sand

He turned his back on her, sank down on the ramp around the raised part of the floor, and cradled his head in his arms. Without raising his voice he began to groan. He tried to swallow the saliva that had gathered in his mouth but it stuck in his throat and he gagged. The mucous lining of his throat had become hypersensitive to the presence of the sand; he would never get used to it no matter how long he stayed there. His saliva had become a brownish scum that oozed from the corners of his mouth. When he had finished spitting he could feel the harshness of the sand even more. He tried to dislodge it, running the tip of his tongue over the inside of his mouth and repeatedly spitting, but there was no end to it. His mouth was parched and hot, as if some inflammation had set in.

Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes feels like sand. When I read it, it felt like sand was constantly trikling down my back, into my eyes and my mouth, getting into places and agitating me; one feels uncomfortable while reading it and it is more to do with the landspace than the intricacies of the plot. The best comparison that I can think of is Lowry's Under the Volcano in which he paints, using the medium of words, the landscape of Mexico; a spectrum of orange that overwhelms the reader and both mirrors and shows the insignificance of Firmin's alcoholism. With Abe it is somewhat different; when one normally thinks of sand one thinks of rolling beaches or the Sahara desert but here Abe creates a feeling of claustrophobia that makes for unsettling bedtime reading - huddled under the duvet thinking about sand rubbing ar your skin makes one twitch with discomfort.



Yet it is the sand that becomes the central character of the story. The man is only named through the futile "Missing" announcement that is placed following his disappearance and none of the other characters are ever named. They are swallowed by the anonymity of the Dunes who's grasp the man ceasely tries to escape throughout the narrative as if trying to maintain his own individuality, his own subjectivity, that is increasingly becoming squeezed from him by the sand that affects the constitution of his body as well as his mental state. But from the beginning he is fascinated by the flow of the sand; the repetition of the 1/8mm flow beats through the text, a reflection of the sand that falls into their hole daily and which they are forced to dig away at each night. As if jumping into the Heraclitean river they try to walk upstream, attempting to maintain a stable existence against the vastness of the flow.

But is not the message of the work? As the man muses in a mental dialogue;

- It's a story I read some place... Leaving ome is all the fashion now. I thought it was because of bad living conditions, but that doesn't seem to be the only reason. The mentioned a middle-class farm family that had recently added land to its holdings, bought machinery, and was doing quite well, when the eldest son suddenly left home. He was a quiet, hard-working young man, and his parents were completely puzzled; they didn't know why. In country villages you have social obligations and reputation to think of, so there really must have been a reason for the heir of the family to have left home...
-Yes, certainly. An obligation is an obligation.
-Then, it appears that one of the relatives took the trouble to find the young man and hear his story. He wasn't living with a woman, and he didn't seem to be driven by debts or pleasure; there was no single concrete motive. Then whatever was the reason? And what the young man said made absolutely no sense at all. He seemed unable to explain it very well himself, beyond saying he just couldn't stand it any longer.
-There really are foolish people in the world, aren't there!
-But when you think about it, you can understand his feelings. When farmers increase their workable land they have that much more to do. In the final analysis, there's no end to their labor, and they only wind up with more to do. However, the farmer at least has a return on his potatoes and rive. Compared with a farmer's work, shovelling away the sand is like trying to pile up tocks in the River of Hades, where the devils cart them off as fast as you throw them in.
-Well, what happens with the River of Hades in the end?
-Not a thing. It's an infernal punishment precisely because nothing happens.
-Well then, what happened to the son after that?
-He has planned the whole thing in advance and had probably even settled on a job beforehand.
-And then what did he do?
-Well, we went and took his job.
-And after that?
-Well, after that he probably got his pay on paydap, and on Sundays I suppose he put on a clean shirt and went to the movies.
-And then...?
We'll never know unless we put the question to him directly, will we?
-And when he saved up some money, he probably bought himself a radio, didn't he...?




The Sisyphean task of digging the sand each night for it to return each day becomes emblematic for the general absurdity of life but it leads to the question as to whether their sand digging is indeed more truthful to daily existence. The sand flows and they try to maintain themselves within it, attempting to stave of the flow of a world that cannot be stopped, and this they are very much aware of. In the midst of it they have their own tumultuous relationship, clinging to eachother whilst the sand clings to them, rubbing at their skin and making their eyes weep. The man tries to escape but in the end realises that he has no particular need to escape; he stops within the sand and helps the woman to buy her radio. And this leaves us with the question: Is it better to keep futilely trying to escape or to give up on escape save up enough money to buy a radio?

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