The theme of `home' and `homelessness' in The Petty Details of So-and-so's Life
A modern-day philosopher, Mark Kingwell, argues that our times are marked by the feelings of hope, imagination, and homelessness. Since you cannot spell `homelessness' and `homeless' without mentioning `home' - both words effectively mean the lack or the absence of a home - then it is only natural that when a person thinks about The Petty Details of So-and-so's Life and the theme of homelessness, it is the father of the family, Oliver Taylor, who first comes to mind. He abandons his wife and children, and goes on to live on his own in the streets - and yet, in spirit, as a semi-real, semi-imaginary figure, Oliver continues to influence the lives of his wife and children, affecting the minds/imaginations of the latter, effectively driving/exiling Emma and Blue away from the Taylor household. Camilla Gibb's The Petty Details is full of exile and homelessness; however, there are also hope and imagination, affecting the former in ways that are both good and bad, all according to Mark Kingwell's ideas, as shown below.
Therefore, what does then the term `home' mean, especially to the Taylor children? Does a sense of exile and homelessness mark human experience in our times? If it does, how does our sense of hope, our imagination affect it?
Well, for a start, a home is a person's abode, his/her dwelling, a place of residence - i.e. a place to live more or less permanently. Conversely, Camilla Gibb clearly indicates that in The Petty Details the home of Emma and Blue Taylor is clearly not their house; indeed, when Emma - after temporarily leaving her studies (pg. 206) - actually returns to the Taylor household, Elaine tells her to get a job (pg. 213). Furthermore, Emma herself quickly finds another place to stay without any heartbreak or regrets - there is nothing holding her to that place. ("It took Emma about a week to leave her mother's house", "The streets seemed totally unfamiliar" - pg. 214). In The Petty Details a place where one is born does not always equal `home', it seems. Rather, modern people have to follow their hearts and minds to find it. Oliver Taylor is a prime example of that: initially, he is a dreamer, an inventor of things; his is a radical new approach to things such as family matters (pg. 22-23), even more so than Elaine's. However, in the end, it all goes wrong: Oliver's inventions do not seem to work, and so following his dreams' breakdown into nothingness through an alcoholic haze, his very humanity follows suit: "...Oliver has become animal" (pg. 114). Along the process, Elaine effectively kicks Oliver out of the house, effectively exiling him to a lonely fate - ` "I told him to clean up his act or get out," Blue had heard her tell anyone who would listen." ' (pg. 107) However, even though his life afterwards becomes neither gentle nor pleasant, Oliver Taylor does not come back; that thought apparently does not even come into his mind, unhinged as it became. It seems that Camilla Gibbs tells us that whenever your home stops feeling like a home, exiling/leaving it, becomes not so bad either. However, if the term `home' may be more versatile than it appears to be, how does it affect the term `exile'? After all, does not `exile' mean banishment, going away, or leaving - your home, your homeland, or a similar place - a place where you were born? In response to these questions Emma and Blue leave their house on their own volition, and they do not appear to miss it at all, repeating the behavior of their father. Emma returns home only because she has to, while Blue, after leaving his home initially to search for their father (pg. 93), and never returns there.
Therefore, this means that Oliver is not the only character in the Taylor family who is homeless, or has problems with his imagination for that matter; he is just the most obvious example. Emma wonders, is "she actually a homeless person too? One that simply happened, however temporarily, to have a home?"(pg. 125). The similarities do not end here; Emma also has problems with her imagination, as it costs Emma her place at the dig: ` "Apparently, I was a little carried away," she sighed. "Thought I was on to something--still think I was on to something--but managed to piss off everyone in the process" ' (pg. 206). Emma's "pissing off everyone" is not so different from Oliver's actions: both father and daughter have meant well, but in the end, the lack of realism in their lives ruins their intentions. However, unlike Oliver, Emma was "on to something", there was something in the dig - an old well (pg. 245-46) - and so, to a point, Emma is right: there is a place for imagination and hope in this world, for all of its rationality. What is more, Emma's actions also inspire her former professor, Nick Savage, into following his dreams, even just for a bit: ` "And so I've come here, on a one-term sabbatical, to do something I've always wanted to do--work on an Incan site in the Andes. Gracias, Emma. Nick." ' (pg. 246) Thus, excess imagination can not only harm, but also heal and inspire people.
In turn, this brings us back to the issue raised by Mark Kingwell, and showing us the answers to these questions, throughout The Petty Details Emma and Blue go through life's various experiences, good and bad, seeking a home or homes of their own all that time. Their lives may not be easy or simple, as they lose their father early in life, then Emma loses her position at the dig while Blue is unable to find himself, and both of them constantly fear the spiritual shadow cast by Oliver over their lives. However, in the end they do find closure - Emma with Nina and Blue in jail. It certainly is no romantic fairy-tale ending, but it is an ending that is appropriate for our times, for it demonstrates the correctness of Mark Kingwell's hypothesis. After all, even back at the turn of the 20th century, before the WWI, it was unthinkable that Oliver would blatantly abandon his family just because his wife nags all the time; that Elaine would not feel ashamed at all that she is a mistress of a married man; that Blue would not provide for his mother and sister when he came of age - this all bears the mark of our modern times. Now, however, people consider all of these things almost as parts of modern routine.
Meanwhile, as Mark Kingwell has argued, a sense of hope and imagination, affected by homelessness and exile marks the lives of the Taylors. In an `old-fashioned', traditional home, marked, as a rule, by a nuclear, heterogeneous family, it would be unthinkable that a daughter would grow up to be a lesbian, or a son - a drug addict, who could not hold to a job, or that both of the children would eventually leave and practically never come back. In fact, you can consider the Wainwrights - maternal grandparents of Emma and Blue - to be such a family, as they consist of a father, a mother, and two children. The initial difference, though, is in Elaine, who is definitely not your average 1960s girl, coy and demure; instead, she has dreams and plans of her own. Oliver, who is not your average man either, but a dreamer and an inventor instead, is another herald of things to change as well, a new, non-traditional world for them and for their children.
Since Elaine and Oliver are different from a traditional married couple, the education of their children is different too, as the pages 22-23 of the novel indicate. The results are not long in coming, on page 25 Emma offers Blue to believe that they are orphans, that is to say they believe to have no home or family. Moreover, since they have no home to speak of and call their own, Emma and Blue have to travel until they find one; and while they do that, they cannot have regular, ordinary, old-fashioned lives. Practically they are self-exiled, they are homeless on the outside, but on the inside they are full of ideas, dreams, hopes, even though their real lives that are bitter at worst, and bittersweet at best.
Therefore, with its full content, does The Petty Details support the argument of Mark Kingwell that a sense of exile and homelessness marks human experience in our times? Furthermore, various examples disprove that Oliver Taylor is only homeless character of the novel - both of his children, and possibly his wife, suffer from the same condition, albeit to a different degree. Finally, the novel itself is about life of regular people, shown in petty details/vignettes, for the readers can imagine that Taylors live at the same time as them. Consequently, the novel can be treated as an information guide to us warning us that we (or our children) may experience what any of the central characters of the novel experienced: the feeling of a home that is not a home but something else; the feeling of homelessness that follows that initial feeling; and the hopeful feeling of seeking their own identity and/or personal abode, the way that the Taylors have sought in the book. That is the proof of the correctness of Mark Kingwell's statement.
Works Cited:
Gibb, Camilla. The Petty Details of So-and-so's Life. Canada: Anchor Canada. 2003.