Wednesday, January 8, 2014

The Notebook

Janos Szasz’s The Notebook is a fable about the destructive effects of hardening oneself against suffering and loss. 
Two 13-year-old twins are left with their brutal grandmother to be saved from WW II. They determine to harden themselves against pain, suffering and emotions. They survive the grandmother, the war, separation from their parents, while feeling themselves inseparable. Lying together asleep they breathe in unison as if the twins were indeed one person. 
Having deliberately forgotten their mother’s loving words and burned her letter they can refuse her attempt to retrieve them. They grow so remote from their father that upon his return they coolly send him to a fatal mine. Climactically their hardening against the outside forces leads to their hardening against themselves. That’s why the boys who have been inseparable for so long now split up. One crosses the border, the other stays behind, because they have hardened themselves to accept a loss they couldn’t conceive of before.
None of the characters have names. They are the twins, the grandmother/witch, the officer and his friend, the maid, etc. The lack of names coheres with the twins’ abandonment of their humanity and identity.
The title refers to the journal that the father, as he goes off to war, gives the boys to record their every detail of life. The assignment becomes a central part of the studies which their mother exhorted them to pursue but also encourages their self-awareness. The pages we see reveal their growing awareness of the world’s harshness, especially the flip-book cartoons of repeated violence. 
     The violence in their clinical collection and killing of insects and animals grows into their violence against the pretty maid who bathed with them but then slandered their friend, the Jewish shoemaker. With the former sexual initiation followed by the murder of the Jews the boys first come to terms with adult experience. They are not improved by it.

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