“Drink it!” Barbara said sharply. “I’m tired of trying to help you. Drink it all down, one swallow, come on. This is what we do down here in hell.”
Picking up on Natalie’s analysis of the role played by the myth of Orpheus in this central section of the book, and her even more suggestive description of Marina “following in his literal footsteps, meeting the people he met, engaging in the same search he engaged in,” I’m going to suggest that one trick that Patchett plays on us is to tempt us to identify so closely with Marina that we share her errors, including her interpretation of this myth. Error, of course, comes from the Latin word errare, which means to wander around, get lost, go astray, and that’s what Marina spends this middle section of the novel doing. She literally wanders around Manaus in Chapter 3 because she can’t think of anything else to do, buying a carved bird and trying to imagine how different her experience of this place must be from Anders’, simply because she’s able to pass as a local:
With her black hair caught back in a barrette beneath the hat she’s bought and her cheap clothing and her flip-flops, she was able to pass in Manaus the way she was never able to pass in Minnesota. Here they looked at her and seeing someone who looked something like a woman they knew, looked away. When she was spoken to it was only a simple greeting, that much she understood, and she nodded her head in recognition and kept walking. Anders would have been mobbed everywhere. He was so blue-eyed and overly tall, his skin was very nearly luminous, as unfamiliar to these people as snow itself. Any passerby could see deeper into Anders than he could the Rio Negro.
There’s Anders as our Germanic anderes, or other, as Natalie pointed out in her first post, and here’s Marina blurring the boundaries between the two meanings of Indian as badly as the Minnesotans who ask her if she’s Lakota back home, or the tourists who will insist on snapping her photo with the Jinta at the trading post in Chapter 8. So why, if she seems to be recognized and acknowledged, does Marina hate Manaus so much? Why does she feel herself to be plunged into hell during her time there?
Part of the reason is that Manaus is a place between two worlds. We might even say that it’s a place between two Edens – the frozen Eden Prairie, MN where the book begins, which feels like home to Marina, and the strange, terrifying paradise of the jungle that we’ll see in the novel’s final section. Manaus, in the book, seems to be the worst of both worlds, too tropical to be civilized, and too civilized to be natural. The opera house, for example, is described at one point as “the line of civilization that held the jungle back. Surely without the opera house the vines would have crept up over the city and swallowed it whole.” Later, as the music begins, Marina feels the tropical horrors of Manaus – “the chicken heads that cluttered the tables in the market place and the starving dogs that waited in the hopes that one might fall… [t]he children with fans that waved the flies away from the baskets of fish…the smells, the traffic, the sticky pools of blood” — fall away, so that “suddenly it was clear that building an opera house was a basic act of human survival. It kept them all from rotting in the unendurable heat. It saved their souls in ways those murdering Christian missionaries could never have envisioned.” (If you haven’t seen Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, let me suggest that it helps to make this perverse marriage between opera and the Amazon even stranger than it seems here.)
Manaus, then is a hell of liminality, of being half one thing and half another, like a mermaid or a child caught between two cultures. That term – “liminality” – also turns out to have an anthropological meaning: it connotes the middle stage of a ritual or a rite of passage, a period of disorientation, in which a subject sheds her identity or social status before acquiring a new one. It makes sense, in this context, that Marina would see Manaus as the hell into which she has descended, like Orpheus, to search for the dead Anders: “She knew the story of Orpheus, but it wasn’t until the singing began that she realized it was the story of her life. She was Orfeo, and there was no question that Anders was Euridice, dead from a snake bite. Marina had been sent to hell to bring him back.” Marina’s error here is that she fails to recognize that she’s not Orpheus, but Euridice. As Natalie notes, she has followed Anders into this hell, and immediately following the opera, she will follow Dr. Swenson — constantly disappearing and calling back, “Are you coming, Dr. Singh?” – through the streets of Manaus, then into the jungle, and finally out of the hell of self-doubt she’s been wandering in for the past thirteen years. In that sense, Manaus embodies Marina’s own status as a liminal figure, someone caught between east and west, black and white, rational scientist and lost, frightened child. “We always feel better heading home,” Dr. Swenson says as they head upriver at the end of this section. Marina has no way to know where she’s going at that moment, but she feels an intense relief – and feels certain that Anders must have felt it too — to escape this city, like hell’s waiting room, half way between one world and another.
Finally, on this issue of liminality, is anyone else noticing the way the novel is built on a series of blocked passages? (I owe this one to my brilliant wife.) Dr. Swenson, lecturing on “the cervix, the cervix” in front of a high wall of slides of atypical cells back in Chapter 1, is the blocked passage to a medical career for Marina. (Just to be clear, “the cervix, the cervix” is the narrow passage through which a child must pass to be born.) With the ferocity of her lectures, Dr. Swenson keeps her students in a liminal state, “at the intersection of terror and exaltation, a place that keeps the mind exceedingly alert.” Later, in Chapter 2, when Marina remembers her panicked attempts to save the baby stuck in the womb as his mother’s cervix fails to dilate, becoming not a passage but a wall, she realizes that she’s begun her story of this disaster in the wrong place by simply describing the events of the birth. Instead, she should go back to that first day in Dr. Swenson’s class, and the way she inspired both terror and admiration in her students. (Time, in the opening sections of this novel, flows strangely, not like a river, but like a swirling pool, in which Marina slowly drowns. Only when she gets into the jungle does the immediacy of her experience, and her need to survive by avoiding the dangers right in front of her, seem to turn time back into a river.) And when she looks back at Dr. Swenson, what she remembers is how hard she was on the women in the class:
She would tell them stories of her own days in medical school and how when she came along the men knit their arms together to keep her out. They made a human barricade against her, they kicked at her when she climbed over them, and now all the women were just walking through, no understanding or appreciation for the work that had been done for them.
So Dr. Swenson becomes the barrier, the wall, through which her female students must fight their way. In Manaus, she hires the Bovenders to serve as both wall and passage – “the cervix, the cervix” – denying access to those who would interrupt her work, granting it to those they find worthy of her time. If Manaus is hell to Marina, it’s because that tropical city replicates the experience of the child she scarred, stuck in the birth canal, unable to make its way into the world without the cutting intelligence of a figure like Dr. Swenson to set her free.
Click here for the next post in the series: David Lynn, Week Two