Cal's Narrative Choices
Cal makes his presence in Middlesex as narrator very visible, calling attention to his narrative choices and power throughout the novel. Close to the beginning of the novel, describing Milton and Tessie’s efforts to influence the sex of the child they want to conceive, Cal admits, “Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can’t be entirely sure about any of this” (9). Cal is a “prefatal” narrator for most of the novel. Callie isn’t born in the novel until page 215, but even after her birth in the novel, much of the story he tells can’t have been known by him, such as Milton’s experience of death or Lefty’s vertigo after a stroke, which Cal points out, Lefty mentioned to no one (262). Cal’s narrative calls into question any narrator’s knowledge of “the truth.” After Callie’s birth, Cal says, “From here on in, everything I’ll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events” (217). So we know that before Callie’s birth, the narrative is unreliable because the narrator is “prefetal,” and after Callie’s birth, the narrative is unreliable because of the narrator’s “subjective experience of being part of the events.” Cal further complicates the narrative by admitting that when Callie wrote her autobiography for Dr. Luce, she “quickly discovered that telling the truth wasn’t nearly as much fun as making things up” (418).
Cal’s real choice in the novel is how to narrate his story. In deciding to begin his story with the story of Lefty and Desdemona, two generations before him, he makes a significant statement: no story has a stable beginning. Cal calls attention to narrative choices made by others, too, such as when Lefty and Desdemona begin rewriting their sibling narrative when they dance at their home in Greece after Lefty rejects Victoria and Lucille. Desdemona says: “’You’re a good dancer, cousin,’ . . . and her heart jumped again. . . “ (39).
As narrator of the novel, Cal not only knows about his grandfather’s transformation from Jimmy Zizmo to Fard Muhammad, he can place that transformation before his own in the novel to show how one may have been a harbinger of another. Likewise, the similarities between Desdemona’s struggles with being an immigrant and Cal’s are here because Cal narrates the story this way, wanting us to see his own experience in light of what Desdemona went through.
Occasionally, Cal elects to discuss Calliope in the third-person. This generally occurs when Callie’s genitals are involved. For example, Cal writes, “How did Calliope feel about her crocus?” (330), “Calliope was also a virgin that night” (373), and, “A word on penises. What was Cal’s official position on penises?” (452). Perhaps most significantly, Cal refers to Callie in both the first-person and the third-person when Callie is at the library looking up “hypospadias” and then goes back to meet her parents after their meeting with Luce (429-33). The passage begins in the first-person, with Callie finding the definition. The passage switches to third-person with “There it was, monster, in black and white, in a battered dictionary in a great city library” (431). The passage remains in third-person as Callie meets her parents, hears them explain what Luce told them about her condition, and waits for them to confirm what the dictionary told her: that she is a monster. In the passage’s penultimate paragraph, the narrative switches back to first-person: “He didn’t say the word. I didn’t make him” (433). The perspective shifts seem to indicate a lingering discomfort within Cal about his genitals. Cal is never able to live completely as a man because he isn’t a man: he’s a hermaphrodite. The experience of someone raised as a girl and living as an adult man is not the experience of a person raised as a boy and living as a man. The two experiences may have many overlaps but they cannot in the end produce the same kind of man. This is particularly evident in Cal’s telling of his attack by two homeless men at the camp in California. The attack is narrated in present tense, although the introduction to the attack is in the past tense. After three sentences in past tense, which provide a context for the attack, Cal switches to present tense with, “It is midnight in the mimosa grove” (475). A few paragraphs later, Cal writes, “I squeeze my legs together, the girlish fears still operating in me” (475). Although this is a recollection, it is told in the present tense as if Cal still has these girlish fears inside of him even now as he tells the story.
Cal seems to finally be ready to live as a hermaphrodite with someone else, rather than alone, when he meets Julie. After playing his usual game of drifting away after a chaste weekend together, Cal opens up to her and shares his story with her. However, just as Lefty and Desdemona were aware years earlier that the story they told on the Giulia would be “the truth,” Cal must be aware that whatever story he tells Julie—which just happens to sound almost exactly like Giulia—or whatever story he tells us will be “the truth.”
blogarama
