The View from Saturday- revisited
Mar. 13th, 2023 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThe View from Saturday by EL Konigsberg
I wrote up my quizzer notes on A View from Saturday a few years ago whengrrlpup read it. I still stand by this. A View from Saturday represents badly written quizzing and poorly managed quiz teams and is very frustrating to me in this sense.
But I was struck on my recent reread about a different way to read the book, which I probably didn't have the vocabulary for back then: A View from Saturday is a Jewish Narnia. Jewish Narnia is a term coined in a terrible and yet weirdly seminal ten year old essay "Why There Is No Jewish Narnia" by Michael Weingrad, which after all the fuss mostly wasn't about Jewish Narnias, but about Jewish Middle Earths. Both the Narnia series and LotR feature secondary worlds, but LotR is exclusively a secondary world fantasy and Narnia is a portal fantasy. And Weingrad seems more interested in the second than the first, one of many problems with the conceptual framework of the essay. Yet Ruthanna Emrys, a few years later, brilliantly illustrated what a Jewish Narnia could look like in her short story "Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land": In a Jewish Narnia, protagonists venture into a magical world through the cupboard, only to discover that the magical world refuses to stay confined to the cupboard and it was never confined to the cupboard to begin with. The magic invades and inhabits the 'real world', our world. A Jewish Narnia is a story about living a life where the mundane is itself infused with the magical.
The first of four flashback narratives in A View from Saturday, Noah Gershom's, takes us to Century Village in Florida, a retirement community that 9 year old Noah pointedly distinguishes from "The Real World". Everyone in Century Village used to be someone else in the Real World, but coming to Century Village transformed them into retirees. (Except, critically, the Rabbi. Rabbis in the Real World stay Rabbis in Century Village, Noah discovers.) This is the very language of portal fantasy, and language like this recurs in later sections: Nadia's Zaydie refers to Disney World as "Mr. Walter Disney's Version of the World". What is reality and what is fantasy and when are they the same thing is a quiet subtextual question of the whole novel.
In the Noah section we metaphorically encounter fairy gifts, gifts that come with a price tag greater than the gift itself, and yet which have their own mysterious rewards. In the Nadia section we metaphorically encounter the wisdom of talking animals, specifically sea turtles (notably the Mock Turtle appears in the Wonderland books). Konigsberg consistently uses the tools of fantasy to tell a story of the intrusion of magic into the mundane world. And both Noah and Nadia are Jews, though Nadia is a self-identified half-Jew (with her father getting an obnoxiously on-the-nose depiction as a neurotic Jewish CPA in Noah's section and a more complicated depiction in Nadia's section.) In the second half of the book we leave Florida for the stories of the non-Jewish Ethan and Julian, who discover different kinds of magic: the magic through the looking glass. Ethan's section is littered with references Julian makes to Alice in Wonderland, another seminal portal fantasy. And then we reach Julian's section, which is all about magic, the magic of sleight of hand and how even that magic comes at a cost to its performer. Afterward, in Mrs. Olinsky's section, Mr. Singh tells her that each of the Souls has been on a journey. I think there is something very specifically crafted about the fact that the journey of the two non-Jews is told in terms of an adventure that doesn't take them beyond Epiphany, New York- The Real World. The Jewish Souls go on journeys in physical space because they already know the magic will return with them, but the non-Jewish Souls venture through the portal while remaining physically in Epiphany., forced to see the way the magic is all around them.
I find this a really satisfying way to read the novel structurally. It makes sense intuitively that when you start with the premise of a fantasy construct that crosses over from the mundane to the magical, that you would get stories that are situated in the mundane to a much greater extent than recognizable fantasy. It also makes what is unsatisfyingly inexplicable in the novel have a governing logic behind it: The Souls are connected because this The View from Saturday not a realistic fiction, it is a fantasy novel.
I wrote up my quizzer notes on A View from Saturday a few years ago when
grrlpup read it. I still stand by this. A View from Saturday represents badly written quizzing and poorly managed quiz teams and is very frustrating to me in this sense.But I was struck on my recent reread about a different way to read the book, which I probably didn't have the vocabulary for back then: A View from Saturday is a Jewish Narnia. Jewish Narnia is a term coined in a terrible and yet weirdly seminal ten year old essay "Why There Is No Jewish Narnia" by Michael Weingrad, which after all the fuss mostly wasn't about Jewish Narnias, but about Jewish Middle Earths. Both the Narnia series and LotR feature secondary worlds, but LotR is exclusively a secondary world fantasy and Narnia is a portal fantasy. And Weingrad seems more interested in the second than the first, one of many problems with the conceptual framework of the essay. Yet Ruthanna Emrys, a few years later, brilliantly illustrated what a Jewish Narnia could look like in her short story "Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land": In a Jewish Narnia, protagonists venture into a magical world through the cupboard, only to discover that the magical world refuses to stay confined to the cupboard and it was never confined to the cupboard to begin with. The magic invades and inhabits the 'real world', our world. A Jewish Narnia is a story about living a life where the mundane is itself infused with the magical.
The first of four flashback narratives in A View from Saturday, Noah Gershom's, takes us to Century Village in Florida, a retirement community that 9 year old Noah pointedly distinguishes from "The Real World". Everyone in Century Village used to be someone else in the Real World, but coming to Century Village transformed them into retirees. (Except, critically, the Rabbi. Rabbis in the Real World stay Rabbis in Century Village, Noah discovers.) This is the very language of portal fantasy, and language like this recurs in later sections: Nadia's Zaydie refers to Disney World as "Mr. Walter Disney's Version of the World". What is reality and what is fantasy and when are they the same thing is a quiet subtextual question of the whole novel.
In the Noah section we metaphorically encounter fairy gifts, gifts that come with a price tag greater than the gift itself, and yet which have their own mysterious rewards. In the Nadia section we metaphorically encounter the wisdom of talking animals, specifically sea turtles (notably the Mock Turtle appears in the Wonderland books). Konigsberg consistently uses the tools of fantasy to tell a story of the intrusion of magic into the mundane world. And both Noah and Nadia are Jews, though Nadia is a self-identified half-Jew (with her father getting an obnoxiously on-the-nose depiction as a neurotic Jewish CPA in Noah's section and a more complicated depiction in Nadia's section.) In the second half of the book we leave Florida for the stories of the non-Jewish Ethan and Julian, who discover different kinds of magic: the magic through the looking glass. Ethan's section is littered with references Julian makes to Alice in Wonderland, another seminal portal fantasy. And then we reach Julian's section, which is all about magic, the magic of sleight of hand and how even that magic comes at a cost to its performer. Afterward, in Mrs. Olinsky's section, Mr. Singh tells her that each of the Souls has been on a journey. I think there is something very specifically crafted about the fact that the journey of the two non-Jews is told in terms of an adventure that doesn't take them beyond Epiphany, New York- The Real World. The Jewish Souls go on journeys in physical space because they already know the magic will return with them, but the non-Jewish Souls venture through the portal while remaining physically in Epiphany., forced to see the way the magic is all around them.
I find this a really satisfying way to read the novel structurally. It makes sense intuitively that when you start with the premise of a fantasy construct that crosses over from the mundane to the magical, that you would get stories that are situated in the mundane to a much greater extent than recognizable fantasy. It also makes what is unsatisfyingly inexplicable in the novel have a governing logic behind it: The Souls are connected because this The View from Saturday not a realistic fiction, it is a fantasy novel.