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Title
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The Life of a Hyena / "A Little Life"
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Creator
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Sheoran, Ria
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Date Created
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2024
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Contributor
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Yanagihara, Hanya
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Date
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2015
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Description
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This art project is double layered. On the first layer, there is a collage that depicts the novel aesthetically, with images from magazines, newspaper, printouts, and the bible. Jude St. Francis, has religious trauma from a man named Brother Luke at the monastery he grew up in. I thought that bordering the collage with excerpts from the Gospel of Luke would be a powerful statement. Other images depict mental health, NYC, and hints of his community. The second layer consists of string art. Jude envisions his life’s tormentors through the motif of hyenas that rip apart his mind. The hyena string art has different threads leading away from the center, depicting the different people that inflicted harm on Jude that led to his deep rooted trauma. The artwork overall is haphazard and messy, but that was my intention. The novel is lengthy and filled with so much passion and pain that I found it made sense for my craft to emulate this chaos.
RIA SHEORAN ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US:
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara was published in 2015 by Doubleday Publishing. It was nominated for twelve notable awards. Through learning about the impact of crafting on my understanding of a text, I have gained insight into the structure, point of view, and emotional themes of the novel.
Upon publication, the novel quickly snowballed in popularity, with significant reviewers talking about its substance and impact. The New York Times reviewed the novel in September of 2015. The review explained that the novel is ripe with trauma and consists of a “relentless downhill trajectory” that could have been made more powerful and less predictable if Yanagihara had focused on less traumatic events. They proclaimed it to be “the most talked-about novel of the summer” and praised the novel’s substance, while also acknowledging that it is longer than it needs to be and deserves both negative and positive reviews. Jeff Chu wrote a review for Vox in December of 2015, stating, “A Little Life is the best book of the year. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.” He says that the prose is “so stunning that it would stop me, pushing me back to the beginning of a paragraph for a second read.” The content of the novel is so harrowing that he cautions readers to be wary before attempting to read it. Goodreads, the popular reviewing site open to the public, racked up many contrasting reviews. One reviewer rated the novel with one star, writing, “The writing is actually gorgeous. I can see why many, many people like this book. Really, Hanya Yanagihara knows how to use language. Unfortunately, the story she told was not worthy of it. The longer I read this book, the more I dreaded reading it, the worse my feelings got as I read, and the more I hated it for existing.” On the other end of the spectrum, a positive review states, “Its brilliant writing, its broken characters, and its bleak, unforgiving story dug into my heart, into the very pores of my skin.” The consensus from top readers and reviewers seemed to be that though the novel is heavy in content and hard to read without preparation, its writing is phenomenal and deserves the popularity it has gained.
The craft project I undertook consists of two layers of work. The first layer is a collage depicting the novel and how I see it aesthetically. The second layer is an attempt at string art, depicting the face of a hyena, with different threads leading away from it signifying the people who traumatize Jude St. Francis through his life. Collaging originated all the way back in 200 BC in China. The technique slowly made its way through medieval times, and artists used materials such as gold leaves and gems. In the nineteenth century, it turned into the art form that it is today, using newspaper and magazine clippings, photographs, text from books, and a jumble of photographs and objects glued together on a canvas (Adibi, 2021). Because collage is such an old and versatile art form, I knew there was a lot I could garner from using it in my project. String art was originally meant to aid the education of mathematics. In the 1800s, a mathematics teacher, Mary Everest Boole, used it to explain geometric concepts to her class. The nature of the activity and the final result made it a popular crafting activity in the twentieth century. Open Door Enterprises created string art kits in the 1960s that skyrocketed the technique into an art form (Ross, 2024).
Given the length of the novel, I originally struggled to allow myself to focus on specific parts. Using collaging seemed like a beneficial way to incorporate different elements of the text to see how they worked together aesthetically. I had two questions going into the collage that I wanted to answer: How did happiness and sadness work together in the text? And how did point of view work in shaping Jude St Francis’s character? For the first question, I realized that they did not work together and were in fact the same thing within the novel. Sadness overlapped with happiness in a way that was hard to conceptualize, but by physically placing papers on top of one another through the collage, I could visually represent this overlapping. Feeling one emotion at any singular time is rare because the human body tends to feel more than one at any time. Jude’s mental health constantly reminds him of his pain no matter how positively he manages to shape his life. The novel’s point of view is narrated in the third person, occasionally switching to the first person. Harold Stein, Jude’s adoptive father, is the only character who speaks in a first-person point of view, and it is interesting to see how his contribution is solely for the purpose of shaping Jude’s character. Given this information, I was prompted to use images that reminded me of Jude as the only member of his community, which is how he sees himself from his perspective on his life. The third-person point of view explores different characters’ lives, and using a collage to show elements of a community physically depicts the scope of how many characters are actually integral to the story.
Jude’s poignant mental-health struggles led me to add a second layer with string art. Using hyenas as a motif for pain was a concept that stood out to me as highly important in the novel. Despite all that Jude suffers, there would be no story to tell had he not been irreparably traumatized by the events in childhood. His deteriorated mental health was an important concept to follow, and, by physically depicting a hyena, I made sense of the way that he thought of his abusers. Through my art project, I led five lines of string away from the hyena to single out the abusers in Jude’s life. At the starting point, they overlap with each other slightly. This overlapping was not intentional, but, upon reflection, I realized that despite his abusers targeting him at different times in his life, when he thinks about them, they are all grouped as the same. Having them overlap within the string art of the hyena made sense because the hyena became a depiction of Jude’s mind to me. The scattered and messy nature of the strings represent his mind as a jumble—and, through his perspective, we see this jumble. The strings that lead away from the hyena show that, when viewed from a different perspective, each instance of abuse impacted him differently, whether physical, sexual, or emotional abuse.
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References
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Adibi, Ali Asghar. “A Brief History of Collage.” University of Tehran Science and Humanities Series, Springer International Publishing, 2021, pp. 1–5.
Chu, Jeff. “A Little Life Is the Best Novel of the Year. I Wouldn’t Recommend It to Anyone.” Vox, 14 Oct. 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/10/14/9519855/a-little-life.
Maslin, Janet. Review: ‘A Little Life,’ Hanya Yanagihara’s Traumatic Tale of Male Friendship. 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/books/review-a-little-life-hanya-yanagiharas-traumatic-tale-of-male-friendship.html.
Ross, Lawrence. “A Deep Dive into the History of String Art.” String of the Art, 10 Feb. 2024, https://www.stringoftheart.com/blogs/news/a-deep-dive-into-the-history-of-string-art?srsltid=AfmBOopRbHnxgsbNw1JOcZehUQhgTkAEFSDKrWjjBxtSOIpECUnTKdNW.
Yanagihara, Hanya. A Little Life. Doubleday, 2015.
Yanagihara, Hanya. A Little Life. Goodreads.