The Space Between Two Texts

One of my favorite books is Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse. He's dead. I realized as I was working on this assignment that I don't read many authors who are still living. I did recently read Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, which I enjoyed. I googled her name and no obituaries came up in the search, so I have reasonable cause to assume she is still alive.

The protagonists in both of these stories have an internal conflict that centers around their relationships with their mothers.

Hesse's character, Goldmund, is a vagabond, who leaves a monestary to partake in worldly pleasures of the flesh. Goldmund's copious love affairs are a result of his unconscious search for the mother he lost as a young boy. (Hesse was a big Freudian).

Kincaids character, Lucy, is an au pair from a developing Carribean island who comes to the states to work for an upscale New York family . Her conflict is not a search for her mother, as Goldmunds, but rather a search for a way to seperate herself from her mother.

The struggle for these characters to identify their relationship with their mother at times takes back burner to the more immediate action of the story, but I feel like it is the driving force in both books.

Both characters embark on the quest in search of finding/sepearting from their mothers by leaving the security of their homes. Goldmund leaves the oppressive security of the cloister and Lucy leaves the oppressive security of the island she grew up on.

Though these books were written 60 years apart I think it shows the timeless importance of the mother/child bond. The nature of this relationship (or lack of it entirely) seems to have had great influence over the characters in these two books. It seems Freud and his philisophical influence are not dead yet.

Some of my favorite passages from Lucy:

"Because Peggy and I were now not getting along, we naturally started to talk about finding an apartment in which we would live together. It was an old story: two people are in love, and then, just at the moment they fall out of love, they decide to marry."

"Then I saw the book Mariah had given me. It was on the night table next to my bed. Besdie it lay my fountain pen full of beautiful blue ink. I picked up both, and I opened the book. At the top of the page I wrote my full name: Lucy Josephine Potter. At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: 'I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it.' And then as I looked at this sentence a great wave of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great big blur."