What does it mean to not have a history? Alejandro Zambra’s ‘Ways of Going Home’
Names, or lack or inappropriateness thereof, are a ghostly presence in Alejandro Zambra’s characterization of the macro- and micro-level themes expertly tangled in his novel Ways of Going Home (2014). Names serve as masks, rather as functioning to reveal something about the characters, places and issues coming together in the personal and impersonal, familial and political, country-wide planes of time and space. Characters, places and issues are not transparent, nor are they surfaces to project on or depths to be mined for narrative “meaning,” thus depicting the chaotic space in which Zambra operates as the “I” who writes and the “I” on the pages of Ways of Going Home.
Zambra writes that “our parents never have faces. We never truly learn to look at them” (8). If streets have mystical names, conjuring the assumption that there is “no history” underneath, a similar vein runs through the theme of parents, parenthood and personhood in this novel. There are multiple ways of going home, and there are multiple ways of navigating one’s surrounding environment and the interiority of oneself, and perhaps even one’s parents. The novel is after all broken up into “literature of the parents” and “literature of the children,” presenting children as “secondary characters” to the parents. If street names can tell us “nothing” of the history, then parents’ names and faces are equally obscuring in this narrative of Zambra’s dictatorial-controlled country of origin. But isn’t this sentence a paradox? If our parents “never have faces,” how might we “look at them”? Parents and writing teachers are often stereotyped as saying things like “never say never”; parents, because anything could happen and writing teachers, because “never” comes with a high burden of proof.
Zambria’s coded use of names at the micro and macro level, in the street names, the faces of the parents and the subsections of the book, provides readers a model for decoding the chaotic environment around them, within and without the narrative space of Ways of Going Home. It illustrates that there are multiple “ways of going home”–and determining and reckoning with what and where home actually is. It helps us to see that as the world did not revolve around the child and adult coming of age and mental maturity in this week, so too we are not primary but secondary characters in our own lives and in the “grand scheme” of things.
