[issybird]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Maybe it’s just about the society Larsen knew, pushed to extremes. We don’t ask if there is a deeper meaning to every book we read, when it is about the world we know. We just accept that world as depicted and then events take place in it, whether murder or romance or adventure or whatever.

I think the things I read into the book, of which I wrote way back at the beginning of the thread, are there perhaps, or not. That includes my thoughts on the stress of trying to live as one sort of person when you feel inside like another sort of person, whether that is to do with skin colour, or gender, or sexual preference or religious belief, or whatever. We each of us bring our own interpretation to any book, which is affected by our background, upbringing, other reading and on and on.

I suppose what I love about reading is that it’s a relationship I have with the author, who is speaking to me, and he or she may say something different to each of us.

I go more than one way on all of this! I tend to believe that the text is the text and can be seen in the context of its times, but I'm not as interested in how it reflects the author her/himself. At the same time, it can be illuminating, so long as you don't start to see what isn't there and there is a lot missing from Passing. Inference should only go so far and I think we've gone pretty far here, but it's also fun and there's nothing wrong with that.

I also thought that Passing is both about race and about race as metaphor, which might or might not be what Larsen intended. The title Passing is far superior to the original, in what it can be taken to imply and in its historical resonance.

But in talking about lacunae, I've become increasingly interested in Brian and what drives him, but then I'm hoist with my own petard, as I do think we get into "making it up" territory. It's a little odd how Irene was portrayed in her own voice as so controlling to Brian. And what did Brian want, really? As was noted upthread, it's not as if he wouldn't be tending to the poor in Brazil and I think we have to assume that Brian also had carriage trade in Harlem. I can't help thinking (and again, based on minimal textual evidence) that part of Brian's issue with Irene was the lack of sex. He put the name of Brazil on it, but that could have been because discussion of sex was even more off the table.

In fairness, Irene was entitled to input on Brazil. It was her life, too, and not what she signed up for. There's also the question of their sons and where they'd be better off and it was legitimate to think that their prospects were better in racist America as the offspring of the urban upper middle class than they would have been in the putatively unracist Brazil.

All of that said, I can understand why Brian would have been attracted to Clare. While I have no doubt that Irene pushed Clare, part of that is that I don't think Clare would have given up so easily or readily or without thought. She never struck me as suicidal and I think it would have been a last resort for her. I'm even willing to think that part of the function of the man she was with in Chicago was to show that Clare always had another man in her string. An option in case everything blew up, which was a possibility she lived with constantly.