thinking without boundaries

It can often be difficult to readjust our outlook on life and open up to the things we don’t understand or aren’t comfortable with.  The comforts we obtain by living “inside the box” and not opening to alternative trains of thought, or by being content with our “tunnel-vision” and not seeing the broader picture, are safe, but they also inhibit us.  By studying the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Bessie Head, Bharati Mukherjee, and Salman Rushdie, we can see as evident in both these authors’ personal lives and their novels that having a “subaltern” or different viewpoint of the world doesn’t need to be debilitating.

Although examples of seeing the world in not just black and white, but multicolored are presented in each of the works of the authors listed above, two of them present their message in a way that is more effective than the others.  Kazuo Ishiguro and Bessie Head both use their characters as their medium to express their personal life experience as being “artists of the floating world.” 

Kazuo Ishiguro, along with all of the other previously listed authors, moved from his homeland and experienced life with an outsider’s perspective in a foreign country.  Ishiguro experienced a change in the frames that made up his reality, and this same problem occurs in the characters of his novels.  In An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro’s second novel, the main character Ono is also caught between two worlds.  Throughout the novel Ono is driven by nostalgic memories of his old days as a professional painter.  Ono was looked at differently by his friends and co-workers after he produced propaganda paintings for the war.  It was later after the war that Ono had plenty of time to contemplate the actions he had made previously.  His country had changed drastically and he no longer felt he lived in his home land.

Ono is an example of a character with a set narrative or frame of mind.  He refuses to welcome change and is stuck reminiscing of his past life.  Ono is so framed in his way of thinking that he refuses to believe that his propaganda-filled art didn’t influence an outcome in the war.  He pictures himself as a great man, even a sort of hero, and no person can make him think otherwise.  At one point in the story, Ono’s grandson is imitating an American sitcom star, and Ono gets frustrated and asks him why he doesn’t want to be a Japanese hero instead.  Ono is so set in his way of seeing the world that he only sees what is right in front of his face or what his personal life experiences have brought him. 

Bessie Head, another example of a person who transcends simplistic binaries of black and white, shows the dangerous side of living a “frameless” life.  In her novel A Question of Power, Head creates a loose autobiographical account of her life.  The main character Elizabeth is dealing with issues of feeling lost and not having a sense of rootedness.  Although one has complete creative freedoms with a frameless mind, it often comes with its dangers to “live without bearings and a compass” (Burton, 2007).  Elizabeth is haunted by multiple different voices in her mind, which constantly torment her and cause her to literally go crazy.

Bessie Head’s character Elizabeth brings up the question of the brilliant mind and whether it can be achieved without insanity, or losing one’s mind in the process.  Elizabeth was not held down by society’s boundaries, mainly because she felt as though she didn’t belong anywhere in the first place.  The sense of frameless thinking has been witnessed over and over again through several different artists, writers, musicians, and scientists in the past century alone.  Many of these individuals could not take the boundless thoughts that accompanied their freedom and originality of identity and eventually either lost their minds or took their own lives. 

Without these “either…, or…” mentalities so many of today’s problems could be resolved.  It is when we get so set in one frame of mind that hostilities towards others who don’t look at the world the same way are born.  The worst human-related catastrophes and genocides can all be reduced to evidence of group think which inevitably stem from one person’s “you are either with me or against me” mindset. 

To avoid falling into the absolutist trap, or the one-track mind, there is probably a middle line somewhere between the characters of Ono and Elizabeth.  We must learn to live with both “roots and wings” (Burton, 2007).  In other words, we must constantly be open to new experiences and new ways of thinking, while at the same time having a sense of belonging to something or someplace.  To prevent ourselves from becoming trapped in the black and white mindset we must recognize the narratives that make up our identities.  Only when an individual is able and willing to embrace their own originality can they be free from the limits society lays upon them.

Works Cited: Burton, Rob Artists of the Floating World 2007. (P.131) University Press of America.