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December 28, 2012

Daddy Love: The Psychology of Abduction


Do you remember that old song, Runaway Train? When I was a child, I was listening to this song, shocked by its video: There are over one million youth lost on the streets of America. Even now, I do not know exactly what I felt … pity, angriness, sorrow, for all the lives that were/are destroyed by some of us. Literature has always been a mirror of reality, and in its history we discover themes like love, war, family relationships, friendships, religion and many others. Why wouldn’t abduction be one of its themes? A theme which is molded from our own dark reality of the 21st century, which we hear on the news or in some crime films or TV series.  But is Literature – with capital L, the one that is worth reading – entitled to depict such a theme? Why should a writer write about this, when there are so many other things to be talked about?
Somewhere in the book there is a TV discussion around the following question: Why hadn’t the boy left his abductor when he had so many opportunities? The answer that one of the talk-show hosts gives is the following:
Looks to me like the kid could’ve gotten away lots of times. Looks to me like he’d come to like his new life better than with his old family – no school, hanging out, skate-boarding, eating pizzas… I’m suspicious of this kind of thing, kids running away from home and claiming to be ‘victims’.(169)
Daddy LoveJoyce Carol Oates does not write a crime novel, but a psychological one, in a minute way, not to entertain us, but to make us aware of another part of reality. Robbie is an intelligent five-year old boy who is abducted in a parking lot. He is not the first boy who is abducted by Daddy Love and not the first one who is sexually abused. The book, as I already said, is not for entertainment and it is very difficult to be read by the sensitive ones; with every page that you read, you want to be lied, you wish for a real happy-ending – for the little boy, for the mother, for his family; you hope that the six years of captivity will disappear in the end and everyone will be happy. You do not want to know Daddy Love’s sick thoughts, or that the dog – Robbie/Gideon’s only friend – was brutally killed in front of the boy, you simply wish for a small good thing for the child. But Oates gives you only the reality, an X-ray of the human soul, the roots of the evil and its consequences, depicting the psychology of the mother, of the abductor, of the father, and the most intriguing one to my mind, of the boy.
The Preacher did not stand at the head of the flock and preach to uplifted faces but moved between the rows of seats in the central and side aisles of the little church with the ease and grace of a true shepherd. Often the Preacher reached out to touch a shoulder, a head, an outstretched hand – Bless you my brother in Christ! Bless you my sister in Christ! God loves you.” (40)
Daddy Love’s perspective is the main one in this novel. Interesting enough, when we first meet him, the abductor wears the clothes of a Preacher, utterly different from what we shall discover afterwards. Religion is extremely important to him, he gives to his “sons” Biblical names, and there are several analogies that he makes in his mind with saints or martyrs. He sees himself as a savior, as a Jesus or as a Dalai Lama, thinking once that he is the “reincarnated spirit of Tibet”(67):
The Wooden Maiden was an ingenious invention of Daddy Love. As Jesus was a carpenter, so too Daddy Love was good with his hands, and found such “handyman” work soothing. He would make of his sons apprentices in such work. A child was never too young not to help his father. (74)
However sick he would be, he knows how to read the psychology of the crowd, able to remain invisible when he abducts “his” children: The ordinary individual, Daddy Love had discovered, was not so very different from a child in his perceptions and expectations.” (52)
Men that are ordinary, common, like the rest, are invisible. Witnesses cannot “get it right” because they “see only what their eyes see, not what is invisible.” (53) In the eyes of the world, he is simply a father with his son, a Believer, just one of the many; he is the “restless American type” (56). On the other hand, he wants to be something else, different, unique; he loathes women, but he is adored by them, and he enjoys this, he sees himself as an artist, a painter or a sculptor, and he really thinks that he saves those boys from their mothers, although he is unable to love anything or anyone, having no voice of consciousness.
Moreover, the narrator does not explain in long sentences why Chet Cash became Daddy Love, but it gives us flashes of his memories, without any further analysis. We find out that “He had not seen his fucking “family” – fucking “relatives” – who’d betrayed him to the Wayne County, Michigan juvenile authorities, aged twelve, in twenty-six years.”(51)
Daddy Love is not the only one who is influenced by the past, but also Dinah’s mother, in the few chapters that are dedicated to her drama, is caged in her own past. Therefore, before the abduction, Dinah is the mother who is haunted by her own problems that are rooted in her relationship with her own mother. Both she and her husband, Whit, promised to themselves that their son will be raised to be happy: “God damn, Dinah, we’re going to bring up our son to be happy. None of this bullshit from our families, O.K?” (36) She is the passive kind of person, unable to scold anyone, accepting everything, who has moments of hating herself, obsessed with the thought of being a bad mother: “You must hide from your child your own foolish uncertainties. You must hide from your child your own sudden sharp-as-a-razor self-loathing.” (6)
Although she was on the verge of dying when Robbie was kidnapped, she cannot forgive herself for letting off of his hand. Sinking into pain, “in the defeat of her life” (29) confronted with the ignorance of the world, found on the Internet (where she is judged) or on TV programs, she redirects all her thoughts towards her missing son:
It was a pit of confusion into which she fell head-long. She was aware that she was very likely dying because her breathing had ceased because her skull was cracked because her soul was leaking through the crack like smoke from abandoned, long-smoldering mines in Pennsylvania that yet continue to ascend through cracked pavement.”(28)
She does not say anything about her husband’s infidelity, of the times when he sinks his own pain in alcohol, the times when he comes late at home, but Whit’s “inner, essential life” is drawn for six years in the direction of finding his son: “[…] you attribute your subsequent life – every mood, every downturn – to that catastrophe. You can’t imagine an alternative life. There is only one life. You have no perspective.” (247)
This inner life of his is sharply defined in the following excerpt:
His sexual being, the very essence of his soul, had been obliterated, at the time of his son’s abduction. His sense of himself as an individual with some degree of control over his life had vanished utterly. His fatherhood, his manhood, his dignity. Another man, a predator, had taken his son. It might have been the most ancient and primitive of insults, Whit thought. More even than the abduction of a wife. (239)
Robbie’s disappearance affects the life of his family and Daddy Love’s actions. What about him? How can a smart young child survive for six years of torture and “cuddle-time”? Oates rarely gives him a voice. From Dinah’s perspective, and later his teachers, we find out that for a while, he is a good child, a prodigy, already mature for his age. “And quick. And smart. Fascinated by words.” (12) In the “care” of Daddy Love, Robbie becomes Gideon, the biblical brave warrior, and somehow, ironical, he is one. Slowly, we have “a new look in the boy’s eyes – no longer younger.” (117) There were pages that I could barely read. And somehow, you keep on reading, hoping for a miracle, because I guess that any reader will sympathize with Gideon. You hope that the child will be okay, although, in your mind, you know that this will never happen. Or will it?
Daddy Love brainwashes Gideon, shaping him as he wants, applying Skinner’s methods:
“He’d [Daddy…] read of “conditioning” – the great American psychologist B.F. Skinner and before him the nineteenth-century Russian Ivan Pavlov. But his natural instinct was to reward, and to punish, in such a way as to instill love, fear, respect for and utter allegiance to Daddy Love in the child-subject.”(57) […] That was the Skinner-method of conditioning: praise not blame, rewards not punishments. But hell, punishments were fun.” (124-125)
Gideon remains a very smart boy, who starts telling his story, unaware, at school, through his unique drawings. In his mind, he is making the difference between the Son – what the kidnapper sees, what he wants his “son” to be – andGideon – the one who thinks, who feels, who rebels, the “warrior”:
Son had no plan. Gideon had (maybe) a plan. Son lived in present-tense. Son was is. Gideon lived in past-tense. Gideon was was. Except, Gideon was smarter than Son. Gideon was older than Son and so could live in present-tense if he wished, and in future-tense. Son had smothered in the safety-box. Son had not survived. Son had survived. But as a worm survives making itself small, twisted, flat. Son was not Gideon. Son said to Daddy Love Yes Daddy. I love you Daddy. Gideon said to Daddy Love Yes Daddy. But thinking his own (mutinous) thoughts. (163-164)
However, Gideon starts punishing the ones who has no fault. Gideon starts resembling (more or less) Daddy Love. Gideon loves, in a way, Daddy Love, because Gideon only remembers the time that he spends with Daddy Love. There is an interesting combination in this boy of the Stockholm syndrome with the remains of Robbie’s fragile memories. How normal will this child eventually be? Can you plant evil and expect to collect good things?
Daddy Love is not an easy book, but one extremely well written, raising many questions and subjects of discussions. It is a realistic book – maybe too realistic -, not for entertainment, but it gives us an insight of a traumatic experience, written for those who are interested in the world that we live today, in psychopaths, in psychology, as well as for those who state things like the one the TV host has said. As Dinah was thinking, “Unless you’d lived the hell that Robbie had lived, you could not know. And you could not judge.” (270)
 [The Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. New York, 2013, ISBN: 978-0-8021-2099-1, NetGalley]

December 2, 2012

Scrisoare de Decembrie ...



M-am trezit in al meu Decembrie cu acea durere care-ti spinteca in doua capul, incercand sa ignor ceata ce s-a lasat in jurul meu. Sunt oameni care au un sentiment special atunci cand ,,intra” in luna in care s-au nascut, care asteapta Craciunul si se bucura de luminitele de afara, de Mos Craciun, de darurile ce le vor primi …
 La inceput de decembrie, tot ce imi doresc este sa plec. Cat mai departe. E un dor urias de altceva, in care sa invat sa mai cred in ceva, sa mai vad si altceva, sa ies din tot ceea ce stiu. E un dor care se reflecta pe geamurile tramvaielor, in orele tarzii ale amiezii, in toti in cei in care am crezut candva.
In acest inceput de Decembrie, ma regasesc pe mine intr-un martie trecut… cu valurile ce se inalta tot mai sus, cu zgomotele lor, cu tarmul de unde le privesc jocul. Si singurele lucruri pe care mi le doresc este sa ma simt in Decembrie… mereu mi-au placut globuletele acelea in care sunt inchise casute, omuleti, jucarii… pare o lume perfecta, adapostita, ferita de ceea ce e afara… vezi tu, oricata experienta as avea in a fi ,,un om mare”, oricate ore am in spate, adunati din anii trecuti de a lucra pana la epuizare, de a imbina muncile sisifice cu momentele dedicate oamenilor la care tin, oricata energie ,,supraomeneasca”, ca sa folosesc cuvintele altora, tot ma simt franta. Am stat prea mult afara, in realitate, in lucrurile pe care abia acum tu incepi sa le cunosti… am imbatranit de mult printre ele. In globuletul meu de sticla, as vrea sa am mai multa rabdare, pentru mine, pentru tine, pentru noi, pentru toti, sa mai pot fi acea stanca in care oricine se poate prinde, in care oricine este iertat, in care oricine este inteles. Eu vreau acum sa fiu cea inteleasa.
As vrea sa dorm. Si imi doresc mult de tot linisteSiguranta (poate asta mai mult decat orice), pace si multe culori. Nu vreau nimic altceva, nu vreau carti sau esarfe sau agende sau portofele sau parfumuri sau … nu vreau nimic. Nu mai vreau sa fiu in perioada asta nici profa’, nici aia care tot scrie, nici calutul la care toti sunt inhamati. Ia-mi toate ambitiile, ingroapa-le pe unde apuci, si lasa-ma sa fiu eu, lasa-ma sa respir, lasa-ma sa ma joc. Vreau fulgi de nea si jocuri si din nou, zapada. Vreau sa alerg prin parcul meu vechi, sa vad o Gradina Botanica inclestata in namet, alba, fara nimic altceva, vreau sa fac multe poze la ursii mei preferati, la stelele de Decembrie, la patinoare si saniuti.
Cand ma gandesc la iarna, nu imi amintesc mai niciodata de frig. Desi il vreau acum, sa-mi intre in suflet, sa-mi reaminteasca de ceea ce am fost candva. Cand stiu ca iarna e acum langa mine, imi amintesc de fulgi, de luminile universitatii, de un “forever young”, de …
As vrea sa vad un oras adormit sub torente. Si as vrea sa vad toate luminitele de altadata, sa mai cred ca oamenii pot ramane mereu tineri. As vrea sa mai cred, sa simt, sa mai indraznesc sa sper in ceva.

Bird set free

„Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it.” (Daniel Klein) You see, I’ve had a design, and I don’t know where I did wrong. ...