The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Lessons learned, vietnam war, meaning of
The Lotus Eaters
The Lotus Eaters is a woman’s coming of age story set in
Vietnam during the American war there. The civil war,
and the war between Vietnamese culture and American culture becomes the
intrapsychic battle that the hero, a person who thinks of herself as nondescript
in her California home environment, explores as she becomes a war photographer. She becomes a was photographer, on the one hand, in an overdetermined way: her father was a soldier, as was her
beloved older brother and, when her older brother is killed in Vietnam, she is
drawn like a moth to flame to the site of his death. But she also becomes a war photographer in
an almost whimsical way – "Oh, there is a war on, I’ll just go over and take
some pictures as if I were a tourist going to Europe and, like that tourist, I
might only last a week, but maybe I’ll like it there and decide to stay." Like Odysseus men in the land of the Lotus Eaters, I may decide to stay because I like the flavor of the lotuses.
Frankly, as I started into this book I was much more reluctant to read it even than I am about my psychoanalytic identity. This is a war, I thought, that is better forgotten. I was creeped out by the descriptions of the jungle and leeches and the uncertainty of who might attack from which vantage point. I felt on edge, uncomfortable, and, on another level, manipulated. Why is the author choosing this space, I wondered. Is there a point to the discomfort evoke by her writing, decades after the war is over, her first novel about a war she didn’t experience herself? Why is she returning to this most embarrassing and misguided moment of ours? Does she want to rub our noses in just how out of touch we were?
Fortunately I managed to manage my concerns
long enough to get over the hump and be pulled into the central dilemmas that
are played out very intentionally against a backdrop that suits them and helps highlight how they are played out, in a hidden way, in our contemporary world.
In describing how a good photographer works, the author lets us know her intent. The good photographer, she maintains, does not instruct us. She tells the story, and, when we hear the story, we construct the intended meaning ourselves rather than having it given to us.
The author of this story starts near
the end of her story, telling us about the photographer’s experience on
the day that the US pulls out of Vietnam.
In the process of doing this, we learn the outline of what will be told,
in effect, as a flashback through the rest of the novel – the story of a love
triangle between the hero and two others – an American and a Vietnamese. The American we know will die in the war and
the Vietnamese man will be the person the photographer manhandles onto a helicopter out of the country on that last weird day as she chooses, to her apparent surprise and our own, not to join him on that last helicopter ride out.
We spend the novel, then, with a question. How do we get to that day that we think of as
final? How do things work out so that the
particular configuration the author has set up can be resolved and make sense? Not to spoil things, when we get back to that
moment, there is enough still unresolved that we realize that the story does
not end where we imagined that it would, but just a bit more needs to be played
out, and we are hungry for it. We have been setting the stage,
through this long and complicated novel, for an ending that will be both a
resolution and an opening to new questions about how what we now know about
this woman will play out in her life and, vicariously, in our own.
So, I will now violate the author’s rule and talk directly
about what the book means rather than tell the story. She has already told that story, and what
follows is a reaction and my own interpretation and experience of the impact of
the story. I do not mean it to
definitive. I, like the author, was not
in the Vietnam war. I, unlike the author,
am not a woman. So, like the author, I
will have to imagine myself into places that I cannot inhabit.
One reason that a woman might want to locate a woman’s
coming of age story in the Vietnam war is that the patriarchal attitudes of men
are perhaps never more clearly on display than in war – and this war is a particularly
good canvas on which to paint those attitudes – neither the photographic core
nor the military was meaningfully inhabited by both sexes. Further, the cultural divide between the
American and the Vietnamese cultures is starker during a time when we are
occupying and, at least in theory, fighting on behalf of people we, on some
other level, despise and devalue.
The point here is that in our current cultural space, where
our political correctness would force us to whitewash the differences, she
might be accused of imposing a latent sexism and racism rather than being able to describe them in
their natural and naked shape before we knew enough to better hide and disguise
them. To put on my psychoanalytic hat, in
so far as this woman is writing about contemporary issues, this woman chooses
to do that where the defensive structure of the culture is not so well
developed. Because we, as Americans and
as men, are able to unselfconsciouslessly assume that ours is the best way to
operate, we can express that in undisguised fashion. Discovering there are flaws in the
assumptions underlying both of these aspects of ourselves, we don’t necessarily
quit believing in this truth, but we hide our belief in it better than before.
So, the question for a woman coming of age in a man’s world –
and especially in a Western man’s world, is how does she remain/become true to herself? What is a feminine self? What is required of a woman – or of this
woman in particular? How can she make
use of the psychological and social landscape, one that is determined largely
by American males, to become a woman?
And isn’t this a contemporary problem, one that is complicated by men
who disown their beliefs and values – who hide behind being woke while still practicing
a variant of a very old and deeply culturally engrained pattern of
behaving? So, let’s strip the curtain
off and deal with what’s lying underneath.
There are a number of teachers in this novel – many of them
are men. The two main teachers include the
first lover – the photographer who is driven to get the best picture and is the
quintessential American male. Comfortable
in his bravado, married to a woman who represents a world that he disavows, and
comfortable being sexual with women he does not care about. While he is all of these things, he is also
troubled enough by this construction of himself to desire the hero – to feel
that she is a worthy compliment to him and someone he can both admire and
connect with, something that he has not done before.
The second teacher is also the second lover, a Vietnamese
man who embodies a very different culture and a very different form of
masculinity. Rather than wearing who he
is on his sleeve, he is reserved. His
world is, if anything, richer and more emotionally alive than the first lover –
a person he serves but with whom he also becomes friends – but access to this man's emotional world is not offered or even imposed in the ways that Americans engage
with other people – it is earned. His
tight rein on himself is necessary – he needs to serve many masters while
letting each know that he is caring for them in the best possible way – while he
needs to remain true to himself, far from an easy task.
There are other teachers, but it is important that there is
a female teacher – a French woman who is left over from the former occupation
of the country – a woman who is in the fashion business and who is wise to the ways
of men. The hero and this woman form a
friendship that helps sustain her as she navigates numerous treacherous waters.
I would like to focus on two central learnings this woman engages in. The first thing that this woman learns about herself, much
to her surprise, is that she is brave.
Much braver than she imagined herself to be. This courage is not about standing up for
herself, though. In fact, it comes about
in the process of losing herself – of becoming so focused on what she is doing
that she is unaware of herself. At this
moment, she both does extraordinary work and she is supported by and accepted
by men – for a variety of reasons. Some
of the men profit from her courage, some of them are moved by it, and some of
them recognize that she needs to be protected because her courage leads her to not
think of herself. She is also, and this is implicit, protected by the mantel of being an American. She has a particular kind of freedom to be brave and to survive that those around her do not.
The second thing this woman learns (I am writing as if this
were linear when in fact both learnings are more parallel and intersecting and they are both learned and forgotten and learned again)
is that she is not a tourist or a dilettante.
She is here with a purpose. This
is a complicated piece of learning – and one that has to be learned in
different ways in a veritable kaleidoscope of situations. On one level, the American occupation is the
occupation of tourists. They do not move
in and join with the natives – they hold them at arm distance.
Our hero learns the Vietnamese language and eats their
pho. She connects with them individually
– sometimes as a tourist – she spends a day weeding a rice patty, but goes back
to being a tourist the next day - but who these people are begins to seep into her bones. Some of the military guys have “gone native”,
but this seems like an extreme version – one that is not authentic. She goes to tourist sites, she photographs the
Ho Chi Minh trail, but his is hardly a guided day trip. And she doesn't go native in some faux macho way, nor faux femme way, but as herself, as an American female in a foreign and intriguing land.
More centrally, though, she wrestles with the urge to be a
tourist – to see the best sight and go home and show the slides to her friends
as a kind of trophy of her visit – and she wrestles with the urge to be not just any tourist, but the best
tourist – to have the most compelling slide show not just to show the horror of war
(while she is simultaneously drawn to it), but to beat out the other tourists
at being the best tourist and, in the process, she intermittently loses sight of the fact that this
is a war in which human beings are dying in gruesome, awful ways.
How can she – how can we – live lives of authenticity when
we are surrounded by sights and experiences that we need to protect ourselves
from? I suppose this second learning is
a subset of the first – how can we learn to have the courage to face the things
that are terrifying and to engage with them rather than turn away? How can we develop the wish to be connected,
deeply and powerfully, to a transient and deeply flawed world without losing
our capacity to be awestruck by it?
As I’ve written about these two things that she learns as
she grows up, I realize that these are not static teachings, but ones that come
and go. They are “known” to a different
extent at different moments. I am struck
that this book reflects an organic principle of a good psychoanalytic
therapeutic encounter, it is periodical and self-contradictory. The integrity of this story, one of the
reasons that it works for me, is that the hero does not move from not-knowing
to knowing, but rather moves in and out of knowing, forgetting and learning
anew and in new ways as she moves forward.
She is both cannier and more naïve as she develops, and this feels true
to me – or at least true to my own development.
She is, at no place in this novel, and certainly not at the end, done.
And perhaps that would be the third thing, then, that she
learns – and the author teaches us in the well-crafted ending – that she is able
to live in a world that is complex and internally inconsistent. Things are not as they seem – the story that
we thought we were being told at the beginning is not the story that we end up hearing
at the end, and yet it is. As we become savvier,
we might not have to become more cynical – we might become capable of
withstanding the intensely contradictory nature of life without having to
resort so frequently to blotting that life out.
We might be able to live – to return to contemporary life – with men,
including myself, who deny patriarchal values while simultaneously practicing them. We might be able to extract from flawed
models useful means of moving forward.
As I was reading the novel, it felt like the Vietnamese
lover was set up as the desired and more virtuous model, and I think he
was. This is, after all, called the Lotus Eaters. The hero will want to stay in the land of the lotuses. But the Vietnamese lover was not a perfect
model. I found myself uncomfortably
aware of how hiding the richness of his inner life, especially from the hero,
left her cruelly isolated from him – or reliant on a kind of knowing that
invites, I think, a kind of fantasy that can lead to delusional distance from connection. If the writer intended a less complicated
version of the world than I think she delivered to us, I would encourage us not
to be satisfied by that version – not to be satisfied by the idea that there is
a solution, but instead to join our hero in what I believe to be the position
she attains, that we can, indeed must, live in a world that is deeply flawed
and yet deeply, achingly beautiful – and we can trust ourselves to navigate and
improve it as we work towards a better version of it, while simultaneously careening perilous
close to destroying it and ourselves.
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