Look at page 252. This is the scene when the mirror breaks in the bathroom: "The mirror crack'd from side to side" is used here in The Icarus Girl, but it is a quote from the poem "The Lady of Shalott" by Tennyson. The motif of the mirror is used over and over in "The Lady of Shalott" to juxtapose reality and myth, and to convey the theme of sight and knowledge. As for Icarus Girl, mirrors create twins in the way that twins "mirror eachother." It's important that Oyeyemi uses this quote here, because in the poem, soon after "the mirror cracks," the Lady of Shalott commits suicide (Her suicide is related to Launcelot). In The Icarus Girl, the mirror breaking causes an escalation of the tension in the novel. Jess's real fear of TillyTilly (who is death?) begins in the bathroom when TillyTilly tells her she wants to become her (essentially kill her).
From "The Lady of Shalott":
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.
Follow this link for the full text of the poem:
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/los1.html
Love Medicine
Detail of beadwork from an Ojibwe medicine pouch
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
She's only twenty years old with a debut novel and a second book in the works, but Helen Oyeyemi, author of The Icarus Girl, says she doesn't want to be a writer when she grows up. With one year to go for a bachelor's degree in social and political sciences at Cambridge University, she's pondering a career as a librarian. In her conversation with Penguin, this Nigerian-British writer/university student reflects on The Arabian Nights, imaginary friends, and her mom's Nigerian potato porridge.
Q: Did you imagine that you would be a published author, let alone at eighteen years of age?
A: I wasn't ever confident of getting published, but it was definitely one of my hopes. I read so much growing up that it was inevitable that the impressions I was picking up would spill over into writing my own stuff. It was a weird conflict—I really wanted to be a writer, but almost didn't see writers as human, possibly because my favourite tales were the ones that put up a kind of semipermeable barrier between the reader and the teller of the tale, so that the storyteller is always just the storyteller and never the story. I thought I'd hit the jackpot when I found The Arabian Nights.
Basically, publication was a distant dream because I thought I'd need to go through some trial of fire and water to get published and come out with some unrecognizable style. Now, rather than some mystical apprenticeship, publication means that I'll undergo literary maturation in a very public way. Readers will be able to pinpoint from book to book where I'm improving—or flopping. "Publication is the auction of the mind of man," to borrow a phrase from one of my favourite poets, Emily Dickinson.
Q: How did the idea for The Icarus Girl come to you?
A: I'd already written about twelve short stories featuring a character called TillyTilly who seemed to always hurt her friends. She was pathetic in that she appeared to be unable to help herself, and yet she was also quite sinister and knowing. So in starting The Icarus Girl, I was trying to find out about her history and who she was, then Jess began to take over the central story.
Q: What inspired the title for your book?
A: I thought about the relationship between Jess and her mom as a little bit similar to that of Icarus and Daedalus. Icarus and his father were imprisoned by King Minos, but then Daedalus crafted wings out of wax and flew away to safety. Icarus got carried away with the power of flight and his wings couldn't support him when he circled the sun. Similarly, with the idea of imagination, Jess's mom, as a writer, has an imagination that she can rein in and use wisely, whereas her daughter is unable to control her own imagination and gets too close to a facet of reality that will only damage her.
Q: In The Icarus Girl it is hard to tell if eight-year-old Jess is imagining her friend TillyTilly or if she is real. How much of the story is your imagination and how much is based on reality?
A: Unfortunately, I never knew a little girl like Jess. If we met, I think I wouldn't know whether to give her a hug or shake her and give her a bit of a slap. Most of The Icarus Girl is imagination, mainly because the basic premise—Jess's having a Nigerian mother and an English father, and growing up under a strong influence from one and passivity from the other—is far removed from my own experience. Both my parents are from Ibadan, Nigeria. Jess is far braver and far more sensitive than I was at her age. I had an imaginary friend myself, named Chimmy, but TillyTilly isn't based on him; he didn't affect my life and wasn't central to my youth in that way. I wasn't particularly lonely, but did need someone to calm me down, which Chimmy did.
One thing that is based on reality is Jess's tendency to cross out the bits of books that hurt her. I used to do that a lot; I would rewrite endings. Jess's love of Little Women is borrowed from me as well—that book still kills me. I also have some familiarity with the "thousand natural shocks" of day-to-day dread, which might partly be the reason for my enjoying Poe and Emily Dickinson. (I hate to blather on about her, but she is so astute and brilliant. In one of her poems, she says she "lives on dread" and describes it as a fuel.) I'm the kind of person who's always looking over my shoulder, though I don't know what for. So Jess's fear of catastrophe is an exaggerated vein of my own experience.
Q: Tell us how The Icarus Girl came to be published?
A: I was in the upper sixth form, the last year of school before university, and I started a short story called “The Icarus Girl.” I thought it was the best thing I'd ever written. I winced far less than usual when reading it over because it somehow felt strong. I sent it to Robin Wade, a literary agent who'd started up two years previously, hoping that he wouldn't have a huge list of clients and would have time to give me advice on how to maintain this style. I wanted him to take me seriously, so having only written about 20 pages, I told him I'd written 150 pages and would finish the novel soon!
I hoped that Robin would tell me that I could become a writer when I was older, but he emailed me back the next day to tell me he wanted to represent me and that I should send him the rest. I got permission to skip homework from my surprised English teacher and ignored the homework for my other subjects. I wrote every day to complete the story. I'd even wake up in the middle of the night to write down paragraphs. When the A-level exams came around, I got through them by eating incredible amounts of bread (white sliced, whole meal sliced, rolls, whatever!) while I continued to write The Icarus Girl, flicking an eye over notes desperately photocopied from textbooks and contemplating exam failure. I thought I might be turning into an enormous bread roll. And I couldn't fail without dread consequence: I had a conditional offer from Cambridge University to read social and political sciences, and for that I would need A grades for all three of my subjects. Once the novel was completed, Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury (U.K.) saw what I'd written and noticed that I was trying to say something. We met between exams, and she made an offer for The Icarus Girl and a second book.
Q: Can you say what your second book is about and when it will be released?
A: I don't want to say; I don't want to talk it away. But it's going well so far. I think Bloomsbury is thinking of early 2007 for the second novel.
Q: I read an article that quoted you as saying that your parents didn't know you were writing a book and that if your mom read it she would interpret it as “watching her culture die.” Were your suspicions correct?
A: I don't think I was right in saying that. I was probably being unfair to my mom in failing to appreciate her ability to apprehend fiction as fiction. I was being such a grand and dramatic teenager in that interview. My mom got hold of a copy a couple of days after the novel was published, and she reckons she finds it really evocative and feels as if she's there when she reads the Nigerian parts, which is a huge compliment coming from a native.
Q: Has Nigerian food been a strong influence for you growing up in England? That part of the culture plays an important role in your book.
A: Not really. I used to eat a lot of Nigerian food before the age of ten, and then I started balking at it because I wanted chicken nuggets like my friends. I still have some favourites, like my mom's yam, sweet potato, and potato porridge that she makes with palm oil and atarado (peppers, kind of like chilies). But on the whole, food isn't the way I access culture. Things like smell take me there, but smells are impossible to describe for the purposes of a novel.
Q: Your writing is what one would expect from a seasoned author. To what do you attribute your talent as a writer?
A: If I sometimes read as if I were a bit older than I am in narrating The Icarus Girl, I think that's mainly something to do with trying to maintain distance and to formalize my role as storyteller, rather than my eighteen-year-old self. I had two central characters to drive the story, and I wanted to push the focus very intensely onto their relationship. It flowed because I already had the ingredients and an intention.
Q: Can you see yourself as a full-time writer?
A: Nope. On a pragmatic level, I don't see myself earning enough writing full time to be able to afford all the books I want to buy. Also, I think it will be weird never to have had a job or to have had a reason to live in the “real world.” (I've never been offered a job I applied for, though—it's as if they sense I have no actual life skills. Terrible.)
I keep changing my mind about what I'd like to do when I graduate. I started off wanting to be a psychologist, then put paid to that by specializing in politics this year. Then I wanted to be a literary agent, before spending a couple of days helping Robin (my own literary agent) out at the office. And now I think I'd quite like to be a librarian in a massive library. It may sound boring, but I think it's true that people who outwardly live very quiet lives may be more likely to have very rich and intense internal landscapes and consequently need less drama. Also, I could influence people's reading if they asked me for recommendations.
-Penguin Books
KQ, if you're going to post from another site, say so and give us the link.
Post a Comment