Language is probably Homo sapiens’ greatest achievement: our ability to share information and ideas has raised civilizations, led us to every corner of the globe, and even put a man on the moon. But what happens when two people do not speak the same language? That is when an interpreter becomes invaluable. Mr. Kapasi from Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies”and the unnamed narrator from Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman” would, at first glance, seem to have little in common. Mr. Kapasi is a middle-aged interpreter and tour-guide in India who is stuck in a loveless marriage and who experienced the death of his son from typhoid. The narrator is a Chinese-American wrestling with family silence and shame as she attempts to piece together the story of her also unnamed aunt, who became pregnant by a man who was not her husband and was persecuted by the village en masse, leading her to drown both herself and her newborn baby in the family well. A second glance at their stories, however, reveals something unexpected but crucial: both characters are interpreters, albeit of different things. Mr. Kapasi literally interprets not only languages, but social and emotional cues as well (although, not always accurately, as we shall see). The narrator interprets silence itself. She’s parsing cultural traditions, taboos, and shame to reconstruct the story of her aunt, reading meaning into what is said as well as what is unsaid. While Mr. Kapasi translates for the living, however, the narrator translates for the dead. Mr. Kapasi translates the spoken word while the narrator, in contrast, translates all that is not said. Both characters function as observers, translators, analysts, and makers-of-meaning.
The narrator is fighting an uphill battle against a decades long legacy of concealment. Kingston begins her piece with the following warning to the speaker by her mother regarding her aunt, ‘“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.”’ (1) , and “Don’t let your father know that I told you. He denies her.” (1) This dire admonishment details the absolute secrecy of the story of the aunt and the wall of shame that surrounds her tale: silence has been the aunt’s legacy and the speaker’s family is intent on ensuring that this remains the status quo. As opposed to expressing rage at the villagers for attacking their home, killing their livestock, and stealing and breaking the family’s possessions, the narrator’s family instead blames the unnamed aunt (who might not have been a willing participant in the act of conception) for the supposed shame she has brought upon the family within their closely knit village. To wit, the village is so closely knit that inbreeding is a very real possibility but, again, this is never spoken aloud. People are simply forced to marry virtual strangers from other villages and move away, “But another, final reason for leaving the crowded house was the never-said.” (3) Shame and silence are this community’s assumed modus operandi and isa heritage of which the family refuses to let go.
Mr. Kapasi, a translator in a doctor’s office by day and a tour guide on the weekends, is fighting a battle, too, only this war is waged within himself. He feels lonely, unappreciated, and all but invisible as he navigates both his newfound middle class status and the tours he conducts for foreigners. His wife is unappreciative of all of his efforts, “Mr. Kapasi knew that his wife had little regard for his career as an interpreter….and that she resented the other lives he helped… to save. If ever she referred to his position, she used the phrase “doctor’s assistant”, as if the process of interpretation were equal to…. changing a bedpan.” (8) She is also seemingly repulsed by him, “….it occurred to him (Mr. Kapasi)…. that he had never seen his own wife fully naked. Even when they made love she kept… her blouse hooked together, the string of her petticoat knotted around her waist.” (11) It is little surprise that Mr. Kapasi should (mis)interpret Mrs. Das’ interest in him as romantic interest, as he has no one else in his life who is providing that for him.
Both characters are drawn to stories that fill a personal and emotional void within them. Mr. Kapasi: lonely, unappreciated, unhappy in his marriage, and yearning for recognition, reacts to Mrs. Das’ attentions as if they are a romantic revelation or spiritual elevation; they plug the hole in his heart and stroke his malnourished ego. He laps up her attentiveness much like someone, lost in the desert, will run head first into an unexpected oasis.. He reacts to her taking notice of him and praising his day job as if her queries, alone, are the life line that will save him from mediocrity and routine. The speaker is trying to fill a void as well, only hers is not only personal, it is also larger than herself. She is a one woman warrior battling years of denial and the very erasure of a human being. She is weighed down by a conflict of identity (Is she Chinese? Is she American? Is she Chinese-American?), cultural oppression, and generational censorship commingled with intense shame.
An additional commonality is that both Mr. Kapasi and the speaker encounter a woman who becomes something of a catalyst for them each, spurring them into something akin to metamorphosis. Momentarily intoxicated by the attentions of Mrs. Das, Mr. Kapasi suddenly becomes quite the romantic; he envisions the two composing lengthy and intimate letters to each other, letters that will bridge the thousands of miles between them, “She would write to him…. and he would respond eloquently…. In time she would reveal the dis-appointment of her marriage, and he his. In this way their friendship would grow, and flourish.” (10) This is new terrain for Mr. Kapasi: his arranged marriage at a young age deprived him of his dreams of studying languages and made him a young husband and father, instead; struggling to make ends meet and dealing with the death of his son and his wife’s subsequent blame of him. The narrator, though not encountering a physical person, encounters the closely guarded secret of her aunt, of whom the narrator had previously never even known existed. The narrator, emboldened by her American cultural exposure, commits an act of rebellion: she writes her unnamed aunt’s story so that the whole world will know to what her aunt was subjected, endowing her nameless aunt with a kind of belated acknowledgment that she existed and bore a child. She relates, “My aunt haunts me- her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her….”. (5) The narrator and her aunt may not have names, but their humanity and worth is no less valuable for this fact.
A final common thread between the two stories is cultural expectations and pressures: the expectations placed upon each character to behave in a certain, preordained manner or risk ostracization from the community at large by bringing shame and judgment onto either the characters themselves or their families by association. Mr. Kapasi and the unnamed aunt were both coerced into arranged marriages, with the aunt ‘marrying’ a rooster as a stand-in for her chosen husband because he was away and unable to be present at the ceremony. Both marriages ended in disappointment and disillusionment: Mr. Kapasi and his chosen bride do not love each other and she harbors blame towards him that he was unable to save their dying son; the aunt had only enough time with her husband to finally meet him and consummate the marriage before he left to go look for work, leaving her at the mercy of her in-laws, who, “…could have sold her, mortgaged her, stoned her. But they had sent her back to her own mother and father, a mysterious act hinting at disgraces not told me.” (2) Mr. Kapasi, trapped by the compromise of his marriage, the abandonment of his dreams, and the stifling restraints of Indian middle-class propriety, is stuck in a state of perpetual and palpable, yet quiet, longing. The narrator is caught between her Chinese heritage and her American individuality, making her identity a conflict between inherited silence and personal revelation.
Not only are these two stories incredibly riveting and emotionally hard-hitting, they are prime examples of the competent and correct use of punctuation to effect a prosody in a text. While Jeanne Fahnestock, in her book Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion, notes, “Edwin Herbert Lewis cited the ‘well-known fact that the English sentence has decreased in average length at least one-half in three hundred years’” (265) and that “…it seems likely that the shrinkage has continued” (265), this does not seem to be the case in either “Interpreter of Maladies” or “No Name Woman”. Fahnestock attributes this decrease in sentence length to “… a by-product of changing punctuation conventions. A period now does the work once done with different degrees of separation by periods, colons, and semicolons;” (265) But a sampling of “No Name Woman”, for example, proves otherwise:
“In a commensal tradition, where food is precious, the powerful older people made wrongdoers eat alone. Instead of letting them start separate new lives like the Japanese, who could become samurais and geishas, the Chinese family, faces averted but eyes glowering
sideways, hung on to the offenders and fed them leftovers.” (2)
Kingston, in her first sentence, uses two commas to separate the clause “where food is precious”, which, itself, reflects back on the introduction of “In a commensal tradition”. She could have alternatively written:
“Food is precious in a commensal tradition. Powerful older people made wrongdoers eat alone.”
This construction, however, removes something of the meaning of Kingston’s sentence: first she introduces the idea of “commensal tradition” being enforced by “powerful older people” who passed judgment on “wrongdoers”. She qualifies this dynamic by explaining that it was instilled because “food was precious (scarce)”. Her following sentence uses four separate commas to set off and highlight information she wishes to convey in a specific order. The commas, which act as pauses, lend her final construction a sing-song element, better known as ‘prosody’.
Similar examples can be found in Lahiri’s piece; indeed, Lahiri is widely lauded for her prosody in her writing as well as for what is known as ‘syntactic symbolism’. Writer Virginia Tufte, in her book Syntactic Symbolism: Grammar as Analogue, argues that, “Syntax is by nature more limited than meaning, for it must carry many different meanings.” (Chpt. 14) She also writes, “Syntactic symbols sometimes have the help of poetic diction, metrics, and sound symbolism.” (Chpt. 14) An excellent example of this in Lahiri’s piece is found at the very end of the story, when Mrs. Das accidentally loses the paper with Mr. Kapasi’s address:
“…the slip of paper with Mr. Kapasi’s address on it fluttered away in the wind. No one but Mr. Kapasi noticed. He watched as it rose, carried higher and higher by the breeze, into the trees where the monkeys now sat, solemnly observing the scene below.” (20)
Note that the paper with the address is not attached in a notebook, nor is it a full sized sheet of paper that is less likely to become misplaced. Rather, it is a “slip”: a small piece torn out from elsewhere, almost like an afterthought. Symbolically, this “slip” is lost in a ‘slip’, when Mrs. Das reaches for her hairbrush and pulls both objects out simultaneously. It is worth noting, too, that Mr. Kapasi and the monkeys are the only witnesses to this loss; silent sentinels to a communication that will now never be realized. Finally, the paper floats upward on the breeze, almost as if it is an offering to the spirits of the temple the Das’ and Mr. Kapasi visited that evening. As any reader can discern, Lahiri certainly knows how to load symbolism into her sentences, structuring the syntax the way an architect would draft a dream home.
Analysis of the authors’ sentence construction can enrich the reader’s appreciation of the finesse and craft that went into composing each piece. But the stories resonate beyond their mere mechanics: they are emotional journeys underpinned by some of the most basic and universal of human emotions: love, fear, loss, identity, belonging, despondency, and so many more I would be hard pressed to identify them all. This exploration of emotion and the human condition lend each story a timelessness that, I suspect, will never dissipate.
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