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Dialogues@RU is published annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume One
Spring 2002
The Voice
of Melancholy in Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation -
Page 3
by Joanna H. Martinez
Is it possible for an immigrant, however, to be totally cured of cynicism and the constant suspicion of the other culture? There is a certain joy and pride in the moment when one can finally understand the shades and connotations of once alien cultural sensitivities, and when one is finally able to understand the dialects and vernaculars of a foreign language. Hoffman's autobiography provides a profound description of how the patient observation of the American people can become the source of deep understanding of their language and culture. Finally, through her ability to recognize and comprehend the many voices of the 'American' language, Hoffman becomes "a vigilant Culture watcher" (Lost 221), and consequently a writer for The New York Times:
All around me, the Babel of American voices, hardy midwestern voices, sassy New York voices, quick youthful voices, voices arching under the pressure of various crosscurrents. I've become a skilled diagnostician of voices, and of their neurosis. I know how people feel, how they are, not from what they say but from how they sound (Lost 219-220).
In "The New Nomads" Hoffman admits that the pleasure of such a deep understanding of the new culture can be intoxicating. On one hand it can spark great creativity of intellectual thought. But it can also endow a person with a false sense of superiority over the scrutinized culture and its people. This "relish of sharpened insight" and the "savviness of skepticism" (The New 52) can very easily accompany an idealization of the native country and its culture. For many immigrants the separation from the mother country is similar to a child's separation from the mother. According to Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical theory, discussed in detail by Friedman, a "child's separation from his mother is followed by the mirror stage and a narcissistic identification first with his own image and than with others like him" (37). Likewise the immigrant's separation from the native land often causes a narcissistic stubborn belief in the infallibility of one's own culture. The homeland becomes idealized beyond recognition and it becomes the mirror of unquestionable perfection, against which the other alien culture is always judged. That is certainly the case with Eva's memories of Poland, and it is an explanation as to why this war devastated and anti-Semitic country should be perceived by her as Paradise. "The New Nomads" also discusses another possible form of such an imaginative picture of one's homeland or culture. The second possibility is that the homeland may be demonized and the past and the culture abandoned, as it is initially by Maxine Hong Kingston in her story of assimilation The Woman Warrior. Depending on what the "psychological choice" is, Eva Hoffman comments, "the realm can be idealized or demonized, but the past can all too easily become not only 'another country' but a space of projection and fantasy. Some people decide to abandon the past, never to look back. For others, the great lure is the nostalgia -- an excess of memory" (The New 52). Both rejection and idealization of the native culture is a process that women often go through in the solitude of their individual experiences. Friedman's argument that women don't feel themselves existing "outside of others, and still against others, but very much with others" (Friedman 56) is an overgeneralization when considering both Eva's and Maxine's stories. It is precisely the feeling of alienation from the society that drives those women to action. Eva feels distant to the American culture, while Maxine resents her Chinese culture, but both of them must fight their way through times of extreme resistance to some aspect of their environments. The road to the feeling of collective power, thus, always leads through dark avenues of individual struggle with alienation and women, after all, do oppose themselves to others and often become what Gusdorf would call the individualistic "biographical selves" (Friedman 56), always characteristic of autobiographies written by men.
Why, one could ask, would anyone want to idealize a country that was a Communist and anti-Semitic regime? The most superficial and the easiest answer is that Eva idealizes Poland because it is the only home she knows. Eva's idealization of Poland is, however, a function of a specific kind of Polish melancholy, for an outsider hard to understand. It is a melancholy that it taught in school and at home by the constant glorification and romanticization of the turbulent Polish history. It is a melancholy that finds its expression in the serious and teary words of the "fare-well" verses Eva's friends write before she leaves for Canada:
Most of them choose melancholy verses in which life is figured as a vale of tears or river of suffering, or a journey of pain on which we are embarking. This tone of sadness is something we all enjoy. It makes us feel the gravity of life, and it is gratifying to have a truly tragic event -- a parting forever -- to give vent to such romantic feelings (Lost 78).