Frederick Busch: “Ralph the Duck” from Absent Friends

Jogen Chowdhury: “Man in Grief” (2006)

My assignment was to write something to influence somebody. He called it Rhetoric and Persuasion…. I wrote “Ralph the Duck.”
Once upon a time, there was a duck named Ralph who didn’t have any feathers on either wing. So when the cold wind blew, Ralph said, Brr, and shivered and shook.
What’s the matter? Ralph’s mommy asked.
I’m cold, Ralph said.
Oh, the mommy said. Here. I’ll keep you warm.
So she spread her big, feathery wings, and hugged Ralph tight, and when the cold wind blew, Ralph was warm and snuggly, and fell fast asleep.

Sometimes a whisper can speak as loudly as a scream, and a mother’s lullaby can outperform a 104-piece orchestra. I’ve been reading a lot of complex symphonies lately; it was nice to be reminded of the power of simplicity. Not that it’s an easy story; it requires close attention, as it’s all carried in a word here, a sentence there.

The narrator is a college security guard who takes a free class every semester. He’s up against an English professor who never quite realizes that, despite his degrees, he’s no match for this guy by any measure. You are not an unintelligent writer, the professor tells him. “You are not an unintelligent driver,” the narrator says later, out of earshot, after fixing his car for him. The professor tries to convince him he can’t say “fuck” in a college essay. The narrator has some fun with this, putting forth a convincing argument, like a child would, until the professor in frustration falls back on the academic version of “Because I said so!” When the narrator turns in the story of Ralph the Duck for the Rhetoric and Persuasion part of the course, the professor gives him a D. “It isn’t unappealing,” the professor tells him; but, of course, it isn’t appropriate for the course. The narrator turns around and shows him just how talented he is at Rhetoric and Persuasion by rescuing a student – a student the professor had an affair with, in fact, how’s that for symmetry and unity – from a suicide attempt.

Simple, right? But that’s just the surface.

I was the oldest college student in America, I thought. But of course I wasn’t. There were always ancient women with parchment for skin who graduated at seventy-nine from places like Barnard and the University of Georgia. I was only forty-two, and I hardly qualified as a student….
I was getting educated, in a kind of slow-motion way – it would have taken me something like fifteen or sixteen years to graduate…

The professor’s addiction to litotes is loaded with meaning. Sure, it’s funny, a way to poke the overblown academic in the eye, but both instances have great significance because he’s stumbled onto a truth he can’t consciously admit. The narrator is one sharp cookie, but the professor can’t quite handle a middle-aged blue-collar part-time undergrad who can fix cars and get to the heart of “A Rose for Emily.” But by using the indirect structure – “not an unintelligent writer” – instead of containing the student’s ability, he’s exaggerating it, misusing a tool from his own workshop. Hoisting himself on his own petard, in fact.

… I could see how disappointed he was. He’d been banking on my having been a murderer. Interesting guy in one of my classes, he must’ve told some terrific woman at an overpriced meal: I just know the guy was a rub out specialist in the Nam, he had to have said. I figured I should come to work wearing my fatigue jacket and a red bandanna tied around my head. Say “Man” to him a couple of times, hang a fist in the air for grief and solidarity, and look terribly worn, exhausted by experiences he was fairly certain that he envied me. His dungarees were ironed, I noticed.

The professor’s also addicted to his own version of truth. He doesn’t want to hear about the guy’s military service spent in Baltimore railroad yards; he wants Vietnam combat, damn it, and he badgers him until he gets it, in a scene that reeks of testosterone – cigars, his own military service, the loose women he’s known, language, this guy is out to prove he’s as much man as his student even if he can’t fix his own car. Even if his dungarees are ironed.

Then there’s the narrator’s daughter.

We never learn the details about the girl – what her name was, how old she was or how long ago it was when she died. For that matter – and this matters – no one ever says directly that she died. It’s strongly implied, and how else would she be gone, but the loss of his child is one of those things the narrator just can’t face head-on; he in fact exaggerates the importance by not facing it, in a kind of psychological version of litotes. He comes very close when he rescues the student suicide, and we get a glimpse into what he faces daily, the heartbreak and guilt he carries around in quiet despair, as his daughter’s death, Vietnam, and the teenager merge into one.

In the end, it’s a story that leaves a lot of questions. It’s usually referred to as a story about a Vietnam vet, but I wonder if maybe the Baltimore story was the accurate one. If he told the professor what he wanted to hear, he knew how happy that made him, that it conformed to his preconceived notions, so he tried the same story on the suicidal teenager. It’s only when that didn’t work too well that he brought out the truth about his daughter. What if the Vietnam dreams he told the teenager were actually the dreams he has of his daughter? If he feels so responsible for her death it’s his own personal Vietnam? I can see this, I can see a father racing to the hospital with his daughter, only to find out he’s too late – so when he brings in the teenager, he says, “She better not die this time.”

So what does this have to do with the Ralph the Duck essay? For me, it formed the turning point of the story – not the essay, but the aftermath. The story starts with dog vomit and his wife sleeping on the couch, apparently a – forgive me – not uncommon event in the household. Things improve domestically over the course of a few days, but there’s a special poignancy when he tells his wife what’s going on in the class.

Fanny said, “Shit! you’re never that laconic unless you feel crazy. What’s wrong? Who’d you punch out at the playground?”
“We had to write a composition,” I said.
“Did he like it?”
“He gave me a D.”
“Well, you’re familiar enough with D’s. I never saw you get this low over a grade.”
“I wrote about Ralph the Duck.”
She said, “You did?” She said, “Honey.” She came over and stood beside the rocker and leaned into me and hugged my head and neck. “Honey,” she said. “Honey.”

This scene accomplishes a lot for me. First, we find out he has a history of “punching out at the playground,” which is what he’s been doing with the professor in a passive-aggressive way. Then we find out he’s a bit wounded over the grade, perhaps angry. But most importantly: Ralph the Duck has an ineffable significance, a significance shared with his wife.

So what’s the story behind the Ralph story? I don’t know. Maybe it was his daughter’s favorite story. Maybe it was the story he told her the night she died. Maybe it was a story he told her when she got scared in the hospital. Maybe it’s the story his wife told her. Whatever it is, it now becomes a story to comfort him, as his wife spreads her feathered wings around his naked, shivering heart.

I decided to read this story, which is from 1989 (it was in BASS) on an impulse. A few weeks ago, Celeste Ng wrote a post about it for the “Stories We Love” column at FWW. I could swear I saw a twitter conversation about it, but it’s not there anymore, so maybe I imagined it. That imagined conversation was so intriguing, though (even though I don’t remember anything about the contents), I went to my library and checked out Frederick Busch’s collection Absent Friends just so I could read it. It must’ve been one helluvan imaginary conversation. That would’ve been fitting, because it’s one helluva story. Even if it is quiet as a whisper.

Food Network Star 2013 (Season 9), Ep 3: A Star is Chopped

No not that kind of food authority!

Hello I am Zin and it is Food Authority Week! This is where the contestants have to pretend they know what they are doing even when they have no idea because that is what Food Network is all about after all! I wonder if they realize how this sounds but I suppose no one is really paying attention to what anyone is actually saying anyway. Giada is doing something else this week so it is only Bobby and Alton.

Mentor Challenge:

They all get a mystery ingredient and have to not only cook with it but sound authoritative with it even if as Alton says they have never seen it before. They have 30 minutes to make a dish and then have to talk about it and make it sound good. The winner will get an advantage in the Star Challenge.

Chris gets bottarga which is salted pressed roe so it is a relative of caviar! It is common in the Mediterranean and he saw it when he was in Italy in fourth grade and he is worried that it is very strong so he does not use too much in his salad with apple fennel and celery. Alton likes the salad but did not taste any bottarga! I think Chris was a little too careful!

Nikki has to use cuttlefish so she will make a semi-vegetarian salad with cuttlefish on the side! That means marinated cuttlefish salad with carrots zucchini and peppers with a raspberry vinaigrette. She says she was a picky eater when she was growing up but she got over it! Alton likes the salad but not her presentation. He heard “I made a great salad and put the cuttlefish on it” and does not see that she grasped the ingredient.

Stacey gets the durian! That is the stinky fruit but she says it tastes sweet once you get past the rotten garbage smell. I am not sure I could get past something like that! She makes custard and talks about being in Malaysia with her father and discovering durian at a roadside stand and wondering what that smelly fruit was then being surprised by the sweet taste! Alton thinks her presentation is rambling but if Giada had been there she would have said it was a nice little story! He likes her custard though.

Rodney finds bitter melon in his bag! He makes a fruit salad with blueberries and apples and gin instead of a pie and puts the toasted seeds on top! It is not a pie but it is made of stuff in pie filling so he calls it “pie style.” Alton is happy because it is good and he sees how Rodney approaches food. Alton gets the Pie Style. I think the gin made him happy.

Lovely has rambutan and it just so happens rambutan was an ingredient on Chopped recently so I know what it is! It is scary looking but just a fruit once it is peeled so not that strange an ingredient. The floral sweet notes remind her of a peach so she makes a rambutan bread pudding with raspberry champagne sauce and every plate is a party! Alton is not so sure because he thinks the raspberry was a mistake and it got in the way.

Russell gets arrowroot and I am surprised because I never saw it whole before only as powder! I used to love Peek Frean arrowroot biscuits but it seems it is something like jicama so he makes bacon broth which sounds awful but it is one of his deadly sins and creates some kind of fried arrowhead root with broth and pecan-dried papaya pesto. That sounds weird! Bobby says the pesto overwhelmed everything.

Viet has umeboshi which he knows about so he makes crab avocado salad with umeboshi vinaigrette but Bobby wants more umeboshi. Viet should not have whined so much about Damaris and paid attention to his own ingredient which by the way is not exactly bland!

Chad has to deal with salsify and unfortunately not only has he never used it he has never heard of it so he mispronounces it as “sassify”! Chris is kind of pleased about that which seems mean for Chris who has been pretty pleasant so far! I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe that he only heard this after the fact and it was something the producers made him say rather than that he sees Chad as direct competition and is glad to see him goof. Chad makes grilled salsify corn and bacon hush puppy. Bobby corrects his pronunciation but the hush pups are dense. That is too bad because they look delicious!

Damaris gets mango pickle an Indian condiment. Viet is jealous that she got something already spiced and whines that it is not fair which is too bad. I liked Viet! I hope he does not turn into a whiner! Even Damaris thinks it is an easy ingredient though! It reminds her of bacon so she uses it as a bacon substitute in sautéed red cabbage and cauliflower. Bobby likes the flavor a lot. the mango pickle is strong and flavor keeps going on and on.

Danushka still thinks her biggest problem is getting her personality across! She is funny! She is quirky! I still think her problem is that her personality is very clear! She is very impressed with the pretty dragonfruit and uses slices sort of like little coasters for a grilled shrimp cup! I think it is interesting that they gave her dragonfruit because I have never tasted it but I have heard it is very pretty with very little flavor to it and that is pretty much Danushka! Bobby wants her to be more creative. Oh come on you knew she was not much of a cook when you brought her on! And it sounds more creative than the fruit salad Rodney made! I can not believe I am defending her but there is so much to criticize her for it does not make sense to pick on silly things. At least she gets it because she says “I think I am failing in the food authority category.”

The Winners are: Rodney and Damaris! They are not only Safe for the week but they get to sit on the Chopped judging panel for the Star Challenge so they do not even have to cook! I wonder if they kept them from doing Chopped so they would not get Chopped! It is pretty bad when you watch a show and feel so manipulated you suspect everything that happens!

Star Challenge:

Alex Guarnaschelli shows up for the Chopped round! Damaris is worried about Alex until she finds out she is on the judging panel and not cooking. She is actually worried about being on the panel because she might make enemies! The contestants are divided into two groups and compete four at a time.

Group One: Sporting Events foods: Beer, hot dogs, peanuts, cotton candy. Damaris is on the panel.

Russell: He figures he has four of his seven deadly sins with lots of fat and salt and sugar and booze so he is ready to go! Alex is nervous at first because he throws three of the ingredients in the food processor but then he adds tofu as the glue to hold it together. I am not sure calling food glue is a good idea! He makes a kind of dumpling so Alex is reassured! He talks about sin and New York and San Francisco during his presentation but does not finish talking in the one minute. They have no idea what the food was. Damaris thinks it is all soft with no crisp. Bobby says it is not his best dish and he does not need all the bells and whistles he needs to BE the bells and whistles. Russell: “I have screwed the pooch royally.”

Chad could stand there and smile and Alex and Damaris would drool. He has two boys (sorry ladies it seems he is taken!) and they love waffles so he makes chicken and waffles except with hot dogs and peanuts instead of chicken. He puts the beer in the waffle batter and makes sauce with the cotton candy. Hot dogs are close enough to bacon to get away with that I think. They are worried he did not test the waffle iron but it seems it worked out ok. Bobby likes his enthusiasm and confidence. Alton likes the waffle even though he did not think he would but it is nice and crisp.

Danushka loves fried food so she makes a beer battered hot dog with peanuts. Bobby asks her what she is doing with the batter and she says she fried it out of boredom. They get very upset! Alex needs a minute! The last person to give lip to Bobby Flay (Paul in 2010) went home that day so I am surprised a trap door does not open up under Danushka right then! She was trying to be ironic but she only got as far as sarcastic/smartass. She calls it a hot dog rocket and adds candy sriricha dipping sauce which is a reasonable thing to do with cotton candy. She is playing the purist card to serve a hot dog that looks and tastes like a hot dog. Her whole dish conceptually works in fact! Bobby likes the color of the sauce. Damaris lets her have it: she still seems like she isn’t excited to be here! Danushka says she is very calm and she does not need smoke and mirrors “but thank you” she tells Damaris which is kind of a nice way of saying “f*** you.” I have to give her points for that one! In this instance she is just not playing the game. I suppose they told her she could have three episodes and in this one she pulled out all the stops. Alex loves how she reacted to Damaris but does not like her presentation. Alton tells her everything is presentation not just when the presentation starts. Nobody mentions how her food tastes!

Viet pulverizes the hot dogs and simmer them in beer to extract the flavor then cooks ramen in that. Then he adds grilled hot dogs and peanuts to the ramen and serves it with the beer broth. That does not sound very good but it looks amazing! He talks about hot dogs in his childhood. I am beginning to wonder about him. First he was born in a Malaysian refugee camp and then his mother made umeboshi and now she is working 18 hours a day and he is making ramen with hot dogs and that is his earliest food memory. Giada would be pleased he has a childhood story for everything! Truth is not that important. Damaris says it is complex and refined for 30 minutes. Bobby likes the presentation but thinks he needs more passion. Do not listen to him Viet! I am still unable to get over what FN did to Emeril even though now when I see him on Top Chef he is pretty normal but they turned him into a buffoon! Do not let them do that to you!

Back in the green room while the second group is working Chad says Damaris did really well as a judge (and he is right) and Viet thinks it is because she is a culinary school teacher. I think it is because she sat behind a desk and did not feel pressure to perform. She should remember that!

Group Two: Food for Kids – chicken nuggets, fruit leather, cheddar goldfish crackers, apple juice. Rodney is on the panel.

Nikki has watched every episode of Chopped but never wanted to actually be on it! She makes Semi-Vegetarian Broccoli and Chicken Nugget Spring Roll with sriracha and fruit leather sauce. Rodney says the presentation is awesome and I do not mean if he means the dish or her speech which I do not even remember. He likes the dish too. Alex says she repurposed the ingredients and integrated them well.

Stacey thinks the ingredients are the back seat of her SUV (not her mini-van she insists but she also insists she is a soccer mom which confuses me). This is what she does every day as a mom! She is supposed to be a chef and she is feeding this crap to her children every day???!!! She makes a chicken pot pie out of it just for Rodney! Time is ticking down and she is still trying to peel apart the puff pastry! Bobby asks if the oven is ready and she says it is super-hot but everyone knows there is not enough time for it to cook. Chris asks if he can help her and takes her stuff out of the oven at 25 seconds. That is nice of him! See that is what I would expect of the compassion guy not to laugh because someone can not pronounce an ingredient! Her pot pie does not cook not even the inside.

Lovely is a Party Girl! I think she is still glam but she makes a Party on a Plate of stuffed bell pepper. What kind of party has stuffed bell peppers? Oh I see she cuts them into pieces and roasts them so it is more like little pepper-plates instead of stuffed peppers. I finally understand Lovely! She has said it all along but this is the first time I have seen it! She makes comfort food, like stuffed peppers but makes it Glam! I get it now. She makes a sauce with apple juice and the leather. Rodney likes the apple pie filling on top. It is not apple pie filling but pie is what he does so that is what he calls it. Alex thinks it is too sweet and needs some garlic or soy. Bobby praises her for being confident and smooth but Alton complains she is too slick and too smooth like she is reading a script right in front of her eyes. This is a tough room you can not make them happy!

Chris is on it! He rips the cap off a bottle with his teeth while running across the floor! He scoops the chicken out of the nugget and makes… chicken nuggets. Huh? He uses buttermilk and rice flour batter which is better than that awful breading I suppose but we still have the mechanically separated meat that goes into those things. He makes a gastrique from the fruit which is a fancy way of saying he adds vinegar to it. He helps Stacey take her pot pie out of the oven and Alex notices he is spending his last minute helping Stacey. Maybe they are showing the two faces of Chris this episode: Chad gets schadenfreude and Stacey gets help. He tells them he turns Something Old into Something New. But then we get to the Star of our Show: The Big Reveal of Deep Dark Personal Secrets! In the Preview I said he was a lacrosse player who had three shoulder surgeries and a culinary school grad and called him a Frat Boy and then we found out when he was a kid his parents were missionaries and he went with them on medical missions and he has been talking about compassion and helping all along and everyone has been wondering how he expects to make a show out of that but now he comes out with it: he is a recovering addict and alcoholic! Coming to FN next year: “The Chef with Something for Everyone!” Are you a sports fan? Got it! Religious? Here you go! In AA? Have I got a chef for you! And after filming he became the guy who was smart enough to hire Charles Ramsey as a dishwasher! Do you want to bet they throw him overboard for Nikki or Damaris? At any rate they are very happy to hear he had a broken life and cooking was his saving grace. Rodney likes the dish too!

Verdict:

Nikki made the best dish and Chad had a good presentation and a good dish so they are both safe along with Rodney and Damaris.

They torment Stacey and Lovely for a while but they are just spanking them and they are safe.

It is down to Russell and Danushka, but Danushka was toast from the moment she told Bobby she was bored. Danushka is out!

She says she is not Miss Positivity 24/7! That is true. She did get through this whole episode without sneering at another contestant and she did call the dragonfruit “gorgeous” so I think this was her Redemption before the Axe episode. Her goal was to show them she is not like anyone on Food Network but she didn’t make that happen. Oh I think she made that happen very well! But there is a reason there is no one like her on FN and they are not going to change that!

In 2010 the witty folks at TWoP designed a show for the contestant Brianna they called “Cooking with Disdain” because she was not happy that other contestants did not know what sriracha and Worcestershire sauce was (I can understand not knowing one, but both? People who want a food show?) and hated to cook for children. I think she and Danushka have a bright future doing that show for the Comedy Channel!

Ed Park: “Slide to Unlock” from TNY, 6/10-17/13

Lettering by Timothy Goodman; photograph by Grant Cornett

If you could type out all your passwords, their entire silent history, they would fill a book you could read in a minute.

And once again it’s the annual Fiction Issue of The New Yorker, this year with the theme “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The story art is a series of pieces by Timothy Goodman and Grant Cornett; they’re all presented on video here, to a jazzy noir soundtrack. Pretty cool.

We put our lives into our passwords, don’t we? Even though we’re not supposed to – don’t use the name or DOB of anyone close to you – we do it anyway, because how else can you remember all those passwords. Not to mention the test questions.

This story starts with a man recalling all the passwords for various accounts. In so doing, it’s as if his life is flashing before his eyes. We learn a great deal about him just from his mental explanations (“your daughter’s name”; the date of his first kiss). It’s fun, but a little strange. In the last two paragraphs, everything becomes clear.

You cycle through your passwords. They tell the secret story. What’s most important to you, the things you think can’t be deciphered. Words and numbers stored in the lining of your heart.

I thoroughly enjoyed this piece – it’s very short (and it has to be; to carry this out much longer would try the patience of even the most devoted oddball-narrative enthusiast), not even two pages, and it’s available online. And yes, it’s in second person. But don’t let that scare you off – even Cliff Garstang, self-avowed second-person-hater, liked the use of it here.

Is it a “trick” ending? It’s the second time in a week I’ve encountered a story that was pretty good but not great until the very end, when everything changed. I think I ran into a rule about that once: if your story doesn’t work without the last sentence, it’s not a good story. Maybe it’s ok if it’s a paragraph instead of a sentence?

In any case, it was an interesting enough story without the ending; the last paragraph elevated it to something else. Maybe that’s why writers use trick endings: when they work, they’re really, really good.

The Tie was Just the Last Straw

This was a scary week – and it had nothing to do with the NSA.

Sorry, I have trouble getting worked up about the government spying on me – not because I take privacy lightly (I don’t) or I think it’s a good idea to trade freedom for safety (not that either). No, it’s just that I’ve assumed all along that everything is being recorded somewhere by someone, so I’m not surprised or alarmed to find out that’s the case. When I first started using the internet, someone told me, “Assume everything you type on your keyboard might end up on 60 Minutes (yes, I am that lame, and that old, to consider Mike Wallace the scariest interviewer around).

But because of the insanity, lots of people have been sending around stuff that is scary. I thought I’d share, so we can all be scared together. Countdown, please:

#4. Spambot Conversations

From Dr. Ricardo Battista (who is a real person – I think) of SocialDeadZone tumblr posted this:

“the delightful spectacle of two spambots being polite to each other”

A couple of weeks ago I wondered out loud (if Twitter can be considered “out loud”) why miscellaneous people were favoriting miscellaneous tweets of mine – I find it hard to believe some European SEO guru was that impressed with my tweet linking to comments on Benito Cereno – but it’s really scary when bots start talking to each other, however politely. I promise I am a real person. I’ll be less polite if that will prove it.

#3. You Don’t Know What You’re Missing from Joe Holmes of Vidthoughts

It’s not news that search results turn up different things for different people, and that searching for, say, a cheap table might result in ads for tables cropping up everywhere you go for the next six months. The Filter Bubble is not new; Eli Pariser invented the term in a TED Talk (followed a year later by a book) more than two years ago. But Joe put it a different way – or maybe he just reminded me, at a time when it seemed to matter more, of something I’d forgotten about – and yeah, he managed to scare me with stuff like this:

“…how much your computer costs influences what results you see…”

“…the result of promoting these algorithms to the office of internet curator is an effective censorship that heavily favors the status quo…”

Joe’s perspective is that of a Youtube newbie trying to find an audience. That’s not something I care about much; I’m perfectly happy being obscure, and if I ever thought anyone was reading this stuff I’d be paralyzed with fear and never write another post. But I am a consumer of electronic information, and censorship bothers me.

And it is censorship – showing us only what we probably already like – and sounds like calcification to me. I think I have eclectic tastes – but is that just what Google thinks? Am I just playing around in the same sandbox over and over again, unaware there’s more out there?

#2. We’ll Dream of Being Blind

From CTHEORY: Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio: There is a great science-fiction short story, it’s too bad I can’t remember the name of its author, in which a camera has been invented which can be carried by flakes of snow. Cameras are inseminated into artificial snow which is dropped by planes, and when the snow falls, there are eyes everywhere. There is no blind spot left.

Louise Wilson, CTHEORY: But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?

Virilio: We’ll dream of being blind.

I have no idea who Paul Virilio is, but it’s obvious why this made the rounds this week. If that isn’t scary enough- this was written in 1994.

#1. And the scariest thing I saw this week:

Chris Hayes has started wearing a tie on air. Forget the government in my internet: get the network out of Chris Hayes’ closet.

I suspect, see, that MSNBC has decided he needs to look more authoritative. The effect, however, is the opposite: he looks like he’s on his way to his Bar Mitzvah. Yes, it’d have to be a Catholic bar mitzvah, but you get the idea: he’s trying to convince the world “Today I Am A Man” and we’re all giggling at how cute it is, in that completely off way when a kid tries to put on grownup clothes. Now, I don’t pay much attention to clothes unless they leap out and demand attention. This change is glaring to those of us who’ve been following him on TV for the past several years. You can’t buy cool – but you sure can sell it for ratings. And yes – I am far more upset about this than I logically should be.

I’m glad I’m not twenty-two. I don’t like the way this ride is going, so I’m glad I’ll be getting off sooner rather than later. Maybe that’s the truly scary thing: my own apathy. Kids in the 60s were saying, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” By golly, they were right.

Susan Daitch: Fall Out (Madras Press, 2013)

Cover Art by Valerie Spain

Years ago I read an article about the unexpected effects of the nuclear testing this country did in New Mexico and Nevada in the 1950s and early 60s. Because of rain patterns, the radioactive fall out was blown far to the other side of the continent, and this would later lead to a spike in certain diseases. That this would occur so far from the location of the testing sites was completely unanticipated. I wanted to explore the idea of unintended and far reaching consequences through a triptych of interlocking stories that became “Fall Out.”

~~ Susan Daitch

Susan Daitch found herself interested in fallout. Initially, the radioactive kind, but, because she’s a writer, it spreads out from there. This is the first of the Madras Press 2013 releases I’ve read, a set of quick stories that follows literal and figurative fallout.

It’s a story-suite that seems like one thing, then another: techno-rant, science fiction, industry exposé, comedy, family saga, social commentary. The overwhelming theme is that actions have consequences: even the smallest thing we do today might echo into years into the future, just like radioactive fallout no one knew existed in the 50s when they were setting off all those bombs. Each of the four sections chains together, showing how characters in the “present” of any one time are affected by what happened in the past.

Zweig wanted to reproduce that ephemeral moment when you hope the hand that extends itself will not crush instead, that the audience’s fear and heightened anxiety will fight with the desire to trust,… He couldn’t quite get it right.

“Conduction,” the first segment, is very short – a few paragraphs – and starts with factual information before segueing into an anecdote that forms the first link of the narrative chain. “Night of the Avengers” carries forward the chain, in a zig-zag way; the descriptions are wonderful. It leads into “Dust Devil,” which is where I started to catch on to the narrative chain. Inspired by a movie, Melman changes his major to archaeology, heads to the desert for field work, and unwittingly walks into a nudist camp. His search for artifacts is fruitless, looters having beaten him to it over the years, but when offered an opportunity to do something about that, he demures. The final section, “Tourist Attraction” tries to pull it all together.

If he took it, or anything else, from the site, he couldn’t donate the objects to a museum whose security would probably be poor, or sell the artifacts and wave goodbye as they traveled to a life in a vitrine in Tokyo, or Paris or Moscow. Once loose in the world they could, just like Palmer’s stolen babies, go anywhere. When he walked out of the cave around nightfall, he took nothing with him. He rolled a few boulders over the entrance to the cave, so looters would miss it, though he knew, as he drove back into town and later to the airport, that this is never possible, and sooner or later everything worth exposing is unearthed.

For me, it didn’t quite come together as a whole; it became another case of the parts exceeding the sum. Still, it was an enjoyable read. Susan Daitch has a fondness for the history of art and film: her novels and stories include frequent elements of film restoration, illustration, and restoration. It’s quite possible I’m just missing a crucial element that’s necessary to get the full impact.

Madras Press always stretches out my comfort zone. This year, they’re using that matte cover I so love (it seems to be catching on everywhere with indie publishers) and the cover art led me to the wonderful website of Valerie Spain where other treasures awaited. As with all Madras Press books, net proceeds benefit a nonprofit organization of the author’s choosing. Daitch’s book will help support Women for Afghan Women, “securing and protecting the rights of disenfranchised Afghan women and girls in Afghanistan and New York, particularly their rights to develop their individual potential, to self-determination, and to be represented in all areas of life: political, social, cultural and economic.” I can see the significance of fallout all over that.

That’s what I love about Madras Press: it’s more than a book, it’s an adventure, and even if the story doesn’t land squarely for me, I fully enjoy the conversation. What more can you ask for from seven dollars.

Taiye Selasi: Ghana Must Go (Penguin NY, 2013)

[Kweku] How could he have known? That a life that had taken them years to put together would take weeks to break apart? A whole life, a whole world, a whole world of their making: dinners, dishes, diapers, deeds, degrees, unspoken agreements, outgoing answering machine messages, You’ve reached the Sais, we’re not here right now. Beep. And won’t be here ever again. Leave a message. Until nothing was left but the statue of the mother in the trunk of the Volvo and the painting, two forms. Oil on canvas. Kehinde Sai, 1993. Signed by the artist. The Bigger Person.

It’s archeology, this book: a dig through the levels of this family, through the lives of these six people. You think you’ve got the picture, then you read on and find out you didn’t know the half of it. You see things through multiple sets of eyes, and you get a sense of who these people are by the things they do and don’t see.

Last March, on the day it was published in the US, I requested it from my library, having been awed by Selasi’s short story “The Sex Lives of African Girls” in BASS 2012. I was the first borrower when it (finally!) arrived. Within a half hour of finishing that library copy, I ran to my Fiercely Independent Local Bookseller, my face still puffy from the crying I did during the last three pages. I told the bookstore guy that I’d just finished my library copy and knew I had to own it. “It’s that good?” he asked. “Yeah,” I told him, “it’s that good.” And then some.

[Taiwo] It occurs to her suddenly how stupid she must look to this driver from Ghana in his sensible coat as he watches her, waiting to see that she gets from his cab to her building and safely inside. She teeters up the stoop in the platform stilettos and turns to look back at the driver, the snow.
Downward it dances and lands on her shoulders and nose and his windshield, the hush of a storm, with the street emptied out of all seekers of warmth and a wind blowing gently. She holds up a hand.
They are angels in a snow globe, both silent and smiling, two African strangers alone in the snow: kindly man in a cab in a bulky beige coat waving back as he pulls from the curb and honks once and a girl on her steps in a short white fur coat crying quietly watching him go.

The language is exquisite. I was reading To the Lighthouse for a class at about the same time, and I kept thinking that both Woolf and Selasi really know how to use nontextual material – sections, chapters, division, and above all, punctuation (I so love a writer who isn’t afraid of the outer edges of the keyboard). I’m also a big fan of non-standard syntax. The sentence fragment. Nested clauses. All the stuff they tell you not to do in English class. I ended up dictating what may be a quarter of the book into a Word document – just to hear it out loud, though I told myself it was to have quotes readily available for a post. I really didn’t need seventeen pages (!) of quotes for this post. And I had a terrible time whittling them down to just these few.

[Kehinde] His siblings and their parents belong to a People, bear the stamp of belonging.
He and Taiwo do not. Their features are a record, yes, but not of a People, the art history of Peoplehood, constant and strong, but the shorter, very messy, lesser history of people, small p, two at least, who one day happened to make love. As children they’d decided they were aliens, or adopted.… It wasn’t until later, at thirteen, in Lagos, just arrived at Uncle Femi’s, ushered into the lounge, that they’d see, from the threshold, standing frozen with wonder, the face that theirs came from, there, white, on the wall.

Given the title, I’d expected the book to be about the 1983 expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria, but it’s barely mentioned; the Sai family is in the US in 1983. Leaving, however, is the lens through which everything is seen. “We were immigrants,” says Fola towards the end of the book. “Immigrants leave.” Leaving – and what remains – permeates the story.

Fola Savage and Kweku Sai are the immigrants, she from Nigeria, he from Ghana, who meet in Pennsylvania in the early 70s, marry, and over twenty years build professional success and beget four children: Olu, the twins Kehinde and Taiwo, and the baby Sadie. Selasi has helpfully provided a little primer in the front of the book with pronunciations and translations for these and other names, as well as a family tree. The “present” of the story is fairly simple (sixteen years after abandoning his family, Kweku dies, and the scattered family gather for his funeral, bringing with them the echoes and effects of past events), but it’s told in fairly complicated fashion: the POV jumps from character to character, the timeline zigzags and includes “remembered past” in the present as well as flashbacks told from the perspective of the characters at the time, the “archeological” effect that involves multiple passes over crucial events in increasing depth and from different points of view. That may be one of my two faint complaints (the other is the parade of epiphanies in the final chapters): it’s a bit more complicated than it needs to be, I think. Still, that’s pretty much a reality check – I loved this book, so I need to be sure I still have some perspective by finding some flaw, no matter how small.

[Taiwo] There was the other one, the first one, the one they’d deleted, the one who backed down a sunset-lit drive while she watched from the window obscured by darkness, having played with the lights to bid Kehinde inside: first off, then on, then off, then on: just sufficiently dark now to see in the car, the man’s face through the windshield, soft, narrow eyes narrower, fighting: then filling with, tears – but resolute.
He would know, too, she thought… She would find him and tell him. He was somewhere in Ghana (according to Olu); she’d go there and wait. She’d be seated on his stoop when he came home from work, in a Volvo as she saw it, the sunset full swing. He’d seen her from the driveway and slow to a stop with that look on his face for that seen in such films when a man on the run returns home before dark and the hit man is waiting, at ease, in plain sight, with his boots on the railing, a gun in one boot where the man in the driveway can see it. Like that. He’d stop, kill the engine, and stare from the car with his eyes meeting hers, hers unblinking, his wet, for he’d see in her face that the light had gone out and would know without words that his daughter was dead, that the girl he had left on a street in North America was not the one sitting on this stoop in West Africa, with boots propped on the railing and pistol in boots, that she’d died because no one would save her.

I think it needs to be that complicated, to tell the intertwined stories, to show them in various combinations, to show events from multiple points of view. It’s necessary to spiral around, getting closer and closer to the truth (I came up with a little graphic, combining this spiral structure with Fola’s tendency to “feel” the well-being of her four children in separate quadrants of her abdomen, to know when something’s wrong by physical sensation). That’s how we live, after all, going through things over and over, thinking about seminal events at various points in our lives, and, with a little luck, learning more about them, more about ourselves, along the way. That’s how these characters progress.

[Fola] She touches her stomach as she does when this happens, when fear hovers shyly, not showing its face yet, when something is wrong but she doesn’t knowo what or with which of the offspring that sprang from this spot. And the stomach answers always…
Fine.
Sadness, tension, absence, angst – but fine, as she birthed them, alive if not well, in the world, fish in water, in the condition she delivered them (breathing and struggling) and this is enough. Perhaps not for others, Fola thinks, other mothers who pray for great fortune and fame for their young, epic romance and joy (better mothers quite likely; small, bright-smiling, hard-driving, minivan-mothers), but for her who would kill, maim, and die for each child but who knows that the willingness to die has its limits.

It’s a pretty audacious choice, to start a book with the death of a main character, but it provides a road map of where the story’s going, and given the complexity, I think provides a degree of orientation. In the first section, Kweku shows us his life from his perspective. In the second, as his ex-wife Fola and the four offspring are notified, we see how he has affected them, particularly his leaving. In the final section, the family gathers for the funeral, for a gripping round of “force your characters up against each other where they can’t escape and see what happens.” Kweku’s absence from the family is the origin of the story; it’s also the axis around which the rest been spinning for decades, so it’s fitting the book should start – and end – with his literal exit from life.

[Olu] For all his life when he looked for his father, like this, scanning quickly to spot Kweku’s face in the bleachers at meets or the seats at recitals, he’d scanned for the contrast, first and foremost for brown. A bluish color brown appropriately likened to chocolate and coffee, the complexion that he had himself – and that no one else had, no other father in Boston. He could always pick out Kweku in an instant by the color. Here at the airport his eyes, as conditioned, scanned quickly for contrast and blinked at the shock: they were all the same color, more or less, all the fathers…

We find out more about Olu, who walks in his father’s footsteps with trepidation; Taiwo, who sees father figures everywhere without realizing it; Kehinde, the artist, entwined with his twin Taiwo in an unspoken bond of guilt and shame; and Sadie, with the privileges and disadvantages of being, at age twenty, “the baby.” At the center is Fola, an unspeakably strong woman who can’t make up for a mistake borne of self-doubt, and Kweku, whose leave-taking is the center of everything.

So much symbolism: Kweku’s imaginary cameraman, carried forward in Taiwo’s mental movie. Fola’s flowers. Sena, who fixes things, who gets people out – or brings them back in. Mr. Lamptey and the mango tree he would not chop down. Slippers, oh god, the slippers, the slippers that protect, that cover the bruises… it was the slippers that undid me at the end.

It’s a very visual book. I can see the portrait of Somayina (and the generation-spanning hatred Femi directs towards it); the basket of slippers by the door; the statue of the Mother of Twins, “iya-ibeji;” the night of uncharacteristically playful, joyous sledding Taiwo mentally edits over time to remove Kweku after his departure; Kehinde’s art, the canvas he signs then gives his father, unaware of the moment as it happens; the photograph that so puzzles Sadie, until she realizes its significance. And the battered brown leather slippers.

[Sadie] She wants to tell Fola that she loves her, that she’s sorry, that she didn’t for a moment mean to say those horrid things, and that however it appears from that apartment in Coolidge Corner, whatever Fola may think, that she isn’t alone – but can’t: for two of the four things aren’t true, and she doesn’t have Fola’s new number.
…
What she couldn’t tell Fola is how much less hurtful it is not to belong to a family not her own than to sit there in Boston, just the two of them smiling, rehearsing all the reasons that no one comes home.

Death, separation, shame, otherness, betrayal, rage, connection, need: it’s all in there, in these people with their strengths and flaws. And some beautiful reading; the individual sections and chapters are wonderful little stories in themselves, and make more sense, deeper sense, as you continue to read. For most of us, it’s a multi-read book. On first read, Taiwo’s comment on pg. 41 – “Relief that she knew, that she’d gotten it right, tinged with terror at what might happen were she one day to be wrong” – only meant what it said. On second read, it leapt off the page. I barely noticed the mention of the scar on Fola’s abdomen the first time through; that, too, had new significance later. I love a book with a good second read – and I suspect this one will have good third, fourth, and fifth reads as well.

In 2005, Selasi (then writing as Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu) wrote “Bye-bye Babar,” an article about the “Afropolitan” – the descendents of educated African 1960s emigrants to Europe or the US, grown up now, globally comfortable, who bear the imprint of Africa yet struggle to answer the question, “Where are you from?” Her earlier story, and this book, are continuations of that thought. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around “African-ness” since Africa is a big place, a diverse place. But so is the US, so is Europe, so is Latin America, and I don’t have trouble wrapping my head around those concepts. I’ll have to try harder.

[Kehinde] he can’t read her thoughts.
For years he had. Read – or more accurately heard – them. As if they were words in her voice in his head, only snippets but clear ones, and clearer the feelings that went with the thoughts; he could feel what she felt.
He still doesn’t know when he lost good reception. It wasn’t in Nigeria, for all the horror. After college for the last time he saw her or earlier? He doesn’t trust his memory when he tries to think back. The wrist-slitting scrambled his memories, rearranged them. The archives remain but are all out of order. He can’t tell what age he was when such-and-such happened; couldn’t say in which country he was in which year. He knows that at some point the line filled with static, then little by little went properly dead. He senses his sister – still experiences her presence like the space between magnets to a finger passing through – but can’t hear, so he doesn’t know, her now.
Radio silence.
“He’s gone” made her laugh, and he couldn’t hear why.

As silly as it sounds, the book smells good (oh, my, I’m really smitten, y’think?). I’ve become quite enamored lately with the sensory aspect of reading material. Tin House remains my best-smeller, with What the Zhang Boys Know and the 2013 Madras Press collection of four teeny tiny books taking first prize for the warm, diffused matte cover I so love. Ghana Must Go is right up there, with a pleasant smell and a wonderful dust jacket: slightly parchment-textured on the outside, high-gloss on the inside, the embossed title written in Selasi’s own hand (really: the two a’s and the two G’s are different; it’s not a handwriting font, though it probably should become one). I’m a little concerned I’m developing some strange book fetish.

Selasi is multi-faceted: she’s a screenwriter, photographer, essayist, and, by the way, pianist (Rachmaninoff to Coltrane) and cellist. But she can’t add, which fully endears her to me. Interviews can be found all over the ‘net: I already referenced Melissa Harris-Perry‘s wonderful sit-down with Selasi last Spring in a previous post (“this is the white woman’s privilege. Wet hair.” MHP turns hair into sociopolitical gold every time). She also spoke with Diane Rehm on NPR (there is autobiographical material in the book – Selasi’s father is Ghanaian, her mother Nigerian, she was born in London, has a twin sister, her parents separated when she was young, after which she grew up in Brookline and went to Yale before Oxford – but “the hurts, shames, loves, motivations arose from the fictional world”), and Ellah Allfrey of Granta (she lives in a “cd-shuffle” of New York, Delhi, and Rome).

To him, who could name grief by each one of her faces, the logic was familiar from a warmer Third World, where the boy who tails his mother freshly bloodied from labor (fruitless labor) to the edge of the ocean at dawn – who sees her place the little corpse like a less lucky Moses all wrapped up in palm frond, in froth, then walk away, but who never hears her mention it, ever, not once – learns that “loss” is a notion. No more than a thought. Which one forms or one doesn’t. With words. Such that one cannot lose, nor ever say he has lost, what he does not permit to exist in his mind.
Even then, at 24, a new father and still a child, a newly motherless child, Kweku knew that.

In the Granta interview, Selasi says, “Somehow I would have to earn my family’s forgiveness for not being a doctor.” Yep, I think this should do it.

Susan Perabo: “Indulgence” from One Story #178, 5/3/13

“I wanted to write a love letter to cigarettes. I wanted to write a story that genuinely, without irony, celebrated smoking… now, ten years after quitting, I recall cigarettes with an affection that I feel for no other nonliving thing.”

~~ Susan Perabo, One Story Q&A

You’ve got to read this story.

I’m not going to say much about it. I’m not going to trace the plot, or explain how I identify with the characters, or guiltily admire the structure, or even relate my experience of reading it (with one exception). I’m not even going to link to the author’s interview at the One Story website as I usually do (the quote above will have to suffice unless you want to go googling) because I think it’s too spoilery, even before you get to the capital SPOILER ALERT warnings. And, above all, I’m not even going to talk about why I won’t talk about it.

But you’ve got to read this story. Trust me on this. You should probably read it at a time and place where it doesn’t matter if you melt into a sobbing puddle of goo for a while afterwards. Not, say, on your lunch hour.

If you, like me, are an ex-smoker, you might find it a difficult story to read. As is obvious from the Q&A quote above, Perabo is an ex-smoker. I could tell, as I read, it was written by a smoker – not someone who lived with a smoker or observed smokers – because she got so many of the tiny details right. The “musical wheeze.” Missing cigarettes between cigarettes. And the best one of all:

What I loved about smoking, after my first day as a smoker, maybe even after my first puff, was that a cigarette was a thing to reach for every time I wanted to reach for something. It was a permanent answer to the persistent question now what?

That was the best thing about smoking for me: it gave me something to do. I’m so glad to know I’m not alone.

Now, it may seem a little narcissistic (a little?) to write about myself, instead of addressing the story this post is ostensibly about. But I can’t discuss the story – even a little, even in an abstract way, which would be the best way to discuss it, talking about form, about rules, about my experience of reading it – without spoiling it, I believe. So I’m left with smoking.

Ok, that’s just ridiculous. Let me try to get a little closer:

Don’t go away thinking it’s a story about smoking. It’s a story about indulgence on many levels (I never realized the depth of the word before). It’s a brilliant love story in form, content, and effect. It’s a story that will get you thinking about the decisions you make, the ones that seem pretty shaky at the time, and how, even if you make a decision with love, you may not know if it was the right one for a long time. In fact, you may never know it at all, unless someone tells you. And inversely: someone else may never know, unless you tell them.

You’ve got to read this story. It costs $2.50, the price of about eight cigarettes. It’ll last a lot longer.

Literary Death Match: PortlandME, Ep. 2

Take one part literary reading, two parts cheesefest, generous splashes of quiz show and wrestling match, suffuse with humor, spread on local writers/performers, then blend that concoction into the population of a tiny city always overshadowed by its more popular west-coast twin in the mixing bowl that is the Space Gallery, and you’ve got Literary Death Match, Portland (ME), Ep. 2 from May 10.

The specifics are available on the LDM Journal so I won’t bore with links and biographies. LDM is anything but boring. Even if you have no interest in “Literature” it’s fun. After all, out of an hour and a half, only 28 minutes is actual reading; the rest is hilarious commentary that manages to combine roast and feedback (Ron Currie, Jr.’s bicep vein was a major factor, as were diaphragms).

Zin commented on Ep. 1 back in October, but why should Zin have all the fun (not to mention, Zin has declared Sunday with Zin is on hiatus for the duration of Food Network Star, but that’s another issue). Ep. 2 was just as good, even if my comments are not as, um, colorful. Lewis Robinson came away with the Title of LDM Champion.

LDM is a lot of fun, but they respect literature (come on, Pulitzer Prize Pictionary?). I’m all for whatever makes reading more accessible. And they’re everywhere, including Iceland, so they’ve probably been in your neck of the woods. They made a TV pilot last December, which, hey, I’d subscribe to HBO just for that, and I didn’t subscribe for Aaron Sorkin (though it was close), so that tells you something.

Oh, the Humanities!

“Literature” by James Koehnline (2007)

More Online Fiction…

“for the love of books” by Vipul Mather

…because you can never have enough.

I updated my Online Fiction Page only three months ago, but I recently started following #StorySunday on Twitter (which I’m also adding to my Cool Sites for Readers and Writers page as a Tool for Readers, even though it isn’t exactly a website), and have come across several stories in quick succession that I simply must share right now or I’ll burst.

Flash:

“The Woodcutter’s Wife” by Ben Black, from Smokelong – you’ll never think of Hansel and Gretel in the same way again.

“Endnotes” by Gregory Norminton, from The Guardian, 01/29/08 – did I mention I love a story that doesn’t look like a story? This brilliant gem was part of #StorySunday of May 12, contributed by Rachael de Moravia.

“Unspeakable Acts” by Philip Langeskov, from New Writing, 10/02/12 – commissioned by the BBC to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of W. G. Sebald, broadcast on “The Verb” on the 14th of October, 2011. Contributed to #StorySunday on June 2 by Anna Metcalfe

Short Stories:

“An Index of How Our Family Was Killed” by Matt Bell, from Conjunctions, 3/4/09 (ok, so it took me a while to stumble across it) – I’m always a sucker for a story that doesn’t look like a story.

“Male Seeking Female” by Claire Burgess, from Annalemma, 10/26/11 – fate, missed connections, and love, in a meditation on the nature of reality.

“In Hanneke’s Room” by Kate Brown, from Swansea Review, Spring 2013 – sometimes we get what we need in the strangest ways; contributed to the May 12 Story Sunday by Tania Hershman.

Other Forms:

“For A.M., 1996- 2013” by Jason Novak, from The Rumpus, 03/15/13 – one of the most heart-breaking things I’ve ever read (and I’ve read a lot of heartbreaking things). Thirty seconds from wherever you are to a puddle of tears, guaranteed. Yet somehow it’s not maudlin, just honest.

Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927)

There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever her own occupation might be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling.

I sleptwalked through this story when I was in high school in the early 70s (it was a really bad year for me) then encountered it in the late 80s in college (yeah, it took me a while to get there). I have to admit, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to find it on the syllabus for the Fiction of Relationship class. But I’m glad I had the opportunity to dig into it again, this time when I’m in the mood to do so rather than worrying about a grade. That’s the great thing about these Coursera classes – you don’t get anything out of them but understanding, so why bother unless you want to learn something?

And whaddya know – third time’s the charm. I finally “get” it. I’m not saying I’ve become a huge fan, but I can recognize and appreciate the techniques.

It’s one of those novels in which very little happens: a woman beginning a painting is the height of the action. What really works is that Mrs. Ramsey dies halfway through, in the short second section, yet is still a presence in the third part of the book. The pacing does exactly what it’s supposed to do: it focuses our attention, in this case, on what is being thought rather than done, and how those two things sometimes don’t match.

I’m very fond of writers who actually use punctuation, sections, paragraphs, extratextual devices in the service of their work. I’m reading a book right now that does this. I love it. Punctuation – not just the period and comma and quotes, but all of it, the semicolon, the colon, the dashes – is, after all, there to be used, and not haphazardly, but for a purpose. I also appreciate what’s done here with stream-of-consciousness and irony. So I “get” it – I see technique – but it’s still not a book I particularly enjoy – I don’t “get into” it.

As usual, I went looking for some informed discussion, and found an NPR interview from “The State of Things” between Frank Stasio and Duke Professor Reynolds Price. It’s an odd interview, but does contain some great moments, to wit:

Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the
sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.

[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his
arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before,
his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]

Frank points out Mrs. Ramsey dies “after a comma.” It’s not just a comma, it’s a comma in a bracketed sentence tucked into the quick little second section. It’s an interesting technique, given the “waves of time” and the constancy of the lighthouse and how omnipresent Mrs. Ramsey still is in the third section, particularly to Lily, to minimize her actual death in this way.

Prof. Price, in fact, considers Lily the protagonist of the book. He’s an exceptionally distinguished professor, but my first reaction was to argue with him; it seems to me Mrs. Ramsey gets that claim, even though she’s a memory for half the book, because she still has the most influence. Yet, I see what he means: the climax of the novel belongs to Lily, and my favorite passage, the sum of the whole book to me, as quoted up top, is said by Lily. I find it interesting that he does not consider Lily to be a representation of Woolf – she was far more accomplished and well-read than Lily – so he disagrees with the fairly standard interpretation. I like that, a voice of dissent. He does accept the Ramseys as stand-ins for Woolf’s parents, however. There’s a definite passing-of-the-torch going on, so even though Lily is not Mrs. Ramsey’s daughter, she reads like she is.

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsey seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm’s fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like a pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation.

Frank mentions that in most passages, the sentence structure is such that Mrs. Ramsey’s thoughts are the primary part of the sentence, while her actual actions – reading a book or brushing her hair – are contained in subordinate clauses. It’s a book about thoughts, not actions, so they get the more dominant role; the actions reflect or contrast with the thoughts.

One of them notes that “She is writing a book which cannot be read adequately when one is planning tomorrow night’s dinner for four guests.…” That’s very true. It takes a great deal of concentration, and even then, it’s very hard to follow, just because of the number of characters introduced. Even on my third read, I had to keep a list of who’s who. Prof. Rice thought that was appropriate, since “she was a woman who always found it hard to do two things at once”

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll
have to be up with the lark,” she added.

They pay special attention to that first line. It starts with “Yes,” pretty dramatic, and of course the promise of the lighthouse, but what I found enlightening was Frank’s further comment: “we can get there but you can’t be skittering around on terra firma, you’ve got to be up there flying around with the larks.” That’s interesting to me because it’s somewhat opposite of what is expected: terra firma should be the place where things get done, but for the Lighthouse, that symbol of dreams, a different approach is required. This meshes with the reversal of sentence structure as well. Which is another point the Professor makes: the unity of theme, content, and form.

I’d already noticed the stabilizing, uniting effect Mrs. Ramsey had – it’s hard not to, when Lily expressly mentions it in the third section – but they comment that Mr. Ramsey is all about analysis, breaking things into pieces, fragmentation, whereas Mrs. Ramsey is about synthesis, bringing things together.

I also found the original NYT review from May of 1925, which was reprinted online in June 2008.

I’m looking forward to the class on this novel; unfortunately, it’s one of those things that other people seem to get more out of than I do, but I’m glad I at least get to listen in.

Steven Millhauser: “Thirteen Wives” from TNY, 5/27/13

TNY Art by Balint Zsako

My wives get along very well with one another, though their relation to me is more complex. People sometimes ask, “Why thirteen wives?” “Oh,” I always say, putting on my brightest smile, “you can’t have too much of a good thing!” In truth, the answer is less simple than that, though the precise nature of the answer remains elusive even to me.

Hello again, Steven. You’ve thrown another curve ball, haven’t you? I have to admit, I loved reading this, and found it very accurate, if by that I might mean that all of us are many different people at once and fulfill different roles, and the best kind of spouse is one who shifts gears at just the right moment. Who knows when to comfort, when to help, when to challenge or scold or just… disappear. It’s a great deal more interesting than that old-hat list of multiples so many consider to be included in “wife”: friend, lover, helpmeet – or, worse, the awful one that lists her by her uses: housekeeper, nurse, teacher, chef, accountant.

But you don’t write that sort of thing, the sort of thing I can read along with and nod and say, “Yes, me too, I know exactly what he means” to myself. You write things that make me scratch my head and read again and again – I had to print out and cut into pieces “A Voice in the Night” (that’s not a complaint; I loved the adventure). You write things that make me work for it (again, that’s not a complaint).

So what am I missing?

Is there some progression here as you list your wives? Forgive me for being reductionist – I know you don’t write mere lists – but since the story is available online it would be ridiculous for me to include thirteen individual quotes, one for each wife, and I certainly wouldn’t want to leave any out. So here is my bare-bones version of your wives:

Balanced partner, Comforter, Contrarian, Perfection, which, as you’ve discovered, is in itself an imperfection, Cheater (in thought, deed, or just possibility), Rejector, Double, Impossible Promise,
Secret-sharer, Needy invalid, Fixer, Opportunity Missed, Gone.

And I see something interesting. Maybe it’s not one woman at the same time. Maybe it’s in chronological order, with a few detours. We all start out with our ideas about marriage, the “You do the cooking and I’ll clean up” intentions, the “I’ll never wear a flannel nightgown” vows (silly fools who don’t appreciate the slow reveal, not to mention the softness of cotton and the comfort of warm fabric), have a first fight, make up for it, cheat (some of us skip this step, you know, it is possible), come together and grow apart as we age… is this a story? A story of a wife who made him (it is published as fiction) promise to turn off the machines when the diagnosis came through, kept it secret until the signs began to show, was beautiful in her neediness, made it easy for him, leaving onlu regrets of what they didn’t experience, and a memory in her wake, a figure that can’t quite be glimpsed?

Or am I overreading again, and it’s just a list? I don’t know, Steven, and I’m not sure it has to be any one thing. Maybe, like the thirteen wives, a story can be many things at once, rotating to show different faces depending on where we are when we read it.

My thirteenth wife is abundant and invisible; she exists only in the act of disappearing. This perpetual annihilation is her highest virtue, for by ceasing to exist she increases her being; by refusing to be a particular woman, she becomes a multitude. Though I am denied my thirteenth wife, who is always other, denial is her generosity, and I’m grateful to her for more lasting gifts: the gift of memory, the gift of desire, the gift of astonishment

In the end I have no idea what you’re doing here [Addendum: I just got an idea - you have no actual flesh-and-blood wives - these are imaginary wives you bring out in your imagination when you need them...], but, unlike when I didn’t know what you were doing in “Phantoms,” I love the ride. So thank you.

A little detour

Chris Hayes – political commentator, formerly UP, now ALL IN (I shudder to think what his next show will be called) – usually tweets about, obviously, political stories, the economy, climate change, that sort of thing. Occasionally, basketball. But Monday night, as the Memorial Day weekend came to a close, he sent out something unusual for him:

I thought maybe I was misunderstanding the term “cover,” but what the hey, I clicked on the Youtube link. And found my obsession for the week: LP.

It was very confusing at first. What’s LP? I’m old enough to read it as long-playing; is it the name of the group? And gee, forgive me if I’m being politically incorrect, but… is that a girl or a boy? The song, unfamiliar to me (like most contemp music) is “Halo.” The singing is not always “pretty.” But the longer it went on, the more mesmerized I was. I listened to it again. And again. It’s seven minutes long, but I couldn’t stop watching.

Here it is: When I watch the original, by Beyonce, I see a pretty woman singing a pretty song about a pretty man. It’s nice. But when I watch LP perform it, I believe in salvation.

I finally tore myself away to look at what else LP had posted, and randomly clicked on “Into the Wild,” and, about a minute in, went slightly insane.

Chances are, even if you’re as out of touch with contemporary music as i am, you’ve heard LP’s voice, though you may not recognize the name the singer goes by. Think: commercial. Rock climbing… got it? “Somebody left the gate open…” Yeah. That’s LP. That’s “Into the Wild.”

In a CNN interview, LP talked about performing that song, like at SXSW, how she (finally got that figured out; now all I have to do is figure out why it mattered in the first place) struggles to not smile just before she sings that line. Because she knows what’s going to happen:

Always after that line, she knows, the murmurs start.
“I see a few of them, every time, look at their friend and go, ‘Ohhhh.’ It’s kind of funny and embarrassing at the same time,” LP said during an interview at SXSW. “And awesome.”

I spent some time, quite a while ago, hunting down the song that went with the ad, and wasn’t able to find anything back then – not surprising since all I had to go on was a single phrase. The mystery is finally solved. But I’ve been spending way too much time on YouTube this week. LP, you’re amazing, but this old lady needs her life back.

I do this sometimes, get stuck on a song, listen to it obsessively. My previous record was 36 iTunes plays over 3 days for Ballboy’s “I Gave Up My Eyes To A Man Who Was Blind.” I think, if I combine views of both “Halo” and “Into the Wild,” I surpassed that by a wide margin this week.

Thanks, Chris.

Kafka – “Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Country Doctor”

Edward R. Shaw: “Insects Playing Poker”

For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny…. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes call “exformation,” which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve.

~~ David Foster Wallace, “Laughing with Kafka” from Harper’s, July 1998.

This Kafka trio is also part of the Fiction of Relationship course, although, according to the one-week-to-go-email I got yesterday, “In the Penal Colony” seems to have been removed. But it’s a very cool story, in terms of doing interesting things with words (though I suppose that applies to all of Kafka), so I’m including it here anyway.

“Metamorphosis”

Yeah, that one: on my first go-round in eighth grade, the guys went, “Wow, a guy turns into a cockroach, cool!” and the girls went “Ewwwww…” and lots of us gave up on English class (and some gave up on literature in general) because the teacher managed to make it boring, going on for an hour about symbols and asking those stupid leading questions like, “What does the apple represent?” when all we all wanted to do is talk about how it’s like The Fly and then Martin drew a cockroach on Janet’s notebook that creeped her out so she threw it out, and for days a guy went around waving his hands in the air screaming, “Help me, I’m on my back and I can’t roll over” to show how sophisticated he was, now that he’d read French literature. “It’s German,” someone told him, and then we all laughed at him for pretending to be grown up when he was still a kid just like we all were because nobody knew what to do with this stuff.

Maybe it plays differently in 2013.

I wish we’d had DFW as a teacher, in 8th grade, or at any of the multiple points since then at which I’ve encountered Kafka; I’m glad I stumbled over the above-quoted article, taken from a speech given at the PEN American center earlier that year.

I thought about the relationships between Gregor and his family as I read – it’s hard not to – but also about the family itself. Gregor is the POV character, but (remembering what Manuel Gonzales did with the father who turned into a werewolf) what must it be like for a family to discover one of their own has become a bug? I was thinking in terms of severe disability – the grotesque euphemism “vegetative state,” advanced Alzheimer’s, severe psychosis. I once wrote a story draft about a man who loses function – first his sight, then his hearing, then body parts, until finally he’s only a beating heart – to consider how much could be taken away before the main character decided, “This is not my husband.” I couldn’t make the story work; Kafka would’ve.

Kafka did:

… [M]uch of the story centers around the question: what is a person? At what point does alteration alter you out of being human? (The deformed, the chronically ill, and the elderly know something about these matters.)
….
In Kafka’s most interesting work, human status is precisely what is being taken away. Not by any act of cruelty but rather by a writerly imagination that sees the human as a category you could exit.

~ ~ Arnold Weinstein, A Scream Goes Through the House (Random House, 2003) p. 104

It’s a different story to me each time I read it. Once, it was all about the sister; once it was all about work. I hated my job at the time and wished I’d turn into a bug (a wish I wished I could’ve taken back when a few years later, I did). Andrew David King, in “Black to Green to Gone,” put it much better: “…[W]ithin the first few pages of The Metamorphosis, Samsa worries that his new existence as an arthropod will affect his job….[I]f he’s going to be late for work, it hardly makes a difference whether he’s fallen ill or turned into a bug.” Still later, it was all about the language and symbolism. It’s a story that offers more with each read, that changes as the reader changes, which is why it’s still a good read, forty years after Martin and Janet and all the rest.

“In the Penal Colony”

Kafka’s authority figures are never just hollow buffoons to be ridiculed, but are always absurd and scary and sad all at once, like “In the Penal Colony”‘s Lieutenant.

~~ David Foster Wallace, “Laughing with Kafka” from Harper’s, July 1998.

Kafka wrote this story in 1914, before the Beer Hall Putsch, before the Nazi party, when Hitler was just a name for a kid who failed his physical for the Austrian army. Kafka wrote this story about an officer in love with his horrifyingly effective killing machine years before his countrymen would create the horrifyingly efficient killing system that would become known as the Holocaust. That isn’t to say that the seeds of that atrocity weren’t already sprouting, of course; German Nationalism began in the late 19th century, and German Romanticism even earlier.

But the story is not about Germany at all. It’s about communication.

Communication? That threw me. I thought at least it had something to do with capital punishment, or maybe military or dictatorial insanity. But, as Weinstein points out in A Scream Goes Through the House (p.122), the punishment is a little too stark for that: it’s “torture, not justice.” That makes sense; to talk about capital punishment, the idea that there might be at some level to someone a good reason for it would need to be demonstrated, and there’s nothing here that justifies much punishment at all, let alone twelve hours of torture by writing. Though the explanation the Officer gives is technically convoluted and the machine is downright Rube Golbergian, that’s what it boils down to: the prisoner will be written to death:

Kafka is asking us to weigh language as an adequate or inadequate bridge between humans.
….
Thick-skinned humans are trapped within their bodies, cannot cross the bridge from me to you. This is what the machine is designed to correct. The beak that rends the flesh of prisoners, that writes into their bodies the “sentence” they receive, is a writing machine. Kafka has devised a kind of fleshy semiotics that aims at no less than a miracle: the production of a language that would be one with what it says, that would collapse the classic sign/referent division. Try to imagine a language that is immediate, so that the letters “l-o-v-e” actually become love rather than the word designating love.

~ ~ Arnold Weinstein, A Scream Goes Through the House (Random House, 2003) p. 123

What stood out to me most is the Officer’s seemingly insane devotion to his death machine, the earnestness with which he sought to convince the Traveler of its perfection and value. Kafka must have had a reason for doing that, beyond convincing us that the guy is a nut-job; a few sentences, at most a paragraph or two, would’ve taken care of that, but for page after page the Officer goes on describing the intricate workings of the machine – and, failing to convince the Traveler of its beauty, finally gives up and avails himself of his own device.

Through his explanation, he skips over the bit about digging out flesh and even death, but merely focuses on what the machine does. That, then, is the, forgive the pun, point.

In his Kenyon Review article (the one that in fact pointed me to the DFW piece) “Black to Green to Gone,” Andrew David King links this idea of communication to tattooing as a literary form: the message becoming flesh. I get a little lost between reading and writing somewhere in his argument, but here it’s crystal clear:

Understanding and deciphering: this is what “the script,” which is carved into the skin and thereby learned, works to encourage. The assumption is that what any author undergoes when creating a work is a process of learning that happens through the infliction of wounds.

~~ Andrew David King, “Black to Green to Gone” from Kenyon Review, 9/2/12

There are times when I wish understanding a text was as easy as having it carved into my skin. But it’s right there in the text, as the Officer explains the effects to the Traveler:

You see, it’s not supposed to kill right away, but on average over a period of twelve hours. The turning point is set for the sixth hour. … For the first six hours the condemned man goes on living almost as before. He suffers nothing but pain. …He first loses his pleasure in eating around the sixth hour. … But how quiet the man becomes around the sixth hour! The most stupid of them begins to understand. It starts around the eyes and spreads out from there. A look that could tempt one to lie down with him under the Harrow. Nothing else happens. The man simply begins to decipher the inscription. He purses his lips, as if he is listening. You’ve seen that it is not easy to figure out the inscription with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds.

~~ Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”

The turning point – I wish I knew the German, does this mean the same thing it does in English? Does it have the same literal plus figurative meaning, a point at which the body is turned or the point at which the overall course of things changes? I’m still not sure exactly how this works, if the Condemned Man is flipped over once at six hours, or if the physical turning is continuous, but in any case, it is at hour six that he starts to get it: understanding occurs, he is listening. Like Helen Keller and “water,” he gets it, and it shows in his eyes: “A look that could tempt one to lie down with him under the Harrow,” says the Officer. Really? But there it is – the leap from physical to figurative. Nobody wants to get written to death, but how many people right now are trying to read something, trying to communicate, to understand, to be understood? Why, I’m doing it myself, at the same moment I read the words, in a kind of collapse of time.

We’ve all heard or said something like, “It’s engraved in my mind forever.” It isn’t the writing the Officer admires, envies: it’s the understanding. That sixth hour is pretty amazing, literarily speaking – and now, don’t I sound like the Officer, reveling in the art of the thing without considering what the Condemned Man is going through.

“The Country Doctor”

I rather hit the jackpot on this one in the form of one Richard T. Gray who, in addition to the usual academic achievements, just happens to be, or at least was in 2011, Editor-at-Large of the Journal of the Kafka Society of America. Which is all well and good – I mean, somebody has to be, right? – but the best part is, he also stores his lecture notes for the classes he teaches online where any fool googling around can stumble upon them.

But let me start with the story.

It reminded me of Ishiguro’s “A Village After Dark,” which was a practice run for the grammar of dreams he used in The Unconsoled. The coincidence of first one thing, then another, going wrong as the doctor prepares to depart, the sudden coincidence of everything being solved, the wound that isn’t there then is, the distortions of time – even the ending, which takes place on transportation! – felt very familiar to me. I’m reminded of what Wallace said about Kafka’s stories being not so much surreal as nightmarish. So I was glad to see it is a dream-form piece.

Dr. Gray’s lecture notes begin with the original German in the opening sentence: ” Ich war in grosser Verlegenheit” is usually translated as “I was in great difficulty” or “I was in great perplexity.” Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about German beyond “Mein Herr Marquis, ein Mann wie Sie” (don’t worry, it’s not important, trust me). This is all well and good – “Verlegenheit” does indeed mean “dilemma” – but it also means “embarrassment,” and look what happens when you feed “verlegen” into Google: to edit, move, lay, shift, adjourn, misplace… But since words don’t always behave the way translation software thinks they do, I’ll rely on Dr. Gray, who points to three specific translations:

1) “dilemma”
2) Verlegen as an adjective means “shame” or “embarrassment….
3) Verlegen as a verb means “to misplace”, to “lose” due to being distracted, etc….
….
Thus one of the opening words of Kafka’s German text is overdetermined (to use Freud’s terms) by concentrating into one single word these 3 different possible meanings or allusions. Each possibility points in a different direction, but each direction proves to be relevant for a deep-psychological reading of Kafka’s text.
–Reflect on these 3 motifs in the text: Dilemmas (and their solution); Shame (and its consequences); Misplacing (or repressing) important information/things/people, etc.

~~ Richard T. Gray, Lecture Notes

This alone would keep me pretty busy for a while. I’ve always been interested in what goes into translation (it’s incredibly complicated, particularly with something this nuanced), as well as suspicious that translated works can’t possibly produce the same experience as the original, and here it is right in the first line, an implication that is lost – misplaced! – in translation.

And again we encounter doubles. I got a whiff of this when I first read the story; the “rose coloured” description of the worms and wounds can’t be a coincidence. But what Gray sees is that the doubling meets in the middle: at one end, we start with the Doctor, at the other end, with the Groom at the other, working through Rose and the Boy, until they all end up in bed together.

He links this to the conflict between Responsibility (the Doctor’s overt attitude towards the Boy) and Lust (the Groom’s overt attitude towards Rose), and the Freudian sublimation of erotic wishes into ambition – in this case, incomplete sublimation, since he is stripped by the family and placed into bed with the Boy. To borrow and slightly modify Gray’s exquisitely simple yet extremely communicative graphic from his notes:

Doctor     ->     ambition     ->     Boy/Rose     <-     eroticism     <-     Groom

But isn’t there rage at the end? In the last paragraph, we get words like lost, robbed, naked, abandoned, old, betrayed – "once one responds to a false alarm on the night bell, there's no making it good again – not ever." Is this the price of sublimation? Or is it rage at the failure of the sublimation?

Gray also discusses the tense shifts in the piece. I'm awfully proud of myself for having noticed them, since I often miss such things, but it seemed pretty overt to me. He relates this to the Doctor standing in suspended time at what for us is the end of the story: the present I reflecting on the historic I. I wonder – is this a kind of reliving the experience – a literary version of the flashbacks of PTSD?

This bloc was terrific reading; I’ve already I have a weakness for weird, and weird is even better when accompanied by insights from people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre (1847)

Rebecca Brown: “String”

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is—I repeat it—a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.

~~ Charlotte Brontë, Preface to the Second Edition, 1847

I’d managed to avoid this novel until now; all I knew was that it involved a Mr. Rochester and a madwoman in the attic, and that Wide Sargasso Sea was intended as a feminist prequel to change the perception of that madwoman. I’ll admit, I wasn’t particularly pleased to see it on the syllabus for this upcoming Fiction of Relationship class. On reading it, however, I was pleasantly surprised.

Sure, the language is a bit much, particularly the “Dear Reader” addresses, and some of the story is absurd to modern sensibilities; still, I was drawn into things. The suspense, the drive of “what happens next,” of “I know she’s going to get out of this, but how?” often spurred me into reading a chapter or two more than I’d planned at a given time. That’s a very good sign. When I watched the 1996 Franco Zeffirelli movie on YouTube, I was disappointed at all that had been left out. The long speeches – “talking heads,” they’d call them now in writing workshops that worship clean prose and action – are essential to the overall work. (On a side note, one Eyre enthusiast – from Chile, no less – has gathered the proposal scene from four different movie versions onto one page.)

I found much of it psychologically astute; interesting, given that psychology as any kind of discipline didn’t exist in the mid-19th century. I felt a genuine connection between Jane and me. I confess that I once told someone it was as if we were connected by a rubber band, and when he moved away from me, the elastic snapped painfully back against me. Ok, I was young (well, not that young, but young enough), but I was surprised to see the “string” image used here, and by Rochester, of all people – who does not have the excuse of youth. Maybe I wasn’t quite the sap I thought I was.

Jane’s period of unrequited longing for Mr. Rochester – her pain at watching him court Blanche Ingram, her torment as she tries defeat her heart with her head – was pitch perfect; those who think it maudlin have never been in that space, caught between hope and despair by an emotional longing beyond control, and considering Jane has substantial emotional control, that’s saying a lot. Then I cheered for her as first Rochester, then St. John, tried to bully her into a relationship on their terms, terms she found disagreeable – as Rochester’s mistress after the revelation of the presence of his wife, and as St. John’s wife in a marriage devoid of love or passion, undertaken for the sake of appearances and utility. They argued very effectively to get their respective ways – diametrically opposite ways, as they represent opposite forces – and though she wavered, she didn’t fold.

I very much enjoyed the way religion was incorporated. The pacing also struck me: the eight “happy” years at Lowood, after the reforms but before Miss Temple married and left, were omitted. That’s the longest stretch of time in the novel, in fact, but it’s unnecessary. I’m reminded of Steve Almond’s admonition, “Slow down where it hurts.” My sense of Jane’s return to the charred ruins of Thornfield is that far more than a year has passed, but in fact, that’s the amount of time involved – chronological time, at least, since much has happened in that time, and it is like a different century.

One largely irrelevant note for documentation’s sake: because I’ve been having some trouble with eyestrain lately, I “read” this (as I did “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby”) by listening to the Librivox dramatic reading, marking up a download of the Gutenberg online version as necessary. I was surprised at how well it worked, and in some cases, I learned a few things (like the pronunciation of “St. John” as “Sinjin” for instance). I think it increase my enjoyment greatly; the readers, particularly Jane/the narrator, were excellent.

But the only way to really understand Jane Eyre is to realize that the episode in the red room – a visit from phantoms and fairies and imps, sound in the ears, rushing of wings, eventuating into a scream that comes from her without her knowing it, but then goes “quite through” all those around her – sets the stage for the entire novel, gets replayed throughout Jane’s life, is ultimately the scream that goes through the house.

~~ Arnold Weinstein, A Scream Goes Through the House (Random House, 2003)

In my search for auxiliary materials for the work, I happened across A Scream Goes Through the House by Arnold Weinstein, who will be teaching the course I’m reading for. I would imagine his older work, titled The Fiction of Relationship, would be more specific (and seems to cover most of the readings in the course), and I’ve requested it, but it may take a while, whereas I have Scream in my hand, at least for six weeks thanks to my local public library. I also have Maggie Berg’s Jane Eyre: A Student’s Companion to the Novel from Twayne’s Masterwork Studies.

Both (though I’ll rely more on Weinstein here) provide support for the apparently-now-taken-for-granted interpretation that Bertha, the madwoman in the attic, is a double for Jane: the passionate, wild, “libidinous” and creative side that must, in Victorian times, be kept locked up at all times.

Much to ponder here: for more than a century, it never occurred, even to the boldest critics, that the “mad, bad, and imprinted” Bertha could be understood as Jane’s “other”… The animal is nothing less than libido itself, i.e., the energy system that drives bodies, a view that Victorian thinking proscribes with all its might.
We will never know how much of all this Brontë intended – it is the first question my students ask when I suggest this libidinal interpretation of a book many of them have red in much more innocent fashion – and my only answer is: can we know what any author intends? What we ourselves intend? Novels are not subject to prove or disprove, like evidence in a courtroom… I’d say that some overdue nineteenth-century bills are being paid in this text. What other kind of map could possibly show us these things? I can think of few literary examples that display more perfectly why art matters, what it is good for, what it enables us to see and hear.

~~ Weinstein, A Scream Goes Through the House

This fits in with other characters as well. Helen Burns, for example: she doesn’t burn at all, she dies, void of anything resembling passion for anything but God. St. John, who likewise burns with ambition, but the ambition of the do-gooder; not the worst kind of ambition to have, but doing good needs to extend to one’s partner as well, and that’s where he fails. Addendum: I’m just now, nearly a week after writing this, filling in this doubling, seeing St. John as the adult version of Helen: passionless, good, focused on heaven. While Helen was a great model for Jane as a new student at Lowood, St. John is not what she wants as an adult, now that she’s known passion, i.e, Mr. Rochester. She reacts to them differently – both help her, but she ultimately rejects the path they offer.

I still don’t quite understand the logic of Bertha’s madness, or why Rochester felt justified in hating her. He was tricked into marrying her, she wasn’t well, but still, the venom heaped upon her, and the sympathy and, later, forgiveness heaped upon him, seems out of proportion. But then, I’m talking from a time and place where arranged marriages are uncommon (or at least less sneaky), where madness is (usually) seen as illness, where divorce is easy to arrange.

I notice that yet again, as in Melville’s “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno,” the use of doubles in literary symbolism. I wonder if this a nineteenth-century thing, a shared theme of the works selected for this class, or if it’s a nearly universal literary technique and I’ve just been missing the point in everything I’ve read.

In any event, I’m surprised how much I enjoyed the book. Now that I’ve got Jane Eyre under my belt, I may have to read Wuthering Heights and find out what all the fuss is about Heathcliff.

Ben Marcus: “The Dark Arts” from TNY, 5/20/13

TNY art by Brendan Monroe

These days, autoimmune diseases were the most sophisticated way to undermine yourself, to be your own worst enemy.

Hey Julian: You think you’ve cornered the market on suffering, don’t you? Maybe you have. You and your three tombstones.

Your story begins and ends with with sex; that’s a clue right there to where the problem lies, isn’t it. First, the sounds of sex in the night at your hostel, sounds that bring to your mind “animals strapped to breathing machines, children smothered under blankets.” Is the intimacy you crave really that frightening to you? No, I don’t think so; I think the craving you deny is really that smothering.

You paint your pain for us, the battle between you and you, your body that can’t tell the difference between what is it and what is not, between friend and foe. You use such exquisite phrasing, images of destruction – and you know, don’t you, how anything medical holds special interest for me – that I’m drawn in. But drawn in to what? Your trip to Germany (where you so easily tell the difference between natives and foreigners), to what “was meant to be a romantic medical-tourist getaway” for you and Hayley, you to get your rebellious white blood cells under control, she to… what, take care of you? Fix you, make you acceptable? I don’t know yet, I just know that the trip was her idea. And this brings us to your first tombstone:

That was a tombstone inscription for you: Julian Bledstein. He went without saying.

So what happened with you and Hayley? You quarreled, sure – you quarreled all through Europe until she finally stayed behind in France while you went to Germany – but what about? Is it just your nature to quarrel, like your white blood cells that quarrel with your bones? Or does Hayley play some part in it as well:

She was too stubbornly self-contained, too confident, too O.K. with it all, which was decidedly not O.K. with Julian. A self needed to spill out sometimes; a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it. But Hayley had built a firewall around her feelings and moods. There was no knowing her, and fuck you if you tried to pierce her privacy. You were a creep and an invader, and you’d be rebuffed, then shamed.

I have only your word for it; Hayley is not here for me to ask. Was she attracted to you for the repulsive nature – repulsive in the sense of that which sends away – of your very cells? The man who can’t be touched, the woman who doesn’t want to touch, a match made in a hellish heaven?

You repulse your father, as well, with your lies about the great hotel and the sumptuous meal you’re about to search for, your father who would send you his last dime if it meant you would get well, your father who tried to feed you over and over, just to get you to live (something about him making pancakes – the widower who learned to make pancakes to feed his sick son – touches me), then scraped the food you rejected into the trash and made more. Maybe it’s because you are the blood of his blood that he hasn’t given up on you, that he keeps trying? Is that what works for you, this repulsive nature of yours, that others have to keep trying? Do you like the reassurance? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

“You are not supposed to be coming alone,” says the receptionist at the clinic. None of us are supposed to be coming alone, but that’s all some of us have, isn’t it? Ourselves, the ourselves we reject. Tricky stuff, this.

But then you feel better. Is it because of the treatment? And of course you sink right into existential angst, once the physical angst leaves you: maybe you aren’t sick at all: “Perhaps this was just what it felt like to be alive.” Maybe you just long for existential angst now that the discomfort has eased; at least the scenery is different.

And when the man in the hostel takes “liberties” climbing into your bed while you’re dreaming of someone who isn’t Hayley but is nonetheless warm and sweet and comforting, you repulse that as well. Hey Julian, come on, think about it: Wouldn’t it be a scream if your autoimmunity was a physical manifestation of repressed homosexuality? If your body has converted your rejection of same-sex into rejection of same-self?

You go back to wondering if your complaint is justified, if maybe it’s just this exaggerated sense of outrage you have, the one that convinces you other people don’t feel this way: maybe it doesn’t matter that a stranger sneaks into your bed in a hostel. You can’t quite get the “beggars can’t be choosers” maxim right, but you’ve got what you need from it: “Wasn’t it enough to be kissed by someone?”

No, Julian, it isn’t. But it’s kind of sweet-sad you think it might be.

And when the doctor shows you the shadow on your brain scan, the one you see in the light box, the one you want to understand, to move it from abstraction to reality – “Where is it?” you ask the doctor, but he doesn’t understand, he just points again to the scan: “It is here,” instead of putting his finger above your left ear or in the center of your forehead or just above the nape of your neck or on the very crown of your head to show you where, in fact, this shadow lives – you get your second tombstone.

This first. To understand this. Then, maybe.

Which implies, maybe not.

No doubt a scary moment for you: a moment when you want someone to comfort you, an ally, someone to become one with you. But all you get Hayley, returned from wherever, from whomever, brimming with hope and affection and you long for an animosity scan, to finally locate with precision the resentment, the detachment. For now, all you have is the feeling:

Looking at Hayley, seeing her radiate, feeling her cozy up against him, it was ridiculously hard—in fact, it was impossible—not to feel that the affection she was suddenly smothering him with was meant for someone else.

You send her away, your emotional antibodies reacting to an alien presence, here in a foreign country where you over and over stand out as an other whether getting medical treatment or arranging a hostel room or ordering a jamless crepe. Maybe that’s hopeful. Hayley is the closest other you have, which isn’t saying much, is it. In fact, it may be the problem: did you choose her because she would not get too close? Is that the this you are finally beginning to understand?

You began with the strangling sounds of sex; now you end with the hope of sex, if sex with strangers. Seen from that angle, it’s an improvement, I suppose, if you’ve stopped rejecting yourself. I know repression is a powerful thing, but did it really take a shadow on your brain to lead you to a shadow on your soul?

You come up with your final tombstone, the one that will serve you this coming night in the hostel:

Wouldn’t you like to join me?

It’s a start.

Pushcart 2013: Ain’t More Thing to Climb*

Art by Caitlin Faulks (caitii-cat) on deviantart

Thank you, honored reader, for sampling our collection….And even more can be found through a subscription to the little mag of your choice or a purchase at your local, independent bookstore.
We depend on you. Without you, the theater goes dark.

~~ Bill Henderson, Editor, Pushcart XXXVII

Once again, I find myself in the position of hyperenthusiasm that some find tiresome – and if I’m truly honest, I’ll admit the fiction on average didn’t quite charm me as much as last year and the year before, though that may just be a function of rising expectations – but still: I love Pushcart.

This is my third year blogging the fiction, my second year considering (if briefly) the poetry, and the first year I’ve read every non-fiction piece, making this the first Pushcart of which I’ve read every single prize-winning word.

I skipped a few of the fiction pieces I’d blogged before, like “Tiger” by Nalini Jones (which I enjoyed enough in One Story to go out and get the collection What You Call Winter) and Wendell Berry’s “Nothing Living Lives Alone” (which I pretty much trashed when I encountered it in PEN/O.Henry 2012; I’ll return to it some day, but it’s too soon. It served its purpose here as the story that downright annoyed me in this anthology; there’s always one, an any prize anthology. I now see it as a sign that the editors are doing their job well).

In looking back over the posts, I found I’d forgotten only one of the stories. I think it’s preferable that I actively hate a story than that it fades from memory, but it says something about this anthology that only one story out of so many pages was unmemorable.

There were plenty of stand-outs. I find it interesting that a couple of them are enigmas, stories I don’t understand but still love: “The Seventy-Fourth Virgin by M. C. Armstrong, for instance, or Laura Kasischke’s “The Barge.”

Jeanne Shoemaker’s “Sonny Criss” didn’t particularly appeal to me but I still admired it. That happens sometimes.

Then there were those stories that flat-out amazed me: “Emissions” by Joshua Cohen, “The Fall of Punicea” by Paul Stapleton (which, during the writing of this post, I simply had to read again to see if it was still wonderful; it was), Seth Fried’s “Animacula” which I love more each time I read it, and “From Your Hostess at the T&A Museum” by Kathleen Balma, which I read as fiction and incorrectly identified as nonfiction when it’s actually poetry – good enough reason to love a piece, when it resists classification, but this one rises above even that distinction.

Non-fiction was the big surprise. Granted, I had a couple of “so what” reactions, and Kent Russell managed to write the only piece in three years of blogging prize anthologies that I just couldn’t finish with “American Juggalo” (though I later went back and got it done as part of a wonderful conversation with above-named poet Kathleen Balma about the mixed effects of this volume on a community) but overall this was great reading. “To The Rainforest Room” by Robin Hemley, “Helen Keller Answers the Iron” from Andrew Hudgins (as embarrassed as I am to admit it), and Sue Allison’s “Made to Measure” were particular favorites, though I have to give special mention to Jennifer Lunden of “The Butterfly Effect” for 1) winning me over in spite of myself, and 2) being a PortlandME neighbor.

The poetry was more fun than last year because I got help. It’s always nice to be able to refer to someone who knows what they’re talking about when I don’t, and with poetry, I’m always at a loss. Why is this a poem, instead of a flash? Why is this a great poem, and not adolescent emo? I found most of the poetry highly enjoyable, and, like last year, far more accessible than I would’ve expected, but I still am fumbling when it comes to why the line break is here and what the purpose of the spacing is. Maybe I’ll know more after my poetry class this fall.

I have longstanding disengagement difficulties: all things end, and at the end of something wonderful, I find it difficult to put down. Normally, I combat this by jumping right into something new. But disengaging is more difficult at this point since I have an unaccustomed break in my prize-anthology schedule: PEN/O.Henry, usually released about now, won’t be out until Fall. I have plenty of other things to do, of course, and there’s always lots out there to read; it’s just that the prize anthologies form the backbone of my blogging schedule. I’m substituting the reading for my upcoming Fiction of Relationships class, but still, I’m feeling a bit vague and aimless at the moment.

Maybe it’s nice that I can let Pushcart linger a little before it takes its place on my shelf with its sisters and cousins. And, of course, there’s always XXXVIII to look forward to.

*What, you haven’t seen Vi Hart’s video, “Ain’t More Thing to Climb?” Well gee, watch it now.

Fiona McFarlane: “Art Appreciation” from TNY, 5/13/13

TNY Art: Tim Flach, “Kinda Ready”

Henry Taylor had always known it would have money one day, and this confidence was vindicated when his mother won the lottery on Thursday in August of 1961. Still, it wasn’t sure he could afford to quit his job, so he went into the office the day after he heard the news.

I encountered this story as I was finishing up notes on Bartleby; if I see a vague similarity, is that because I happened to be reading them at the same time? Both feature unambitious, safe, status-conscious narrator-protagonists unable to override a single point of stubbornness in a new-arrival other.

Though this story, unlike Bartleby, is third-person, we are still only allowed to see the other – Ellie, the office girl Henry sets his sights on once he has money – through the protagonist’s filter. And it’s quite a filter:

She had the quality of a bird among grasses, peering out in nervous excitement, eager for a mate but afraid to abandon her safety. He was certain that she had taken this job not to make flimsy dates with different men but to find a husband

That a woman might have a job only to find a man – the details are in question, not the intent – is a skin-crawling attitude, though accurate for the time period in which this is set (1961). The setting, for that matter, is Australia, which is something new and different for me (except for David Brooks’ “Blue” which remains one of my favorite short-shorts ever, and, oh right, The Thorn Birds (oh, come on, you read it, too, and you wanted to go see a sheep ranch and deflower Richard Chamberlain; how differently that miniseries plays now, post-revelation).

Ellie gives Henry her own reason for taking a job, however; she’s rebelling against her parents, whose more academic and artistic lifestyle involves worn carpets and broken dreams. Her mother would’ve been an artist had she not married her father, an academic. But Ellie’s more practically minded:

… She was tired of living beautifully on too little money, tired of her parents’ belief that education was worth any sacrifice, and wanted to prove to them that it was possible to take a job in the world, so far into the heart of the world as an insurance firm, and still love art. Because she did love art.

Again, the conflict between art and commerce. I’ve been running into it all spring, it seems, from Project Runway to, again, Bartleby, the Writer who rebels against the Lawyer. In this story, Henry wouldn’t know Art if it kissed him on the ass, while Ellie is merely paying it lip service. But that’s enough to disturb Henry.

Ellie takes a Friday night art appreciation class, and throughout the story, it remains a bone of contention between Henry and her. Friday night is his night to go to the dog races; Saturday he does horses (and on Sunday he does Kath, which we’ll get to). He likes gambling, which may seem incongruous to such a safe personality, but he gambles the same way he chooses Ellie as his wife: safely, coldly, dispassionately.

I don’t see much passion for art in Ellie, either, but since we see her through Henry’s lens, it’s hard to tell. Still, she’s taking art appreciation: looking at art, learning about it from a safe distance, not creating art. Full disclosure: I’m signed up for an art class, beginning next week (Coursera is addictive; good thing it’s free), and I fully expect I’ll drop it once we have to actually create art; I’m more interested in understanding how art works than in making it, much like fiction, so I have good standing to pontificate on this issue. Those who can’t do, no longer teach; they blog.

What interested me most about the story (which didn’t interest me all that much as a whole) was Henry’s perception that life started going well for him once his mother won the lottery and he anticipated becoming “rich.” This windfall has no financial effect during the story; he doesn’t get any money, and for a while I thought the story might be about how his mother declines to include him in her good fortune. But right away, before he has any money or even a promise of a share, his life changes, just on his belief that he’ll be coming into money.

He gets a promotion, for instance (it’s hinted it’s because of his inheritance, though it may just be coincidence) and acquires Ellie, which he never would’ve done before he expected to have the money to marry. He’d been getting along with Kath, the proverbial “sure thing,” for some time, part of his Sunday routine: lunch with Mom, sex with Kath. He dismisses her, the way one would a barber; she knows he’s got another girl, a “real” girl, not a floozie to sleep with. She accepts this. Kath, too, is quite passionless, but in her situation, she needs to be.

Kath, the most human character in the story, provides the decision-making scene. She happens by his pre-race hamburger joint one Friday, goes “to the dogs” with him (I have no idea if “going to the dogs” has the same connotation in Australia as it does here, but I suspect so; Henry is slumming, miffed that Ellie won’t give up art appreciation for him). He ponders how nice it would be to have wife who would go to the track with him, instead of to art appreciation class. Then she asks for money. She appears willing to perform services for the money, leading Henry to finally act like half a mensch: “She was willing. It was her being willing that made him stop.” He’s made his decision.

I was sure, after reading the story, that this would turn out to be an opening chapter in a novel that would follow Henry and Ellie, with Kath perhaps flitting in and out of the picture, but no. McFarlane does have a novel coming out this Fall, but it’s unrelated.

I would imagine my dislike of the story is evident from my comments; I found it single-note. Had it not been for the connection to Bartleby, which I may have invented just to find something to do, I would’ve been even more harsh. It’s interesting that McFarlane mentions, in her Page-Turner interview, her “interest in the excitement and confusion of this time.” I know nothing of 1961 Australia; I was awfully young at the time, but my impression is that things didn’t get interesting in the US until 1964-5. In any case, I don’t get anything exciting, certainly, from the story, and not much confusion; both Henry and Ellie seem rigidly set in their views of the world, and manage to work out a compromise around art appreciation that, I’m guessing, will not survive a year, much less the decade.

But that’s another story.

My Gray Goose Chase

I will restrict my illustrations here to two songs, differing in as many aspects of provenance as any two folksongs in the language can differ, and almost certainly not related through diffusion, yet remarkably similar in their use of an indestructible and gigantic bird for symbolic expression of social protest.

~~ John Greenway, “The Flight of the Gray Goose: Literary Symbolism in the Traditional Ballad”

It’s funny what might get under my skin, leading me on a – dare I say it – wild goose chase. Even funnier, where that chase might lead me.

TNY published Lethem’s “The Gray Goose” a few weeks ago. It referenced the folk song of the same name, appearing in the story first as a children’s song by Burl Ives and a few pages later in a Greenwich Village club, as laden with significance for the main character: her mother, as a member of the American communist party, had taught her the goose represented the struggling middle class, a tidbit with which she later impressed her friends at the club.

I was curious at the time, so I began my wild – or rather, gray – goose chase. I discovered the Burl Ives 1959 version was a cover of a 1935 Leadbelly recording (the two knew each other and sometimes performed at the same folk concerts), back when white artists frequently “covered” black songs to bring them to wider audience rather than in the current sense of simply re-recording a song. I still wanted to know more about the origins of “The Gray Goose” folk tune: was it a spiritual? A children’s song? Something older? Was it American, European, or something entirely different?

The most promising source of information I could find, based on a footnote to a footnote, seemed to be an elusive article titled “The Flight of the Gray Goose: Literary Symbolism in the Traditional Ballad” by one John Greenway, published in a now-defunct journal, Southern Folklore Quarterly in 1954. How does one find a copy of such an article?

I called the Portland Public Library. I felt a little silly – it seemed like a mission that was doomed to fail – but they have this “Ask a Librarian” number, so I asked a librarian if they had some magical way to find a 60-year-old article from a Kentucky journal out of print for 30 years.

They did.

It would take a couple of weeks, I was told, since the University of Maine at Orono (about 135 miles away) was in summer session. Three days later, a PDF arrived by email. I love my library. I love all libraries. And I love librarians.

So what did folklorist Dr. Greenway have to say?

He starts with “The Cutty Wren,” an English folk song unrelated to “The Gray Goose” but similar in some ways as it served as a medieval protest song associated with the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt, protesting feudalism and the abuses of the landlords, and, like “The Gray Goose,” features an undistinguished bird elevated to great status. Greenway considered “The Cutty Wren” not in the American culture at the time of the article; today, it’s listed Mark Gregory’s worldwide database “Union Songs” and was included on the 1960s album “Songs of Protest” by the British folk group led by Ian Campbell. John Greenway didn’t know, in 1954, that the 60s were about to happen. And the internet, well, he would’ve laughed.

What does “The Cutty Wren” have to do with “The Gray Goose”? Not much, really, other than they both involve less-than-glorious birds as symbols of resistance to oppression:

A somewhat similar area of protest to that out of which the song came, however, existed in the South during slavery days, and still exists in rural prison camps. In both cases a defiant society or group, living in an environment of deprivation, restriction, and oppression was denied free channels of expression; such conditions inevitably produced songs in which protest is concealed from those outside the group by symbolism, allegory, and other devices. During ante-bellum times the slaves had a semi-religious song ultimately derived in form from the African “call and response” group singing, which may have begun something like this modern descendant:

George went a huntin,’
O Mount Zion
He kill a eagle,
O Mount Zion.

and went on to tell of the difficulty George’s mama had in cooking the bird; the last time the singer saw him, “he war flotin’ down de riber.”

This, then, seems to be the song that developed into “The Gray Goose.”

He further relates the symbol of the goose more generally to “Ol’ Sis Goose” – when the goose goes to court, she finds the judge, attorneys, and jury are all foxes – depicting an overt kind of racial injustice: “the Negro in a white man’s court is I pretty much the same predicament.” Greenway then traces the Goose through Leadbelly, who, having spent eleven years in Southern chain gangs, saw it as a way of honoring the prisoner who survived.

Greenway is uncertain about the reason the goose itself was selected as the bird of choice for this symbolism, however:

Just why the goose should be accepted by the Southern Negro as a symbol for his people is not easy to see (although the goose is a similar symbol in folklore from Finno-Ugric to Hindu mythology); perhaps because of its very homeliness, perhaps because he recognizes in the goose certain qualities that we city-dwellers do not see. I felt a hint of this two weeks ago when the papers reported the incident of two wild geese vainly attempting to help a broken-winged companion into the air. Perhaps the goose has a highly-developed sense of social consciousness.

Sentences like that final one make me very glad I called my library to obtain this article.

He further traces the evolution, or, in some cases, devolution, of folk songs: some lose their symbolism, and thus their meaning, and become children’s nonsense songs. He specifically points out the modification of “The Gray Goose” that replaces “Lawd, lawd, lawd” with “Ho holly Ho” and additional “repetitive nonsense;” it’s interesting I can’t find that lyric online, while the original version – the version Leadbelly and Burl Ives sang – is plentiful. That feels like a kind of small justice to me.

Now – what does any of this have to do with the Lethem story?

Miriam, the daughter in the story, is somewhat dismissive of the song when she hears it in the club, since she remembers it as a children’s song. She does remember, however, that her mother had a Marxist interpretation for it, and thus impresses her friends with that knowledge. Greenway acknowledges that “many songs of social and political significance have a disconcerting habit” of losing their meaning between the fields and the nursery, but here the meaning was significantly preserved, if lightened by Ives’ delivery. Miriam’s mother, furthermore, adds her interpretation to keep the meaning with the song – if a different meaning than it had when Leadbelly sang it, which was very different from the “George Went a Huntin’” that originated in slavery.

In the interview that accompanied the story, Lethem made some references to the song. He remembered the song with some mixed feelings, and so Miriam came to see it as “a sort of trapdoor into the mingled shame and pride of a family’s political past.” Thanks to Greenlaw, I have a better idea of the origins of the song, but Miriam, at 16, thinks her mother’s interpretation, Burl Ives’ version, is the original one. It’s possible, given that the novel follows her to other protests and revolutions and uprisings, that the song remains the same for her, a more general symbol. Or perhaps she, too, discovers more about it: Lethem mentions in passing “an Irish-American folksinger discovering he’s no Bob Dylan” but it’s not clear whether or not that is part of the novel.

Is it ok to co-opt a song? To change the symbolism for a different purpose, another oppressed group? What if we allow the goose to be more generous – to represent anyone who is downtrodden, oppressed, struggling, staying the course, resisting destruction, and believes that release, flight, freedom is possible? The origins of the song in slavery, America’s seminal injustice, merely provides the bass line. The harmonies and melodies of racial injustice, prison inequalities, socioeconomic disadvantage, discriminations based on gender, religion, sexual preference, can create a refreshed, not a new, song.

Is this co-option, or growth, a sign of life, of universality? It depends. I think it’s important for the co-opters to acknowledge the original origins, which is not something Miriam or her mother do in the story. Perhaps they (or the Irish-American Dylan wannabe) encounter it later. Or perhaps the song fades from the novel – titled Dissident Gardens – with this section.

But The Gray Goose will fly on, regardless.

Herman Melville: “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853)

But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel.

~~ Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”

Ah, Bartleby: a longish short story, printed in two consecutive issues of Putnam’s in November and December 1853 and later included in Melville’s collection The Piazza Tales, to good response (“It touches the nicer strings of our complicated nature, & finely blends the pathetic & ludicrous” [Richard Henry Dana, Sr.]; “One of the best bits of writing which ever came from the author’s pen” [Berkshire County Eagle]). It’s been made into several movies, plays, and operas, and serves as the go-to story for every junior high school English teacher in the US, not to mention what must be hundreds of thousands of term papers, dissertations, and theses.

Yes, this is another item on the syllabus for the upcoming “Fiction of Relationship” class taught by Arnold Weinstein of Brown University via Coursera.

Since it’s also one of the most analyzed stories in the Western canon, I’ll bypass a great deal of very interesting symbolism (a terrific University of Kansas website offers a wide array of resources, as does Bartleby the Inscrutable, a collection of essays edited by M. Thomas Inge that served as a primary source for me) and just focus on the relationship aspects.

Or, I should say, on the possible relationship aspects. One of the fun things about this story is that anyone can read anything into it – or nothing at all. As it happens, a great many scholars have read a great many things into the relationship between the unnamed Lawyer and Bartleby, and seen in them reflections of a variety of relationships.

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the individual so resisted be of a not inhumane temper, and the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity; then, in the better moods of the former, he will endeavor charitably to construe to his imagination what proves impossible to be solved by his judgment. Even so, for the most part, I regarded Bartleby and his ways. Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him.

~~ Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”

One of the (to me) more obscure and thus more interesting interpretations, put forth by Egbert S. Oliver in “A Second Look at ‘Bartleby’,” is that Bartleby represents Thoreau, with Melville as the Lawyer. He starts off discounting his own thesis – Melville never wrote anything about Thoreau, never discussed him, never met him, and may never have read “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (he did borrow Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers from a friend in 1850, three years before Bartleby was written but that’s it). But he knew a guy who knew a guy – in this case, he knew Hawthorne, who had a collection of essays including “Civil Disobedience.” That’s pretty thin. Oliver’s essay has been debunked by several other scholars.

However, I’m always intrigued by someone who swims upstream.

Thoreau says with a defiance which Melville must have admired: “I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.” Bartleby’s associates, his neighbors, his jailers even, did not know what to make of him, and Thoreau had found the same reaction of bewilderment. “They plainly did not know how to treat me… for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall”… This is the kind of challenge which intrigued Melville and set his mind to working out the implications. Here is a man who lives in society, certainly to a real extent dependent on it, yet withdrawing, aloof. Bartleby, when asked to join in cooperative tasks, replies, “I would prefer not to.” He gives no reasons. He simply wishes to refuse. Thoreau’s advice is explicit. He is encouraging a withdrawal from life, even an attaching of one’s self to others, as he had built his cabin on Emerson’s land.… Melville quietly writes the satire to show that one cannot afford such a boast: to squat somewhere and live within yourself is to refrain from living.

Oliver equates Thoreau’s “I declined to pay” and the resulting wish “to withdraw and stand aloof” with “I would prefer not to.” The diarist becomes the scrivener, the green trees of Concord with the green screen the Lawyer uses to keep Bartleby out of sight but within easy reach; “Bartleby, too, simply wished to refuse. He stood aloof. He never gave reasons. He never argued. He embodied passive noncooperation.” Of course, Thoreau did give reasons for his refusal to pay the tax, and during his time of aloof withdrawal in the woods, he showed up at Emerson’s house for dinner regularly and sent his laundry out to his mother. Not that it matters, since Walden is a different book.

I don’t have the knowledge of either man, or either writing, to support or defend Oliver’s theory. The notion of passive resistance and civil disobedience is obviously central to both texts, which may imply a causal link but certainly does not require one. It may be more likely that Melville had read Thoreau’s essay and incorporated those ideas into the story without specifically intending there to be a symbolic relationship between the two people. Or he may have chosen the idea for a different reason.

Leaving the Thoreau connection behind, as academia has done, as more of an interesting diversion than a serious theory, we come to the more popular interpretation of Bartleby as the artist vs. society. Here I rely on Richard Chase’s “A Parable of the Artist” from Herman Melville: A Critical Study (1949).

The short stories of this period of Melville’s life are personal and introspective. Melville was thinking of himself as an artist and trying to understand the artist’s relation to his society. Bearing this in mind and on the internal evidence of the story, there seems no doubt that Melville was consciously writing a parable of the artist… Bartleby is a scrivener – that is, a writer. He insists on writing only when moved to do so. Based by the injunction of capitalist society that he write on demand, he refuses to compromise… The other scriveners, Turkey and Nippers, represent what we might now call “middle-brow” culture. They have sold out to the commercial interests and suffer from the occupational diseases of the compromised artist in a commercial society – neurosis, alcoholism, and ulcers.… They maintain a grudging and suspicious attitude toward Bartleby, their acknowledged superior as a scrivener – the attitude of the uneasy middle-brow toward the genuine artist.

Just a few weeks ago I went off on a rant about the relationship between Art and Commerce, so this piqued my interest. Things get even more interesting when family gets mixed in, since not only were two of Melville’s brothers lawyers, so was his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, and all contributed to the support of the Melville family during the lean years. I think it’s as if Melville is reassuring himself he has made the right choice, for to do otherwise would be to abandon the Artist in favor of Commerce, and look what would happen to both of them.

Chase heads in the direction of family connections as well.

I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. Hence, though I belong to a profession proverbially energetic and nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet nothing of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace. I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause; but in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me, consider me an eminently safe man.

~~ Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”

In fact, there’s a wealth of analysis out there describing the story as a depiction of Melville as Bartleby and either his brothers or his father-in-law as the Lawyer; in “ Melville, Lemuel Shaw, and ‘Bartleby’,” John Stark goes so far as to cite a specific legal opinion, Brown v. Kendall (establishing “ordinary care” as the standard in tort law), which Shaw as judge adjudicated. Writers frequently – always? – use writing to work out their own complicated feelings; I think Steve Almond says something in This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey to the effect that it’s why writers become writers. Looking at the family through the lens of Bartleby provides an interesting view. I wonder: did they recognize themselves? Did they care? Did they, for that matter, even read the story? Consider this: today, how many people know the name Allan Melville, or Lemuel Shaw?

In vain I persisted that Bartleby was nothing to me—no more than to any one else.

~~ Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”

But relationships with others aren’t the only relationships we have; what about our relationship with self? We might say, “I’m so proud of myself” or, for that matter, ashamed, when we do something we thought was beyond us. We surprise ourselves all the time, wonder where some feat (or craven act of cowardice) came from. I think it’s pretty common to look back on our younger selves and wonder what we’d think of the person we’ve become, and at least now, it’s almost a parlor game to write a letter to the “you” who will be some number of years from now; even in business, there’s the variation, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” We’re very capable of evaluating ourselves as somewhat, if never entirely, separate from ourselves, even if we can’t quite admit it – or if we often don’t want to.

It’s a common interpretation that Bartleby is the double for the Lawyer, a part of himself he’s not sure he likes, a part that just isn’t cooperating. To pick one, Mordecai Marcus, in “Melville’s Bartleby As a Psychological Double“:

Evidence that Bartleby is a psychological double for the lawyer-narrator is diffused throughout the story, in details about Bartleby and in the lawyer’s obsessive concern with and for Bartleby. The fact that Bartleby has no history, as we learned at the beginning of the story and in a later dialogue, suggests that he has emerged from the lawyer’s mind.
…
The professional friends represent the rationality of the “normal” social world, an external force which recalls the lawyer from his tentative acceptance of the voice of apparent unreason represented by Bartleby….The last action which suggests identification of the two occurs when in the prison yard Bartleby behaves as if the lawyer is responsible for his imprisonment and perhaps for his hopeless human situation as well.

I can see this easily: the Youth confronting the Adult he has become, particularly in the prison scene when the Lawyer visits and is rebuffed: “”I know you,” he said, without looking round,—”and I want nothing to say to you.” This is perhaps the clearest point, for me, of the double interpretation, the artistic Youth wanting nothing to do with the practical, commercial Adult who first demands, then abandons, then imprisons him and lets him die. Of course, the Adult did none of these things directly to Bartleby, but it must seem that way to the Youth inside, betrayed following peer pressure, whose promise, needs, desires went unfulfilled in favor of what turned out to be a rather trivial life. It’s an accusatory look back on what could have been.

I’m interested in Marcus’ observation that “The lawyer is not visibly changed after a struggle with his double.” This echoes Chase’s comment about the father/son nature of the pair here and in “Benito Cereno” in that the son-figure dies but the father-figure remains unenlightened. I do see a similarity in the two stories: the main character is baffled by the odd behavior of a second character, yet is unable to resolve the problem which eventually comes to a messy end. And there’s the ambiguous utterance in both stories: Benito Cereno’s last words, “The negro,” is as intriguing as “I would prefer not to.”

Without any symbolic interpretation, the relationship is just as interesting. The Lawyer is baffled, alternates between private rage and tolerance, and seems to feel some strong connection to Bartleby. It’s highly unusual; under no circumstances would an employer permit such an employee to remain past the first refusal to perform an expected part of his duties. It’s the sort of reaction I recall from some hidden-camera scenarios, where people will tolerate incredible strangeness, possibly out of fear that they are misunderstanding or overreacting. But this tolerance lasts past the credible stage for Bartleby; yet it remains a credible story. Puzzling, perhaps, but not farcical or outlandish.

The “I would prefer not to” line gets all the attention, but there are others: “I know where I am” speaks volumes to me.

If Melville had published this story today, say, in The New Yorker (it has the proper elements of the classic TNY story: urban setting, ambiguity), he’d have done a Page-Turner interview and answered questions about exactly what he meant by every puzzling phrase. When the story ended up anthologized in a prize volume (wouldn’t it?) he’d do more interviews, end notes, and explanations, and by the time I got to it, I’d be able to determine exactly what he was thinking. Perhaps there’d be some commentary, a few people who would go past what was offered, link what was said to a theory about short stories or psychology or lawyers that they hold near and dear, but we wouldn’t have hundreds of books and tens of thousands of essays putting forth ideas.

I think we would’ve lost something very special. There’s a lot to be said for each of us reading the text and creating a story unique to us, a story that includes episodes from our pasts and hopes for our futures, instead of looking at the story as something with a definitive answer that could appear on a midterm in multiple-choice form. Ah, humanity.