"Perhaps attempting to polemicize against the menaces of Marxist ideology, the Milanese saw oppression and revolt as no more than a question of feelings and the right to express them, forgetting that not even feelings survive - neither feelings nor any desire to express them - when people have no money, or when money can buy everything, or where penury cohabits with great ignorance."
This sentence appeared in Iguana spoke to me and arose my attention towards the "revolution" on campus. Are people here in DePauw like the Milaneses in Iguana, who just wanted to express their feelings, in this college setting where voices are heard and finance is not on the top of the list of many students?
"Briefly put, the Milanese were persuaded that some world of oppression had something to say, whereases the oppressed don't even exist, or can't, at least, have any awareness of being oppressed when their condition is authentic and a legacy from distant past." Personally, I think the scenario that is described there are the scenario here are fundamentally different in this case. Despite the differences, there is a phenomenon of a lack of communication in the society - how do other people feel like? We only have a limited amount of space in our brain that a lot of time we choose to avoid the question by not recognizing it.
Although the theme of oppression is present in The Iguana, I don't believe that it is a major point of concern in the novel. Instead, I found it to be used as a tool to express the much greater, overlying theme of the value of the fantastic, as discussed in class. I believe that Ortese uses oppression and the fantastic as a way of defining reality. The description of the count as a nothing, or water filled cloud, and a wasted life is the true purpose of the novel, which is to prove that our perception of reality is illogical, and the wrong way of interpreting. Ortese uses the fantastical character of the iguana to portray what nonfiction/reality can't.
ReplyDelete