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  • Analysis On Eve Babitz

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    Francis Feng
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    Eve Babitz's writing prioritizes amusement over meaning, with satire and flippant judgments. While her style uses wit and lingo that can obscure themes, her essays arouse trenchant feelings in readers. The essay analyzes Babitz's "No Onion", which discusses American pop culture influences like the rule against kissing after eating onions. While the onion rule seems insignificant, Babitz reflects on how minor cultural lenses reveal determinants of shared mentalities among her peers. Readers can view Babitz's work as nostalgic or dig deeper to see critical thinking behind the jokes that dissects the era.

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    A short analysis on Eve Babitz's words with a focus on I Used to Be Charming.

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    Analysis on Eve Babitz

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    Eve Babitz's writing prioritizes amusement over meaning, with satire and flippant judgments. While her style uses wit and lingo that can obscure themes, her essays arouse trenchant feelings in readers. The essay analyzes Babitz's "No Onion", which discusses American pop culture influences like the rule against kissing after eating onions. While the onion rule seems insignificant, Babitz reflects on how minor cultural lenses reveal determinants of shared mentalities among her peers. Readers can view Babitz's work as nostalgic or dig deeper to see critical thinking behind the jokes that dissects the era.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    Download as pdf or txt
    48 views2 pages

    Analysis On Eve Babitz

    Uploaded by

    Francis Feng
    Eve Babitz's writing prioritizes amusement over meaning, with satire and flippant judgments. While her style uses wit and lingo that can obscure themes, her essays arouse trenchant feelings in readers. The essay analyzes Babitz's "No Onion", which discusses American pop culture influences like the rule against kissing after eating onions. While the onion rule seems insignificant, Babitz reflects on how minor cultural lenses reveal determinants of shared mentalities among her peers. Readers can view Babitz's work as nostalgic or dig deeper to see critical thinking behind the jokes that dissects the era.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 2

    Francis Feng

    Professor Dan Kellum

    International Writing Workshop II

    3.21.2020

    Further Analysis on Eve Babitz

    Eve Babitz is a writer who would sacrifice meaning-making for pure amusement. In her

    writing ethics, fun is imperial; satire is essential; and flippant judgments are there to spice up the

    first two. It is common that her swarm of wisecracks and Los Angeles lingo flies around and

    dilutes storylines and claims, making them hardly visible, yet the entirety of her essay,

    nevertheless, never fails to arouse a trenchant feeling in the readers—It feels like she casted a

    spell on her words to make them talk beyond literal limitations. How does she keep her work

    from being simply a game of words or a clever gimmick that attracts Americans who just want to

    feel the nostalgia?

    The more I read Babitz, the more I see the answer. After reading her “No Onion,” a

    collection of shorter, subtitled passages coalesced under one title, I came to realize a little more

    about the driving forces behind her writing. “No Onion” is about American comic books and

    magazines, teen romances and kisses, onions and garlic, but most importantly, about the odors

    that linger in Eve Babitz’s memories. “They seemed to understand that the consequence of

    Archie saying ‘no onions’ would result in an ‘out-of-gas’ car with hearts coming up from the

    roof.” (Babitz, 69) Again, opening with an ambiguous sentence exclusively validated through a

    comic book character, Babitz flirts with her readers, challenging them to guess the subject matter

    of this prose. While I did not grow up in the U.S., I assume those who grew up consuming
    American pop culture can get her point right away: it is about kissing, kissing without eating

    onions beforehand because it is just unacceptable—what a piece of tacit and classical American

    teen knowledge.

    “No Onion” ironically details Babitz’s onion-phobia moments—how she felt obliged to

    abide the rule—and the anomalies she encountered growing up that made her doubt the rule’s

    credibility, such as the skater boy in her high school who didn’t mind kissing her after having hot

    dogs with onions. It is almost like her memoir about first loves—in fact, it is—but she seems to

    have said more. The No Onion Rule itself might be intellectually insignificant and childlike, but

    what it represents is the pop culture’s bigger-than-imagined influence on teenagers. While we

    think Babitz’s writing merely functions to recount the cultural scene of her time, she reflects—

    through the most minor and unexpected lenses—on the determinants of the cultural mentality she

    shares with her even-aged. However, Babitz never tells us what to think: the trenchant feelings

    her work arouse in us would, eventually, turn into understandings, except that they are not from

    her but from us. This might also explain why she intends to keep her work elusive—she wants us

    to have the story.

    As readers, we can take Eve Babitz’s work merely as a nostalgic stunt that transmits us

    back to our youthful past or to the passionate land we all have dreamed to live on, but we can

    also choose to dig deeper and see the critical thinking, dissecting the entire golden era, behind

    those jokes.

    WORKS CITED
    ———————————————————————————————————————
    Babitz, Eve. I Used to Be Charming. “No Onion”, page 69 - 75. New York Review Books, 2019.

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