Bird Brain

Michael Chabon’s mystery novel, The Final Solution, possesses an interesting character, that of a bird called Bruno who is owned by a little boy. On account of Bruno’s eccentricities, mainly that of spouting numbers out in German, he is stolen and privy to the view of a murder.

The result of Bruno’s capture coupled with the coveted knowledge that he possesses highlights that a disruption in one’s homeostasis brings about narrative events in literature. To support this disturbance, formalism’s defamiliarization acts as a catalyst, meaning it both incites and perpetuates the incident’s intrigue and value to the reader as well as the cast of characters.

Meanwhile, narratology’s focalization advances the narrative of the story and invests the reader to the fate of the characters. This investment is done via coloring the diegesis or story world with how the characters’ view things and what things the characters focus on.

In “Art as Technique,” Victor Shklovsky states that defamiliarization is “. . . to make the stone stony” (Shklovsky 12). For instance, imagine an individual takes a rock from the ground and begins to examine it. The individual notices that it is a felsic igneous rock, and more specifically alkali feldspar granite. Now the individual decides to write a poem about the rock and equates it to a watermelon. Within this example there are arguably two cases of defamiliarization. The first is the scientific classification of the rock which is not ordinarily utilized in conventional discourse, while the second is the likening of the rock to a watermelon.

But if the individual just walked past the rock, say, on a commute to work every morning, such a distinction would never befall them for as Shklovsky puts it, “After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it—hence we cannot say anything significant about it” (13). Thus, an act of defamiliarization is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object to bring it into focus for the habituated.

In Michael Chabon’s novel, the first significant instance of defamiliarization pertaining to Bruno is when he starts to list off numbers in German. The passage is:

“Zwei eins sieben fünf vier sieben drei,” the parrot said, in a soft, oddly breathy voice, with the slightest hint of a lisp. The boy stood, as if listening to the parrot’s statement, though his expression did not deepen or complicate. “Vier acht vier neun eins eins sieben.”

The old man blinked. The German numbers were so unexpected, literally so outlandish, that for a moment they registered only as a series of uncanny noises, savage avian utterances devoid of any sense. (Chabon 5)

Notably one can see in this passage that the boy, habituated to his bird’s words, is not taken out of the moment. The old man and the reader, on the other hand, are defamiliarized enough with this occurrence that the scene is brought to the forefront of the mind’s eye, into focus. From the old man’s view, this shift is extreme enough to be incoherent for a time, which causes him to pause and reflect on what was spoken, as poetry tends to do. From the reader’s perspective, the italics and change in language are unusual within the current context and so the reader is likely to take notice, deepening the intrigue or draw of the narrative.

In said narratives, it is also valuable to point out that the focus is tinted by the idiosyncrasies of the individual that is perceiving the events or objects, in other words the focalizer and the focalized. This tinted focus allows for the characterization of characters to take place, which, by proxy, creates the narrative as when said characters act within the diegesis a story is woven in their wake.

It is crucial then, that one does not confuse characters with one another, which one is ought to do if they use point of view, as point of view commonly confuses who speaks with who sees. If one does confuse the two, said person is mistaking one character for another, which makes that individual’s reading of the text incorrect. The reason behind this is because the events are conveyed to the reader through a filter of the focalizer’s thoughts, memories, and perceptions, not someone else’s.

In the case of The Final Solution, a large portion of the narrative is done with an external or extra-hetero-allodiegetic narrator-focalizer and from the internal focalization of an old detective who is intradiegetic. This means that when the unnamed narrator is the focalizer said narrator observes and reports on the events without taking part in the diegesis. When the old man is the focalizer though, he is within the story world and because he is sometimes distant from the action, and he is sometimes not in the “hero’s position” he cannot be classified consistently throughout the story as more than just intradiegetic.

It is also important to note that, despite there being an unnamed narrator who is outside of the diegesis, most mysteries of the book remain as such, up until the penultimate chapter and in the case of the meaning behind the bird’s numbers, the entirety of the novel. This lack of knowledge is on account of the narrator restricting the knowledge said narrator reveals and the old man, in his subjectivity, simply not knowing the answers. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s book, Narrative Fiction, corroborates this point stating that:

In principle, the external focalizer (or narrator-focalizer) know everything about the represented world, and when he restricts his knowledge, he does so out of rhetorical considerations . . . The knowledge of an internal focalizer, on the other hand, is restricted by definition: being a part of the represented world, he cannot know everything about it. (Rimmon-Kenan 80)

Because of this restriction, both do not divulge the plight of the bird until the aforementioned tenth and penultimate chapter. On account of this hidden information and the consistent defamiliarization the bird provides an oneiric quality to the novel.

An example of this can be found at the end of the first chapter where Bruno says, “‘Neun neun drei acht zwei sachs sieben’ . . . as they . . . [him and his owner, walk] . . . off into the wavering green vastness of the afternoon” (Chabon 9). In the passage the numbers are now closer to being habituated but still hold a mystery as they are now affirmed as something common that Bruno does, thus giving him a distinctive character trait. The main act of defamiliarization however, lies in the “wavering green vastness” attributed to “afternoon.” The incorporeal nature of the description permeates a blurry and fluid image of the lush and abundance of the countryside which compounds with the unspoken heat and lethargy of summer.

In describing the scene in such a way, multifaceted meanings are encoded into an elegant aesthetically pleasing package that can be deciphered by the reader. More precisely, this description makes the afternoon vibrant and as a consequence it shows the reader that the narrative is proficient in the qualities of poetics.

As mentioned above, because the numbers are a staple of Bruno, the effect that they possess as a tool of defamiliarization is lessened. Therefore, something else takes its place, Bruno’s singing which is described at the end of the third chapter as, “. . . a lovely contralto and, as it issued jerkily from the bill of the gray animal in the corner, disturbingly human” (20). The usage of “gray animal” is not only an act of defamiliarization, but it is also foreshadowing the future anthropomorphizing which the bird is given after he returns to the narrative in chapter ten.

Within that chapter, the old man uncovers the murderer, and the bird Bruno arguably takes the mantle of the focalizer for a portion of the time. The reason this is arguable is because the narrator-focalizer may be merely adopting the characteristics of Bruno, the focalized, and yielding perception as an emotive component, for doing so grants, “. . . an external focalizer (a narrator-focalizer) the privilege of penetrating the consciousness of the focalized . . .” (Rimmon-Kenan 82). Something that supports this reading are the usage of elevated diction the focalizer sometimes uses such as, “The bird they ate the most often was the kurcze Hahne poulet chicken kip . . .” and, “. . . eloquent expression of sardonic intransigence . . .” which are words a parrot would be unlikely to pick up through mimicry (Chabon 112, 115).

There are also places where the narrator-focalizer is almost certainly speaking, such as when Bruno mocks his captor by saying, “‘There is no fucking prefix,’ . . . [followed by] . . . There were certain songs that provoked such responses in certain people, and one learned to avoid them, or in the case of a very clever bird like Bruno, to choose one’s moments” (116). This passage provides an example of the narrator labeling a character with a personality trait, and because, “. . . the ideology of the narrator-focalizer is usually taken as authoritative . . .” one can assume that this authoritatively assertive comment about Bruno being “clever” makes it more likely that the narrator-focalizer is the one speaking (Rimmon-Kenan 83).       

On the other hand, one could argue that a bird’s tendency to speak, and thus think, in the third person due to the side effects of mimicry could allow for passages that ordinarily could easily be ascribed to the narrator-focalizer to lean more towards ambiguity. This argument can be scrutinized by the notion that anytime there is a shift in perception, the focalizer subsequently shifts as well. On account of there being other passages that have a different style to them, one can assert that there are indeed distinct instances of Bruno being a focalizer rather than what is focalized.

An example of this is the following line, “The man blinked, breathing steadily, angrily, through his soft pale beak,” which misattributes the nostrils of a human to the anatomy of a bird, signifying a shift in the accuracy of perception from the previous florid language of the narrator-focalizer to that of Bruno (Chabon 115). A byproduct of this focalization shift is that it additionally contributes to defamiliarization as depicting a nose as a “soft pale beak” is something that is simultaneously unique and distinctive enough to be memorable, or at the very least, conspicuous.

It also directly corresponds with Shklovsky’s definition of poetry as he claims that poetry is, “. . . attenuated, tortuous speech . . . [and put more bluntly] . . . Poetic speech is formed speech” (Shklovsky 23). Seeing as parrots, as a result of not being human, have difficulty with speaking when compared to the average human, one can posit that their attenuated and tortuous speech is rife for poetic potential.

A counter argument would be that poetic speech must be formed speech and, seeing as parrots are not forming speech, as what they are doing is more akin to reciting song lyrics, they cannot produce poetry, only a parody of poetry. Yet, in this narrative, the anthropomorphism of Bruno coupled with his apparent heightened cleverness could make the difference irrelevant or even nonexistent.

Shifts in focalization can sometimes be subtle, as changes in perception can happen while still addressing the same topic, as shown when Bruno opened:

. . . his beak and emitted, in a way that pressed very satisfyingly on the raw place inside him, a series of low chuckling coughs. This allusion to Kalb’s characteristic odor, though the man would have had no way of knowing it, constituted a faithful and exact reproduction of the sound produced by the Blue Minorcans that had scratched in the back garden of le Colonel’s house in Biskra, Algeria, in particular of one strapping blue and white lady whose coloration Bruno had always admired. (Chabon 118-119)

This passage is initially from the focalization of Bruno, which can be known on the grounds that it speaks about his feelings, particularly that the sensation is satisfying.

The following sentence, though, can be subscribed to the narrator-focalizer because of the all-knowing specificity of places that are never mentioned again and the lack of direct sensory input. In this instance defamiliarization can also be seen through the hinting of a more expansive diegesis which the reader is not privy to, resulting in the reinterpretation of information with suddenly a whole lot more context without enough additional context to place it in.

This act of keeping some things about Bruno and his history a mystery continues as the story draws to a close. The old man remarks that, “I doubt very much . . . if we shall ever learn what significance, if any, those numbers may hold,” which is a far cry from what most characters were believing at the beginning of the novel (129). This is the case because the peculiar and out of place nature of the German numbers caused the characters to come to their own assumptions as to what the numbers could mean. Some thought it was a cypher, others thought it was measurements, and some even believed it to be bank numbers.

The reader can also hazard a guess that given the title, the final words within the novel, “‘Sieben zwei eins vier drei,’ the boy whispered, with the slightest hint of a lisp. ‘Sieben acht vier vier fünf,’” and the bookended location of the train tracks where Bruno is startled by the train and then sings, “. . . in flawless mockery of the voice of a woman whom none of them would ever meet or see again,” that the numbers could be labels of individuals who were apart of the Nazi's “Final Solution” (131).

Regardless of the answer, this initial defamiliarization acts as a catalyst for some of the character’s innermost desires or fears which, viewed through focalization, inevitably result in unraveling what kind of individual they chose to become.