December 16, 2016 - 06:29
The Book of Salt, as the title would suggest, takes many approaches to salt. Binh continually comes back to it to enrich his storytelling; like adding salt to food, adding salt enhances the themes, narrative, and messages of the story. The immediate association between Binh and his story and salt is for cooking, as he’s a cook. Salt is many things in Truong’s novel: it adds to metaphors and recipes, creates stories by words and by senses. “Kitchen, sweat, tears, or the sea. Madame, they are not all the same. Their stings, their smarts, their strengths, the distinctions among them are fine (260).” One more delicate use of salt is to thread religious allusion through the book, which helps emphasize relationships, morals, and themes of biblical nature that shape the way Binh tells his tale.
Religion, especially Christianity, is strongly threaded through The Book of Salt. Binh’s father, the Old Man, is perversely Christian, using the Church as a way to make money. It’s through a priest that Binh’s father meets Binh’s mother. His father’s moral response to Binh’s homosexuality is rooted in the Bible; the Old Man thinks Binh’s homosexuality is detestable and disowns him because of it. Binh also implies at times that the Old Man’s ethics are bound more to the Bible and what he gleans from it than the real things in his life, such as on page 194.
“I am not like you, Old Man. I love my fellow man because of who I am, not because I was told to by the holy fathers and their holy gospel. In the name of your god, commit your body to this earth…”
The manner in which The Book of Salt twists the figure with the most Religious sway into someone hateful and horrible brings into question the extent to which Biblical references and recommendations should be taken as the right or best solution to something. The Old Man is self-serving, vain, and greedy, the opposite of what those who follow the Bible are said to be.
There are other elements of religious myth, such as the name of the ship Binh works on, the Niobe. Niobe, a character in Greek mythology, was a daughter of Tantalus (associated with unachievable desire rooted in sin) who was punished for her hubris. She bragged that she was better than the honored Leto, as Niobe had seven daughters and seven sons whereas Leto had only two, the Olympians Artemis and Apollo. As penalty for this arrogance, Apollo killed her sons and Artemis killed her daughters. Some tellings of Greek mythos say that this is the reason behind the seven boys and seven girls traditionally sacrificed annually to the Minotaur. For the ship to be named after a figurehead for arrogance and pain contrasts with the image of a ship as a place of liberation and a better future for Binh.
The themes of religion and Christianity, as I said earlier, are enhanced by the allusions to Biblical salt. From the first glance, the reader is presented with an emulation of the Bible: the title of the novel is stylized in the same way as the most of the parts of the Old and New Testaments. Book of Genesis, Book of Job, Book of Revelation… by titling The Book of Salt as such, there’s a certain gravitas implied. Truong aligned a writing of Binh’s story with a writing God’s story, which implies weight and sets it up as a parable.
Salt comes up in a couple of places throughout the Bible: in sacrificial rituals and as a sacred symbol. Additionally, in Ezekiel 16:4, this line appears in a section labeled sometimes as "Jerusalem as an Adulterous Wife":
"Our ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. On the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloths. No one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to do any of these things for you."
Here, salt is acting in tandem with washing and swaddling to clean and prepare infants for a good life. On page 217, Binh says "Before I could taste my mother's milk, I tasted the salt on her nipple.” Binh’s mother also teaches him to cook as a young child, where she teaches him other life strategies and lessons as well. His cherished moments in the kitchen with his mother resurface many times throughout the book. Not only does he reminisce, but her teaching to shape his life.
The first book of the Old Testament is the Book of Genesis. Chapter 19 holds the story of Lot, a nephew of Abraham, who lived in Sodom. God had decided to destroy Sodom because of how sinful it was; namely, that gay sex was popular in Sodom (On page 193, the Old Man refers to Chef Bleriot as “that French sodomite”). Because Lot lived there, Abraham pleaded with God to spare Sodom; God compromised that if 10 "righteous" were found there, the city would not be destroyed. Angels were sent to Sodom and Gomorrah; they stay with Lot. The men of the town gather around his house so that they might "know" the men who are staying with them- he offers his virgin, engaged daughters up for sex to spare the two traveling men/angels. The men of the town accuse him of being a judgmental foreigner, and the angels make all the men blind. They then tell Lot that God is going to destroy the town and that he should take his wife and daughters and leave. As God rains down burning sulfur on the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's wife looks back, in sorrow for lost roots. God turns her into a pillar of salt.
God isn't just warning against homosexuality, he's warning against nostalgia.
Binh’s whole story is one of nostalgia. In telling his story he is looking back on his time with GertrudeStein and Miss Toklas; it starts with the two photographs he kept from their last day together. Then, there’s nostalgia layered within; when he’s with Stein and Toklas, he’s thinking constantly about his time at home. His father’s voice haunts his every move. It is not that Binh necessarily wishes to be back in his past life, but there’s a certain amount of regret and preoccupation with his past. Almost as if he wishes he could go back, but change something. Binh’s preoccupation with the past prevents him from living in the present. Alternatively, he uses nostalgia to escape his present situation of loneliness and constant other-ness. In some ways, the less desirable other situations that Binh has been in sustain his present- "Salt enhances the sweetness (185).” But then, in other places, his longing is for positive things, such as his encounters with the man on the bridge. Perhaps in these places, salt is not necessarily bad. As in a wound, it hurts, but cleanses.
Nostalgia is its own kind of religion, in a way. There’s a ritual looking back, an idolization of something that used to be. Even the story of the basket weaver speaks of looking back or staying grounded in the present: the son does not attempt to go back home just as Lot’s wife was not supposed to. Truong’s multi-faceted treatment of religious and Biblical references throughout The Book of Salt prevents a straightforward interpretation of morals or messages. Salt acts with religious allusion to enhance and emphasize those allusions, as it does with many other dimensions in the book. However, it does not necessarily speak to what is right or wrong, a dilemma Binh also confronts. A piece of his nostalgia, which the Bible so strongly warns against, is wrapped in doubts of morality regarding himself, his family, and his past, as seen through his internalization of his father’s hatred for him. But at he root of it all, positive or not, nostalgia is what carries Binh through his tale and his telling of the tale, without a hint of escape from nostalgia at all.
Works Cited:
The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments. Trenton: I. Collins, 1791. Print.
Truong, Monique T. D. The Book of Salt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Print.