her self-worth. In fact, Nao’s assessment that her own life is “stupid” and “empty” (22) inspires her to devote her diary instead to the life of her great-grandmother, whom she describes as “totally unique and special, like the last Galapagos tortoise or some other ancient animal hobbling around on the scorched earth, who is the only one left of its kind.” Here, Jiko’s value is based on scarcity and uniqueness, while Nao’s sense of worthlessness arises from a feeling that she is “unexceptional” (25). Therefore, Nao resolves to first exalt the worth of Jiko by writing her great-grandmother’s life story and then kill herself. However, in order to see how her entanglement with Jiko’s narrative helps Nao step away from the trash heap, it is necessary to look more closely at how the novel complicates the question of suicide. Nao and her father respond to perceived worthlessness by trying to throw away their lives through suicide, a desire Jiko opposes; not only would they snuff out all other possible life paths but their suicides would bring their families shame. However, Ozeki complicates the issue by presenting two other instances in which suicide becomes inevitable and, to a certain degree, acceptable: the “falling man” suicides on 11 September 2001 and the suicide of Nao’s great-uncle Haruki, whom Nao calls Haruki Number One. After the September 11 attacks, Nao’s father, Haruki Number Two, repeatedly views online footage of “[b]ombs exploding. Buildings collapsing. Beatings. Bodies” (279), but mostly he becomes obsessed by the “small dark human shapes, dropping down the sides of the buildings” (267). At first, these dark squiggles resemble ordinary blast debris, but closer observation reveals that “The squiggle is human. A time being. A life” (268). Watching and rewatching as desperate people jump from the towers to become human debris, Nao and her father are linked in knowing that if they had been there, they would have joined hands and jumped together, finding some dignity in maintaining agency over the manner of an unavoidable death. Thus, while the jumpers may initially resemble falling debris, Nao and her father come to see them as worthwhile human beings making an agonizing decision. Nao’s great-uncle, Haruki Number One, had made a similar decision; a philosophy student drafted into the Japanese military in the final months of World War II, he finds his freedom of choice severely restricted by the necessity of putting his body in the service of the state. His official diary and his final letter, written to pass the eyes of censors, pay lip service to war rhetoric: his death will fulfill a noble cause and will result in a greater compensation for his grieving family, increasing his postmortem financial value (217). However, his secret diary, written in French and well-hidden from censors, openly expresses his reluctance to engage in any form of killing and sets forth two mutually exclusive options: fly his plane into an enemy battleship as directed or turn away at the last minute and fly into the sea, killing only himself. Flying into the sea would end his life in “watery disgrace rather than inflamed heroics,” decreasing his postmortem value, but it would “at the very same instant forever alter the fate of those enemy troops on the battleship, as well as their mothers and sisters and brothers and wives and children” and others with whom his decision will inevitably entangle him (325). Haruki Number One wrestles with this conundrum of unlimited entanglement until he comes to a decision: “I am determined to do my utmost to steer my plane away from my target and into the sea. Better to do battle with the waves, who may yet forgive me” (328). Like the jumpers on September 11, the kamikaze pilot who cannot control the inevitability of his death finds agency and dignity in controlling its manner, but only after he recognizes that even the boundary of death cannot disentangle him from the community of the living. Since his suicide leaves behind no bodily debris to be buried (his corpse presumably returning to the food chain beneath the waves), Haruki’s mother, Jiko, receives from the military a small box containing only a piece of paper on which is printed a single Japanese word a footnote translates as “remains” (248). Interring a word instead of a body may be the ultimate method of separating the decaying body from the community of the living, but in Jiko’s eyes, Haruki Number One is thus not trashed but transformed—into language, which he, as a writer, valued more than anything else. Just as Nao and her father discover a sense of connection with the bodies of September 11 victims, Jiko remains entangled with her dead son, despite the absence of a physical body. However, how does this entanglement with dead bodies rescue Nao? The answer becomes apparent when the body in question is Jiko’s. The problem of disposing of bodies lies at the heart of human culture; we do not throw grandmothers out with the trash but treat them with respect in ways dictated by tradition: washing or robing, cremation or burial, prayers, hymns, or boisterous wakes. These and other cultural practices surrounding dead bodies demonstrate the human desire to differentiate bodies from the general stream of uncleanness we call “garbage.” Yet, as Scanlan points out, dead bodies ultimately pose a problem of disposal “because death constitutes the human return to matter, and is in a sense, the ‘garbaging’ of the body” (9). In A Tale for the Time Being, Jiko’s death dramatizes the double differentiation that separates dead bodies from those of the living while also separating them from other types of waste. Jiko’s death is surrounded by rituals that confer meaning on her “garbaging.” As Nao helps wash Jiko’s body and prepare it for burial, she expresses amazement at the quick transformation of Jiko into “A sack. A skin bag. A cold thing” (Ozeki, Tale 364). Even this “cold thing” must be treated with respect, however; Nao recognizes that Jiko no longer inhabits her own bones, but nevertheless Nao interacts with those bones as if they still held the soul of her beloved great-grandmother. After Jiko’s cremation, Nao and her father work as a team, using large wooden chopsticks to pick up Jiko’s crushed bones and place them gently in an urn, while Jiko’s fellow nun Muji identifies each bone: “‘Oh, that is her ankle. That is her thigh. That is her elbow. Oh, look, there’s her nodobotoke!’” (365). Muji explains that finding the nodobotoke allows the dead person to “enter nirvana and return to the ocean of eternal tranquility” (365–66). Even while sorting the bones and ashes of a dead body, Nao and her father cooperate in treating Jiko as a valued member of the human community, a being whose time has not yet ended, who still has hope of finding tranquility. This communal construction of meaning conferring value on a “garbaged” body marks an important turning point for Nao and her father. Up to this point, they have been pursuing parallel journeys pointing toward suicide, a final reprieve from lives they deem worthless; now they work together to affirm the continued value of fragments of bone and ash. This process challenges Nao’s and her father’s assumptions about their own worthlessness, and their encounter with the remains of Haruki Number One continues the revaluing process. After Jiko’s funeral, Nao shows her father the box that had previously held only the slip of paper printed with the word “remains”; now, though, they find something else in the box: Haruki Number One’s secret diary (367). Here is another body they will need to sort through together—a body of words left behind in place of an absent corpse. Translating the diary, sorting the bones of Haruki’s narrative, will become yet another cooperative project for Nao and her father, who tells her, “‘We must live, Naoko! We have no choice. We must soldier on!’” (369). Here, “soldier on” subtly compares the work of excavating trashed narratives with the work of Haruki Number One, who accepts death as inevitable but chooses to create meaning with the small moments of life remaining. Nao and her father are not called to crash an airplane into the sea or hold hands while jumping from a burning tower, but they resolve to find worth in whatever moments remain of their “time being.” For Nao, this means completing her diary and tossing it out to sea in hopes of finding a reader; indeed, the existence of that reader provides the final link in the revaluing of Nao, for only that reader can answer a vital question about her worth. Analyzing the dialogic relationship between Nao’s diary and Ruth’s interventions in that diary, Davis suggests that “these characters create each other through the act of storytelling” (94), while Huang points out that “Simply by reading the diary, Ruth becomes entangled with, and therefore responsible to, Nao” (103). Early in the novel, still committed to killing herself, Nao speculates about whether the person who finds her diary will value her story or toss it into the trash, and she asks her unknown reader, “Hey, answer me! Am I stuck inside of a garbage can, or not?” (Ozeki, Tale 27). For Nao, the ultimate value of her story will be conferred by her reader, which makes Ruth the arbiter of value and author of worth. However, Ruth’s story is itself contingent on Nao’s diary, for toward the end, Ruth begins to realize that she is both framer and framed, author and authored. As Ruth becomes more intimately entwined in Nao’s narrative, Ruth realizes that her own continued existence is contingent on the continuation of Nao’s story. As Oliver puts it, “‘if she stops writing to us, then maybe we stop being, too’” (344). Later, Ruth wonders whether Nao is “the one writing her into being,” whether Ruth herself is merely “a homeless and ghostly composite of words that the girl had assembled” (392). If Ruth’s character grows from Nao’s narrative, then her very being is entangled with flotsam and assembled on a foundation of debris. Schrödinger’s Trash, or Quid Pro Crow This mutual construction of self depends on Ruth’s ability to differentiate between trash and treasure, an ability made even more tenuous by the novel’s exploration of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, which is discussed in both Ruth’s and Nao’s sections of the novel and explained in more depth in footnotes and appendices. Schrödinger’s premise is simple: a cat is sealed in a box with a radioactive substance that either does or does not cause death; the only way to know whether the cat is alive is to open the box and look. As Oliver explains to Ruth near the end of the novel, “‘if cats behaved like subatomic particles, the cat would be both alive and dead, simultaneously, so long as the box remains closed and we don’t know if the conditions have been met’” (396). The problem, of course, is that cats do not behave like subatomic particles, which, as Oliver explains, “‘can exist as an array of possibilities, in many places at once’”; however, this “superposition” is possible “‘only as long as no one is looking.’” Oliver goes on to explain another option, citing Hugh Everett’s alternative interpretation of the thought experiment: “‘[T]he superposed quantum system persists, only, when it is observed, it branches. The cat isn’t either dead or alive. It’s both dead and alive, only now it exists as two cats in two different worlds’” (397). Oliver’s theoretical musings may seem digressive, but they connect directly to issues of differentiation and worth so central to the novel. The opening pages of Nao’s diary posit a variety of possible worlds and possible readers, any one of which might come into being depending on when and by whom the diary is read or whether it is discarded as garbage. Similarly, Haruki Number One’s diary reveals his musings on the possible lives lying ahead of him, conceding in the end that the greatest difficulty is posed by his inability to know the final outcome of his actions (325). Ruth also struggles to accept not knowing which of many possible paths Nao followed. When she first opens Nao’s diary, she flips through and notes that all the pages are covered with handwritten text, from beginning to end; however, as she slowly reads through the diary, she eventually reaches the point where Nao resolves to kill herself—and then the narrative ends, leaving many blank pages. This absence of narrative poses various possibilities: Nao is dead, Nao is alive but stopped writing for some reason, Nao never learned of her father’s heroism or Haruki Number One’s choice, or Nao learned of them but it did not matter enough to stop her from killing herself. The blank pages can be read as an end (of Nao’s narrative or her life) or as a beginning (of new options and pathways for Nao), but either way, Ruth’s lack of knowledge opens infinite branching possibilities. For Ruth, those blank pages provide a call to action. She feels an urgent need to stop Nao from killing herself, but Oliver questions her urgency, noting the four-year time lapse between Nao’s writing the suicide threat and the diary’s making its way to Ruth’s hands and suggesting that it is far too late for anyone to intervene in Nao’s narrative. However, Nao’s discontinuing her narrative could also call into question Ruth’s and Oliver’s existence, because “‘if she stops writing to us, then maybe we stop being, too.’” Further complicating the situation, the empty pages appear simultaneously with the disappearance of Ruth and Oliver’s cat, a junkyard stray officially named Schrödinger but commonly called Pest or Pesto. Oliver wonders whether the events are related: “‘Maybe we don’t exist anymore. Maybe that’s what happened to Pesto, too. He just fell off our page’” (344). Even more significant, though, is that the cat remains missing as long as Nao’s narrative remains unfinished; only after Ruth intervenes in Nao’s narrative is the cat’s state revealed, and both events require the intervention of a jungle crow, an Asian species that Oliver says probably “‘rode over on the flotsam’” (55). The crow appears both in Ruth’s waking world and within her dreams, where the well-traveled bird enables her to cross boundaries of time and space to intervene in Nao’s life and restore her story. As Ruth struggles to accept not knowing Nao’s fate, she falls into a fitful sleep that leads to a dream in which she swims through a black sea “filled with debris” (347) where “there is no up. No down. No in. No out. No forward or backward. Just this cold, crushing wave, this unnameable continuum of merging and dissolving” (348). Within this wave of infinite possibility, she follows the crow that leads her to a park, where she persuades Nao’s father not to kill himself and sends him off to find Nao and prevent her from killing herself (353); Ruth further intervenes by hiding Haruki’s secret French diary, rescued from the waves by the jungle crow, in the box with his “remains” (354). Afterward, Ruth awakens to find Nao’s narrative restored, new writing filling the formerly blank pages. While she welcomes learning that Nao did not kill herself, Ruth is uncomfortable “‘having that much agency over someone else’s narrative’” (377). However, even as she and Oliver discuss this change in affairs, the jungle crow drops a nut on the deck to reveal the location of the missing cat (378–79). Just as Ruth has been deeply disturbed by her inability to know Nao’s fate, Oliver admits his deep disturbance over “‘[n]ot knowing where he’d gone, or if he was alive or dead’” (381). Here, a cat named Schrödinger is revealed to be alive, but just barely, by the agency of a jungle crow that has also, in a dream, helped Ruth to exercise agency over the life of a young girl hovering in uncertainty, in a liminal space characterized by waves of possibilities.4 No wonder Ruth questions the reality of what she has experienced; she recalls Nao’s words at the beginning of the diary—“Together we’ll make magic”—and she wonders, “Who had conjured whom? … Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her into being?” (392). Her intervention into Nao’s narrative, recovering the trashed story’s conclusion, so deeply entangles her with Nao’s story that differentiation between self and Other, or between trash and treasure, becomes difficult. If, as Barad asserts, “The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment” (140), then Ruth and Nao mutually constitute one another through the material agency of discourse retrieved from the garbage. Early in the novel, Nao wonders whether her narrative is “just sitting here wasting time talking to the inside of a dumpster” (Ozeki, Tale 27), and after Ruth becomes obsessed with tracking down the details behind Nao’s narrative, “Ruth’s mind felt like a garbage patch, an undifferentiated mat of becalmed and fractured pixels” (115). Both the reader and the characters envision themselves as mingled with garbage and wonder whether they can escape and find worth, a worth conferred by their entanglement with bodies and narratives across time and space. Rescuing Nao from the flotsam and restoring her narrative allows Ruth to overcome her longstanding writer’s block; in the epilogue, she writes back to Nao: “Wherever you are, I know you are writing. You couldn’t give that up. I can see you clutching your pen.” While she proposes that a continued devotion to writing serves as a way to transcend the dumpster of trashed, silenced, unread narratives, Ruth finally accepts a certain level of not-knowing: “I know I can’t find you if you don’t want to be found” (402). While earlier she had sought clear resolution, now she accepts the uncertainty of lives and stories that might follow many branching paths. Entangled Lives, Entangled Texts Ruth’s closing words, however, are not the end of the story, for the novel constructed from embedded and intertwined texts is itself embedded within additional scholarly apparatus: footnotes and appendices attached to the third-person narration of Ruth’s quest. Ozeki states that she tries to write fiction that “embodies and performs” questions about truth and being, explaining that pointing to truths is “not about just laying them out in the text but about somehow performing them. It’s almost between the lines” (“Interview”). Just as Ruth initially has difficulty differentiating between worthless flotsam and worthwhile narrative, Ozeki’s readers must perform similar acts of differentiation within the blank spaces separating the various entangled narratives and perspectives, a particularly challenging task in the gap between the body of the novel and the appendices. In her brief closing chapter, Ruth expresses curiosity about Nao’s life, saying, “I’d much rather know (emphasis in original), but then again, not knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive” (402). This epilogue, where Ruth takes comfort in the realm of possibility, serves as a transitional point between the “she” of the third-person narrative and the “I” of the appendices, which may represent Ruth the character, Ozeki the author, or some entangled blend of both. Furthermore, the appendices intermingle information gleaned in dreams from fictional characters (407) with scientific information gleaned from real-life characters, such as astrophysicist Adam Frank. Thus, even as the scholarly apparatus and references to sources outside the fictional world provide a veneer of scientific truth, they also suggest the difficulty of differentiating truth from fiction. For what the astrophysicist Adam Frank is supposed to have told her is that “quantum mechanics itself is a calculus. It’s a machine for predicting experimental results. It’s a finger, pointing at the moon” (415). This image, the appendix tells us, refers to a Zen koan about a Zen master who pointed to the moon, evoking this comment in Ozeki’s appendix: “To look for the truth in books … is like mistaking the finger for the moon. The moon and the finger are not the same thing. ‘Not same,’ old Jiko would have said. ‘Not different either’” (416). In a world in which two such unlike things can be considered both “not same” and “not different,” differentiation becomes futile and entanglement eternal. Here, Jiko, a fictional Buddhist nun, gets the final word in a chapter ostensibly devoted to explaining the scientific principles evoked by Schrödinger’s famed thought experiment—a chapter that juxtaposes particle physics with Zen Buddhism, conferring ultimate authority on neither. Appendix E goes on to examine Hugh Everett’s alternate explanation of Schrödinger’s thought experiment, the “many-worlds interpretation,” in which “[a]t every juncture—in every Zen moment when possibilities arise—a schism occurs, worlds branch, and multiplicity ensues” until “[e]very instance of either/or is replaced by an and. And an and, and an and, and an and, and another and … adding up to an infinitely all-inclusive, and yet mutually unknowable, web of many worlds” (415). This statement positing unbounded entanglement echoes Jiko’s repeated rejection of either/or differentiation, which is most apparent when she urges Nao to do battle with the waves of the sea. Sensing Nao’s anger with a world that rejects her worth, Jiko hands Nao her walking stick and encourages her to “bully” the waves; Nao obediently attempts to “cut” the waves, to “escape” from the waves, to assert her will in separating herself from the seething waves, but the water relentlessly defies such differentiation. Nao wonders what would happen if she stopped fighting and submitted to the waves: “Would I be washed out to sea? The sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my fingertips. My beautiful white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where anemones would grow upon them like flowers.” Unable to resist entanglement with the sea, Nao concedes defeat: “‘I lost. The ocean won’” (193).5 However, for Jiko, the result is far more ambiguous: “‘A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean,’ she said. ‘A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.’” For Jiko, differentiation is an illusion and entanglement, a universal principle she expresses most succinctly when she says, “‘Surfer, wave, same thing’” (194). Ruth stretches this sense of entanglement to include narrative itself; after restoring Nao’s missing narrative, she notes that “‘the end keeps receding, like an outgoing wave. Just out of reach. I can’t quite catch up’” (376). For Ruth, Nao’s narrative becomes the wave on which her being surfs. Person, wave, same thing: trash, treasure, same thing; worth, worthlessness, same thing. In dramatizing and problematizing the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, A Tale for the Time Being examines the difficulty of differentiating between one state or substance and another, suggesting that the very labels we place on things and people to establish their worth are only fingers pointing toward truth and not truth. Douglas affirms that dirt as a category was “created by the differentiating activity of mind,” but “all through the process of differentiating its role was to threaten the distinctions made” (162), while Serpil Oppermann notes that “mangled matter and meaning, as interrelated forces, imply that there are no boundaries between human semiotic processes, knowledge practices, and the very material world itself.” Oppermann argues that “In such a radical rethinking of the environment as a dynamic commingling of discursive and material flows, the world comes to be seen as a multiplicity of complex interchanges between innumerable agentic forces” (28). In other words, even garbage, the substance we reject as worthless, retains some sort of agency over our lives. In Ozeki’s novel, rejected narratives, people, and things insist on reentering the circle of worth, while characters’ attempts at measuring worth, at distinguishing between trash and treasure, or disentangling themselves from garbage prove highly arbitrary and transient. Establishing firm boundaries separating worth from worthlessness may be a foundational process by which cultures, communities, and individuals define themselves, but Ozeki’s novel suggests that the boundary itself is an illusion, a story we tell to obscure our entanglement with our own detritus. Late in the novel, Oliver states that words themselves “‘come from the dead. We inherit them. Borrow them. Use them for a time to bring the dead to life’” (346), but in A Tale for the Time Being, Ozeki suggests that neglected narratives and the detritus of trashed lives come back from the dead to provide the wave on which personal identity, community, and culture surf. The author wishes to thank Grace Johnson, Nicole Livengood, Alex Perry, and the Marietta College Faculty Publishing Group for their helpful suggestions. Footnotes " 1. Marlo Starr argues that this dialogic narrative illuminates the Buddhist concept of interbeing (115). While she does not focus on Ruth Ozeki, Greta Gaard’s exploration of connections between Buddhism and material ecocriticism argues that “The new materialist concept of the ‘entanglement’ of living and nonliving matters, or of bodily natures, may find its precedent and complement in Buddhism’s concept of dependent origination, the understanding that no one thing exists apart from another” (292), a concept evident throughout Ozeki’s novel. " 2. Ozeki explains that the tsunami “needed to be an essential part of the book,” functioning both literally and metaphorically: the tsunami washes debris across the waves, connecting cultures at a distance, but it also reinforces Jiko’s references to “impermanence and dependent co-arising” (“Interview”). Guy Beauregard examines how the novel reflects the stories of survivors of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, focusing on the “transpacific dimensions of attempting to hear and respond to such stories” (96). He argues that the novel “positions figures in Japan as presumed objects of rescue while implicitly presenting Canada as a presumed site of refuge” (99). Given Ruth’s determination to “rescue” Nao’s narrative and rescue Nao herself from suicide, Beauregard’s reading is insightful and convincing. " 3. Parallels between A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) are striking, including the faux-diary format and the metatextual interaction between “author” and diary, but the parallels are most clear during Nao’s brief foray into prostitution. Like Golden’s geisha, Sayuri, Nao is groomed to play a fetishistic role, and her virginity is auctioned off to a wealthy patron; however, Ozeki rejects the romantic glow with which Golden surrounds sex work and explicitly critiques “a lot of foolish geisha crap” (Tale 6). " 4. Liminal space, of course, is a place of both power and risk; as Mary Douglas explains, " Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry to his new status. (97) " For Ruth, the actions she takes within the dream world assist Nao and allow Ruth to reenter her writing life, from which she has been cut off over the course of the novel. " 5. Starr convincingly argues that this scene demonstrates “Nao’s ambivalence toward nondualist Buddhism thinking,” for " [t]hough she feels a sense of release through her surrender to the ocean, her fantasy of being consumed by fish and sharks exposes the tension in her psyche… . She struggles over the question of whether to abandon her body or to preserve herself as an individual, desiring both to transcend the bounds of her body and to protect them. (111) Works Cited Alaimo Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self . Indiana UP , 2010 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ammons A. 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TI - Differentiation, Entanglement, and Worth in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
JF - MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
DO - 10.1093/melus/mlaa013
DA - 2020-06-01
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DP - DeepDyve
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